Many of my friends have been asking what games I've been playing in my free time lately, as I used to be quite the addict when it came to gaming. This is not to say I don't game anymore, but not nearly as frequently or adamantly as I once did. Back in the day I used to spends hours of my day playing games. Lately though I spend most of my time on WarCraft III strictly playing
DOTA (Defense of the Ancients) a custom game that has become very popular across the globe (it even has a song create by a Swedish musician). If it's not DOTA, I'm usually playing
LOK (Lands of Kes). Other than that I might install a non-online game from time to time and play it for a few days and then move on and every so often I load up Medal of Honor and play online to brush up on my sniping skills. Otherwise reality and other circumstantial events have taken their toll on my career as a gamer.
My gaming experience has been wide and vast. First I started in the RTS games such as Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, WarCraft I/II and StarCraft. Then a year or so later the internet became popular and dial-up was my gateway to internet gaming and the occasional LAN party with non-stop FPS wars. I started off with Legends of Kesmai, and made my way into real MMO (massively multi-player online) world with Ultima Online and eventually the EverQuest Beta on a friends account. MMO's soon became my game of choice and continue to do so.
EverQuest won the cake though. It began to consume me, some might say in a bad way, but I loved it. It was literally an addiction, along with several of my other friends joining in on the addiction. We were so addicted that we each had two accounts and would each play two characters simultaneously. I had a 65 Cleric and 65 monk who both had oodles of AA (another form of experience and advancement). I was at one time a officer and leader of the guild Crusaders of Faith on the Fennin Ro server, which I met many great people as a member of the guild. I spent countless hours on that game, and I don't regret it. The only thing I regret is that I could go back and experience the game as I once did. The game is still around but it's been manipulated by years of development and over 12 expansions now. It's not the same as it once was, and the people that made the game what it was are either no longer playing or scattered through other servers. When SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) bought out Verant (the current creators of EQ) they realized the potential cash cow it could be. Expansion after expansion was released almost in what I believe was an 8 month time frame. Some of the expansions were good, some weren't, but we still played. For four years we playd, almost religiously, but the game was becoming out of date with the current date's standards of graphics and gameplay. What was going to happen to EverQuest?
Well come out with a sequel of course, EverQuest II was announced and release in Nov. 2004. This gave me the opportunity to start out fresh in a new game where I could strive to be the best of the best. So I sold my EQ accounts to afford hardware upgrades for the release of EQ2. I played, created a guild, was the highest level monk on the server for a few weeks, and leader of the largest most popular guild. I was having a great time, but at this time real-life was starting to catch up with me, and the demands of being a guild leader are close to having a second job. Not only that but my friends who had played with me in EQ were not as eager as I was to move to EQ2. After only a few months my time with EQ2 almost dwindled to nothing. My guild broke apart with lack of leadership and I fell behind and what friends I had didn't wait for me. My friends were either gone, or didn't wanna stick around and wait for me, and my guild had fizzled. I tried playing the game on my own, but it just couldn't hold interest. I still loved the game, I loved the graphics, the game play, the crafting system, the new combat, all the feature of the game I like and enjoyed, but even with all that the game couldn't hold my interest.
I had a couple anti-SOE friends that I worked with that had been pressuring my to play World of WarCraft during the release of EQ2, but being the fanboy I am, I went with EverQuest II. So now that I didn't have EQ2 to sink my time into, I figured I give it a shot and played a 10-day trial. The graphics were different and so was the game play, but the overall feel was the same. I had created a rogue and hastily worked my way up the levels so I could group with my friends. Didn't take me long at all (which was kind of irritating as I enjoyed the challenge of leveling in EQ and EQ2 - as much as I may have complained about it at times. But it gave you a sense of satisfaction when you reach that particular level in EQ, where other games that was missing) and I was soon a member of my friend's guild. I have a knack for brown-nosing officers and leaders of guilds and getting on their good side and eventually becoming close friends with them. Because of this I can manipulate leadership without even being part of it to suite my needs. From this I was able to successfully form a coupe against the leadership of the guild I was in essentially breaking the guild apart and assimilating them into a newly formed guild under my partial leadership. I essentially became the guild leader overtime through my ability to organize, and successfully execute raids, which is what many of the people from the former guild (and several other assimilated guilds) had been looking for. It was fun, leading the guild and raids, and the raids themselves were fun as they were the only real objective in the game once you reached 60. But just as with EQ2 real life caught up with me (unfortunately) and the guild began to break and leadership was taken away from me, which led to my inevitable discontinuation of playing World of WarCraft.
I had finally learned that it wasn't the games so much themselves that made me play them or enjoy them so much as it was the social interaction. I discovered that I didn't like playing games by myself all that much in general, not even non-online games. I enjoy the spirit of competition and the comradery of playing a game, whether it be online, LAN, or sitting next to a person even if they're doing something else. From time to time I do enjoy playing games by my lonesome, but for the most part the game just isn't nearly as fun without a friend. I also realized that if I do play a game mostly alone I'm apt to want to be the best, especially in an MMO. In order to do that usually requires and enormous amount of time to waste away into the game, which is something I just don't have anymore. EQ and WoW are great examples in which I really enjoyed playing the game because I played with my friends, while in WoW I enjoyed it because I was great at what I did, especially in leading the guild I created (and being able to rule the guild with an iron fist was a little bonus for my ego). I really enjoy most of the games I've played, and would love to play them again, but I either have no friends interested in them, or I don't have the time I would want to be able to have to truly enjoy the game the way I'd want.
So now I've ended up playing the few games I play purely because they're games my friends play. But I still missed the good ole times during my few years of MMO binging. A few of my friends felt the same way I did which led us to building our own emulated EverQuest server. We were successful with this and for a few weeks we were reliving the experience that EverQuest was. But due to recent hardware complications our server was dismantled and we've been working on pooling hardware until we can rebuild the server and find a decent hosting connection for it.
I know I went off on a few random tangents here and there, but I hope you enjoyed the story for the most part. If you'd like, please submit your own story about your gaming experiences using the Submit Content link in your user menu.
