Well the newest EQ expansion pack, Gates of Discord, has been out for three days now. What do I think? Well, uh, I haven’t actually bought it yet. I haven’t even really wanted to…
What’s the problem? It’s really a combination of a few things:
1) The expansion itself isn’t too appealing in what it offers. New spells? The ones for my class don’t look too interesting and don’t really give me anything new. New advanced skills? I still haven’t finished buying up all the skills I need from the previous expansions yet. The new tribute system? Sounds interesting, you can buy temporary abilities with points gained from turning in items, but I don’t have many spare items to give. Leadership experience points and abilities? I never lead groups or raids anyway. The new Berserker class? I don’t have time to start yet another new character.
The one really good thing about the expansion would be the new areas to explore, without too many of the flagging restrictions that made Planes of Power such a pain, and the new loot found therein.
But…
2) A lot of the expansion is oriented towards people who have completed Planes of Power and have all the super-uber gear. I don’t. Fully buffed up with spells I have just over 4000 hit points, but someone with enough Plane of Time gear from PoP could have over 7000, maybe even 8000. And they’ll get missed more, use less mana, regen mana faster, cast spells faster, etc… I simply wouldn’t survive in a lot of spots where they will.
And…
3) Guild attrition continues, making playing less fun. Many friends are now off in the raiding guilds and don’t have time to spend hanging out with the rest of us. I wouldn’t qualify, wouldn’t be able to put up with the raiding attitude, and don’t want to abandon SW, so simply joining them there isn’t an option either. Unfortunately, without raiding, the only real option for further advancement is to continue doing groups in the areas of the previous expansion, LDoN.
The problem withg LDoN groups is that the attrition has made it difficult to put groups of guildmates together. Five other people might be logged in, enough to form a full group, but two of them might already be busy in other groups, one might be working on tradeskills, and one might be on just to chat, leaving you with only one other person and four spots yet to fill. And who do you fill them with? Well, you pretty much have to grab random strangers and hope they don’t suck too badly, or constantly call you ‘d00d’… Playing with mostly strangers just isn’t as fun anymore.
Maybe the guild can do something to help scheduling so we’ll know what times we’ll be on so we can form groups with just us. Maybe we can attract more members, so there’s better chances of enough people being available. Maybe we can…oh, there’s lots of maybes, but little motivation. It’s a lot of effort to fix and eventually you start wondering if it’s even worth it and oh fuck it, there’s probably a dozen better things I could do with my time…
But this is nothing new really; there have been lulls like this before and things did eventually pick up again, so who knows. Maybe a month from now I will have bought Discord and be back to playing full-time.
But not right now.