so it looks like i have retired another clan. technically i am not part of the clan anymore, but it's still kind of sad to see them leave AC.
i never really talked about why i left AC suddenly. it pretty much came down to the fact that i ran out of characters who were interesting. i would roll a new character to explore some facet of character development, level him or her up a bit, and then once he or she was template completei sort of lost interest.
my highest level guy, moy, was like almost 60th, and was going to be a life/sword hybrid. all he needed was a CS sword and he would have been a real monster. i had other templates too, 4 tanks (two of them 3 schoolers), 2 griefs, 4 mages (2 ogs). i also played every melee weapon there was for at least a little while, and every missile weapon except thrown. i also played a mage with no war magic, who fought using life magic. just after converting my OG spear to an OG axer i contemplated making a meleeD spec'd mage. it was then that i realized that i had lost my mind.
also, i never got into the whole social thing... it would have been nice to play support for someone, but i was never high enough level to do much more than PL new characters, which i just wasn't into. i wasn't much into PLing my own characters so i was always lower leveled and played alone. i refused to use buffbots for anything other than corpse recovery since i always died in bad places when i did.
i got used to playing alone, and i picked up a number of tricks for recovering corpses and ducking mobs. people told me i was crazy for playing the way that i did, but i was more into the challenge of playing and not powering up.
so after a while, my new exciting characters got into their 40's and 50's, where you are pretty much just grinding thru creatures trying to earn XP for those next 60 levels. that was when AC got to be boring.
i discovered dagger and that was a nice addition. it was nice having extra skill credits to make more rounded characters. i had a 3 school tank with lockpick, and a life spec tank with lockpick. they were fun as well, until the the 40's happened to them as well.
my friend nom started playing, and hunting with him was fun until he soared past me in levels. he only had two characters and one was a tank, so they were very easy to level up compared to my 12 gimps. he also took help from our monarch. that was fine for him, he plays his way and i played my way. he is now one of the survivors honorguard.
nom was the only person that i really played with. pandy and i did for a bit, and that was loads of fun, but she was pretty well done with AC at that point. i didn't have anyone else that i was buddies with, most of the people that i ran across were jerks, so i didn't meet anyone new. the standing joke with me was that i hated anyone who wasn't in my monarchy, and about half of the people who were.
after all of that, i stopped playing pretty suddenly, and now i kind of miss it, but not really. i entertain the thought of returning for like a minute, then i stop. i would like to find a new game that pandy and i can play together, but thus far it has not happened.
there is hope for new games. pandy has talked about playing AC2 again, a friend of mine is playing ultima online and has invited me, and wels and pandy are also talking about guildwars. i suppose i could pick AC up again on a different server, but i don't know. i am still cautious about my hopes for MEO and DDO, but not really. i suppose i should play at least one other MMO besides AC1 before i pass judgement on the genre.