An old cardboard box

I went home for Christmas this year.  I was only there for the day.  I woke up at 5, got in the car, and drove home.  I stayed there for most of the day and drove back that evening.  It was the first time I had been home since I moved here.

When I was there, my father drug an old box into the floor and said, “I believe this is yours.”  The box was torn and ragged with a lid that wouldn’t quite fit.  All over the box was the handwriting of a boy I have long forgotten warning people to keep their hands off.

I flipped open the lid and slid back in time.  Inside the box was the pride and joy of my childhood… a nearly complete set of the original Star Wars action figures and most of the vehicles that came out before Return of the Jedi was released.

I smiled and took out each figure and each ship… marveling at how all the pieces were still there.  They were faded with time, banged up from many imaginary adventures, and many of the ships had torn decals, but they looked exactly the same as they had when I packed them away nearly 30 years ago.

I looked it all over sometimes laughing and sometimes remembering… completely amazed that they were still here after all these years.

My nephews, ages 6 and 8, came and looked over my shoulder and asked me what they were.  When I told them that they were Star Wars toys, they looked at me as if I were bereft of my senses.  “Why don’t their arms and legs bend?” asked one.  “Why does the lightsaber come out of his hand instead of being a separate piece?” asked the other.  “Why don’t the ships do anything?” they both wanted to know.

They quickly lost interest and went back to their fancier toys.  After another little bit, I packed it all away back into that old worn box and took the box to my truck.  When I came back inside, I sat back down on the floor with my nephews to play with them asking them questions about what their toys were, how they worked, and what they did exactly.

I’m starting to think that MMO’s are very similar.  I can sit and play the new games and even enjoy myself in spurts, but the rush of the game fades.  I enjoyed my weekend of gaming (for the most part), but more and more often these days, I spend my time playing wishing that I had something else to do.

I have noticed that the people I play with, more often than not, spend much of their time talking about old games they used to play and sometimes compare them to the current game.  Back then, we would see each other online nearly every day and, if they didn’t happen to log on one day, we all knew something major must be keeping them away.  Now, we might go weeks at a time without seeing the same faces.  Younger gamers, or gamers playing their first MMO, will still log on every day and laugh at us old-timers who are a bit more erratic while us vets seem to always have one eye on the horizon hoping that someone will pull that old cardboard box out of the closet again.

Maybe MMO’s are like toys.  Eventually, most children grow out of playing with toys.  Some never lose their love of toys and continue to collect them, but it becomes definately more of a collection than an activity.

When the guild Mirage released their Sayanora EQ video, there was an intro that said something like, “When I was in Everquest, someone once asked me, ‘Why are you here?  What do you get here?  What do you lose?’  I didn’t say anything.  What did I get here?  What did I lose?  Only memories remain.”

It makes me a little sad to think about those words.  I can remember many happy times spent in Everquest sitting for hours on end at the keyboard and laughing hysterically and smiling as I shared one adventure after another with these strange new friends that I had never met face-to-face.  I remember keeping a written schedule of upcoming guild events so that I would be on time and counting down the days because I couldn’t wait.  I remember spending hours and hours at work pouring through Everquest websites absorbing all of the information that I could find.

As with so many other people, those feelings are long gone. 

I still enjoy my time online.  I still have fun with my friends.  But, it is definately a different type of enjoyment.  More subdued somehow. 

There is now an acknowledgement that there will come a day when I pack my games away in another cardboard box, write warning lables on the lid for others to stay away, and hide that box in a closet.  Even now, my brain tries to think up some new activity or hobby that will get me away from the virtual worlds and into the real world.

I haven’t found that hobby yet.

For now, the box sits empty in the corner.  Someday, I will fill it up and pack it away.

But not today.

Right the second time… or at least more fun.

This weekend was a lot of long hours playing EQ2 on my 2-box toons.  The brigand/wizard combo is freaking lethal to play.

One thing that I decided long ago when I first started the leveling push on my dirge was that the second time around, I was going to take more time and actually do some of the dungeons and instances while they were level appropriate.

So, Saturday morning, my friends who recently joined EQ2 from WoW asked me if there was something fun we could do.  I gave them a few options and off to Crushbone we went.

It was a learning experience.  I’ve been to that zone enough times to know it fairly well and I was almost always the primary puller back in EQ1… even when I was playing my wizard.  Pulling is just something I’ve always been comfortable with.  Where we ran into problems was that no matter how many times I said it, I couldn’t quite get them to grasp the concept of “Stay here until I tell you to move forward.”

I would move ahead into a room with 20 orcs and start timing roamers so I could prox pull a mob and thin the room.  I would finally get him and turn around to pull him back to the group only to find the group engaged in the entrance with half the room.

We died… a LOT.  We had to leave CB twice to go repair because our gear was gone.  Had they stayed put, the number of deaths would have been significantly lower.

My favorite times would come when I would be explaining something and our FREAKING CLERIC would range pull because he was bored.  One cleric nuke at max range on a mob partially in a room or around a corner is a GREAT train recipe.

After a few wipes, I got pissy.  After about 10 times of them asking, “Why did we die this time” and me replying with, “Because you didn’t do what I told you to and you got us killed,” they finally started listening.  From there, things went a LOT more smoothly.

Even with the wipes, it was a lot of fun.  I think it finally sank in with them that there is a BIG difference between pulling 8 or 9 regular mobs and pulling 8 or 9 ^^^ heroic mobs.  They thought I was being overly cautious and I thought they were still playing like they were in Warcraft.  Once we met in the middle, things went well.

Sunday was mostly a mix of me harvesting, tradeskilling, and solo 2-boxing.  The tradeskill bug has hit again and I’ve been pushing forward with my guys who have been stagnating.  My carpenter is now halfway through 59, my provo is 34, and my jeweler is 47.  My brigand has started on the path of the sage, but he’s not far yet… only around level 15. 

The rest of the tradeskillers are progressing much more slowly but I’m also not spending much time on them.  I decided at one point that I really need to just stick to 1 or 2 and work them through first or I’m going to end up burning myself out.  I am sorely tempted to do a push on my armorsmith though.  He is high enough that I can make full suits of the steel armor and that has gone a long way towards helping my brigand survive in ugly situations.  But, I’m about to be entering into my 30’s, so the feysteel armor is what I need to be able to make next and I can’t quite make that yet.

I might work some of that tonight.  Monday nights are generally a good night for me to just screw around rather than actively hunt.  I should have enough feyiron in the bank to bust out a few levels before I have to go harvesting again.  Unfortunately, the lazy ass nitpick harvesters have been working overtime lately.  I made one sweep through the Enchanted Lands yesterday to see if I could luck into a Feysteel node… ran nearly the entire zone and gathered at least 1 stack of 200 for everything else.  Not 1 single ore node the entire time.

There needs to be code in the game where if a harvester only harvests one type of node and ignores everything else, they get struck down by the gods and their recently harvested goods vanish.    That, of course, is just the asshole inside talking.