I started playing EQ in Beta and helped to start one of the most successful family guilds in EQ. At the high point we had over 600 members with over 1500 toons. I ended up being the raidleader because noone else wanted to do it
Looking for a larger challenge I joined a raid guild and within two months was made an officer and head of the damage classes. 6 months later our guildleader was banned from EQ and it was found out that he and 2 other officers had been Ebaying the loot from the raids.
After the other officers voted, I was made leader and we formed a new guild with all the current members and officers minus the previous leader and the two other ebayers. Under my leadership for four years we had many firsts serverwide and all the first on our server. We had people xferring from other servers just to join our guild. The reasons why;
1) We used a modified DKP system that beefed up our best tank with the best equipment in the game but for all other classes was extremely fair.
2) I took care of the guild equipment, money, and tradeskills. I posted daily the amount of pp brought in off my 3 traders and the amount of items being sold with direct equipment incoming and outgoing posting.
3) At the end of each month I distributed all the pp equally between all members that had met the raid requirements minus a standard 100k we kept to gear up new members to a minimum standard.
4) We owned the server. Did every major mob every week and could form a raid 24/7/365.
5) Our standards were high but we vied at many times with Furor from FoH for serverwide firsts. This dedication made us one of the top guilds.
6) I played 8 to 16 hrs per day just to make sure eerything was running right while managing a 400 user computer network in RL.
After we finished PoP (I won't go into the emails and phone calls with Brad Quaid about all the crap with PoP) and my mage was tanking Quarm
(Which at the time everyone was saying wasn't possible but we figured it out mathmatically and decided to try it. It worked perfectly, no one could pull aggro off a mage at the time if the mage didn't want to get rid of it.) I had a couple heart attacks and decided it was time to go back to playing part time for the fun of it.
I played for a few years as a non raid required officer of the guild and when WoW came out decided to try it out. It was cartoonish and way to easy but I was really disgusted with my dealings with Sony over the extremely buggy patches and incomplete new content, so I switched over to WoW since Blizzard had a great reputation.
I played WoW for a few years until it got really boring. Then I quit everything and just did teaching at a local college and web programming for non profits (Parts of the John Deere Open volunteer and United Way websites as examples.) at no cost to them.
My brother told me about F2P in April and I started back up. At first it was a nostalgia trip but as I progressed along I found it to be fun again. I restarted one of my old accounts and made it gold. Been having fun since.
