It’s that time again.  I come home after work, eye the icons on my desktop (I don’t use my desktop for pretty much anything, but I do keep my game shortcuts there), and just sit there staring at them. I had a pretty good run recently, played a bunch of LotRO, EQ2 and EVE. However, the last couple of days, none of the games could really captivate me.

LotRO was the first to fall off. During the time I didn’t write, I pushed my Hobbit Warden the last couple of levels to the level cap. However, I never really got to the point where I enjoyed Rohan. Too on-rails, too grindy, too… I don’t know. I guess part of it is that there’s nothing at the level cap I really want to do. I’ve exclusively soloed to the top, and as such, I never collected any experience with grouping mechanisms. Wardens will be expected to tank in groups. I don’t think I want to dive straight into that cold water. So all there is to do is grind dailies (blech) or level an alt.

EQ2 had the best run of the three. After hitting level cap on my Swashbuckler late last year, I started an alt Illusionist who, after my general MMO hiatus in spring,  is sitting at 85 at the moment (long-lost post about him in my post queue). I’m somehow missing the motivation for the final push to 90, though. From there I should be able to get groups and waltz my way to 95 and 320 AA easily (or at least that is the hope). I switched guilds from a US-based to a Euro-based guild, but it for the most part stopped raiding around the time I joined, which led to reduced attendance in the guild overall. Nobody really quit, but people just play less, and there are still not a lot of people on to play with. I basically switched from one guild with low attendance due to time zone issues to another guild with low attendance due to other issues. I probably should try and find a larger and more active guild, but I always feel like I’m abandoning people when I leave a guild, even if I’ve only been there a short time and not really contributed much.

EVE is the most recent one I picked up again. At the moment, I’m sitting in my private corp again, population status: 1. I’ve been flying around a bit, doing some missions, but that’s really not something that can keep my interest going. EVE missions are quite repetitive and get boring fast. I’ve been thinking about re-applying to the Uni, but being a Uni member comes with some restrictions I’m not sure I’d want to carry right now (especially when it comes to where you are allowed to go and such). Plus, the Uni is specifically designed to be a transitory corp. Newbies join, and most leave after some time when they learned some ropes. As much as I liked the Uni, this transitory nature made it hard for me to completely feel at home. I’m slow in my socializing, so it sucked when people tended to leave about the time I felt I slowly started to get to know them. I’m still a bit scared about WH and Null, so I’m a little bit scared of finding a corp in one of those areas. Plus, I don’t have a lick of an idea how to go about finding a corp in EVE in the first place. It seems to be all about alliances, but you don’t apply to alliances, you apply to a corp that’s part of an alliance, and I don’t think I could name more than 5 corps without looking them up. And while those 5 would probably interesting places to be, and I’d gladly accept an invitation from them, they are also (highlighted by the fact that an EVE noob like me knows them) famous enough that they wouldn’t accept me. You know the saying with clubs and exclusivity…

At the moment, I’m also lying in wait for FFXIV. I’m having high hopes; on the other hand, I know that I’m almost certainly setting myself up for a disappointment. I don’t even know much about the game, just what I saw over the course of a bunch of beta weekend hours. I think I’m projecting my hope for a good community and lots of socializing and grouping onto a game that’s still mostly a clean slate.

Long story short, just like Syp, who seems to be at a point where he feels like he needs to restructure things, I also have to reconsider what I want. Looking at what I wrote, a common denominator seems to be that I want more social interactions in my MMOs. Soloing MMOs can get boring, surprise! I guess I’ll have to do some thinking and figure out what I want and how to go about it. Suggestions are welcome.