oof I’ve had friends who liked to do research on the games they played and learn how to do things externally before coming into the game and doing the things, but if they ever expected me to do that homework I would probably have felt the same as you. I get that it must be fun for them to give themselves that homework (otherwise they wouldn’t do it right? lol) but for me I have fun by exploring, learning on my own, and overcoming challenges on my own. The only way my friends like that ever spoiled anything for me was by telling me how things worked before I had figured it out on my own or giving me items that they had learned how to get externally before I knew how it was possible etc

For me the main reason I ever played MMOs was that they seemed like an easy genre to play with friends and to find new friends in, and I did both a lot. But I just didn’t know at first that in most MMOs the main thing to do for most people is all the post-game activities lol. My fav things to do in games are usually to explore and learn the lore, which in my experience aren’t things many MMO players care much about. The last MMO I got really into was GW2, and I had helped build a guild that didn’t mind casual players, but even in that guild I couldn’t really participate in end game content because they’d still get frustrated if I didn’t follow the meta strictly. I ended up being “that guild lady” who ran overworld event trains, sometimes dungeons, and sometimes pvp, cuz everyone else who had the rank to run community schedule stuff usually only ran Fractals and Raids and I generally didn’t feel welcome in those categories since I didn’t stick to the meta. That’s not to say I didn’t like the guild, I met a lot of good friends in it and the community was overall really sweet and welcoming, it’s just that despite being essentially one of the founding members and one of the highest ranking members I still couldn’t even participate in most of the content we did without being lectured about doing it “wrong.” And after a while I just got bored and lost interest in playing it (I mean there were other reasons too but that was a big part of it), and haven’t had the motivation to really try any other MMOs since then :/ (GW2 is still probly my fav MMO though, it had a really good story and a lot of cute mounts and pets, I personally especially liked the POF expansion which had a couple big existential moments imo. But after a while it’s like well I know the story pretty well and I know the world really well so because of how I like to play games there’s just not much more for me to do anymore (thanks for coming to my TED talk))