retirement

About 18 months or so ago, I posted about my experience playing Age of Conan. At that time I'd played for just over a year, and this week will see me finish playing after just a shade over 2 and a half years of being subscribed.

When I posted last time, I had fairly recently joined my third guild, Primal Fury. Not long after posting, PF almost fell apart, as a number of the senior players in the guild lost interest and left to play other games. I was one of a few players, and along with Vic, I'd like to think one of the main ones, who stepped up and rebuilt the guild, going back to lower level raids and introducing new players until we were able to get back to where we had been. It took a few months, but PF became a very powerful guild. At our peak, we were running 2 raids in parallel through tier 2, and we were the first guild on the server to craft an Ibis blade.

About a year ago, the guild had begun to fade slightly, focussing more on PvP (which doesn't interest me) and less on PvE (which does), and the game's expansion pack was released. I wasn't excited by the prospect of playing the xpac on a PvP server, so I rolled an assassin on the PvE server (Wiccana), and joined the Third Time Lucky guild, which my friend Misaki played with. I was fortunate that I came in playing a class in which TTL were undermanned, and I was able to quickly get gear and become a regular raider. I raided with TTL as we progressed through T3, where they have now downed Thoth-Amon.

I wasn't there for that kill, though. My interest in the game started fading about 3 months ago, and in the last 2 months I've probably only played 3 or 4 times. Given that, I've cancelled my subscription. It was difficult to do, simply because there are a lot of people in the game whose company I have enjoyed for a long time, some of them, like Misaki, going back more than 2 years. Its been very interesting to see just how solid a social group can be formed over a voice chat server, when everyone is working together to achieve a collective aim. I hope I'll be able to meet up with some of the people I've played with if I play another online game.

For now, though, "serious" gaming has somewhat lost its appeal, and I'm devoting more of my time to some activities that I've let lapse in recent years, particularly books and movies.