I feel a certain level of vindication in saying that I survived my experience in Everquest 2.  I don't want to compare this level of survival as something akin to making it more than a day in the Iraqi Police Force or coming out unscathed from Guantanomo Bay, but saying I survived my Everquest 2 without any serious psychological scarring feels to me like something to proud of for the moment.  

I think it'd be wrong to call Everquest 2 a bad game; there's just too much stuff to do and see in this game which all ties in neatly together to call it a badly developed game.  The game possesses a great interface that allows a person to easily interact with the world, the graphical engine can easily be scaled to fit your systems needs, and the opportunity for questing and adventuring is so diverse that you could probably spend years playing this game and not see everything.  You can easily pick up or drop quests, find items, hunt creatures of all sizes, and get into parties or groups for what can often times be a lot of fun

I think the important thing a person needs to know before starting on Everquest 2 is that you MUST have a plan to what you are going to do or accomplish. Unlike real life you aren't, for example, limited by geographic location, social status, race, gender, intelligence, or family.  You can, effectively, start fresh with this digital life and be whatever you want to be.  

With so much to do, with so many possibilities, and with so little guidance provided in the game about how to proceed, a person can easily become mired in quests, confused, lost, or uncertain about how to proceed or what to do. If you lose sight of whatever your goal might be, you'll definitely feel like your head is up somewhere the sun don't shine.

In the game there are two major career paths: adventuring and craftsmanship. Adventuring pertains to slaughtering enemies and in Everquest 2 you can only hunt computer creatures and not other players.  When you win you take the loot and either use it or sell it.  That's all adventuring is.  Fight, loot, continue.  Sure you can join groups of up to six other players but after a while, when you figure out the best spells for your character you can literally go on autopilot or half asleep and do well.  While some creatures you fight are surprisingly creative, others fall flat like a creature in an Ed Wood movie. 

The big problem with adventuring at least in the early levels is that you often stay in the same area for along period of time to finish a multipart quest or many quests in one area.  For example, one quest I took with my cleric (which reached level 34 by the way thanks for asking) involved taking various body parts off creatures in an area called the Fallen Gate. The Fallen Gate is basically a deep dark cave full of ghosts, snakes, and zombies. The first few parts of the quest I completed with enthusiasm especially after receiving the reward of the armor.  But admittedly, when hunting for the last piece (the sixth piece I think) I felt dejected and exhausted especially since the quest often asked you to go back and get more of the same thing for each different part of the quest.  "Patchwork soldiers AGAIN? Shit you dumb store owner, why didn't  you tell more that before!"  Why, I wondered, do I often not mind playing the same map of a shooter over and over online but this Fallen Gate area, after several weeks of grinding, the thrill of it all was rapidly fading away.  While groups and raid parties often were very helpful in completing these quests the game started to feel more like work and less like free time. 

While I think it can be fun, the quests for materials, often very good items are more often than not insanely boring and requiring you to move between 3 or 4 different parts of the world. Often times you have to run to one side one map only to go back to the far side of the first map world then often do that again and again. I wish they put an odometer on your character so you can see how many miles your person has traveled. After six months of play I'm pretty sure my character is at or approaching a thousand miles of running. That's more running than I've done in my lifetime. I used to run cross country people!

To call Everquest 2 "grinding" is generous.  Sure it can be rewarding but after running across entire continents, hacking orcs, and hacking zombies then being asked to do it again but this time on the other side of the island, it really starts to become a blur.  While having a great guild (Shattered Knights Mistmoore represent!) helps alleviate some of the monotony, even the addition of guild quests is simply more of the same but at an unprecedented scale of size since, I believe, the developers think that since it's a guild quest you won't mind running twice as far. 

The crafting skills can make one a lucrative living but I never participated in the craftmanship because (a) it seemed rather silly to work on sewing or making food in a game and (b) I refuse to pay for a game then go around picking fruits or cutting rocks!  I go into games, especially dungeon and dragon type games to beat stuff up.

Everquest 2 is a lot of doing for often very little reward.  I already have something like that in my life. It's called a job.

I just like the screenshot and included it.  Me against about 50 orcs. They were all grays for some stupid low level quest I never finished. They couldn't touch me.