Steam keeps track of how much time you spend playing a game, and by far the largest one on my list is, uh…

I’ve been ‘playing’ it for a few years now, but Idle Champions is an ‘idle’ game, so very little of that is actual, hands-on playing of it. Most of that occurs early on when you’re just starting out, where the basic gameplay is to select an adventure, set up some party members in a formation, and then keep buying upgrades for them and tweaking things a bit (swapping members in and out, moving them around, clicking ‘ultimate’ attacks) when things start getting more difficult. It actually requires a fair bit of your attention at this point, managing all of this. Eventually you get some ‘familiars’ which can automate tasks for you, such as levelling up party members and clicking on the playfield, and ‘modron cores’ which can automate setting up a formation and restarting the adventure when you hit a certain point. With enough of these combined, the game then basically plays itself automatically, just continually running an adventure over and over again with no intervention required.

But, you might ask, why would you even do so? Well, there is Stuff to earn… Your party’s strength is affected by a lot of things, including the ‘item level’ of the equipment they wear. The item level is raised by either using blacksmithing contracts, which come from chests, or finding duplicate pieces of gear, also from chests. Chests can be bought with ‘gems’, and gems are earned by defeating bosses, which you do by…running an adventure over and over again. Hence, with the familiars and modron cores you can just set it up and let it run in the background and just check in on it every once in a while to buy stuff.

But, there’s other stuff to keep track of as well. A big source of your party’s strength will also come from legendary items, which requires earning dragon scales, which requires you to interrupt your gem farming and run a special adventure once a day for a week for each batch of scales. New heroes get added on a roughly monthly basis, and you have to run a bunch of adventures to unlock them and get them geared up. Special events occur every once in a while which require you to log in once per day for a week to open a special chest, or keep the game running to passively earn some new temporary currency. There is now a daily login to earn a new ‘platinum’ currency which can be used to buy some stuff that would normally require real currency.

All of this kind of begs the obvious question of ‘why’ though, and that’s where the FOMO starts to kick in in subtly interconnected ways. Why would you want to unlock a new hero? Well, new heroes are sometimes essential for the new ‘meta’ to make for a stronger party that can beat the more difficult adventures. Why would you want to log in daily to unlock a special chest? Well, sometimes you can get valuable things like a Potion of Polish from them, and you have to do so at least four times to get the Bonus reward, and you wouldn’t want to miss out on that, right? Why would you want to passively gather a new currency? Well, it’s the easiest way to get pigment buffs which raise your party’s strength significantly… They’ve done a great job of giving you a whole bunch of reasons to log in and play the game regularly, in order to help you…become better at continuing to play the game. There is no final goal to it all, as they’re regularly adding new campaigns and adventures, so you still feel this constant need to prepare.

The problem is that this starts to nibble away more and more bits of your time. You can leave it running in the background 99% of the time, but it still takes a non-zero amount of time to do that dragon scale run, to spend the currencies and buy the upgrades, to unlock that hero, to do the daily chest claim, etc., and if I spend a half hour each day doing these maintenance tasks, that’s a half hour less time for other games or tasks. The interconnectedness makes it difficult to limit your interaction, too. Oh, maybe I’ll just fire it up once a month to get the new hero. Except that I’m going to need chests to equip the hero, so I could just leave it running to farm gems for the chests. But if it’s running anyway, I may as well check the daily login… And before long it’s back to being a time suck again.

So, ultimately, I think saying goodbye to Idle Champions means quitting cold turkey. It wasn’t really a waste of time, but I think for me it’s the only practical way to get off this FOMO ride.