I am going to get a little personal now so if you don't like that sort of thing, then I apologize in advance!
Well, when I first found EQ, me and my daughter's mother were "on the outs" so I wound up having a lot of time to myself. Staying up with nothing to do, and no job, eleven years ago, I stumbled across Everquest. Saying that I was hooked would be an understatement. At the time I wasn't working, so I would literally stay up for DAYS STRAIGHT until I couldn't stay up anymore, then roll over to my bed, which was five feet from my computer at the time, fall asleep (I wouldn't log out, I would just go AFK) and then the minute I woke up, I would start the process again.
Friends in real life no longer mattered. My friends were the avatars I was looking at on my monitor for days and days straight! They were my family!
It was really, really bad! With the exception of my daughter, Everquest came before everything else!
In 2004, the game became a shell of itself and I quit! The scary thing is, I didn't quit because I was wanted to, I quit because the game was no longer fun!
So six years pass by and then I hear about this server. I was already heavily involved in the community of another private classic server that is still being developed and I was chomping at the bit to play classic EQ again, so I came to this when it was in beta. I am sure some of the devs remember sitting in zones for hours upon hours with me, into the late hours of the morning while we fixed pathing and other things that I had knowledge of.
But anyway, the server launched, and that was it! Within a couple days I wanted to do nothing but play again!
But there was a problem with that!
I now have a very good job, and I am an important person there. I have a house and I am getting married July.
All of that started to suffer; My performance at work, my relationship with my fiancee.......it got sour and it got sour FAST! So the server launched on Oct 2, 2009 and by the middle of October, I was faced with a choice......
My normal life or my life in Norrath.
I chose my normal life. I completely put everything that had to do with Everquest behind me as quickly as possible and it really was like quitting an addiction cold turkey. I honestly thought that I need to stay away from everything Everquest in order to lead a "normal" life. When I caught myself thinking about it, I would shake it out of my mind and think of something else.
Time went by.....
I came back to the server this past weekend, and I am hoping to have a balance with this whole thing. My fiancee told me that she would give me some space, but I also told her to tell me the minute I start to show signs of falling off the wagon again.
All in all, this game is called Evercrack for a reason!
The bottom line is I SEVERELY underestimated the addiction-based power of this game and I nearly paid the price for it!
I think this time, I do have a balance, but I will be ever wary of falling deep into the hole of Everquest-addiction again!
So far....so good.....
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