Hudson I agree with you about EQ2 being a bit of a lonely Climb and Wow is more streamlined and easier to jump into solo. Both games are great in different ways though, it really comes down to preference.

The funny thing is, some people seem to think that, just because it is an MMO, you have to group to have a good time. I’m not antisocial, but if I have a choice between soloing or grouping with someone that acts like their butt is a piece of headgear, I’ll either solo, or craft some stuff. Of course, since I have 3 accounts and 27 toons, I can always find something to do, lol.

About the time RoK came out I started having less time to play, my guilds both more or less disintegrated, and so I went back to a small “IRL friends” guild I’d been in. That guild was so small I can’t recall if we ever have actually gotten a group of 6 together for any kind of instance run or anything. PUGs were still fine, etc, in spite of not necessarily being “perfectly geared.”

Then TSO hit, and somewhere along the line “must have mythical, T2 gear and 170 AA’s” seemed to become the “minimum required” for even a PUG. Obviously this isin’t truly the case, since not 1 of my toons have mythical, T1 gear, nor more than 140 AA’s and I’ve seen all TSO instances with at least 1 of them and the groups successfully completed them too (most of the time). Even so… the perception has increased over time, and my desire to log in has decreased, in spite of the fact that I have a blast every time I log in. Go figure.

Even so… I did something the other day I never expected to do — I canceled my EQ2 account. I think I’ve only logged in to it maybe 4 times in the past 3 months and it doesn’t fit the budget for the coming months. Perhaps in February with the new expansion I’ll be back (budget issues should be gone by then too). Hopefully with the 10 new levels and new dungeons and such everyone will again be “the same” and not so worried about “let’s do this faster faster faster.”

and I would know I live in south Texas. And no we dont talk like hillbillies

I don’t know what the Meiers Briggs test is, and I think I don’t want to find out ;) Sounds like a Bartle test for real life?

Anyhow, this whole discussion made me want to give EQ2 a serious try again. I gave WoW several tries and EQ2 only one, yet every time Tipa writes something about it, it seems like a fun game with a lot of well thought-out little intricacies. And some amount of depth that not many other games seem to have. I got bored of Runes of Magic quickly, for example, because it seems like a big grind through cardboard props, empty hulks of NPCs and predictable skill sets :(

We all had to take Meiers Briggs tests at work. I didn’t realize ESTJ was a really huge group among males, and even females, and most people are J. They did not have a breakdown of who goes into computer science, but who knows if there is even a higher correlation among Js. There sure as hell seems to be one with managers. that could be part of it.

Yes asian grinds are achievments. It’s the same exact thing.

I suspect achieving and killing are the two easiest styles to program for, both allow for repetition of content. Killing is harder in an RPG but easy to program for in FPS. But socializing and exploring seem to require a lot more content since they seem less interested in reusing (exploring where you have been is … not exploring. And we want new hats and dresses for our RP parties, we’re bored with the same old ones, etc). Content is expensive to produce.

I have no clue if any of that is true or if it’s an exaggerated image that is projected here, but it would correlate somehow with American MMORPGs, because they all seem to be achiever games. “You don’t have tier n gear? Pffftth. Get out of my group!”

I’m not sure I see so much of that in MMOs from Europe or Asia. If you count the hardcore grinding that Asian games do as achiever gameplay, that might be right, although from the Asian perspective the whole grinding experience is more like a road that needs to be traveled, and the goal is to travel the road, not to reach the end as fast as you can. Or some such thing. At any rate, they’re so much more grind-tolerant, they seem to actually enjoy it.

What are everyone’s feelings on that?