What has it cost you? The Pixel fixation.
 

I imagine we're all here for our love of Norrath in One guise or another.
My heartbeat still speeds up when I hear the loading music.

I stumbled across a copy of Everquest while out shopping in London with an old girlfriend back in early 2000. Our regular tabletop gaming group had split up, moved away etc so this seemed like the ideal way to keep in touch & still get together in a Fantasy realm. The rest, as they say, is history...

I stumbled about for awhile as many of us do, finding 'my class' as it were, shortly followed by finding my guild, One I stayed with throughout my Live years.

I was working for B.T (British Telecom as an engineer) back then, they have a great system where you can go sick for 6 months with full pay & somehow I managed to blag it & get signed off with 'stress'.
Looking back I'm not 100% convinced that my priorities were the full ticket back then, (no shit) and so I stayed up most nights as my guild was on EST (Being a Brit, this would have been an issue to a 'normal' person).
The girlfriend soon became an Ex & I barely noticed. I moved in with another guildmate who had his own place & lived on a diet of Marlboro & Cake for months....

I came through it, but realise that not everyone does. Addictive Personality & all that.
I'm happy to say that I'm now happily married & still working for B.T, always got twitchy at the thought of EQ & am playing as & when I can now, with this thing called willpower.


*Apologies if this thread has been done to death previously, I did a search but came up with Nada.

my dignity and probably my health

only big gains here daily

I think it hurts a lot of people's social development and skills because EQ has a might makes right style of play . Red99 has surprised me with just how horrible the people are there. Racism is pretty damn rampant and very few have any tact on the winning or losing side.

Basically barring petitions and general stupidity... once 1 side has numbers and gets an advantage it's pretty damn hard to lose it. This corrupts people with poor social/life skills pretty damn quickly.

Good topic. I think it's something we avoid talking about. In complete seriousness, I think Rogean and Nilbog would be doing a huge service to mankind to pull the plug on this server. EQ addiction won't ruin everyone's life, but it most definitely ruins plenty of them. Weep for their souls come Velious.

even the ones claiming they are 'anti that' are pretty bad, was in <Fresh> for all of 24 hours and was legit yelled at in vent about being a spy, like its the cold war.

p.s. wasnt a spy

edit: I lost a baseball scholarship to a major SEC school 2 years into it, basically let my health go down the drain and got hurt in scrims. Now I just do my night job and go home to my kids and wife. Prolly woulda been a millionaire.

I almost failed out of college, i righted the ship but regret it cus I woulda had a crown of rile in 2001 if I didn't, now I just have student debt and p99.

Sad stuff and things. Too much to write about.

Just remember to follow the 20/20/20 rule. throw in push-ups and crunches too.

Don't play a bard.

On the contrary, I used it as a crutch to get me through some bad times. Eq helped me in a large way.