With my EQ2 raiding career at an end – I just don’t have the time for a six day a week raiding commitment any more – and the EQ1 guild up and running now, it’s time to start adding back in the other games I want to play. I love EQ1 and always will, but EQ2 is my home.
I know I’ll miss raiding. But every night we would meet at 8pm, run to 11 or 12, and then I’d have to do my writing for the night if I hadn’t completed it before. Since just keeping up with my raid commitment meant more than 20 hours a week raiding, I stopped logging in at any other times because that was already too much time spent playing MMOs. So the group instances I loved – gone. Playing the alts I cherish – gone. All gaming but raiding wiped out. That’s the raiding trap. You raid casually, learn to enjoy being part of a larger group and trying to be as effective as you can be. That’s a lot of fun, but you want more, and so you join a raiding guild. Now you are owned. You have just voluntarily given away all your free time. Saturday was our only day off, and you can bet I played no EQ2 that day. Raiding sucked away all that I loved about the game, except raiding itself.
I was falling asleep in a Shard of Hate raid a couple of weeks ago. I was also falling asleep on my day job, my writing was increasingly sloppy, my boss at work told me people were noticing I was dozing off at odd times in meetings and such, and it looked like my desire to raid could endanger not only my health, but my real income. And so, though I meant to log in and explain all this, I could not bring myself to click on the EQ2 launcher for weeks.
Once again, like EQ1 and WoW before it, I had let a game come to dominate my life. If I clicked that icon, I would by that small movement of the fingers, put my life and livelihood at risk.
There’s a reason raiding guilds are dominated by teenagers, college students and the unemployed. Who else can really afford the time? Not that anyone can, really. And even if YOU feel you can balance a full time day job and a 20+ hour a week raiding commitment – I’ve proven to myself time and again over several different games that I cannot, as much as I would like to.
When Davic informed me that Delusions of Grandeur had deguilded me, I felt relief. A burden had been lifted. I wanted more than anything to be running around with the Big DoGs of Befallen killing big stuff, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t even log in to tell them why.
One of the unfortunate casualties of my love of raiding has been my alts. Their levels lurch upward whenever I am between guilds. The last interregnum got my inquisitor to 80 and my necro to 68. Now it’s time to give them a little love.
Perhaps to mirror the EQ1 nostalgia group, Stargrace has invited people to join her over on the EQ2.Najena server for some old-fashioned EQ2 nostalgia. Both EverQuests were meant to be enjoyed with a group of friends, to my mind the best way to enjoy ANY MMO. I was chatting with her this morning as I respeced to DPS and looked over the guild recruitment tool to see if there were any casual guilds I recognized. And I was thinking… hmmm… IRS incentive check… 7 main characters… wholesale swap to Najena server… Nah. Even I can’t justify $350 for that sort of change. Especially not after bringing a couple characters over to Luclin on EQ1.
But Winterwing, my Arasai bruiser. Maybe I could bring one over for a good cause. She’s hovering (as Arasai do) somewhere south of 30, fresh from soloing most of the Butcherblock quests. Soloing is pretty boring. If I had a regular group, though, that would be something.
Or maybe I could just save $50 and restart Winterwing over there, but this time as an assassin. A pure dps melee class – my favorite non-healer type of class. (Why choose a bruiser, then? I liked how she looked in a gi. Really.) I dunno. While it’s likely to be the continued adventures of Dina and Dera in EQ2 on these pages, it might just be a small winged faerie who gets to tell her story for a time.