I am free! (of MMORPG subscriptions)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

For the first time since October of 1999, I am not paying for a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game). Yes, this is a geek thread. You have been warned.

It all started with Everquest. I remember having a level 5 ranger trying to kill gnolls outside of Blackburrow. I remember the first time the werewolf in West Karana found me and my first trip through Kithicor at night. Those were heady and exciting times. My first dragon raid. My first trip to the planes. So many firsts.

EQ and I were inseparable. Sure I would take time once in a while to play a FPS or RTS (first person shooter and real time strategy for the geek impaired), but EQ was my one true gaming love and the only MMORPG I played. Never once did I stray to Ultima Online. Then unexpectedly came a chance encounter with Asheron’s Call. It just wasn’t the same or as good. EQ forgave me and took me back, but it was just the first in a string of infidelities, next Star Wars Galaxies, then Dark Age of Camelot, then City of Heroes. After each, EQ was always waiting with open arms.

Then in the fall of 2004, the next generation came with hot fresh graphics and new game play. First was EQ2, but that was quickly forgotten a month later when World of Warcraft went live. WoW held my attention (and my credit card) for about a year and a half. Still, my attention waned. I tried some free subscriptions to Eve and City of Villains. No love there.

So this last spring I returned once again to my original love, EQ. We were reunited until September when Sony’s failure to deliver on their pre-expansion promises led to an ugly split. Last month I gave WoW one more shot, but it failed to grab me and their expansion was yet again delayed. My subscription expired yesterday.

So, for the first time in over seven years, I’m currently not subscribed to a MMORPG! I know that EQ is still waiting for me for that one last fling. I’m sure I’ll fall off the wagon again with some MMORPG or another, probably sooner rather than later. Still, mundane and pointless as this thread may be, I thought I would share this day with my fellow Dopers. I am finally free! :cool:
Yes, I do have a Real Life ™ and a girlfriend (and a race car).

2

Guild Wars is free. :wink:

3

My location on the SDMB used to be Rivervale, but I’ve been sobe…er a, EQ-free now for 18 months.

I DO miss my halfling tank now and then, though.

  • Turek
    65 Halfling Warrior
4

It might have no monetary cost, but it still has a time cost.

5

At my EQ-worst I was 4-boxing a 68 enchanter, a 66 mage, a 68 beastlord or a 65 shadow knight, and a 68 druid or a 65 cleric. Hotkeys for teh win!

6

I never really had much fun boxing in EQ… but that’s probably because I was too busy trying to teach casuals how to raid so they could leave me for the resident uber-guild, repeatedly, while also topping out the DPS rankings with my wiz whenever possible. Glutton for punishment, I guess :slight_smile: I went straight through from EQ release 'till the WoW/EQ2 releases scattered my friends to the winds, though.

WoW only lasted me a few months - which is weird, since I’m totally Blizzard’s bitch for every other title they’ve made, ever. For all that some of the stuff in the game was revolutionary, it was missing a bunch of the things that made EQ so much fun for me. It was refreshing to get off of the whole monthly payment thing, though, and it certainly made my girlfriend much happier.

(Upon my two-month-fall-off-the-wagon return to EQ this past summer, I decided that playing an EQ wizard was infinitely better than a WoW mage for the utility of root and channelling alone. Never mind how WoW somehow managed to make PvP less fun than EQ when EQ screwed it up whenever possible. Oh, the novels I could write on game design if anyone cared…)

I’ll probably try Vanguard when it comes out - my guild may or may not have received an invite to the beta, but my computer can’t run it right now either way :stuck_out_tongue:

7

I left EQ when EQ2 launched. Played EQ2 until last February or so, then tried CoX. Lately I’ve been too busy or tired to do much gaming, but Vanguard is coming, and I’m cautiously optimistic about it, even with SOE now in the picture.

Lots of memories. Researching/planning out my first attempts at leading raids against Doomshade. Planar raiding with the mighty CoW Alliance (Amity, Lightbringers, Watchers of the Night) MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

19 straight hours camping the damn fish in LoIO for my leafblower. Trading in the lag hell otherwise known as EC Tunnel (Selling 3 bags of stuff @ 2nd Torch!). Grinding LDoN.

MGB Bot9 at Nexus Stone in 5 min. Anybody add symbol or KEI?

Popping into Surefall Glade to pass out some goodies to the newbies…and noticing a level 3 ranger dragging Wurmslayer around coz he was too young to lift the damn thing…

Quad kiting for fun and profit.

Getting harrassed by a killstealing necro while playing an alt. The next day, back on Oakie, catching the fuckwit when he needs a teleport. Porting his sorry ass to Surefall Glade, and binding his soul at the feet of the Druid Trainer.

Spending 2 weeks solo in Umbral Plains for druid armor.

Breaking in to the Plane of Fear.

“You will not escape me, Oakbrow!”

:smiley:
EQ: Oakbrow Farwalker, Druid of 67 Seasons (Karana Server)
EQ2: Farghus Blastenfartz, Trollie Palladun (Him am NOT ebul!) (Najena)
Kahbueme, Warlock (Najena)
CoX: Angus McKenzie, Tanker (Liberty)

8

<mumble> Fucking druids. :mad:</mumble>

:smiley:

9

I started playing my first ever MMORPG last week and have become addicted to it. Urban Dead - it doesn’t even have graphics! And it’s free.

10

I never have had the RPG addiction, but I was hopelessly addicted to a FPS. Day of Defeat is a Half Life Mod and I was completely hooked. This was in college and we had a four computer network in our house and this was hooked up to a DSL line. Almost every night for several hours, myself and my three roomies would go online and “do some killins”.

Just before Half Life II came out, the entire network switched from WON servers to STEAM. I delt with it for awhile, but the connections were slower and I got timed out more often. This seemed to effect lots of people, and less and less people would show up to fight.

After Half Life II came out, almost no one played the first Half Life mods and I quit all together.

As long as I can hold off on buying HL II, I will remain free.

11

I was an Anarchy Online addict, I had a lvl 200 MP and was pres of the largest neutral guild on Rubi-ka.

I have a friend (Pusher) that is trying to get me to play City of Heroes. I’ve kicked the habit. While I do pine away some days wishing for the uber stimulation, the comeraderie, the tweaking yourself silly, the tweaking someone else silly, the hunt for the item, fighting with the inventory system and the sad wails of lost xp.

It isn’t that I don’t have the time. It isn’t that I don’t want to play, I’m just afraid of the power those life-sucking games have over you, how important it all feels and how unimportant it really is.

There is a person in my old guild who had a baby not long after I did. She still plays. I hope she can manage her time enough to not forsake the baby for the game.

Welcome to the real world.

12

I was addicted to EQ for a long time as well. When I was younger I used to play D&D with friends all the time, and even did so semi-regularly when attending the academy. After graduation I moved around so much that it was really difficult to meet up with people to play the traditional dice and paper roleplaying games, so I really fell out of the habit. Sometime around 1990 I discovered text-based online role playing games and I played them to some degree from 1990-1998. Aside from that, I kept mostly to strategy PC games, and never had much interest in the single player computer RPGs offered during that time. In 1999 I pick up Everquest and really like it at first, it was basically like DikuMUD with a graphical interface at that time. By the time I had my first char (a necro) to level 20 or so I realized that despite the term “MMORPG” Everquest was a lot different from the text/dice based role playing games I had played before it and in my youth, as there was very little emphasis on role playing whatsoever.

That should have been a turn off, since I was primarily picking the game up because I liked role playing games. But it wasn’t, because Verant and later SOE were very good at making you feel attached to your character. I think the popularity of EQ is sort of like the popularity of the Sims, in that you’ve got this virtual character that you’re continually improving, and it’s very hard to improve. I spent forever getting my necro his “epic” weapon, and periodic expansions with more improvements meant you could never “max out.” Unlike the Sims or virtual pets and the like, EQ was more in-depth and had a social element to it as you were playing and grouping with other people.

I’ve never really regretted my time playing the game, even though I played it a lot, I had fun doing it, and I don’t view one hobby as intrinsically better than others. As long as you don’t let it interfere with your responsibilities in life I don’t view it as a problem. While I played EQ, I didn’t read the news as much, and I didn’t watch any TV whatsoever, really. So it basically just supplanted other things I did that in themselves didn’t have any real value.

13

I know that of course, it was just a joke. I’ve been playing those types of online games since 99 and have been a GM in one for the last two years. I’m all too aware of the time that goes into it.