Warning: Long rant ahead. If you don't have time or/and braincells to kill, you may want to give this one a miss. It's, more or less, my EQ life story, with the specific names cut out.
Wiestrum wrote:
it's not a competition, it's a way to socialize, to pass the time. There is no winning it. You play to have fun, to better your toon, or your guild. Like in life, you set goals and work toward attaining them.
How do you "win" in life? Can you even win? Everyone dies at the end of life. There is no rez :) It's not the end of your life that matters, it's the journey itself that is the "game".
This is only one way of looking at it, Wiestrum. The point of this thread was to find differing prospectives and to put them out in the open.
For many of us, there is indeed competition. Competition is the very reason I play online games. Competition, at its peak, is the reason for the Zek server. It's what drives much of those who play constantly. We seek to be ontop, to be strongest, to have earned some recognition in our endeavors.
This said, the social and adventure aspects are other reasons for playing this game. While I can respect these, as being one who values competition more than these two other aspects put together, I can not possibly agree that competition isn't a driving force of the game.
I want to be stronger. Stronger than that decaying skeleton that I first saw as a challenge on my orginal Barbarian Shaman, stronger than that mammoth calf that I saw when first exploring the tundra's edge, stronger than the mammoths my Druid saw in his early days, stronger than that damned ice gaint that dropped such great amounts of cash, stronger than that wretched diplomat who shrugged off my most powerful spells, stronger than that contemptable dragon whose gaurds alone where a pain to dispatch, and, finally, I wanted to be stronger than anyone else that did; stronger than that damned Iksar Monk with his twinks, that Wizard who continually stood away and blasted people from the tops of the peaks, than that duo of Rangers who constantly stalked me until my power was low in the tundra, than that Mage who kept trying to fight me over the IG camp, than the Necro/Ranger duo who led the main PvP guild of the time on tracking me down. It was all for competition.
Strangely enough, even social interactions were competition for me. I rememeber finally checking my /played and realizing I'd spent over 102 days in game time; I wasn't one to go AFK and leave it on. I wasn't particularly wealthy, so where had the time gone? I was gifted at leveling, so it definately wasn't to that. I rarely gave trading a second glance, nor did I camp much. While I fought PvP a good bit, most logged or headed to a different part of Norrath after several short encounters; I was an "anti-PK", meaning the only people I PvP'd were the hardened players who took PvP as a way of life on Rallos. Well, the time had gone to power leveling. I'd built several guilds from the bottom up through it, proudly watching my creations take down The Sleeper one faithful day (or, rather, trio of days). It was even competition that drove me to this. On a highly factionized world of Zek, even achomplishing this required several different characters with several different guilds and followings.
Blah. Why am I rambling? I suppose, the bottom line is, competition, for me, has driven nearly a real-life year of game time by the end of it, and its crazy, to me, to discount competition as a reason for gaming.