When I die, I don’t want my last thought to be, “Why oh WHY didn’t I grind out another thousand AAs when I had the chance?”
Etha, 67 Druid, 191d 3h played
Tipa, 71 Rogue, 254d 12h played
Brita, 75 Cleric, 181d 8h played
Tipa, 68 Ranger, 9d 1h played
Those aren’t even all my EverQuest characters. Six hundred and thirty five full days playing just across those characters. I could add my 65 mage or 58 shadow knight to that. At eight hours a day, that would be five and a quarter years. (Though, it’s easy to see how much quicker leveling in EQ has gotten. 1-68 in nine played days? Sweet! And that included raiding!).
It’s easy to claim that the time I spent playing EverQuest and other MMOs would just have been spent watching television or reading, but that’s not true. Before EQ, I was making and finishing furniture, spending a lot of time with my kids, learning to write, teaching myself 3D animation, running PBEM RPGs over Usenet, delving into photography and working on open source games.
I pretty much gave up all those things so I could play MMOs full time.
When I got disgusted enough at myself, I quit EverQuest and vowed to never again spend all night, every night playing MMOs. And I haven’t. I limit the amount of time I spend online each night. And when an MMO demands an unwavering commitment in order to get to the next level (as EQ2 now demands of me so I can get the troubadour spell known only as “UT”), I stop playing that MMO.
Two things were in my in-box this morning. The first, an interview by Kill Ten Rats’ Ethic with Grim of a hardcore World of Warcraft raiding guild. He spends six hours on weekdays and fourteen hours on weekends playing World of Warcraft. He literally does nothing else but play WoW.
At some point, he’ll stop playing WoW – it will happen – and he’ll be left with pretty much nothing. He’ll look back on his life up to where he started playing WoW, and then see where it continues after he stopped, and it will be as if those days spent playing that game were as if he’d been in a coma for several years.
That’s how I feel about my years in EverQuest. Like I was in a coma.
The other item in my in box was a note from a promoter for the MMO documentary “Second Skin”, a fairly unflattering look at the lives of those of us who devote our time to massively multiplayer games. That will be aired on SnagFilms.com for a week starting Friday, and I’ll have more about it when I’ve seen it.
These days, I rarely play “hardcore” MMOs. They really turn me off. I play EVE Online and Wizard 101, both casual MMOs – at least the way I play them. If a MMO comes out that clearly wants me to devote my life to it in order to get ahead – I pass. Maybe it’s a great game, but any game that uses as its premise that their players should expect to be playing this game as their sole hobby and obsession deserves to die in flames.
MMOs are great games. It’s easy to get lost in them. The best make warm, comforting worlds surrounded by your friends that you never want to leave. And then you move on and all your accomplishments vanish.