A Personal Observation of Play Style

It seems that I go through a phase every couple of months where no matter what game I go to, it doesn't keep me occupied for very long and I'm not sure why. When I fell in love with my first MMO (EverQuest) back in 1998/1999, I would play it every day for as long as I could and that lasted for years. The feeling of "fun" never left that whole time, even if I just spent the afternoon standing out in EC watching the auction spam fly by.

Those days are long gone, but my addiction remains. I have played just about every MMO on the market for some period of time only to find myself getting bored within months (at the best) or even just days or hours. Most recently, I spent some time playing Vanguard and leveling up a necromancer, finding him a nice guild, and getting him suited up to do some of the upcoming raid content, but something is missing. I don't know what that something is, but sometimes it just feels like a chore to log in and "play".

The feeling got so bad that I did something I swore I would never do - reactivate my WoW account for the 10-day trial of the Burning Crusade expansion. While PvPing and killing people is fun every once and awhile, there is really no depth to the game, so (within hours) I find myself bored already.

I think that I compare every new game to the feeling that I got during my first few years of playing MMO's, and that seems to be a problem. No matter how big a game world is, no matter how intricate the mechanics, no matter how many friends I can make - nothing compares. If I were rich, I suppose I could subscribe to every MMO on the market and play a different one every day of the week, but honestly, how fulfilling would that be? I want what I felt in EQ. I want to feel accomplished, cherished by friends, and most of all, I want to have fun.

While I still see myself "game hopping" when something new hits the market, I really think I'm done doing it with what's on the shelves right now. I think I might buy into SoE's Station Access plan and go back to playing EQ, EQ2, or Vanguard - depending on what kind of a mood I'm in.

What about you? What do you do to satisfy your gaming needs?