Returning to an MMORPG: Should You Do It?

I have a pretty decent list of MMORPGs that I played since I was 16. My very first was Ultima Online. I was a Swordsman. I remember I had enough bandaging / healing power to even resurrect people. And if I remember correctly, out of 100 skill points possible I needed about 80 to do this task.

Everything leveled up in small increments, like 0.1.

It was a game that I played with a few of my friend, and my sister even shared my account. I scrounged up $30 to give to my mom so that she could send the company a check, and that was how I paid for 2 months of it.

Eventually I moved on and a couple years later I played Final Fantasy XI. This game I was hooked to for over a year. But I got so sidetracked with all the other fun things in the game, I never maxed my level.

I made a ton of online game friends, and I never pressured myself to level. Instead I enjoyed the game for what it was worth each level.

I think this is something that a lot of MMORPGs lack nowadays. People forget that you can have tons of fun in your mid levels and don't have to be the max level to have fun. Lately online gaming has felt like a race to the top.

I quit Final Fantasy XI for World of Warcraft because several of my real life friends started playing. I had no real life friend in Final Fantasy Xi so it seemed like an obvious switch.

One game friend of mine even made the switch a few months after I did and joined me in World of Warcraft.

Two years later and having three maxed level characters with almost full epics and I was beginning to miss the other online games I once played. My real life friends stopped playing World of Warcraft because of school or personal life and I didn't have the urge to come on as much.

So I bought Final Fantasy XI again and decided to start my journey again because my game friends told me they still played; not as much, mind you, but they did.

After spending about 2 hours to install and get the patches going I logged in to Final Fantasy XI for the first time in over two years.

To my surprise, the game had not changed one bit. I quickly joined a linkshell because I wanted to meet people in the game right away so I didn't feel like I was playing a single player game.

I said to the linkshell, "I have been away from the game for 2 years, has anything changed."

I got a series of "No" and one person said, "Well 2 handed weapons don't suck as much."

Well, I liked the game the way it was so that didn't bother me. But I kept typing in my friends' names throughout the night to see if they ever came on. Granted they said they only came on for a little bit at night instead of playing all day. However, it had been several days and not one person out of the half a dozen I thought still played ever showed up.

It didn't take long before the game got boring. I wanted to know if the game was going to still be just as fun before I tried to recover my old account.

So should people come back to an MMORPG after being absent from it for a long time? I don't think so under most cases. Reason being is, MMORPGs can be extremely addictive. If you break the habit of one, why put yourself through it and get hooked again?

I had a friend that tried to return to Everquest 2 after almost a year, and he told me the game changed too much to feel the same.

I currently still play World of Warcraft and I have a free month of Everquest 2 and Final Fantasy XI still going on.

I think the only way I could really ever return to an MMORPG fully is if: 1) I can recover my account again if I had a high level character or 2) My real life or game friends were still playing.

It's hard to redo what you've all ready done in an MMORPG without your friends there. And I realize that an online game just isn't the same without your friends, and the familiar people you see online day to day.