>I'm sorry to hear that. Personally, I think you're wrong that
>a person, at least one of the right mindset, can't approach CF
>very casually and still have fun. Now, maybe that's harder if
>that person is familiar with CF and used to a certain level of
>success / achievement. I can only speculate since I haven't
>been a player since those early days (maple.can), but I feel
>pretty confident saying that it's been a very, very long time
>since CF existed in the way you're describing, to the point
>where I'm curious how much of your nostalgia is selective
>memory. I have my own memory of the "good ol' days" and I'm
>occasionally reminded by other people that what I remember
>isn't always how things were. Part of enjoying CF in the
>present, I've found, is not trying to reconcile it with the
>past. Who knows?

I find the game, as time goes on, to be a worsening time sink, rather than staying the same or getting better. In fact if you want to not be lunch for every other player, certain things that are quite UN-fun are almost obligatory. It used to be if I had a half an hour to kill, I'd log in for that half hour and be great. I could pop on, do stuff, have fun and log out. Nowadays so much (prepping, skill training, etc) is taken for granted that when I was a lowbie with my most recent character that EVERY fighter class I grouped with would ungroup at 15 to dash off to the mists. Every. Single. One. I try and do as much of this stuff as I level as I can, and if I have a mage I'll sit and spam spells when I have nothing better to do, but that's when I'm RPing or having a conversation or something mostly. I just don't spend hours spamming up skills and ####, in favor of going on and playing the game. As a result, even in fights where I know I have the advantage, a good portion of the fight is determined by who landed more of their skills, and the difference is tangible. Admittedly a lot of my issues are typing related these days, but also a lot of the time it's skill or spell failure related, when half my #### lands, but the other person lands every thing, near every time. There's some of the fun taken away from you when you're performing in a sub-par manner in PK, because you're a casual player. The struggle is real!