For the Hoard! No Cure for Potion Non-Use

Anyone who has played an MMO knows the feeling. You are hours deep into your current play session, battling the second boss of a dungeon when things start to go awry. One by one, your party is annihilated and sent back to the spawn point. "Why didn't you pop your pot? We may have had enough DPS that time," your party leader asks over voice.

"I, uh, forgot," you reply.

You didn't forget. That health potion is sitting there on your hotbar ready to use at a moment's notice. You, my friend, are a potion hoarder.

Potion hoarding silently afflicts thousands of gamers across hundreds of servers across dozens of games. The main motivation for this condition is the fear of not having the potion for when it is really needed. The truth is, hoarders will never, ever consider the present as a time to really need a potion. They are constantly living with the fear of a future encounter against some yet unknown super boss or enemy player zerg.

The futile struggle to rid someone of this behavior lies in the eternal paradox of a potion hoarder's reasoning. If a hoarder lives through an encounter, then the non-use of potions is justified. If the encounter ends in death, the player then congratulates himself or herself on not "wasting a pot" and "saving that level 14 potion for a fight I'll really need it."

Treating potion hoarding is something MMO psychologists continue to wrestle with. "Denial is the biggest obstacle in attempting to get a player to comes to terms with it," writes Dr. Josiah Morgoone of 'MMO Psychology Yearly'. "All you will get from them is: 'I don't have a problem... and that's why I never need to use any of my pots.'"