Career, Family, Everquest, Sleep, choose up to three.

Can I have your stuff?

Kids get pretty independent before you know it, their need for your time starts high but wanes steadily, and may even go negative. Balancing careers and relationships around eq requires luck in circumstance, and definitely caution.. and maybe even making do with less.

I'm not sure anyone with obligations that plays eq ever gets enough sleep though.

Everquest has a high up front cost. Meaning it takes a lot of time to get to the end game, however once there its rather easy to STAY caught up. In pop time raids gave 3-5 aa per week, we get about 10 a week in TSS just from raiding. Most of the players in my guild on Mangler only log in for raids and thats it. They are still current gear and relevant aas.

As others have said, there will always be people who raid 24/7 and are the super hardcore, but that doesn't have to be your EQ. The level cap is 60 till luclin. Only a few AAs really matter in any expansion. ~10 hours a week can both get you to endgame and keep you there. As others have said its easier with a dedicated group or guild, but EQ doesnt REQUIRE you to give up your live, its what you make of it. Especially on a server where everything is tradeable, there is even less of a barrier to get caught up.
Its a game, figure out how you want to play it and have fun.

Three? That's fancy.

Preach!

We're all in our 30's / 40's now and we have a wife, kids, and a high demand engineering job.

I really want to play EQ but as OP said, pick 3...

The XP boost at 50% was perfect. Now I look at the icon and I'm like "nope I dont have more than 2 hours to play right now so there's no point".

So there is a fair point in there. The amount of time you have to play in one sitting is far more important than the amount of time you have to play in a week. If you play after your kids go to bed and you can't stay up late, you don't really have a choice. Maybe a solo class and just accept it takes a while, or accept not playing.

Personally I found once my kids hit 12 things opened up a bit. It depends on if they are in organized activities or not, those can take up a lot of time. But outside of that, a 12 year old kid is going to entertain themselves for the most part. Try to hold on, it does get better.

This is again true on truebox servers, but not so much on the non truebox servers. Most of my exping comes in <2 hour windows. It's effective because i can log on and be gaining xp in 5 minutes.

Yeah, I should have qualified that I meant when trying to LFG or do PUGs as a single player.

No we aren't, Deliah has been gone nearly 20 years now, are you kidding me? and lol @still working the money mines.

And no, the second trial was was declared a mistrial as well, so don't talk. Jury talks, rumor walks.

I was hoping this would be more of a game and less sad whining. Oh well. Given the choices, I pick everquest, sleep, and everquest again.

The long memorial day weekend was sufficient for a ton of people to max a character. No interference with tons of good careers to play on a long weekend. As for family, yeah it'll cut into time playing, but how much is on you. Is eq a serious hobby and your partner understands that every few months you like to go extra hard playing for a few days? Is that a huge problem? Most dudes have hobbies that eat time. I know it's mean to say here but it's an argument I make all over - a lot of eq is about time management and some people are just way more efficient. More time killing, less time lfging or moving around etc. They level much faster. And... they usually seem more stable irl in the same way. Whenever I run into people who have these blowups like their partner is mad and says no more or they're failing at work or whatever, it always seems to be people I also see waste a lot of time in game.

Get your life together, do a better job of balancing your hobbies and budgeting time for playing, and then do the same in game too. Don't putz around lfg or constantly swapping camps or farming grey cons on your non maxed char and blame anyone else for being slow. Don't piss off your wife the day before launch or commit to doing stuff you don't want to like outings or whatever and then say oh no why is there no time left for my everquesting, that's on you.

The game design doesn't need to change, your expectations need to change.

Well exactly, and that's always been the case. Taken in and of itself, I am not sure I would automatically classify everquest as something that "works" with real life. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. EQ is not your friend. It isn't your buddy, it isn't your pal, your amigo.

EQ was/is a carefully designed addictive elf simulator. It's a Skinner box. It functions the same way heroin functions, except with elves. You can carve it into a functional life, sure. But that's not anything the game is designed to do lol. That's on you, may God have mercy on your soul.

If I am DBG, I am just trying to keep this IP alive till the first cadres of players hit the retirement homes and truly have nothing else to do as their brains get nerfed by the month by creeping dementia.

And NO, TOM, it is NOT the fault of the meds.

So change the game for everyone else to please just you?

I have a career, a family, a good sleep schedule, and I leveled to max with every level cap increase.
You can definitely do all four.
Here are some tips.

#1 - Make friends. Either in guild or out of guild, build a friends list. This increases your chance of getting groups, limiting the amount of time you sit LFG. It's no guarantee of getting a group, but it increases your chances.
#2 - Have a plan. Leveling is a main goal sure, but what can you do to increase your character beyond leveling. Trading in the tunnel, tradeskilling, farming, all of these can be done while you are LFG. This way you are still improving your character while you find a group, instead of sitting in one place spamming LFG channels. Keeping busy will make your limited play time feel more productive.
#3 - Consider your class. Some classes get groups faster than others. Healers, Tanks, and Pullers for example. Other classes are good for solo grinding, like Necros and Druids. Maybe switch classes to something more in demand (lowers LFG wait times) or has better solo ability (See #2)
#4 - Find a different game. While EQ has made improvement to the leveling process (Faster exp gain on TLP's, removal of Hell Levels, etc), it is still a very group focused game that doesn't lend itself well to casual play. Maybe go to WoW, SWTOR, or another MMO that works better for casual players with limited play time. There are also a lot of really good open world single player games out there too.

Honestly, this game is not a fit for everybody. It is a very niche game designed around old styles of play. Some people like it that way and embrace it, some people make it work, and others can not. Much like any hobby in life, you either make time to achieve success and enjoyment, or you find something else.

Family, sleep, career--but I think there's room for all 4.

Agnarr is pop locked and everyone is super nice. The race is over there and what you have left is an AMAZING community. You guys should give it a try!

No one said it’s hard as in difficult. It’s not difficult you just click a play button and log in.

It is however TIME CONSUMING which is not the same thing as HARD.

Do you understand the difference between time-consuming and hard yet?

My assertion is that they will have more good paying customers if they reduce the leveling time sink because of people who have less free time than spare money.

On the other hand, I am retired, single, kids all grown up, no demands on my time. Play about 6 hours a day.

And yet I am not max level.

I do not "keep up" with others in the game and to me there is no leveling time sink because that is not what the game is about for me. While I realize I am a minority and that 90% of the other players feel the stress and peer pressure to get to max level, I wonder why? There is no end to the game so why hurry? Relax.

If I want pug or whatever I just ask in chat and there is always someone else of my level available. Its not like I got left behind with no one to play with.

I putz around doing quests and frequently get side tracked.

So its not how much time you have but what you do with the time you do have. I just totally waste mine

And isn't that what a game is about?

So you are saying that committing time to a time-consuming game when you have limited time is not hard? While simultaneously asking for an increase in the exp rate for people who have limited time? Do you not see the contradiction?

It doesn't matter whether you classify it as difficult or hard, managing time can be one of the most difficult things any person does. If it wasn't hard, you'd have no problem managing career/family/EQ/sleep and this thread wouldn't exist.

Or are you saying you have plenty of time, but you just don't want to spend that much of it leveling up? If so, then it's not about career/family/EQ/sleep, it's about how much value your time has versus the value of playing this game. But I don't think that's it, as your thread seems to imply there isn't enough time to do all of those things.

Something being time consuming, in and of itself, does not make it hard. It's committing that time, out of a limited pool of time, where choices have consequences, that makes doing it hard. And that's the point I was making.

EverQuest has long held a "Brand" recognition of being a game where you absolutely need other players - or you need to box.
While I sympathise with anyone who is a keen player of this game who struggles to juggle their RL commitments with gaming this game is always going to have a focus on grouping and raiding both of which require either a clique or a strong guild to support you and you in turn supporting others.

Until such times as this game explores the possibility of a "solo levelling path" or true solo content it is always going to hamstring anyone that plays off-peak or can't play as many hours as most folks.

The other thing to bear in mind is the XP model has changed beyond recognition on Live servers in current content, levelling XP with the ToV expansion & likely to continue is wrapped up mostly in the progression system, killing mobs for levelling XP is simply not rewarding enough to consider it a worthwhile use of your time, better off now to only use mob kill XP for AAXP and for levelling use progression tasks and Overseer missions.
Which ironically suits casual play so long as you can actually get those mythical groups EQ demands.

So boosting XP is probably not that useful, especially since AAXP is capped anyway - boosting it more could potentially devalue "bonus XP" periods making them significantly less attractive.

Focus on organised groups, even on TLP this is the real key to success and in my experience the truly "family friendly" guilds are ones that effeciently get all their raiding done is as little time as possible, the "dirty secret" of playing in a hardcore guild can be it actually leaves you more free time, so long as you can play at that level.

Players even casuals would be well advised to arrange their RL if they can to allow them to raid, the power from better gear in terms of speeding up all other aspects of the game is not to be sniffed at, you focus your time, you get more out of this game.
In most of my prior guilds 2-3 days a week at most were raid days 3-4 hours a day - and none of them expected 100% RA, usually 40-50% is plenty so realistically you are looking at 2 days a week arranged as "me time" and then fit your casual play around that.

I maintained 90% average RA over the past 5 years even with family & work & plenty of sleep & days off to avoid burn out, I did end up not completing all of the group stuff in era but if you pick & choose what you do carefully you can enjoy the spoils of all the most critical things and backtrack at your leisure if you want to be a completist.

TLP don't really need faster XP unless they are at Selo speed of unlocks, you just gotta use your time wisely.