(I'm going crazy by the stupid error message: "Your HTML is not well-formed - no valid tags were found." I DON'T CARE! Just let me post. Gonna write this in Notepad, and try to post it again in plain text with NO CODE dammit.)

I have 1700+ ratings on imdb.com, and I've given almost 10% of them a 10/10. My vote history on imdb:

http://uk.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=9677062
I'm not a perfectionist, to me a 10/10 is simply as good as it gets, so the best game I've ever played gets it. There's also many different genres in movies/tv-series etc, so I've given the best of every genre according to my opinion a 10/10. If I were to give DAOC less than a 10, it would imply that I believed I hadn't seen any games that deserved a 10 because it's the best game I've ever seen.

When rating movies:
Most of my ratings are favourite movies, wich mean ratings 7-10, as those are easiest to remember that I've seen. Most of the movies that I would've rated 1-6 I've forgotten long ago so I wouldn't know where to put the rating. Ofcourse there is a few that is so bad that they're hard to forget, but the best movies are always easier to remember. All the movies I've rated 9-10 are "Must-have's" wich means if they aren't already in my collection, they will be.

7-8 means they are so good I can watch them several times, and many of them I own or would like to own.

5-6 is good enough to keep my eyes on the screen during the entire movie but not something I'd like to watch again,

3-4 I can watch once but I don't enjoy it,

and 1-2 is so shockingly horrible I either just gotta watch them until the end (just to regret I did) thinking "it can't honestly be this bad, there must be something I've missed", or turn it off and feel like the time I wasted I could just aswell have spent watching a blank wall section.

When rating games:

I have yet to come across a game that has involved me as much as DAOC did, and therefore it's the only game I've given a 10, and it did so by such a margin that it's tipped the scale. No other games have a score higher than 9.

My second highest rating I gave to Starcraft wich is a strong 8 (8.5). 8+ ratings is for games that have involved me more or less over several years, and that took a lot more than 1 month to grow tired of. These games will always have a place on my hard drive for easy access.

7+ are for games that have involved me much, but aren't good enough to keep me occupied to this day. Most of them took less than 1 month to grow tired of. A criteria is that I've had very much fun, and gotten addicted to a certain point.

6+ are games I've enjoyed playing, but never had me for long periods of time in a row. It's games that are very fun playing for a while and then I go do something else.

5+ are enjoyable in the moment, but easily tiresome. These can only be played in short bursts, and if I occupy myself with them for a longer period I'll lose my interest in playing again for a while.

4+ lost my interest pretty quick. Tried and failed.

3+ never really caught my attension enough for me to really get interested. There must be something wrong with it.

1-2 I'd rather watch the blank wall section again.

I think there's another reason as well why I got bored from AoC. The market system that has it all leaves no room for me as a player merchant.

When I leveled my first char to 50 in DAOC, I used to lurk around in the lower level dungeons to sell my loots to lower level players. I worked hard to get stuff they wanted, and spent several hours killing yeti and wyverns to get nice drops I could sell. That got my mind off the long road to 50. I think there's something missing in AoC to get my mind of the long road to 80, so I lost my motivation.

Later in Darkness Falls I enjoyed very much to farm seals and sell them to the highest bidder. When Atlantis arrived I actually had fun farming scrolls and selling them, and I made many platinum on buying scrolls cheap and selling them more expensive. So I could, in turn, buy me a spellcrafted suit. As it is now, the chances to actually earn something on the AOC market are pretty slim. And there's no interaction with other players involved which makes it dull.

When that's said, they pretty much ruined the market in DAOC as well later on.

Anyway I agree it's a bit early to throw in the towel, so I might give it a few more tries. It's just gonna be longer periods of time between them. Since I've discovered I tend to get bored a lot faster with AOC than I did in DAOC (it was so much to be done with DAOC I didn't get bored before I had played 4 years and was RR9, then there was a year of boredom, I canceled, and another year has passed), I'm gonna play a lot more casually. I'm not gonna spend several hours in a row logged in, and I'm gonna wait several days between each session. This way I'll probably be able to cope, and I'm looking forward to when they've improved the game. I won't play with levels and grinding in mind, I will only explore and hunt rare monsters and if that leaves me at lvl27 so be it. Since my quest journal is full of tasks I find no fun, I'll delete the most boring quests to make room instead of forcing myself to finish them. Hehe.

There were boring periods on the long road to 50 in DAOC as well, and I remember when my first char hit 50 I was so bored of PvE that I couldn't step in a PvE zone for a year afterwards. Luckily there was RvR so I didn't have to either. When I leveled my other chars, I used the Battlegrounds as motivators. I capped Thid, and then leveled with a goal to reach Caledonia to stay there and cap before moving on. Then when Molvik and Leirvik came, I felt no need to hit 50 at all with my alts.

I wish there were some Battlegrounds I could go to when I'm bored to death of PvE, so my only option isn't logging off and doing something else for a few days. So I wouldn't need to get to 80 to start having fun.