I hate World of Warcraft

Back in January, I decided once and for all that I was going to cancel my WoW account and would never play again. I cancelled my account, mailed my account authenticator token to a friend in California, and moved on with my life.

My plan had been to sit in the wings and wait for the next great MMO, get reacquainted with my consoles, catch up on my reading list, get back in shape, and enjoy not having anything to do with WoW. My plan for this blog was to chronicle that process. I had meant to go through the discovery of my next MMO and put it into words and share it here. FF14 is a disaster. SWTOR is looking more and more underwhelming as time goes on. The Kingdoms of Amalur MMO isn’t going to be here anytime soon.

I have been enjoying my consoles as of late, but they haven’t really given me much to talk about on this blog. Castlevania Lords of Shadow was great even though the  final boss fight against God knows who was repetitive and annoying and the ending was just weird. Force Unleashed 2 was excellent until I got to the Darth Vader fight at  a point which I had assumed was a middle of the game transitional storyline encounter turned into being the annoyingly repetitive final boss fight … bringing what was otherwise a tremendously enjoyable game to a premature end. I have been playing Fallout New Vegas, but I haven’t got too far into the game yet.

This brings me to World of Warcraft. I really did intend to never play again. The Cataclysm expansion launch came and went and I was mildly interested. The expansions always bring an opportunity for a fresh start. he Burning Crusade gutted the game. The game’s best geared players replaced every piece of gear as they leveled from 60 to 70, then furthered the process as they got into the new content. The game was thrown completely out of whack as raid groups were reduced from 40 to 25, so much of the expansion saw many guilds in a constant state of adjustment as they figured out how they would adapt their players and approach to the new game. A lot of players found themselves out of a job and many people floated from guild to guild throughout the expansion. Wrath of the Lich King was an experiment in what I like to call online socialism. The entire expansion was an entreaty to the lowest common denominator of gamers. It was a complete dumbing down of the game in almost every way to appeal to lazy, mediocre players. High end content seemed designed to allow casual or players otherwise incapable of defeating difficult content to achieve success and get the same rewards that better and more capable players could get. It sickened me.

Cataclysm by all accounts is a return to a much more difficult game. There has been a complete reworking of game mechanics for almost every class. The stat system has been redone. Everybody I know tells me that the early content is very difficult and it is tying mediocre players up into knots. I am intrigued.

So a couple of days ago I downloaded the game client. Then I reactivated my account. Then I upgraded my account to the Cataclysm expansion. I logged on yesterday and cleared out my storage character’s bank and 5 tab guild bank of all the WOTLK materials I had hoarded before my abrupt decision to quit. It all added up to over 26k gold worth of auctions. I am extremely curious how much I will make from it all.

Tomorrow I will reconfigure my key bindings to work with my Nostromo n52te and Logitech MX Revolution mouse. Today (as I serve a 24 hour duty period at work) I will complete my research of Hunter mechanics and the new shot priorities. Tomorrow I will dive headfirst into leveling with the expectation of being done in about two or three days. Then I will get into polishing my technique to a mirror shine and reestablishing myself as a top player.

Then I will have the tough decision to make. I will then decide what my intermediate to long term plans with WoW are. To refuse to acknowledge what WoW is and the time commitment it entails is foolish. If I decide to play WoW again, it will be to accept the time commitment for what it is and begin adjusting the rest of my life accordingly. If I decide to go forward, then I must decide whether I will seek a guild that raids on an east coast friendly schedule or look into forming my own east coast friendly guild.

I must admit that even though I really did enjoy the extra time that I had, courtesy of not playing an MMO, I am a little excited about playing again. I enjoyed the commitment of keeping up to date on the game and its many changes. I enjoyed playing. Now I will greatly enjoy making myself a killing machine in the World … of Warcraft.