Who the hell is this Hektor guy, anyway?

For the uneducated among you, Hektor was a character in Homer's Iliad. He was the leader of the Trojan armies, and arguably the hero of the work - in any case, he was portrayed as the most sympathetic of the characters in the book - who dies at the end of the work, killed by Achilles in single combat. The final chapter of the book is his funeral, which happens only shortly before Troy falls to the invaders. That's who Hektor is.

Who am I? Well, that's another story. Maybe I'll tell it some time.

What I will tell you is my experience playing MMOs. It's not as extensive as some people's, but I've played enough to have worked out what is a good thing in a game and what isn't. I started way back with Ultima Online, when I was about thirteen or fourteen or something. Good game? Well, I enjoyed it, but I was young then and easily amused.

The first game that really hooked me, however, was Everquest - which I picked up at about the time Scars of Velious was released. I played most of my time in Kunark with my Iksar Shadowknight and the rest of it around the Faydark with my Wood Elf Warrior, explaining my irrational love for Kunark and Crushbone. I never got above level 35, though - I was content to spend most of my time exploring the world. Loved that game, and I still think it has the most immersive game world of any I've played. I'm not telling people to go out and play it now - it's just a bit dated nowadays - but if you never played it, you missed out on the start of an era. EQ1 was crude and buggy, but it was full of energy and creativity and lore in a way that modern games aren't - probably because of the way the game industry has moved on since then, becoming more organised as the years passed.

After that, I took a break from playing MMOs for a while as I was at a boarding school to get my education finished. Played network Age Of Empires II, Warcraft 3 and Counterstrike, but I was craving for a little more by the time I left.

Enter World of Warcraft. Played that for long enough to level to 60, join a raiding guild and clear out Molten Core and ZG, then start on Blackwing Lair. I left at patch 1.9 (when AQ was released) after my guild fell apart, mostly because no raiding guilds actually wanted more rogues so there was little point in me playing. So I unsubscribed, sold my account and never really looked back from there.

I went without MMOs for a while, occasionally playing some network Halo with a dozen or so of my hallmates at uni, but not doing too much. That changed when I picked up Everquest II on release of Echoes of Faydwer, having read reviews saying the game had turned itself around and thinking 'hell, Crushbone and Kelethin are back, I've really gotta check this out for at least a month'. Only played for a month, because the EU servers were empty and I couldn't get a group. Instead, I found myself playing on my family Xbox 360 or on Company of Heroes, until I read a preview of Age of Conan.

Oh yes, I thought. I was back into MMOs in a big way, awaiting October with bated breath. And then EQ2 announced Kunark, and I suddenly had divided loyalties. I figured I had until October to play EQ2, at which point I could decide whether I wanted to pursue AoC or EQ2 or both. So I signed up again for EQ2 again, this time ensuring I did so on a populated server. You can read my experienced with it here. I've started a blog in the meantime, because perhaps someone out there might want to read my thoughts on the genre as a whole.