Alright, up front:
long post. 
This began as a mid-life crisis rant, and became a mid-life crisis. As I typed, I realized I wasn't pushing thoughts out through my hands, they were moving by themselves as if pulled. Some of this stuff has been in my head for a long while.
It's probably boring as hell for everyone but me. Or not; maybe I'm describing you, I don't know. I've been talking with you all for 8 years, and I couldn't tell you anyone's favorite color, and that is goddamned tragic, and it's my fault.
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MMO's with graphics came into existence when I was 21. I would probably have played Genesis or other non-graphical MUDs, but by the time I had the independence and the financial means to actually maintain a persistent Internet connection, Everquest was coming out. EQ consumed my friend Marty -- we couldn't hang out because he was busy playing. I concluded that in order to continue having the social life I wanted, I'd have to come find him in the game, so I bought a copy.
I must have burned 30 hours a week on that thing, but my play-style was not one that was ever going to get me into the end of the game; I just wasn't ambitious enough to really push for the optimized gear that would tell guild recruiters that I was a good bet for their next push. I preferred to join Solidaire, and Second Covenant, and satisfy what ambitions I had while surrounded by people whose company I actually enjoyed.
It's a two-way street, of course; the expectation when you pick out a guild for social reasons is that you're going to be sociable. I think I was, for the most part, but I was 22-25 -- which meant I was also kind of a complete cock. I wasn't one of the worst -- in fact, celebrity escaped me almost entirely -- but once entrusted with officer authority, I proceeded to learn through trial and error the folly of fearing the loss of something enough to ruin having it, and of the consequences of using power without control. The whole thing crystallized when I tripped out during an argument about recruitment, and misused an officer role to deny a guild member his right to vote, or even argue his case. In the ensuing disaster, I ended up leaving the guild, then coming back as a regular member, and then kind of going away again, but the game wasn't the same anymore. I'd lost the guildmaster's respect, but all my friends were in that guild, and everyone here understands what glorious fun it is to solo in Everquest. Somewhere in that madness, I played host to a really cute, devilishly manipulative minx named Audrey, whose pictures you might have seen. When I'd had enough of providing free room and board, I suggested that this had gone on long enough, and she logged on to see if a message board could get a guy arrested. (It can, but not this guy.)
Then I got a real job, and didn't have time anyway, and so I parked Tranthas Stormwalker in the Plane of Growth at Tunare's feet and walked away from the keyboard. I came away from Everquest with the conviction firmly in mind that I cannot get along with people I can't talk to in real life. This was reinforced by the fact that I got along fine with the folks I spoke to on the phone regularly between raid fights (Taynea).
WoW came out, I whipped up a Night Elf and played with RL friends. Built-in groups, right? I mean, I live next door to some of these folks. It's not like it'd be hard to schedule stuff. I decided that I'd see what the high end is like on this one, invest a little more mechanics research and not side with Skyshrine, so to speak.
I'm pretty good at complicated math; I should have figured out that the odds that the people in my immediate vicinity were going to want to play this game like I played it were not great. Exactly one guy was more hardcore than me, and I wound up in a guild of complete strangers the moment I was ready for raids anyway. Again, good folks, but with a more pointed progression agenda, somewhat more drama, less qualified leadership and less overall courtesy.
The guild leader had not gone through the same lessons about paranoia, and when I accidentally demonstrated leadership potential on raids, I wound up running them while the guildmaster did more administrative things. What that really meant was that he was losing interest in the game and didn't want to invest the energy a raid leader has to put out, and I was happy to take the weight because nothing assures me a plan will work quite like the ability to get everyone to carry it out my way.
Then the guild leader regained some interest, and checked back in just far enough to realize he'd lost positive political control of his organization. He reacted by orchestrating a merger with a larger guild that left him an officer (and me a regular member) in the new one, then bad-mouthing me in the O-channel to the new leadership. My best friend at the time was a rogue named Draesek, played by a guy in California, and he saw what was happening as well -- so we found my RL friends again, figured out which ones were in raid guilds, picked one and jumped servers in the middle of the BC expansion.
Without a RL friend to introduce us, we would never have found another reasonably high-level guild. The game had passed a lifecycle threshold beyond which it's effectively impossible to create a raid guild unless you're standing over the corpse of an existing one with an address book in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Everyone worth recruiting is already up ahead of you, and everyone who's left will never be able to get you within reach of them. But we had an in, so we found ourselves back in the game about a tier behind where we'd been. They loved getting competent heavily-geared damage classes, and goddammit, I opened my mouth on a raid and wound up leading the damn things again.
I hadn't listened to myself enough at the time to realize that I was already beginning to get tired of the whole raid leader thing, see.
Courtesy waned in the face of technical mistakes on the part of really sensitive people who take criticism very personally. Let's face it, these folks don't actually have to log in to get through life; they're here because they choose to be, and I'm pretty lucky at this point to have a team to direct at all, let alone the reasonably successful one I had. But I wanted Illidan's head on a pike, and I didn't really believe we'd ever get there, so I set my sights on Vashj and told myself to be content with that for now.
We never got to Vashj. At the threshold of Tier 5, I spun off a splinter guild and took 12 raiders with me -- no wait, 9 of them balked at the last minute, so I'd just left without even enough new members to sign the charter. The resulting guild lasted until a RL dispute with Draesek that sent him back to my old guild full of the kind of stories that keep the guild leader from taking you both back.
Then WotLK came out, and I didn't need a guild for a while. I ran Niali to 80, and then joined random Naxxramas groups until a guild noticed me. *sigh* I was their raid leader two weeks later, and about a month after Dalaran became a thing I was trying to direct a Thaddius fight and reflecting that it was no longer possible to get 25 people together who wouldn't blow each other up while fighting Thaddius. I think Niali is still in Naxx; I never logged back in.
Okay, I'm not endgame material. I stepped away. Oh, but the next one had its hooks in me before it had ever existed. Someone made a Lord of the Rings game.
In 1985, my grandfather created a monster. He bought us kids (4 of us, 3 boys) a cassette-tape copy of the BBC Radio productions of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. We played them to destruction, and in 1993 an unusually thoughtful girlfriend bought my brother another cassette-tape copy. I have the broken originals, but the copy is gone because we played it to destruction and it wasn't our first one. Then in a B. Dalton's in Seattle, I found out someone released it on CD, and about half an hour later I had the whole thing in MP3 format on a thumb drive. In that time, I probably went through two copies of each of the books, including the Silmarillion.
Don't play LOTR trivia games with me. If you must engage, for God's sake don't let me team up with my brother.
So LOTRO would be awesome if it was done right. And it was! It totally was. I loved that game. I'm not still playing it, because I got in a 30+ guild called Evenstar, and my fiancee is in her 20s and couldn't join, and being a terrible human being (I knew she was going to lose interest in the game soon) I did not make the show of solidarity that I should have and walk right back out. Then Moria happened to me. In LOTRO, the solo experience is wonderful while you're leveling up to catch your guildmates right up until Moria happens to you. Then you can't use your mobility advantage, because everything is hallways and cliffs, which is slow death for a soloing Ranger. Unable to find guildmates of similar level to band together through Moria, I logged a Niali out forever a second time.
Then when Rift came out, it looked really good -- so I found the server Lanys was on, leveled up in that guild, but no one was really organizing it; its creators had moved on, so it already had Solidaire Syndrome, a fatal condition in which leadership logs in so rarely that it's functionally impossible to appoint new officers, so the first complicating condition kills the guild. So I hit dungeons and maxed out DT2 gear until I found a raid guild.
Hrm. I found Impaired Judgement, which really brought things around full circle. IJ prioritized progression over all else, and they did not suck at what they do. We were in Hammerknell the night it launched, and were farming the first few bosses almost immediately. Draped in eldritch relics of deep, thrumming power, Tranthas the Rift Rogue was finally an endgame character.
I hated these assholes. Maybe three redeemable souls in the whole thing. I never said it, because the gear would have stopped coming, but I wasn't really having any fun either.
My lease ran out in RL, and we didn't want to stay where we were, so I was offline for 2 weeks moving -- and I didn't log back in. I sat down at the computer, realized that reaching for the mouse was poking whatever part of your brain is the opposite of the reward mechanism, and fired up Minecraft.
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So there's always one person each game is about, now that I look at it.
- Solidaire: Taenia, the initial reason for playing EQ at all.
- Solidaire after SA/EK/FL/CQ formed: Kragar, who I still talk to regularly.
- Second Covenant: Taynea. She's kind of a hermit, but I still hear from her.
- WoW: Draesek, on 2 servers. We split over a girl, if you can imagine what that was like.
- LOTRO: Brought my own -- Chelsea, who I'm gonna marry next July.
- Rift: ...No one, really. That might be why I only played it for a few months.
I think maybe I don't know how to play MMO's. I always feel like I'm doing it wrong. I'm pushing 35 and still playing them off and on (off at the moment), but... well, I started Everquest to play with Taenia, and never caught up with him. I started WoW to play with my friends, who didn't keep up. I started Rift just to play again, and found out it sucks to play a game without your friends, even if you're doing it right by your peers' standards. It seems that the company you choose to keep in these things, and the company you choose to be, completely define the experience.
