Sarah Cunningham · @jakemaster1390
29th Mar 2013 from TwitLonger
What AQ Means to Me.
To start off for me it means over 5 years of my life playing an enjoyable game, staving off summer break boredom from university, Staving off boredom on my days off from work, unwinding from long weeks of school and work, ways of wasting time when I had other more important stuff to do and couldn't focus and lots and lots of memorable moments that I like to experience in time with releases with the rest of the AQ players when I felt I could share very little when I was with others in real life.
For me playing AQ started in 2008, two years into university at a time when I was going to school Monday to Friday and working 16-20 hours during the weekend. The mists of time have blurred how I originally stumbled on the game. I would play Adventure Quest, as a way to pass the time between some of my classes when the time was not really long enough to get anywhere with my homework or when I was at a point in the day that I needed to relax and take a break. I would love to log on and play the new weekly quests, grab the rare items that would be released and do daily actions like defending my house from monsters. Also I loved that the game was played in the browser with no downloads needed. In the university that I attended every time that you logged off your computer, no information was stored so that anything you downloaded, browsed or tried to save to the computer was immediately erased into black oblivion. This game being browser based meant that I could log on easily at home and school with no wasted time Re-downloading games like others I was playing at the time.
I liked so much from the beginning that I wanted to upgrade. I loved that Twilly was there to greet you, heal you and help to point you where to go when there was an event happening. I loved that you had many classes to choose from and also that you could be a different race once I figured out how to change the sub-race. I also loved playing the quests that you grind to Level up your armours that you bought. I gained a love for levelling up the armours to get a new battle tactic that could be used to defeat a tough opponent. To this point and time AQ has the only quests that I am willing to sit and grind through. The quests to level the armours were very predictable and the only time I got frustrated was when I didn`t get the correct roll at the end a few times in a row. Those quests were like little goals that were attainable in the reasonably short amount of time that I had to play that soon I found that I had already levelled up to 50 without much thought.
At the time when I was making the decision to upgrade I decided to compare the prices of some of the other games that were existing at the time. Other games at the time were around 20 American dollars for only a month to three months of membership. When I noticed that it was a lifetime membership for around the same price as the membership of the other games I was immediately sold on the idea of upgrading that the only thing holding me back was how to pay. At this time the only payment options were Paypal, Mailing in a cheque or paying directly by credit card and I was too shy to ask my parents to help. I found a way to pay and there I was a Guardian for life with a X-Guardian upgrade that helped me to level up very quickly while I was playing. I never looked back because I loved the exclusive access to content such as the permanent access to the crossroads so I could find and construct the blade of Awe. I also loved that at the time you could also get exclusive content in Mechquest and Dragonfable which to me was a really valued bonus.
During my remaining two years of university I would make sure to log in every friday to catch up with the latest story and unwind from the week of hard school work and make sure I was relaxed and ready to go to work for the weekend. Fridays were my only real days off because I usually only had a science lab to attend on that day, which was easy for me unless I had a test and at most one class. I would sit on my computer logged into AQ attending to my house and checking the homepage from time to time to check and see when the release was out and refresh the browser to get the new update. I love and continue to love when I am able to leave my computer in the middle of a quest on my home computer and come back to it the next day without losing progress in the middle of the mission as long as I didn`t close my browser. I also loved the community that came along with the bulletin board where I could find people online to chat with about something I loved, what I looked forward to when in real life I would find it hard to open up with people I knew in real life.
I loved looking forward to the in game events that surrounded major holidays such as Valentines day- Hero heart day, Easter- Grenwog Festival, Christmas- Frostval, Halloween- Mogloween. To me now it doesn`t feel like a season until I have logged on and played the release for the year for these events.
To me AQ also means that it was a the beginning of a very small but very successful company. To this day I am a proud upgraded member of every game that has come from the minds that started with AQ added on both games and creative minds to over the years with their success that started with one single game. I still can`t believe that this was a company that was started in a garage and that I feel to this day that many other companies are trying to mimic the founding principles such as weekly releases and being totally browser based. You may have not been the first ones to try this format but I believe that AQ and subsequent AE games after AQ made the format popular. AQ also was the start of many characters story lines that make appearences in other AE Games that if AQ did not exist that many of them would not have been popular in the other games that they are apart of.