Why I can never stick with EQ

[One Tin Soldier]

I love EQ but the same thing always happens to me. It happened with my first main character back in the day and it happened with all the alts I made later and it happened here on the blue p99 server.

I start out on a fresh server with a healthy population and I love it. I have a blast in the low levels. I get to the mid levels and it's still great fun. I love the grouping. I enjoy doing a worthwhile quest here and there. I love grouping up with people to venture into the depths of some dungeon to try to get some nice equipment upgrade.

It's great. That's the EQ I love and still want to play.

But here's my problem; for me EQ essentially has no end-game. The time commitment required for raiding is too much for me. It was back in the old days on the live servers because I was already an adult back then and it's only gotten more difficult for me over the years.

It's just too much and, frankly, what little raiding I have done I haven't enjoyed. So, as I said, the end-game in EQ basically doesn't exist for me. And therein lies my problem.

There are no end-game challenges for me. There is nothing to do once I hit max level and I know it. Because of this, the closer I get to max level the less motivated I am to continue. When I get to the point at which I feel max-level is within my reach I just lose all interest in going on. Because max-level really is the end for me all I'm doing is grinding out those last few levels untill my character dies for lack of anything to do and it seems pointless so....I just lose interest and stop.

At that point, back on the live servers, I might create and alt if the low level population was healthy enough on my server. Because I played during the time when they were still adding new servers it was more likely that I would move to a fresh server and start over there. Fresh servers full of un-twinked low levels kept me going for years longer on the live servers than I otherwise would have played.

So, I'm not sure what the point of this post is. I guess I just felt the need to play my tiny violin. This is something which has always depressed me. I wish there was some way to sustain the feel of the low/mid level game for much longer. I wish the "end-game" felt more like the gameplay of the rest of the game somehow. I'm not actually asking for any changes I'm just wishing.

I guess I'll wrap this up because it's already turned out to be a longer post than I originally intended. Anyway, there it is, that's my big problem with EQ.