It's been a long time since I logged into WoW.
Like a lot of players, I felt really disheartened by the stories of abuse and harassment that took place at Blizzard - not some invasive corporate culture that had snuck in, say, with the acquisition/merger with Activision, but a part of Blizzard's DNA from the beginning. I felt like I had been naive and perhaps even willfully blind to the red flags that had popped up over time.
At the same time, I've found the grind of MMOs to be somewhat less enjoyable of late. It's not so much the amount of content that's out, but the natural "keeping up with the Joneses" that comes with the genre. I've been experiencing raiding primarily through raid finder, and my experience with that has generally been that in the first few weeks that a raid wing is open, you have people bringing their A-game and characters that are decently geared, and most of all, people will be willing to sit and learn the mechanics.
And, the queue times are not terrible.
But if you try to do this later in the cycle, it's an interminable slog of players ignoring mechanics and queue times that take up most of the time you were even prepared to be logged in in the first place.
After sitting out most of the raids through Battle for Azeroth - I still haven't actually entered the Eternal Palace - I wanted to get back into it with Shadowlands, which in general was an expansion concept and story I was way more excited for.
But with the news hitting not long after Sanctum of Domination came out, I felt gross playing the game. And I've been wrestling with whether I want to come back.
Shadowlands, conceptually, is the kind of high-fantasy stuff that I get really excited for - where the genre is allowed to get deeply philosophical.
The expansion has suffered from delays caused by the Covid pandemic, like just about every industry has, and so it's been a little sad to see this very cool expansion lose out and possibly get truncated.
Meanwhile, at the same time, fans of Blizzard games are having to reckon with the fact that the company that produces said games has been a pretty terrible place for a lot of people, thanks to a culture of protection for abusers.
There have been some small steps toward progress, though I'm not well-versed enough in the effectiveness of different tactics to combat toxic work environments to know if they'll have any real impact. There's a deeper problem with our whole capitalist system where I don't think I can rationally trust any big company to actually try to be better - I find myself skeptical that any big corporation is ever doing anything to legitimately improve the lives of its workers and not just doing a performance for the sake of PR.
Still, most Blizzard employees seem to want to encourage people to keep playing the games. But I'm grappling both with a moral/ethical question as well as one for myself:
I've been playing WoW for 15 years. Could it be that, finally, I'm just getting sick of it?
Oddly, taking this break from WoW hasn't, like, made me a health-nut and given me the energy to fix all the issues in my life, but what it has done is allowed my gaming attention to spread to other things. MMO design has this issue where if they don't give you enough to work toward, it feels empty, but if they give you too much, it feels overwhelming. The problem, of course, is that I'm not sure there is a real happy medium there - the two categories might actually overlap, with no gap between them.
Again, I don't know if this is a permanent "quitting WoW" thing. Hell, I might log in tonight to check out the new half-patch. I miss my characters, and I miss that world, and I miss my guild (though it has been a little less active of late - I'm definitely a part of that, of course).
But I think at the very least, my relationship with this game is changing. And that's ok, even if there are times when I feel nostalgia for the days in 2009 or so when sometimes I'd play all day.
This blog, of course, started off pretty specifically about WoW. I still have a screenshot from leveling my Worgen Warrior through what was then the new Cataclysm world redesign as my background for the blog. And I think that elements of WoW are likely to continue to inform some of my tastes in gaming (I'm very tempted to make a 5th Edition Draenei playable race, though I've struggled to make a setting-agnostic backstory for them.)
I saw a lot of people moving on to Final Fantasy XIV. I remember spending much of the late 2000s and the 2010s seeing, over and over, other MMORPGs touted as the "WoW-killer," and so it's a bit of a shock to actually see another game overtake WoW in players.
But honestly, I'm not really interested. I don't think I ever really liked MMOs - just WoW. And maybe that's myopic because it's really the only one I played. But I guess that it's more like I put up with the issues I have with MMOs because of how much I liked inhabiting Azeroth (and Outland, Argus, the Shadowlands, etc.) I think I'm just feeling this break has been good.
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