It's not the game's fault you moved on.

Okay, get ready for some links.

Most people are pretty content to just remember EverQuest as some game they played once, years back, before WoW came along. Many people tried the new games and went back to EQ. Some never left.

Then there’s the odd sort of people who felt they couldn’t leave, even though they had absolutely zero interest in it any more. Such was the sad fate of Loral, the custodian of what was once the premier (only?) EverQuest blog, Mobhunter. From his writing, he seems to have wanted to quit the whole thing a couple years or more ago. Recently he started coving WoW instead. He recently quit to play D&D fourth edition instead of any MMO. Fantastic!

But he couldn’t leave it alone. When the Living Legacy promotion was announced, he took it as if it were a bullet aimed at his heart, and he wrote a creed best summarized as: People left EQ because they HATED YOUR STUPID AWFUL UGLY GAME. Your Living Legacy promotion is WORTHLESS. If you changed your game substantially and in every way – I STILL WOULDN’T COME BACK. STOP HOUNDING ME.

Well, that’s how I read it, anyway.

But that’s okay. Loral has been leaving EQ for a long time, and if that gives him the catharsis he needs to make a clean break – fantastic. You know, if you don’t like a game anymore, you don’t need to get upset or rewrite the fun times you had into miserable times – just walk away. If anyone asks, tell them you have played a long time, and now you want to try something new. You don’t have to demonize the game to leave it!

I responded at length on Michael Zenke’s write-up of the post over on Massively. I kinda accuse him of being complicit, but the post he made doesn’t (any longer?) support that. Mea culpa. Point I was making is, it’s okay to grow tired of a game. That does not make that game evil or bad, just… something you played, and then you moved on.

I was taking a break and catching up on my blogs, and noticed a post by Saylah over on Mystic Worlds about leaving WoW. See? That’s how you leave a game. By moving on, gracefully. She doesn’t go over and explain all of WoW’s ills, and that the game is in such poor shape that even if they tried to fix them all, the game would still be trash. She is just saying goodbye to a chapter of her gaming life as she and her family start another.

Hey, I left EQ for over a year. When I left, I couldn’t bring myself to even log in once more. But I knew it was me that had changed, not the game, and that the fun times I had there were still fun.

What is it about MMOs that inspire such deep feelings? You don’t see any dark screeds about how Tetris was a horrible, awful game because someone played it for a year and now plays Peggle.