Playing Asheron’s Call 2 again, probably more than any other game I have played recently, has done a good job of how much my life has changed since I was a hardcore MMO player.
I played AC2 for about 5 or 6 months before moving over to Shadowbane, and before it I played AC1 and Dark Age of Camelot. When I was in AC2 I played a KvK server, though for the life of me I can’t remember the name of it. I want to say Coldeve but I’m not really sure (I don’t even know if that is a KvK server or not).
So as you can tell, I was smack dab in the middle of the PvP days of my career. I probably played more PvP in this time frame than any other time frame. Part of the reason for this probably came from DAoC itself because many of the players I played with in both Shadowbane and AC2 (and a very slight stint in EQ2) were friends I made in DAoC. And what this did was provided me with a crew to play with.
One thing I have always said about PvP games is that I really don’t want to play those games unless I have an established crew to go with for protection. I’m not huge on the idea of being ganked for the first 3 months of play while I get my legs, and I think DAoC did a good job of curbing this. Now adays, I don’t have a crew at all which is the primary reason why I don’t go and give Eve Online a shot. I’m 2 years removed from any serious MMORPG play, and probably 4 or 5 from any PvP play. I honestly don’t even remember the names of too many of the PvPers I hung around to see if I could even find them if I wanted to.
During my days in AC2, I as just starting my collegiate career. I believe I was a freshman, though I may have been a sophomore at the time. I didn’t have a job and generally only went to school 4 days a week, though honestly most of the time in college I was planning classes so everything would stack up on 2. What this meant is I had a TON of time and I used a good portion of it for MMOs and other games.
Now, I have a full time job. I don’t have the capability of just having those 2-3 days off every week in addition to a weekend to be able to sink into gameplay. For my evenings, I go out with friends, watch TV and what not. These are things I did when I went to school, but I don’t have the wealth of daytime to go with it anymore.
On top of that, now I have a kid. And granted, I only have a kid part time, but this may actually make timing worse. As if I had the kid 24/7 I might be more inclined to just let them do their thing while I do my thing. But part-time you kind of want to take advantage of the time when you have it. Well this means that I only have every other weekend to play, not every weekend and again, that assumes other friend and family duties don’t come up the rest of the weekends.
I guess what I am getting at is that I’m old and that sucks because I like playing games! On the bright side, I got a couple weeks off coming up for Christmas and not a ton of plans during that time so I am hoping to get some quality AC2 play under my belt. The timing couldn’t have been better.