When people mention World of Warcraft(WOW) to friends, family, co-workers, or whomever, the responses are usually extreme in the direction of love and hate. There are millions of active players right now, I think the most recent number posted was 11 million to be exact. It’s a global game with separate servers in Europe, North America, and Asia to support the massive amount of players that are living in this world around the clock. I originally started playing WOW shortly after it was launched in November 2004. I didn’t really have much of an understanding for the game, but there isn’t a very steep learning curve either. I played on a server with a real life friend, and enjoyed it as any other game. Just something fun to pass the time. I was about to give it up after just a few months because I wasn’t really getting much out of the game and I was usually playing alone anyways. The social aspect of the game was completely avoiding me.

I just happened to mention it to another friend at the time and he was describing what sounded like a completely different game and experience to me. Vast collaboration with 39 other players at the same time, voice chat via a program called “vent”, and incredibly challenging boss encounters. It sounded more like a marketing campaign, but in the next breath he mentioned that he was about to level a new character, along with another friend, and offered for me to join up with them on his server and with his guild. I joined up with him that night and what I consider my real WOW “career” began. Within a few weeks I had a much deeper understanding of the game, was leveling like lightning, and learning more about my class, a Mage at the time. The social aspect of the game was also really hitting me now too, with the guild using the small add-on program called Ventrilo with allowed for everyone online to talk to one another with the tiny push of a button.

We reached level 60 and joined up with the guild raiding Molten Core. The guild wasn’t what you would call a “hardcore raiding” guild, so we raiding on saturday afternoons, once a week. But soon after I got my first taste of raiding, I wanted more than that, and preferably not on a weekend. Which brought me to my introduction with hardcore or “end game” raiding. I started taking note of which guilds on my server, Elune, were raiding more often, and taking on the more challenging raid instances. By this time many guilds on Elune had cleared Molten Core, and 3 or 4 had cleared Blackwing Lair, the same 3 or 4 were working on the most recently added raid instance Ahn’Qiraj. I decided to apply to a guild called Just Crusade. Prior to my application I had really started getting into the finer details of the game. Every piece of gear needed to be best in slot for me to be happy, the problem was I didn’t have access to that gear, so instead my goals were best in slot for the bosses which I had killed, and when I applied, I included all these details and showed my enthusiasm towards the hardcore portion of the game. That week I was accepted as a trial member, and came along on an alt-raid of Molten Core, and an “official” raid of Blackwing Lair and Anh’Qiraj.

Things were definitely different in JC than in my previous guild. My previous guild was friendly and nice, and when things in the game didn’t succeed, that was just the way it went, and nobody seemed to mind. Try again next time, next week, whatever. It wasn’t until reaching the end of the raid that I really started to notice a difference, when we got to the content that was actually challenging for this group of players. That’s when the yelling started. The people making mistakes got defensive, people argued about strategy. Not like debate club, but more like a family. You can yell at your sister, but you do so because you love her and want what is best for her. This is how the guild was operating. They weren’t yelling to be dicks, they just wanted to succeed, and to do that meant to succeed as a group. And after a short while I realized that they were not only great players, but also great people.

Up until now I’ve spoke about the game exclusively without much mention of when all of this playing took place. At this point I was playing the game basically every weeknight. JC didn’t raid on the weekends, but I still played a bit on the weekends. But it was the 5 raiding nights a week that attendance was required, which took a toll on my personal life. It basically meant coming home from work, eating a quick dinner and immediately booting up the game and playing. A night of raiding was usually around 4 hours, so as you can imagine, this wouldn’t be the ideal situation if you were in a relationship with me. In fact, the relationship I was in at the time ended in the middle of a raid. And so did my “career” as an active raider. My girlfriend at the time owned the condo that I lived in, so I moved onto the couch at a friends house, and tried to get my life back on track. I think it was at least 9 months before I even considered playing WOW again. But due to new friends starting to play and the expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, I eventually started again.

I could never really get back in the swing of things with WOW from a game play standpoint. I loved playing with my real life friends, and I loved grouping with my old guild from time to time, but part of the experience was very hollow to me. I had seen what the real end game of WOW is all about, and I missed that part of the game. The problem was the sacrifice that came with it. In order to play the game at that level, you have to commit the time, and that I couldn’t do. Then a few years ago, I moved to California, and WOW became one of the main ways of staying in touch with friends back East. But I was caught in a quandary. On one hand I enjoyed playing a game with friends, on the other hand the game was growing more and more boring the way I was playing it. The last chance that I gave to WOW was the most recent expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King. New content always makes for less boredom, but before long I reached the point of de-activating my account where it still stands to this day.

But what is probably the most intriguing point of this article, is that during all the time over the past few years, call it The Burning Crusade era and more recently the Wrath of the Lich King era, I wished that I was still actively raiding. I would read forums like elitist jerks, mmo champion, wowinsider.com (now known as wow.com), I would follow my old guilds DKP to see what they were killing and looting, and I would constantly be learning about strategies for the new boss encounters, new gear, patch changes to stats, talent revisions, you name it, I was reading about it. If you’ve read any of my articles about investing, you know that I think my brain works like a vacuum when I am interested in something, sucking in all the available information to process and digest. I can’t tell you how many times I used a talent calculator on wowhead.com to try out a new talent build each time a patch changed something. Over time I leveled almost every class to full level with a few exceptions (no warlocks or hunters), so I could spend hours “theorycrafting” on both the current and upcoming ideal specs. I do data analysis and statistics for a living, so it comes naturally to me to look at this game from the mathematical standpoint, and trying to optimize DPS, healing, mana consumption, etc are just big challenges to me.

The problem is that it’s just not possible for me to play the game as I want to, and the game as its available to me is not interesting. QQ, right? I feel like I can’t be alone in this situation. Now that WoW is approaching its 5 year anniversary, there are plenty of people who have given it up. Yet the overall number of subscriptions continues to move higher, even if it has slowed in growth rate. I’m sure Blizzard has statistics as to how many people have quit the game, how many re-subscribe from time to time, and their reasons for giving it up. (They ask you every time you cancel your subscription after all)

For now, I’ll just continue doing all of the other things that I do with my life. When the next expansion pack comes out, I’ll consider playing it again, but by then maybe even that won’t interest me.

signed,

Maybesew (no armory link, the toon’s been transferred and renamed)
Gnome mage
Server first (Elune) 5/5 Enigma set
Server first C’thun kill
Server first Ouro kill
Server first Viscidus kill (something like 3rd alliance guild worldwide)