Not Quite So Massive Now
(Not a post about losing weight, though on one level at least, about dropping some baggage.)Assuming anyone from the good old days (you know, when I blogged properly) is still around, you'll know that I've mentioned before that I play World of Warcraft. I usually back that up with the observation that I AM NOT A COMPUTER GAME PLAYER. And it's true that no other game has ever really held my attention longer than a couple of weeks, never mind the six years since WoW's European launch.
The things that I've tended to identify when analysing why WoW works for me when no other games do usually turn out to be about the game's sociability. The idea that there's a human being behind all those other characters, and I can interact with them; trade with them, talk to them, group with them, fight with them even. And that's all supported by the guild system built into the game's structure.
Which means that over the last six years I've met some lovely people in the game while playing it both here and in the US (and a few wankers and arseholes, inevitably), a number of whom have become real-life friends who both The Mrs and I have spent time with outside of the game, and some others I hope we'll yet have the chance to meet. The game was also a thing that The Mrs and I were able to do together while we were on separate continents so it's meant a lot to us in one way or another, and been a major part of our lives.
So it may come as a bit of a shock to hear that a few weeks ago I logged in, did some basic admin on my various characters, had a bit of a chat with those of my friends who were in the game, flew my main character to his ancestral homelands, and logged out for the last time. My subscription's cancelled, and I'll lose access to my account on the 9th April. The end, as they say, of an era.
If you asked me what's the reason for giving up on the game, I'd honestly be hard-pressed to give just one. It's only a few months since the latest major expansion was released, which not only added new content, it totally recreated the old world in the Cataclysm that gave the expansion its name. When The Mrs and I first heard about it and started to see the advance information we were really excited by it. It seemed like it was almost going to be a whole new game - 'WoW 2' we called it.
And then it arrived, and we blasted through the new content in about six weeks, finding that the whole process of working through the game has been rendered so linear and nannyish that there's absolutely zero excitement to be had in levelling through it, and even the reworked old world, after initially looking so cool, ended up suffering for having been restructured in the same dull way. Nothing feels really challenging any longer, and even though all of this falls out of Blizzard's stated aim to make the focus be the endgame, getting people through the leveling content as quickly as possible, even the first attempt we made on the raid content felt just so much like 'meh'.
It was all of that, together with the realisation that I was logging into the game and having nothing that I wanted to do, along with the ongoing challenge of co-ordinating time with the people I wanted to play with, all of whom are 5 to 8 timezones away, that made me decide that my time in the game was finally heading to a close. I especially didn't want my antipathy towards the game to somehow become associated with the wonderful friends I have there.
More widely, the pleasure of another previously-positive aspect of the game I mentioned above has been dulled. Since we moved to the US we've been thoroughly embedded in an absolutely huge guild. A guild which has many positive characteristics and some amazing people in it, but which increasingly I've felt has become too indiscriminately big, too monolithic to be responsive to its membership in any meaningful sense, and with a just slightly too "we know what's best for you" attitude for me to be comfortable in it. Of course, it make no bones about what it is and what it wants to be, and I know it will go from strength to strength while I wish it well - that's not the point of this post. The reason I mention it is that this is one of a number of factors that contributed to the (and it's a word I keep using for my feeling about gaming recently) malaise which led me to depart the game.
Interestingly, even though other MMOs have come along in the last few years that The Mrs and I have tried, none of them have managed to hold our interest, but just recently it seemed like the curse was lifted, and a new game, Rift, grabbed our interest enough that The Mrs actually made the switch completely from WoW. I was planning to play both, though for less of the time than WoW used to occupy. But we've both cancelled that too. Short term, we're both enjoying doing other things with our time. Also interestingly, we've discovered that a bunch of people we know are also either giving up the game or taking extended breaks from their play at this point too. MMO-burnout seems to be on the rise.
I should stress that this isn't a 'never again'. If I wanted to go back to that account and those characters I could, because it'll all still be waiting for me. But if I do ever play again, maybe it'll make more sense to play on the European servers so I can get the full experience of an active, populated world. It's not like I won't still be in touch with the friends by other means. But at this point any thought of playing again is very far from my mind.
It's odd - the game's brought me friendship, entertainment, challenge and a lot of fun over the last six years. But while it's strange and a little sad not to be talking to the gang regularly, when it comes to the game itself I'm actually barely missing it.
(Note: Most of this post was written before some events this last week which finally finished off any interest in the guild for me. I've left what I originally wrote on that subject as it was, because I'd already left the game before I left the community this week, so the recent events aren't relevant to this update about quitting the game. I should also note that although I've mentioned that The Mrs and I have both left the game, nothing here should be taken as any indication of his thinking on the subject.)