Krypsyn: I am not playing any MMO's now, but I have played quite a few in my life. Honestly, every new generation/iteration of MMO's have left me more any more wanting. I used to play MUDs through my Unix account back in the day. I like games that are hard to learn, take hours of time tinkering to min/max a character, and are unforgiving if you screw up. I really enjoyed games like Ultima Online, Everquest Classic (the first year or so anyway), and Dark Age of Camelot (I still think they had one of the best PvP models, bar none), but since then, as MMO's have been made more main-stream and casual-gamer centric, I have lost more and more interest in the genre.
Anyway, my MMO history is as follows (in roughly chronological order):
1) Ultima Online (very briefly and sparsely, I was on a friend's account)
2) EverQuest
3) Dark Age of Camelot
4) Neocron Beta (Fraggin' loved this game, but it flopped everywhere but Germany, I think)
5) JumpGate Beta
6) EVE Beta (fun, but my computer at the time couldn't handle it)
7) City of Heroes/Villains (I loved my regeneration scrapper sooo much)
8) Everquest 2 (Very briefly. I kept comparing it to the original, and it always came up short for me)
9) Tabula Rasa (for an MMO, I rarely ever grouped with anyone. It was odd)
10) Auto Assault
11) Star Wars: The Old Republic
I know I am missing one or two, but I think I got the major ones. The big one I never tried was WOW; I just couldn't stand the thought of more dwarves and/or elves at that point.
The most recent game I played, SWTOR, I had some fun with. However, the PvP on my server was entirely borked (thus killing the endgame for me, since raiding in that game can go suck eggs as far as I am concerned), and my main three characters were all nerfed at the same time. At the time, I was playing an assassin tank, a mercenary healer, and a sniper DPS, with the sniper as my main. In a single patch, they "balanced" the game such to make my merc overheat on basic heals (thus making her useless), they lowered the relative damage of my sniper (such that even tank classes were dishing out better dps), and lowered the damage mitigation on my assassin tank (who wants a main-tank who can't tank multiple foes if needed?). So, well, I canceled my account the day after that went live.
Just not sure MMOs are for me anymore.
I'm aware of all of those, and your list from 1 to 4 is basically my history with MMO's. I played Ultima Online with the anticipation to play Everquest, which I didn't get to play until it was live for a year, then I only played for six months and only played an Erudite Wizard (I made even less progress in Ultima Online, but still enjoyed it). I did play quite a bit of Dark Age of Camelot, but I never got to max level, I was also in the Neocron beta and played it here and there over it's early years, but I never stuck with it. I never played jumpgate, but I was in the EVE beta as well, though I took many very long breaks. Last time I played it hardcore I was running multiple accounts and my own industrial corp, raking in the ISK and having a blast, but it was taking ALL my time to do so, so I had to stop. I also never played City of Heroes, never really got into Everquest 2 though I've peaked at it as it went free to play and have known many who were diehard EQ2 fanatics (as in most of my old work place), and I wish I had checked out Tabula Rasa before it was taken down. It looked like a great and unique game, but didn't get a chance to shine. My brother in law gave me auto assault for x-mas, but I never checked it out and it was taken down less than a year after, making the $50 purchase null and void. But I'm always on the lookout for a sci-fi mmo, which is why I checked out The Old Republic, despite it not being nearly what I hoped (still enjoyable, just not stellar).
A lot of my time was, alas, taken up by World of Warcraft. That's one big reason why I'm here on GOG as because of my late entry into computer gaming, coming from a console-only family untll my mid-teens, and jumping right onto MMO's within a year after getting our first PC and never really stopping, it goes without saying that I've never really checked out most of the games on this site. I tend to stick with a few games and try to master those. In my case it was MMO's...but any experienced MMO player knows that no MMO truly ends, thus it's a flawed goal :)
To illustrate this theory, here's a classic WoW comic I adore:
http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/168065_700b.jpg My time in MMO's now is a lot more minimal and I have a lot more self-control. I''m relishing being able to actually FINISH single player games, old or new, that I know I'll own years from now, that no one can't take offline or hack or anything that get's in the way of my ownership, or my fun.
