I found this cool little app over at Wordle that takes a bunch of text you throw at it and makes a decorative tag cloud out of it. I just took the front page of my site, plugged it in, and… I guess it’s pretty obvious what my blog is about, with EverQuest right there, front and center. Well, you know, aside from excursions into WoW and some other favorite games I play now and again, I guess my blog has always been about the game I looked forward to so much in 1999, a game I’ve had a love/hate relationship with over the years.
The biggest word of them all, the one most used in my blog, is “level”. MMO’s overload this one little word so much; it’s a marker of progress, but also the activity used to gain it, a specific portion of the game, and so on – if you try to sum up the entire MMO experience (no matter what the MMO), almost everything you do is hung around this one word, level. It’s no surprise that when you reach the maximum level, that your gameplay has to change; suddenly, that one word around which you build your playtime, is gone.
We have nearly reached that point of not leveling in our EQ Nostalgia groups; many of us have reached level 51 or 52 and turned off adventuring experience to focus on AAs. The word “level” has been replaced with the word “preparation” as we use this breathing room to work on our epics, get better gear while it still drops. By not leveling, we guarantee that we will not soon outlevel the Intricate Defiant armor and weapons we have been seeking. Even when we do finally move on, the armor is so good that it will definitely carry us quite far.
Stargrace’s peek into The Buried Sea expansion got me looking at the stuff they offer – even MORE armor sets! I have no clue whether we should work at some point on Dragons of Norrath armor, or hea straight to TBS armor, or see if Secrets of Faydwer has even ANOTHER set which makes the older stuff outdated. And before we even begin to get that far, EQ will have ANOTHER expansion out, Seeds of Destruction. I hope they have more lower-level content. Another exclusively high-level expansion like TBS and SoF won’t be all that exciting.