WoW And I Are Done Professionally

Like the title suggest (thanks Christian Bale), I’m done with World of Warcraft. But what is different from the other three or four times I have quit, this time I think it’s serious. And what is more, I think I’m done with MMOs as well.

MMOs are just too time-consuming. It requires you to devote all your available time, and it doesn’t care how much all your time is, it will never be done with you. Switching from one MMO to another doesn’t give you more free time, you just change what you spend the time on. I realised that ever since WoW came out I have spent pretty much all free time from one MMO to the next, and that – in the lack of other words – sucks. I love games, but spending all the time playing just one game feels like such a stupid waste of time. It’s like being in a candy story with 500 types of candy, and only eating one. Only when I was between MMOs would I pick up single-player games, and when I was done with them I would have time to do other stuff, because those games had an end.

So a while ago when I was still playing WoW I started picking up non-MMO games. Torchlight came first. Then I installed Rome: Total War and had a blast, despite its age. After that came Dragon Age, and Modern Warfare 2. Suddenly there wasn’t enough hours on the day. With all those games to choose from why continue to play for just one?

When I started the Wrath of the Lich King expansion I was excited. It was new content, and classes had enough new and changed abilities that they felt like whole new classes. But I feel that this entire expansion has been a complete letdown aside from that. Grinds and repetitive content was everywhere. Blizzard seemed to have missed the point of why people liked daily quests when they was introduced in Burning Crusade. It wasn’t because they were fun, but because they beat grinding fire elementals any day to make gold… which you needed a lot of back then. Now Blizzard is creating more and more daily quests, and at the same time more things you have to spend gold on.

I had always supported Blizzard in their strategic changes before, but what was happening in this expansion… Achievements (feel obliged to do things for the sake of doing them), free epics from heroics, trivialized raiding content, etc, etc. I can see their reasoning, but I can’t agree with it. I don’t want things for free, I want to earn them, to fight for them. I had in vanilla WoW, and Burning Crusade. It was neither a smooth nor easy ride, but I knew what I was getting into. Handing out free epics is like having a GM coming in and giving you a helping hand at the last percent of a boss fight. There is nothing I hate more than deus ex machina moments in movies, and what is happening in WoW is nothing less than just a deus ex machina moment.

But I’m not unreasonable. There are more people who play the game than me, and I understand that game is shifting focus to the wider audience. I’m not going to cry to everyone I see that the sky is falling. It’s not; it’s just changing. But I don’t like that change, so I leave.

I love what they are doing in Cataclysm, but I also don’t like what they are doing to the “plan” of the game, and in the end I doubt redesigned old zones is going to balance the issues I feel I have with the game.