#1.
I joined the game in Jan 2005 and didn't realize until too late that I should have bought a mod merc, mod fap, imk2 while they were relatively affordable, I could have bought all those and some good armor too. I just didn't realize at the time that I needed to do it and nobody said, hey mac, if you got the money, you better buy these now! I didn't see the price escalation that would come and could have been much more in front of it.
#2.
Didn't take advantage of all the ways to accelerate skilling up my avatar. I didn't realize how important it would later be to be skilled enough to max everything down the road. I was taking the "natural" skilling path, skills were just what you got while you were doing everything else. Had I had the forsight, I could have been one of the top skilled avatars today maxing all my weapons, giving me more options, and having the ability to craft whatever I wanted.
#3.
Somewhere around mid 2006 I was getting extremely frustrated by the bugs, nerfs, item price speculation, escalating cost to play, Land Grab fail, dying because of lag because fap wouldn't fap and you would die. Rubber Banding, game crashing all the time. Just so many frustrations, all the time. I think I've forgotten more than I can remember about all the things that seemed to be going on that were pissing me off. All those things and more that were driving my friends away from here and who were playing other games and requesting my participation there, not here, and they were having fun, and only paying $14.99 a month! It seemed like every time I logged in it was something else to piss me off even more than before, and it was becoming more and more frequent. And that Marco guy, "its dynamic, its dynamic, its dynamic..." He was very annoying. I was having fantasies of bad things happening to him. I was just in a bad mood all the time. It just wasn't fun anymore, at all.
I tried so many things and got the same results, it was costing me a lot of money to keep playing, I didn't want to spend all that money in here chasing HOFs and ATHs that I never got. I remember my best friend and I had spent weeks up at CP in Dome 4 chasing ATH, every night we were there globaling, getting small globals , no items, small hofs, and someone got an ATH off a Weak. We were like "fuck this" and left. That was it, no more expensive hof chasing for us.
I had two LAs and I was having a hard time getting fertilizer to keep them going, it was like a constant thing to log into the game and spend my time just trying to find fertilizer to keep my DNA up and not let it get unlocked, and that was pissing me off, that was taking time and money that I didn't want to spend. We didn't have event management system at that time. I didn't have time to try and put together events and try and run them and I could see was that it was costing me more money than I was making to run some silly screen shot event that every one else was also doing, we didn't have missions then, we didn't have TPs to by or custom messages, r shop cans, and people didn't have vehicles to fly around, or any of that stuff they have now. I was competing with NEVERDIE's hot new Asteroid and Deathifier's big LA and the return was just not worth the effort.
With all that going on, I was really questioning how much longer the game could last, I just couldn't see how it could last with all of these problems. I just couldn't see how people would keep playing and investing with all of these problems. One day I just had enough. I made up my mind to stop. I sold all my stuff and chipped out with the idea that if I didn't have a reason to come back, I wouldn't. I didn't want to. I was mad at MA for what I considered mis-management of this world I had been so excited about before, and now I was angry at all the time, so I didn't want to give them any more of my money. I sold out with a nice profit and left.
It took me 4 years of logging in just saying hi to friends and keeping my avatar alive before I would come back and play some.
Hindsight is 20/20, the game is still here, things are more stable, there's a lot more features that people have been asking for, for a long time, the cost to play is based on how much you want to spend.
I should have taken peoples advice and kept my skills, my items, and my LAs and just logged out and stayed out until I cooled off and MA did more work on the game. By selling my LAs, I lost all the opportunity I had to collect some minimum amount of peds over the years. My items would still be worth more than I paid for them even after they had fallen in value over the years. I wouldn't be having to "skill up" again.
#4.
I came back briefly after the new game engine and bought an imp fap and i2870 because I never had them before and I wanted to experience what it was like to have them. I then promptly got bored and annoyed again at the game and sold them and took the money out. Right at that time, MA came out with CLDs, but I had no interest in looking into it, again I just wanted to get my money out and do something else. Again, in hindsight, I should have invested that money in CLDs and just let it ride while I went to my corner for a time out.
#5.
Whatever else I do in the future. My track record hasn't been too good! I may look back at the money I've re-invested now to get my skills back as epic fail. I guess we'll see