r/gaming • u/TobiasMakesAGame • 1d ago
What game have you spend the most time on not actually playing?
I feel like alot of gamers spend alot of time on their games actually not playing. Myself included!
What game have you spend the most time on without actually playing the game?
For me it's without a doubt world of warcraft setting up addons and weak auras. I hear that they have removed alot of this from the game which is kinda sad but on the other hand it might help us all actually playing :)
I'm about to start playing Skyrim modded for the first (completed the game on release but haven't played much since). Modding sure seems like a place you can spend alot of time!
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u/nrg117 1d ago
That's a easy one, Warcraft.
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u/Geraidetto 17h ago
Yeah, just sitting in the chair and listening to Warcraft 1 main menu music, that's life /s
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u/sunbro2000 1d ago
Black Desert Online and it ain't even close.
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u/SirHangingChad 1d ago
Leaving the PC running for a whole week to be able to click one more time on my gear is definitely worth it, amirite'? (been there, done that)
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u/FrostingTechnical606 1d ago
There is a horse training skill that involves you setting a waypoint and running the horse while you are afk doing fuckall watching youtube or just going to bed. Also you have bulk recipes to craft that take a long time.
Possibly more that I am forgetting.
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u/sparklybeast 1d ago
It's an MMO thing, really. So probably either AFKing 9 Rings on Guild Wars or AFKing combat in Runescape.
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u/Sea-Hat-8515 1d ago
Runescape. Click button while at work and leave it for 10 minutes, rinse and repeat
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u/trippy81 1d ago
What are you guys doing that everyone mentions this. I would love to have this running on second screen while I work but it requires constant input. Chop a tree, lasts maybe one minute? Two? Then you have to input again. I genuinely would love to find something I could do in this game that would let me afk for a longer period of time.
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u/tahu750 1d ago
Higher level skilling activities will often have longer afk times, so higher level trees can last minutes longer than oaks or basic trees.
Right now I'm Angler fishing off my boat. Off shore fishing spots don't move like regular ones do, so you click and it takes about 8 minutes give or take to fill your inventory. You need to put in hours (days) getting the prerequisite levels and equipment to do the more convenient and efficient methods, but once you get them, it's yours.
However, the exception to this is the blessed Gemstone Crab. Its a "Boss" that deals almost no damage and has infinite hp for 10 minutes at a time, then 2 clicks gets you back in the fight. Only takes one quest to unlock the location it lives in, and sure, you need the really good equipment to get the crazy XP rates out of it, but if you just want to do click click and get number go up , as well as eventually get 99 in all of your melee stats for basically no cost , it's fantastic. Multi combat as well, so you aren't competing with all of the other people that are grinding out their combat stats.
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u/trippy81 1d ago
Thank you for this. I’ll look into how to get some of the pre work done over a weekend. I really appreciate it.
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u/DaveFrEve 1d ago
Eve Online
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u/No-Needleworker-241 1d ago
oh yea, thats a good one. Cant believe I had to scroll down this far.
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u/si811 1d ago
Skyrim. Wanted to make the ultimate mod list, worked on it for a month straight and then barely played. Massive stutters and Bethesda infuriating pointless updates killed my enthusiasm.
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u/polarwaves 1d ago
Recently did this with my PS5. Researched and researched which mods to run, which order to run them in and then the game just wasn’t enjoyable for some reason. Decided to scrap all of them and start a new vanilla play through and its already a better experience
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u/atwistedwarmembrace 1d ago
My wife often joked that I was playing "Menu Simulator" when I was playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I think I spent nearly a day inspecting all of the options, writing in my notebook and coming up with a team build to take on Simon after a few failed attempts. I have to say though it felt amazing to put in all that planning and beat him on the first attempt after that monster planning session.
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u/SrsJoe 1d ago
RuneScape I guess, spend 95% of the time not actually doing anything for the game to play
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u/terroreye 1d ago
I spent so much time on the roof of the Orgrimmar bank. Back when I was playing
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u/TobiasMakesAGame 1d ago
Oh, yeah, jumping around Orgrimmar and just chatting. That’s easily half your time spend in wow :D
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u/pointsouttheobvious9 1d ago
PoE. Path of builder eats a lot of time. It's a whole different game planning your characters build
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u/Maidwell 1d ago
I have about 1500 hours in Fallout 76 and maybe half of that has been building in my camps and shelters, does that count?
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u/CleMage79 1d ago
It’s definitely Warframe, talking with bros while doing 600 laps around the Orbiter, dashing around like an idiot.
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u/summonsays 1d ago
I instantly thought back to my WoW days as well. As a dps, waiting is half the game.
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u/TobiasMakesAGame 1d ago
Yeah! I have almost always focused on tanking, so I haven’t had the horrors of waiting for groups as much. But still an unholy amount of time spend on mount jumping around Orgrimmar!
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u/Flanelman2 1d ago
Runescape.
Too busy chatting up the 10gp GFs at the GE.
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u/MrDudeMan777 1d ago
Hey it’s me, your RuneScape GF. Can I get one of those Reddit awards from you and some new armor? Thanks bb
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u/LOGPchwan 1d ago
Back then it was Skyrim because I'm busy modding it. Nowadays with collections of modlist I'm thinking less and can actually play more, while adding few smaller stuff that I so badly want.
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u/kony2012nvrfrgt 1d ago
WoW and PoE2.
WoW = Jump around tree in Stormwind for maybe 70% of playtime.
PoE2 stunlocked in hideout trying to solve my build or crafting maps :/
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u/interesseret 1d ago
Minecraft, and it's not even comparable to all other games I have. You could probably put all the time I have spent modding and tweaking all my other games together, and the time still wouldn't rival my time spent modding in Minecraft.
Early days of modding it was a manual process, and getting a lot of mods to work together could be a really difficult prospect, especially cause I was learning how games work as I did it.
Installing a Skyrim mod was as easy as pressing subscribe in the Workshop. Installing a Minecraft mod was three different support mods, that each had to be manually moved in to the correct folders, followed by troubleshooting what file was wrongly placed.
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u/CorpseCaptain 1d ago
Wae thunder, 90% of your "in-game" time is spent waiting for a match or watching a replay...that game has sadly passed my ark hours of play even though its not actual playtime....I feel some games do this to artificially inflate their player count.
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u/SilentDarKNesss 1d ago
I have 8k hours on Dota 2 and only around 1.4-2k of them is actually playing
sometimes i left the game on as i barely take any resources and a lot of time , watching tournaments in-game is actually good because you can control the camera or chose to watch specific players camera (you can see where are they watching or clicking)
since each games of Dota can goes up from 20-40 minutes or more depends if game is pretty even or one side getting destroy , those hours rack up pretty quick
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u/Maleficent_Slide_262 1d ago
Im playing Gran Turismo 7 now and while I try to spend all my time racing it shows me that 200h+ in I've only spend like half of the time actually driving.
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u/Sylvarius 1d ago
WoW, same as you, running in circles in Dalaran for hours just chilling with friends on discord after a raid ahah.
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u/Muted_Stand_9623 1d ago
Honkai Impact 3rd. I can spend hours just chatting with random people about random topics 😄
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u/comenter27 1d ago
I’ve never gotten past a handful of the story missions on gta5. It’s always been my “enter cheat codes and blow shit up” game
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u/D45ers 1d ago
GTA5’s story is very eh anyway. The game itself, mechanics and all that was fucking sick but the story was so unserious and felt waaaaay over the top goofy I didn’t care for it.
I know it’s GTA and supposed to be a parody in a way but GTA4 was so fucking dark and well written. Even just Nikko but if you had the DLCs it got even more darker
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u/LegioX87 1d ago
I bought Sleeping Dogs 4 years ago on sale and never played it. Does this count?
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u/LessBeyond5052 1d ago
Have you still not played it? I would, it's amazing fun.
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u/Hung0ver_Hero 1d ago
It's trash on PS5, hard crashes all the time and even has a pop up that tells you that it's terrible at the home menu, soft crashes don't do anything but hard crashes can fuck up your system
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u/Gaelic_Cheese 1d ago
Dwarf Fortress. I spent way too much time looking at tutorials while "playing".
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u/Sarah-M-S 1d ago
Tarkov, you spend more time in the damn inventory and loading screens than in an actual raid
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u/TheTurretCube 1d ago
30 minutes organising stash, 15 minutes loading into the raid, 3 minutes until head eyes
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u/Werd616 1d ago
Red Dead Redemption 2: and Hitman: World of Assassination.
I enjoy fishing, hunting and harassing the locals in my current low honor playthrough. I'm not moving on with the story though. I've been in Horseshoe Overlook for months. I'm getting a $1500 bounty in every location first, then I'll probably start mission stories.
I enjoy the kill everyone challenges in Hitman. I've completed all the ones that don't crash my PS4, but I'll still jump into one if I have a couple hours to kill. It doesn't progress any story or give me any levels or anything. It's just a good fun time.
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u/SirFroglet 1d ago
Persona 5 Royal
The game is 120+ hours long and for 80 of those hours you basically feel like you’re reading a manga or watching an anime.
10/10, one of my all time favorite games
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u/ParagonTom 1d ago
Cities Skylines. Come a point in every city build where the cash isn't coming in fast enough to construct my grand plans, so I leave the game running overnight.
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u/Underwater_Grilling 1d ago
Dyson sphere program. Gotta let it run overnight sometimes to cache science
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u/Wise-Pen8752 1d ago
Farm Simulator 22/25 I spend more time building farms then actually farming. Starfield I had 360 hours in that game, easily 300 of those hours were building ships, rest of the game was a drag. GTA 5, I've beaten it twice since 2013, purchased it 3 times for different consoles but every time I start another playthrough I end up just going on rampages lol
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u/ApprehensiveSoup2214 1d ago
40k
I've literally never played the actual game, any of them, just read the lore.
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u/Hopeful_Character501 1d ago
Skyrim. 80% of mod installation, troubleshoot, and reading. 20% Playing.
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u/boxing-boxing 1d ago
The Sims. I spent four hours designing a house and my Sim drowned in the pool on day one. Honestly the best return on investment I've had in that game.
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u/TacoTaconoMi 1d ago
I probably have more time afking in orgimmar (WoW) than I do hours in every other game I've played combined
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u/Overall_Share_8579 1d ago
Flight sim 2020 3500 hrs on steam 2500 hours were probably just tinkering with things to make them work, modding etc...
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u/i010011010 1d ago
I got Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth on the PS4. It's nice that they released a version for it, but it was not built for the older system without solid state storage. The load times are horrendous. However many hours I had by the end, I'm pretty sure 15%-20% ended up being loading screens.
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u/SchwarzerLurker 1d ago
Master duel. If you go second, you see your opponent playing solitaire for 5-10 minutes and then you lose
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u/VZmatthews 1d ago
I'm quite sure the majority of my (surprisingly many) hours on Assetto Corsa was spent on tinkering with the graphics settings and adding mods- haven't played in a while, but it was somehow really fun "min-maxing" the graphics settings to get the best balance of performance and visuals on my lower-end laptop.
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u/SoCloseToFlakez 1d ago
World of Warcraft trying to get into RAID groups or Farming high Key Dungeons finding a good groups.
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u/Ultimate-Flexionator 1d ago
Grim Dawn. Builds is half the game! gotta have every angle perfected...
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u/darkpigeon93 1d ago
According to Time Wasted on Destiny, I've spent over 2k hours in orbit.
I should not have looked that up...
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u/DrDingsGaster 1d ago
Destiny 2, I spend so much time vibing in the menus or sotting around the tower, just for the ambiance.
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u/Lokus-Pokus 1d ago
Satisfactory. My god. The "Calculator Simulator". Hours went by and I was just doing math on a notepad and a calculator on the side, casually checking in how much a building would produce.
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u/lordMaroza 1d ago
Skyrim. I have never finished the game and I have about 1500h just modding (creating/modifying mods for myself included).
I also install a bunch of addons when playing MMOs, but that usually takes me a couple of hours to set up, and maybe 2 more hours, over the course of a week or two, to fine tune.
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u/HumpieDouglas 1d ago
KSP. I spend far more time building and testing rockets, landers, etc than I ever do actually playing the game.
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u/YamSuper5346 1d ago
Metal Gear Solid V!!!
After you beat the game, you just sit in the helicopter and there is a bunch of "gameplay" that's as exciting as sorting your email.
In a good way
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u/ShallowDramatic 1d ago
Guild Wars 2. I used to play the Trading Post, buying low and selling high, buying seasonal cosmetics as longer-term investments, all entered by hand into a little ledger.
Never did do anything with the gold I made, as it was never all that much, not really, but I had a blast.
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u/CPT-yossarian 1d ago
Building and debugging my mod list in rimworld, including creating my own compatability patches.
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u/Aw3som3-O_5000 1d ago
Does building bases and crafting count as "playing"? If not probably Valheim or Grounded.
If you just mean the main story, StarCraft Use Map Settings games.
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u/KewadaLol 1d ago
Probaply world of warcraft. Waiting for dungons, waiting for raid, waiting on flypath, just idle afk while doing something else.
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u/CokBlockinWinger 1d ago
The hidden games you can find in TimeSplitters 2 I would spend hours on. Also, the arcade games in Shenmue, the text adventures and Atari games in COD: Cild War, and Super K’noidtrix in the Adventures of Willy Beamish.
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u/No-Needleworker-241 1d ago
Like you said WoW easily, hell i have it on in the background right now . lol
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u/greenegg28 1d ago
I mean, it’s gotta be Skyrim.
Brute forcing just one more mod into my load order before I really start playing is endless.
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u/m33gapanda 1d ago
NFS games when you idle in the garage it does some cool camera shots of your car.
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u/Agile-Positive-9050 1d ago
Tarkov... There were the times without qol and 15 minute loading screens, so you were longer in the menus than in game
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u/Yellowspawn 1d ago
Skyrim is the only thing that comes to mind I suppose, I have like a combined 1500 hours on different versions of it, but probably even more than that modding it.
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u/RosieQParker 1d ago
I've spent way more time idling in X4 than I have actually playing the game. Sometimes I just leave the simulation running on my pc while I'm off sleeping or touching grass.
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u/thejohnfist 1d ago
I used to set my PC up to farm items in Tf2 while I was at work. Thousands of hours idling.
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u/TheFeelsGoodMan 1d ago
Gran Turismo and it's not even close.
I spent a disproportionately large amount of time painting cars.
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u/Cutter9792 1d ago
I have over a thousand miserable hours in Escape from Tarkov, and I guarantee well over half of that time (probably 3/4) is rearranging my goddamn inventory.
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u/pangeagamestudios 1d ago
like about 90% of my Steam Library, I stare at the Character creation screen and then something comes up and I quit
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u/Greg-stardotstar 1d ago
Arma: Reforger (particularly if playing as FIA)
Sign in, spawn miles behind the front line. Open map, find cache locations, walk to village/town/base to get a vehicle…half an hour later you may see your first enemy. But if they see you first, you’re dead, and it’s another random spawn
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u/SavageWhisenhunt 1d ago
Used to spend like 2 hours in the COD lobby just talking with my brother back in the day
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u/DifferenceShoddy3413 1d ago
Highest ratio wise, probably my 3h in Starfield, because that's like 2,5h loading screen.
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u/DamnImAwesome 1d ago
I spent more time coordinating groups and raids in Everquest than I did actually playing the game. This was obviously before Discord and subreddits. You’d just spam global chat for hours and hours
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u/Whirlvvind 1d ago
Depends on what you mean by not playing.
A lot of time is spent in PoE2 in the hideout selling and crafting gear, looking at skill tree and tweaking it, etc. That is time spent not in a map killing monsters. So if that counts, then probably PoE2 by a reasonable margin.
Otherwise it'd probably be WoW, setting up addons and afk crafting with the game up on my monitor while watching sports on the TV.
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u/theacp127 1d ago
Clash of Clans I played for years even though most of the game was just waiting for things and chatting to people in the clan.
RuneScape is also a game where 90% of it is some form of waiting.
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u/FarkSpezHard 1d ago
Recently I'd say Palworld and Minecraft, just waiting around for stuff. But I did the WoW hopping around in Ogrimmar stuff too.
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u/Interjessing-Salary 1d ago
Satisfactory... I have like 500 hours in the game but at least half of that time is me afking in it so stuff gets made.
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u/RisottoGames 22h ago
Modding Skyrim to perfection and dropping it after a few hours once everything seems to be working. I love the process tho.
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u/Haribomonsterx 20h ago
At times world of Warcraft! Just idling and chilling, fishing about or waiting for things. I’m still new but I also enjoy just not doing anything in the game.
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u/moduntilitbreaks 20h ago
I have 1400 hours in Skyrim. Completed one time. Steam Replay it has like 8000 sessions 😂 Yes, I’m a mod author.
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u/UnusualDisturbance 19h ago
path of building... so many builds i want to try the end up bein nonviable... imagine if i made those characters and actually got through story mode only to hit a wall for the 37th time ..
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u/We_Are_Tanuki 18h ago
I still have a Skyrim game started, maybe only 30min actually played, that i spend like 6hrs setting up modes to make it just how I wanted lol
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u/Silent-Cranberry-591 17h ago
Honestly, Minecraft, half my playtime is just organizing my inventory instead of actually playing...
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u/KermitTheBestFrog 17h ago
High level overwatch streamers sometimes have hour+ long queue times, and often stream other games in a smaller window to not lose viewers
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u/Toast_Meat 16h ago
Sons of the Forest.
I had build an entire neighborhood on a large patch of forest before progressing through the story. Took probably weeks of times.
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u/red22guy 13h ago
Recently got into The GodFather on PS2 such a good game. I just spent all my time taking over businesses to get more money to take over more businesses.
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u/Able_Mongoose_1047 6h ago
Saints Row 2022. Everytime I boot it up, I spend the entire time dressing up my character and haven't finished the game because of it. I do like it btw, I know it gets a lot of hate but what doesn't these days.
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u/Lordgrapejuice 6h ago
Melvor. It’s an idle game and I have roughly 10k hours…maybe a few hundred is me ACTUALLY playing.
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u/ChefArtorias 4h ago
Palworld.
Anything with automation potential that allows you to completely afk farm has a ton of potential for idle time.
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u/Zayghiel 1h ago
Wow definitely from just chatting with random people. Or if doing weird role play events counts as “not playing” cause it’s not “the game”, then even more so.
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u/WorthPlease 1d ago
Easily any version of Football Manager.
I'm playing it not actually playing it right now.
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u/Originaltenshi 1d ago
Used to be Destiny. Idk how many hours me and the boys have just vibin in the tower.
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u/BIackpitch 1d ago
The late night convos in vc while running around the tower like it’s an obstacle course
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u/Originaltenshi 1d ago
Finding new places to sit and see the view or just be sitting in a wacky ass spot
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u/Mediocre-Field6055 1d ago
Probably Elden Ring. I would sit with the two talismans that healed your health or mana over time and let them fully heal me. Then I would continue on, little by little. This way I saved my flasks for actual big fights.
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u/TheJocktopus 1d ago
Many years ago I used to play Mount & Blade: Warband with the freelancer mod which lets you be a soldier in somebody else's army rather than leading an army yourself, so you're basically just being ferried to and from battles (with the occasional visit to cities and castles). I spent most of my time in-between battles reading a book.
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u/bahumat42 1d ago
It's world of warcraft
Using old school barrens chat as a replacement for socialising.
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u/fatso486 1d ago
All of them. I just wasted 7 hours on the first 15 minutes of Alan Wake 2 optimising the living hell for my 6700xt PC. I always have this nebulous goal to hit %70 higher framerate then the XBOX series X since it has a slightly slower gpu.
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u/BassiusPossius 1d ago
Path of Exile