MMO's I've played/am Playing 'Cuz Why Not

- World of Warcraft (still playing)

- Aion Online

- Tera

- Guild Wars

- Guild Wars 2 (still playing, on and off)

- Rift

- Wildstar

- Final Fantasy XIV

- Archeage

Prolly some others, but I can't remember them.

Aion, WoW, Tera, GW2 and FFXIV probably have my favorite gaming memories in them. WoW on the basis that I had no clue how MMO's worked and, for the most part, solo'd an entire dungeon on a Paladin during the Cataclysm expansion thinking I was supposed to do it that way. Plus, the story has more memories for me -- I'm not that knowledgeable of it, but I generally liked it and it reminded me a lot of the books I read when I was younger, like the all the works that featured Drizzt Do'Urden.

Aion sorta taught me what a dungeon was, and had a class I adored (chanter, chanters are the best ever). Technically I was a support role, but I had to take over the primary healing role a lot in that game (and received compliments quite a few times, many saying I healed better on a support character than most clerics they ran into). Mostly dropped it since the RNG was a huge feature of the game (RNG as in, if you want the best stats for anything, you need to spend a ton of in-game money to get the items and then hope that, as you're socketing them, they don't shatter all the expensive ones you had. Failure rates were extremely high, same for enchanting weapons). I like RNG, but I like it in doses (WoW's is pretty decent I feel, I get cool stuff enough to weigh out when I get zilch, Aion just broke all my stuff constantly). XIV had a nice RNG system, where the items you want can drop, but you always get some tokens you can use for the next tier of items. I miss my chanter since not only was he the best class, but the character creator basically let me import one of my older OC's and he got really neat wings and Asmodians just fit the profile for him so well >.>

Tera was the first game I started actively RPing in, mostly because I could play a castanic in a full set of plate armor, a massive lance and give him the Armstrong disposition (see; FMA). But how scantily clad -everything- was and the community that attracted began to really weigh down the game, that and the world felt incredibly dead. The story was non-existent, the water couldn't be touched, the buildings were basically open domes in most cases, the crafting was just misery, the amount of farming to do felt painful, the end game dungeons (only two) were plagued with glitches and 'elite' players. I'm never going to forget Kaprima. I fought Kaprima so many times. So. Many. Times. When they released more content they basically broke their game and after that my guild basically said "nope" and most of us left. (Our guild was a small, fun RP group who somehow had a province we'd win every election -- we did host some server wide events, like the zombie game, which was pretty fun to be a part of).

Guild Wars 2 is where I met a ton of friends and was the first game where I was actually exposed to a larger LGBTQ+ community. I feel some elements of the story are the reason for that, since there's openly gay, lesbian and pansexual characters in the game itself (Sylvari, as a species, are predominantly pansexual and the official relationships they had in canon reflected that for the most part). Still, I love my mesmer sylvari and I loved RPing as him in this game -- basically an adult-sized four year old (literally four years old, the oldest sylvari in existence is like 25 or so). I loved so many things about the story initially, the Nightmare Court, the Inquest, the Wardens and the Pale Tree -- I am still incredibly saddened they never did much with these organizations. Nightmare Court has little written in terms of motivation (Why do they hate everyone? Why do they want to corrupt The Dream? Why do they murder, maim and kill in the name of corrupting the Dream? Why are they so vehemently against Ventari's teachings when most sylvari seem fine with them? They're never really developed, and in te moment where they could have been developed Anet opted to create the Toxic Alliance which I still hate). The RP in the game was fun, the community was pretty decent, the PvP and WvW were interesting and engaging before the latter turned into Blobfest. But the game itself became stale and never developed the interesting aspects about its story and constantly introduced new things instead of building on older things.

I miss FFXIV on the basis I loved the miqo'te males and I loved healing. Plus, I beat most of the major content in that game when it was still particularly hard (latency issues in the Titan Hard Mode fight made it's difficulty much higher, since you'd need to know the rotation by heart so you could move out of the instagib moves before they went off server-side, since you couldn't see it client-side). But the RPers became plagued with elitists who demanded specialized statistics and methodology that took away from the freeform players, and the raiding/dungeon community was beyond terrible in terms of attitude. (Forcing new players to skip story laden cinematics in story dungeons, for example).

Now I did like Wildstar, but it got boring really fast. All there was, was quests and completing them and running from hub to hub. Little to do with exploration and the dungeons just murdered too many groups to make them viable to pug. The PvP was too chaotic and large scale, the maps too small to accommodate the amount of players adequately. Plus, the story can be really, really dark which was a huge shock since all the trailers, narrations and so forth seemed to point towards a light hearted story with jokes and gags akin to Ratchet and Clank. Kind of a huge shock when you go into the game and realized that there's children who've witnessed their entire families torn apart, burned alive, and they're the last remainders who are mourning over their family/lamenting about what they can do.