My older daughter was born in October 2004. One month later, all my friends started playing the new game, World of Warcraft. I had only played a bad MMO (Star Wars Galaxies) and a mediocre one (City of Heroes), but this one looked awesome. I wanted to play, but it seemed very wrong to play a computer game when I had a newborn. But my wife said, “Go ahead and play with your friends. She sleeps a lot”. So I bought it. And loved it. I never got addicted, never had a WoW problem. I was always able to properly balance the game and the rest of my life. But I loved it. Loved playing it, loved reading about it when not playing. Planning my character, working on rotations. The Wrath of the Lich King expansion was the pinnacle. I had a character and a role that I loved: a minotaur druid that turned into a magical tree and kept everyone alive.
Now I’m quitting, for good, only a month into the latest expansion. I’m even stopping at Level 83, which is two levels from the end. If you care to read more, hit the link.
Why this is not Blizzard’s fault
This has been a bad couple months for me. My grandfather had a massive stroke in mid-November, and when driving to see him in the hospital, I was in a significant car accident (no one was seriously hurt). In December, my grandfather passed away, about a week before Christmas. The combination of additional family responsibilities, depression from the loss of my grandfather, and lack of exercise took its toll. I’ve been moody and quick-tempered. I haven’t been an especially great husband, father, or employee. Luckily I know all these things and 2011 is off to a much better start. But the end of 2010 was really crappy.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to log into WoW. I usually had something else I should be doing, but I found that even if my chores were done, there was something else I wanted to be doing. I’m really enjoying reading again. I’m having a lot of fun playing in-person games like D&D or Pandemic. And every time I found some spare time in the evening, when I would have logged into WoW, I did something else.
I’ve played the game for a long time, off and on for more than six years now. I didn’t think I’d play forever. It makes sense that the day would come that it wouldn’t be as compelling. I’d like to do other things now, maybe even play other videogames. Mass Effect 2 is still sitting there, but it seems crazy to play that when I’m paying a monthly fee to play something else. So I’m dropping my obligatory game to free up time to do anything else that catches my fancy.
Why this is Blizzard’s fault
I was more excited for last month’s Cataclysm expansion than I have been for either of the previous two. Updating and perfecting the old world, advancing the overall storyline in an exciting way, flying in old Azeroth… it all hit me just right. I couldn’t wait.
But, the execution left me cold. For years Blizzard has been making the game easier and easier, but they finally made it too easy, too methodical. Too efficient. And finally too easy to hold my attention.
In my three levels of play, the routine is the same:
1. Go to the NPC, grab three quests.
2. Follow the arrow on your minimap to where the objectives are.
3. Quickly complete them, return to NPC.
4. Repeat steps 1-3, until
5. The NPC sends you a short ways to the next minihub.
6. Go to Step 1.
That’s it. That’s the game, at least what I saw of it through the first half of the expansion. And because I can fly everywhere there’s no danger. My favorite memories of the game all result from ground-based travel. I remember the wonder and fear of walking or riding into a new zone. Being the new kid again. My favorite leveling zones were in Vanilla WoW, and nothing beat the excitement of descending into the unknown, like in Un’Goro Crater. The first time I saw the T-Rex pop up, I metaphorically (not literally) soiled myself. Or the bane of my existence, Tarren Mill. I hated that PVP-prone zone. But getting in and out of that zone was an accomplishment. There was danger, and that was fun.
Now you can fly everywhere, right form the start. There’s no sense of exploration and also no danger. This past month, I did not engage in a single World PVP skirmish. As established above, I haven’t been playing that much. But when I did play… it was boring.
And now I’m at the point where I just don’t care. Stopping at Level 83 is the equivalent of quitting smoking mid-carton. The metaphor breaks down when you consider the effort needed to quit versus the effort needed to keep going. I’ve never been a smoker, but I’ve watched friends and relatives try to quit smoking. It seems very difficult. In contrast, I can’t imagine putting the effort forth to get to the level cap of 85. Quitting right now is easy because I don’t care. And while I never got addicted to this game (like a few of my friends) this was always a game that I wanted to be playing. Now I just want to do other things.
Adam and I share a lot of interests, including WoW. But the funny thing is, we couldn’t be more dissimilar as WoW players. He’s the hardcore raider. He pushed to 85 in about 24 hours so that he could start the endgame. I don’t enjoy the endgame, and (used to) enjoy the process. He logs on to raid and then exits. I like(d) to stay for hours doing everything.
What’s telling to me is that two players so different in motivation both find this expansion lacking. We look for different things in this game and yet both of us think that the game didn’t give us enough. (Adam’s dissatisfaction is not indentical mine, and you should read his thoughts). It seems that Blizzard made a horrible miscalculation. For me, the path to 85 is so easy that I’m bored with it. Fun comes from a challenge that you win. Losing isn’t fun, but neither is winning something that wasn’t really a test. You keep people coming back if you let them win, but make them feel like winning is meaningful. An fun game is just challenging enough that you have to work at it, yet easy enough that you get that Thrill of Victory the majority of the time. Leveling no longer feels like an accomplishment to me. It’s cliche, but true: it’s become a job, except I’m paying someone else for the priviledge of doing it.
It seems that Blizzard completely missed that balance this time around. And now I think I’m done.
I have quit three times before this. The last two times I knew it was temporary. Both times I was in the pre-expansion doldrums. I had exhausted the content I was likely to see and just wanted to take a break before the new stuff. this time, there’s new stuff I haven’t even looked at, and I don’t care. I think it’s for good.
It was a good run. I had a ton of fun. But I’m ready to do other things now.
