World of Warcraft: it's over between us
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.
It seems like only yesterday I was running from Redridge to Stormwind to hand in my next quest, but now it seems the all the mana's run dry and I just can't give anymore.
It wasn't always this way. There were many mornings when I'd struggle to lift my mouse hand to the work desk after another all-nighter trying to find the fine gold thread needed for Menara Voidrender to make my Enchanted Gold Bloodrobe. I wasn't the only one - WoW was the talk of even non-geeky brunches and weekend newspaper columns.
In its heyday I was sitting down to dinner in a posh restaurant in Palo Alto with Ben from Bluepulse, loudly discussing some aspect of WoW, and the mid-40s couple at the next table invited themselves to join our table and tell us all about their guild and its adventures. They were both MBAs, both in corporate finance, they had a family, but they also played WoW very, very seriously. Everybody was on Warcraft.
Now, I don't know anyone who's still using WoW as a gaming environment, much less a business social networking platform ;-)
It's time to end this, WoW. According to the screendump you haven't done it for me since April. You'll be better off with someone younger, less socially-confident, and unaware that the LOTR series were originally novels.
Why is it not doing it for me anymore? Mostly because despite the massive patches I downloaded each month, and even when the Burning Crusade expansion came out, for a poor PvP player like me, all you ever offered me was more of the same...
...run/fly/swim along the following convoluted route for the next three hours solid, try not to get killed by the people and things along the way, try and figure out how to kill the thing at the other end, and then keep killing it until it drops the thing I need to bring back here. Then, if it's not breakfast time yet, send me on another wild goosechase in this other direction for another hour to get my ass whupped by a succession of spotty teens waiting around for chumps to run by again and again and again and...
Most of all, I got heartily sick of being used to wipe the floor by other players who memorised all the optimal formulas for success. Nobody should have to remember that the latest patch means the Curse of the Elements and Curse of Shadow now have a duration of 2 minutes when used on PvP targets! I just want to zap stuff, make large explosions, run around in my very own special effects movie, and get killed about as randomly as I kill others.
So, it's not me, it's you. I have finally remembered to cancel before my subscription auto-renews for another three months - no, I'm not interested in another second chance.
I feel better about myself now.
