A Slip In Time

I want to continue playing EverQuest. However, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to do so.

(Yes, it’s yet another boring EQ article. Warning: whiny ranting and self-pity ahead)

In particular, I want to keep playing with the friends I’ve built up over the years. The main problem there though, is that as I’ve mentioned before our guild has lost quite a few people, and once they’re gone you don’t really see them again. Sure, once every few weeks the timing might be right and you can cobble a group together briefly, but the vast majority of the time it just won’t happen due to schedule conflicts and raiding plans. There are still a handful of friends left in the guild, but recently a new problem has arisen: non-guild raiding alliances.

The raiding alliances are actually a great idea: if your guild isn’t strong enough to tackle the higher-end raiding content by itself, get a bunch of people in the same boat together and work together so that you have the combined power to defeat that content. One such alliance ran for a while on our server and I managed to get in on it often enough to get a good half-dozen PoP flags that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Eventually though, that alliance fell apart. A lot of people were using it just to get enough flags to join the high-end guild of their choice, and as soon as they got the flags they stopped going to the alliance events. The number of people willing or able to help dwindled, and eventually the alliance wasn’t strong enough to continue its raids.

There’s a new raiding alliance out now though, but unfortunately (for me, anyway) it doesn’t quite operate the same way. Whereas the previous one allowed almost anyone who was the appropriate level to come along, this one is being picky about who it lets in. It may not be a guild itself, but it has the same sort of steep entrance requirements that you expect from the high-end guilds. Two in particular though are the deal-breaker for me: members are required to be available for raiding by 5pm EST, and must raid four or five nights a week. And oh yeah, they’re not even accepting certain classes anymore, including mine.

5pm EST? I’m still at work for at least 2-3 more hours at that point. Hell, even someone on the east coast would have to get home in one heck of a hurry to make that. This kind of committment is simply impossible for me to make. 4-5 nights a week? Maybe in my earlier EQ days… Right now I could guarantee two nights a week, often make three, and sometimes four or five, but I can’t quite reach what they’re asking for.

Some other people in our guild *are* hooking up with this alliance though, and while it’s good for them, it leaves me with even fewer people to play with. They may still be in the guild, but now they’ll already be off doing these raids by the time I log in. I feel like I’ll be stuck doing pickup groups in LDoN forever from here on, and that’s what I’m trying to avoid in the first place.

I know, I know, I can’t really blame anybody. It’s great that my friends can get into this alliance, since it increases their fun and it’ll help them in the long run. The alliance has every right to set their own rules, to try and avoid the problems of the previous one. Nobody owes me a route to advancement, and many of my hangups over guild loyalty and making new friends are self-imposed. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it. :-P

The thing that bugs me most though, is that I feel like I’ve been robbed of the ability to do things in EQ, all over simple matters of time. Not everyone can put the same amount of time into the game, and those who put more time in *should* be more richly rewarded, but the way EQ currently works seems broken in that regard; right now, it heavily polarizes players into the two separate ‘raiding’ and ‘casual’ camps, with little middle ground. If I can only play 70% of the amount of time that an uberguild would require, that just means it’ll take me 30% longer to reach the same point, right? Or if I miss the raiding window start by one hour, but can stay on one hour later it all works out, right? Wrong, you may still spend a lot of time in the game, but technicalities like those will still kick you down to the ‘casual’ players camp and you’ll *never* reach Vex Thal. Or the Plane of Time. Or whatever the end of GoD is.

Almost 300 days /played time now and most of my armour is still from Velious. Fuck, I’m wasting my time…