I used to hate internet people.  I abhorred the idea of an MMORPG, as I never wanted to depend on someone else for my gaming enjoyment.  my first real MMORPG was Star Wars Galaxies.  I played the shit out of that game, even after Sony screwed it up.  Twice.  What finally made me quit?

People.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t having to deal with people that made me quit, it was the lack of people. All my “friends” quit playing, so the game was boring.

In the fall of  ’06 .  My first 4-5 months were spent in a small corp running missions.  We moved to lowsec and started living out of a POS.  I continued to run missions to try and earn ISK, but kept getting blown up by lowsec pirates.

I ragequit for 4-5 months.

I went and did other things, even trying to go back to SWG for awhile. But during this time I became more and more addicted to a couple internet forums, mainly due to the fact that keeping one of them running was what paid my bills. I eventually came back to Eve.

I joined up with Goonfleet, as I had been a long on-again-off-again member of Something Awful. This was about a month after CCP ‘fixed’ remote doomsdays, and Goonfleet killed Shrike.

Most of you probably know the history of the Great War, and have seen it told 50 different ways, so I don’t need to bore you with how it went from my end. Besides, that’s not what this post is about.  If you’ve made it this far, you probably want to know why I keep playing, even after getting (and losing!) a titan.

It’s the people.

I’ve become good, real-life friends with a lot of eve goons. we get together and hang out a few times a year en-masse, and have smaller get-togethers in between.  I spend more time talking about eve to people than I do actually logged in, playing the game.  I’d let quite a few of them crash at my house should they ever need a place to stay, and I’d even happily let just about any of them fuck my sister if I had one.

So really, the anti-climatic end to this is, people make Eve fun. I would have quit playing this terrible, terrible game a long time ago were it not for my daily interactions. People from all walks of life play Eve Online, Lawyers, 20-somethings living in their parent’s basement, IT professionals, unemployed stoners, that guy bagging your groceries and quite probably even you.

So, if you’re contemplating quitting eve because you find it boring, it’s because you haven’t found the right group of people to hang out with in game. Keep trying. The Eve community is really just a collection of smaller groups of people with their own interests. Find a group of people that share similar interests, and it’ll be like playing a whole new MMORPG.