Jeez, I love EverQuest. Mrs. RickJay and I both love it. We played it all weekend. It’s great. If you don’t play it, by all means start.
But God, it’s addictive. Here I am at work. I am thinking of EverQuest. I dream of EverQuest. No matter how much EverQuest I get, I want more. I’m nothing but a drooling obsessive now.
This morning, walking to work, I found myself thinking “Geez, I’d get there faster if I had SoW.” I get tired at work and wish I had Clarity. Whenever I walk around in the mall I think, “Hope I don’t pull a train into these parties. Where’s the zone border?” When people start talking about pets, i have to catch myself - are they talking about dogs and cats and fish, or about water elementals, skeletons, or Pendril’s Animation?
Damn you, Verant. Damn you, Sony. Damn you all to hell.
Ex EQ addict checking in. Don’t worry once you get high enough in level and realize how messed up the end game is your addiction tends to die off rather quick. I have been level 52 going on 6 months and haven’t had the need to log in for the past few weeks.
I lay in bed sometimes, planning my spell lineup for the next night, I always think I could get there faster is I was SoWed, and my first day of school, I found myself MAPPING the place in my mind like an EQ dungeon!!!
The worst one was, and I hesitate to share this… I was dozing on the beach nad a squalling brat was nearby, I found myself preparing to cast Tashan on her.
So what’s your Character?
Kehli Behli Officer , Champions of Kaos
Lvl 34 Erudite Enchantress,
Erollisi Marr Server
Ps, Looking for new guildmates if anyone is interested!
Your Wife looks at you indifferently, what would you like your tombstone to say?
Ayup, been there still do it too =). And it is funny when you start looking at real life in EQ terms, I catch myself and my friends doing it all the time. “Can someone mez this person holding the line up? So we can place our order?”
And my Characters? lessee:
Blackangel Niteshayde: 54 level Barb Shammie
Illyana Drakosanaireo: 51 level Highelf Cleric
Nalamariee Griffonbate: 47 level Highelf Enchanter
All on the Quellious Server
Yeah, that pretty well proves i’m pathetic and have no life
And actually, I think it’d be easier to quit crack sometimes!
[grumbling old man]
Back in the day, I had to trudge through snow and sleet 12 miles up hill both ways to the computer lab and all we had were text-only MUDs! You young whippersnappers have it easy …
[/grumbling old man]
I’ve stayed away from games like Everquest because they remind me too much of the old MUDs and the countless hours I spent at them. It’s the same path to addiction.
I put two years of my life into EQ, and I walked away last month into the arms of my new lover Anarchy Online.
I loved the lower level game in EQ, but I got fed up with the KS’ing and camping that is the higher levels. That said, I am keeping my EQ account alive on the off-chance they do something amazing with Shadows of Luclin. I doubt they can redefine the gameplay enough to make it worth while, but who knows? At least they are adding horses
I am waiting till Shadowbane before I seriously play a mmorpg. Everquest is addicting for a while, but there is too little actual gameplay. I always eventually got fed up with how easy it was to level.
Sigh, I play EQ too. Been playing for quite a while now too although only one of my characters is in the 50 endgame (DE SK). I basically just log into EQ to chat with friends now since the game is basically boring or I wander around and do weird things or help out people with anonomous gifts. Try giving away all your long time farmed equipment or equipment that you never use to people who “deserve” it. It actually made the game somewhat worthwhile for me.
Did you say they are adding HORSES??? Cite please??? (begging)
I often use game terms, like todya I said I was generating agro from my classmates by working too hard, and I told someone the other day I was autofollowing them.
Oh man.
I have a lvl 18 wood elf druid. He’s about two bubbles away from 19, which of course means porting, and a nice DoT spell.
I was about to join some buddies over at Lake of Ill Omen for some power leveling when my computer crashed after I tried to board the shuttles. This happened consistently. I’d wait 40 minutes for the shuttles to move and as soon as they did, I’d get an error message and EQ would close.
The EQ tech tried his best. After disabling sound, uninstalling my modem drivers and physically removing my modem card from the computer, I still got error messages. Then I’d also start getting blue screens when I tried to reboot. “Invalid VxD dynamic link call from VMM(01)+0000B24C to device “43E3” service EA77”
Swell. This screen would pop up during the launch of Windows preventing me from even using my computer. I had to do a clean reinstall. Mr. EQ Tech said that that was quite a serious error message and I should contact my manufacturer. Knowing the yahoos at IBM Aptiva Tech Support, I figured It’d be a bug hunt pinpointing the problem.
Not wanting to reinstall my OS for a third time in two weeks, I decided to stop playing EQ altogether. My guess is it’s not compatible with some proprietary hardware crap that Aptiva has.
So don’t bitch to me about being addicted. I’ve been forced to go cold turkey after six-odd months of nearly flawless gameplay. With a kick-ass druid.
…I had a Glowing Wooden Crook too. frickin-frackin…
Or was. It bores me to tears now. After the break-up of the uber-guild on Innoruuk that I was in, the game just went south in terms of enjoyability for me. Maybe SOL will bring me back. Or maybe it won’t.
I played an Iksar Shaman and Dark Elf Cleric to level 51. Once I got there, I realized that my role was to participate in the Zergling Rush that is the Vision ™ of the End Game ™. The loot-whore attitude of the “uber” players sickened me, and my desire to pursue gainful employment in the Big Blue Room didn’t seem to fit in with the goals of my guild, who insisted on holding weeknight raids (every week!).
The end game is horrible. I got tired of twinking alts to hear that addictive DING, and decided to cancel and wait for Dark Age of Camelot.
I was hooked on Asheron’s Call for a long while. I had a gimped Sorceror character that started getting difficult to play in the high teens yet I was so attached to him I continued to play him. Over the months he made it to level 23, dying many heroic deaths fighting monsters he had no business going near. My wife got into it and shot right past me in level with a Sword/Bow/Item Magic/Creature Magic character and I quit when I could no longer hunt with her. She then quit AC for Baldur’s Gate 2 and let the account expire. Her gaming slowed down to just a dozen hours a week or so, after getting away from the digital crack that is MMORPGs.
Then a couple of months ago we got Anarchy Online. The only thing that keeps me from getting addicted to it is that we only have one computer it can run well on and my wife is playing all the time, probably 50 hours a week or so. She got an Agent character up to level 9 before getting tired of the lag on Rubi-Ka 1 and started an Enforcer on RK2, which is now at level 65, and she created a new Fixer character last Friday which is already to level 23.
This game has a number of elements that make it more addictive than AC. Once you get to the lower-middle levels (or upper-lower levels if your class has good Computer Literacy skills) you can travel across the world quickly using the Grid, which is a cyberspace-type thing which you can use to teleport yourself from terminal to terminal. You never have to wait long to get back into the action, if you get a /tell from someone across the planet saying they have a space in their hunting party and they’d like you to join, you can be there in 5 or 10 minutes at the most. There’s very little downtime, every class has treatment and firstaid skills that can be used to get your character back into fighting shape after getting whupped on. For the first 75-80 levels or so you can get a level every hour or two of play if you are in a group, and hunting solo isn’t that much slower (especially if you go for easier monsters) - you never really get a chance to feel like your character’s going nowhere, you’re constantly gaining access to better nanoformulas (spells) and equipment, so you have the ‘one more hour until I can use my new gun’ thing to keep you playing. And though the classes aren’t very balanced one-on-one in player-vs-player combat, the way PvP is implemented works better than what I’ve seen in other games - in AC you either played on an all PK server or you could go on a quest to turn semi-permanently PK at higher levels. I’ve heard that EQ is similar to AC in that way, except that there are also factions involved. In AO you have to choose when creating your character whether you are an employee of Omni-Tek (a big evil corporation), a member of the Clans (rebels who have some support from off-planet corporations), or Neutral. The atmosphere is full of ‘Suppression Gas’ that prevents people from performing violent acts. If the gas levels are at 100% (as in the starter cities and many shops) no player or monster can initiate combat. At 75% players can attack monsters and vice-versa. Areas at 25% are called ‘Political Zones’ and players can also attack members of the opposing faction, and in the few areas where it is 0% (Mayhem Zones far from cities or in a few arenas) anybody can attack anybody. You can play the game totally avoiding the possibility of being attacked by other players, but occasionally you will have to turn down missions that have you going into a political or mayhem zone, and miss out on some good hunting, so most players will risk venturing into political zones if they are in a group or if they have just saved (when you die you lose all the experience you made since the last time you saved your progress at an insurance terminal).
All in all, it’s a really neat game. Since it’s the first of the 3rd generation of MMORPGs I have high hopes for the ones that come after it, as well.
Ya know, been there, first when I got the game (two years ago) it was all I could think about. Today I still play it whenever I can (work is pretty easy, and nothing to take home), but I don’t think I’m as addicted to it as before. Still love to play it any chance I get, though.
Anyways, Viscera is my char name, L60 cleric on Xegony.
