06:45 PM
I'm going to be guilty of a cliche and go out and share another World of Warcraft story. I've been off the stuff completely for a bit more than a year and a half, and I wish I had done it sooner.
For me, Warcraft didn't start when WoW was released; when I was little, I'd spend a considerable amount of time on the Macintosh playing Orcs and Humans and Warcraft II, almost exclusively playing the orcs. I was always obsessed with how cool the dragons were, but even more so, I was absolutely in love with the death knights. They were just so cool. They were skeletons in some sort of crazy cloak riding on an evil horse, speaking lines with a really cool voice. I even had my sister try to do some face paint on me so I could have the skull face of a death knight, but she ended up making me look like a really female Santa Claus. But... that's not the story.
But that's not to say that I didn't go out and converse with friends and play sports when I was little, because I did. I just tended to play video games more often than some other kids.
My MMO track record begins with Dark Age of Camelot, which I played on my brother's account when I was around 11 years old or so. It was a really amazing game. Considering that my brother only kept his account for about a month I didn't really get far. A few months or so later, though, a friend in his Tribes clan shared two of his accounts with my brother and I. When I played it again, it was just as cool as it was when I first started. I would go off and run down the road forever, just exploring for a very long time until I was eventually killed by some mean ghosts by the side of the road. I'd fish out some silver from my purse and go on little horsie rides to Camelot or whatever you call it. It was a really good game; even today I say that it was a much more wondrous experience for me than WoW was.
It was in DAoC that I learned what RP servers were, which was definitely for me because I would sometimes emote my character sitting down and biting off meat from a brownie she had just killed. (Hm.) I didn't really give much thought to the nerdiness of roleplaying back then; it was just like going out and playing pretend, only it was now on a video game. (And it was acceptable to do that at the age; going out and playing pretend at this age would be called "LARP.")
Eventually that all ended, and I didn't touch an MMO for years. WoW had been out for a year or two before I was in a place where I was able to play an MMO again, but I was torn between playing Star Wars Galaxies or World of Warcraft. I really liked the Star Wars setting, so I went with SWG. It was fun, but it ran badly on the computer that I had back then, so I eventually called it quits and many months later, in the summer before my freshman year of high school, I was playing World of Warcraft.
I always wanted to play WoW because I loved WC3 and its expansion, and I wanted to know what else happens in the Warcraft story. I remember that back then, I was wondering if (and hoping) it would be similar to DAoC. The first time I watched the intro cinematic I got the chills. By nature I always tend to play mages, but the way that the mage just totally kicked ass in the cinematic pretty much made me throw up my hands and say, with absolute certainty, "Oh, looks like I'm going to be playing a mage."
My nerdy tendencies compelled me to continue the roleplaying trend, but I wanted to get a feeling for the game first before I played my enigmatic and wise characters so I wasn't just running around cluelessly like a dumbass. Playing my first character in WoW, the world seemed really amazing and neat, and I'd see those people flying overhead on their gryphons and I would wonder how they'd get to do that and if they can actually control them. (Though in that respect I had my doubts, even then.)
By the time I got to Redridge, though, I came to realize that the game was getting really boring. I'd sometimes stop and just go to the menu and watch the misleading introduction cinematic again to go, "Oh, well, it's going to be cool like this if I keep on playing it and progressing in it some more." Wishful thinking.
When I got to 30 and was absolutely and dreadfully bored in Ashenvale, I logged off of my mage and went to Shadow Council to begin my first WoW RP character. Now, I could go into a huge discussion about how ridiculous the lack of communication is between Blizz and players about the nature of an RP server, as well as their non-existent enforcement of the RP server rules, but that is a completely different story and a huge digression, completely unrelated to the point.
Shadow Council didn't really last too long for me because the big discussion around on the forums was major requests for RP-PvP servers, and the way that they were spoken of seemed like the concept of RP-PvP was some really big shit. It was shortly afterward that Blizz came out with Emerald Dream, and seeing the RP-PvP tag, I hopped on over. And this is just begging for me to make another complaint about the nature of the community on RP servers, but I'll control myself.
It got me a level 48 night elf rogue, which was my highest level at the time. She (of course she was a she) was a Sergeant Major in the old PvP system and I had fun running around and killing people in WSG. But eventually that all got stale (certainly LONG before I reached 48) and by the time I had hit 48 I already felt that if I were to progress further, I would be FORCING myself to continue. It was by forcing myself that I had even reached 48 in the first place. It was by forcing myself that I had even reached 40 alone.
By this time there were many people in school that would mention WoW, and they were totally not the type of people you might expect to talk about it. Everybody was attractive and we (not they, ha) would casually toss out, "Yeah, I play WoW." It came as no surprise that the game was popular, but I remember I was in the bathroom one day and I heard some guy outgoingly exclaiming, "That's what WoW is! It's a video game!
DD"
So once you come to terms that the game is absolutely dreadful, you pay more attention to the social aspect. It had to have been roleplaying that kept me interested enough to even get me to level 48, but you have absolutely no idea how overly-dramatic the RP community is unless you've actually been part of the RP community. Nobody is ever happy in the RP community and there's always somebody complaining about something, down to every non-issue in the book and picking it apart (bad grammar in your emotes, unrealistic characters, laughable and childish behavior, non-exclusive commitment to roleplaying your character, or maybe your character is described as beautiful rather than a hideous hag). Naturally it all stunk to high heaven, so I turned my attention more to the actual WoW community.
Which was probably a terrible idea, and you probably know why.
It ended up making me a really sharp-witted forum troll on Blackwater Raiders that everybody loved, and were it not for the WoW forums, I probably would have already quit the game for some time. It was very addicting to check the forums and find the right time to accurately and precisely nail a joke opportunity. Such is the nature of forum trolldom. I'd even sometimes check the forums in my computer ops class at the end of the school day, although I did not do so if anyone's eyes were anywhere close to even slightly glancing at my screen.
And I only did it when nobody was looking because it was like a guilty pleasure of mine, and I do not use that term lightly. Guilt was very much present in all of it, in both playing the game and trolling the forums. Those days where I would come home and just play until my bed time always ended with a profound sense of guilt, that I had wasted a perfectly good day in front of a computer screen when I could have been socializing with friends like a normal high school student. And realistically speaking, it was not like I ever really had a hard time fitting in, but I just knew that I could have been going out and having fun with my friends instead of just sitting there playing a game that I both deep down knew and openly stated was simply not fun.
Maybe it was because of how much any sort of gaming consumed my time that I've never ever liked talking about video games in real life. It wasn't so much just casually mentioning video games that I disliked, but going into detail, and whenever people would do that I'd not only try to change the subject, but I'd also get a varying degree of pissed off if the subject continued. I've always hated talking about video games, and it was almost as if I was repulsed by my own behavior. Of course, the only time I've ever gotten REALLY angry was when there was this kid (whom, to be fair, I and everyone else already hated to begin with) just kept on going on and on and ON about his raids and his levels and his arena stats—but that's quite a bit in the future compared to where the story is at right now. By then, I had already quit.
But at this point, I had not. When Burning Crusade came out, I went to Fry's to pick up my copy after school. Before I even got inside, I saw something I won't forget. I was in the car looking for a parking space when a little boy was walking out with his dad carrying a game box in his hands. I joked in my mind, "Gee, I wonder what game HE'S got?" And sure enough, he was clutching to his copy of Burning Crusade. The green box wasn't my first clue; when I looked at him, I got that kind of, "What the hell is wrong with that kid?" feeling firing off in my brain. He was really pale (and I'm not saying "THAT HEATHEN LACKED PIGMENTS;" it was a complexion sort of flavor) and he had red circles around his baggy eyes. His dad was giving off that light grin where he's happy that his son is happy because he just bought him something, but that worrisomely frail kid was busy just being absorbed in that Burning Crusade box.
(Boy this is turning out to be a long post.)
So I went home and rolled my blood elf rogue. She (of course she was female) would end up being one of the most prominent figures on Moon Guard, both in character and on the OOC chat channels and on the forums. The game was pretty okay and felt refreshed playing a blood elf, up until you get to the disgustingly tedious middle part of the game where it's all just one long grind. At some point Wrath of the Lich King was announced. Then I completely despaired about the whole Death Knight thing because it was a much more appropriate class and I wasted so much time playing a rogue, which was so repetitive and I hated doing it outside of PvP.
Long story short (too late), the feeling of guilt and intense dislike for the game came back more powerful than you could possibly imagine, and when I was level 68 I was complaining to my friends that I would only hit level 70 just to hit level 70, and that I had lost all interest in this boring, boring game.
But that was a LONG time before I quit, let me tell you. The social aspect, just by existing, had kept me there playing the game way past the expiration date. You have no idea how often and how long I would just do nothing more than chat away in the chat channels while flying around in Shattrath on my wyvern, running and jumping around in circles on my dreadsteed, or running and jumping around in circles on my mount in the central area of Orgrimmar. I didn't even pay ANY attention to the endgame aspect of the game. Once I hit 70 I was DONE, except not because I just stayed there forever, chatting away about nothing. Probably about how bad a game WoW is, which probably was a bad reason for me to keep playing it. But as long as I was still paying for it, I had to spend an excess amount of time into the game to get my money's worth. And I would just stay there all day, chatting on the chat channels instead of just hitting them up in MSN or something, and at the end of the day I was feeling guilty like always.
So I just needed some sort of nicotine patch to replace WoW, and I decided that Warhammer was the most likely candidate. By the time that I was close to quitting, I knew that the only thing that I would miss would be my ability to post in the forums. And the reason behind that was probably because people were so stupid that I'd just get frustrated by my inability to slap them around for being so outlandishly dumb. But you eventually learn to stop caring about the forums, so you're not upset about not being able to post. That took me a while.
So I ended up quitting a week before that Sunwell patch came out, and I think one of the biggest reasons for that was because my junior year of high school was drawing to a close and I wanted to be WoW-free for my senior year, because I knew that as long as I had the subscription I'd absolutely be compelled to have at it because I was paying for it.
People that say that WoW ISN'T are talking out of their asses because it certainly has its own flavor of withdrawal. After quitting I'd feverishly tell an e-friend of mine to post my reply to an outrageous idiot on the forums because I tended to care too much about all that bullshit that were cluttering my beautiful and pristine Moon Guard forums. But I'd deny myself to pay for a subscription, despite numerous times that I really badly wanted to, and all the months passed by without incident.
When I played Warhammer, it just didn't have the addictive hook that WoW had, and so I quit. For that, I am thankful, because I might have neglected my amazing senior year of high school if I was "busy" wasting time away on another MMO. Sure, there were times when I was like, "Well, since WAR just didn't hook me, maybe I should just play WoW again," which I knew was just me wanting to kill myself or something. But I wanted to know how WotLK had shaped up.
So it was pretty much a godsend when the WotLK trial came out, and I'm glad that it did. Once I played the WotLK trial on my Death Knight character, I was like, "Wow, this is all so new and exciting," for a little but, up until I got to that point in Outland where I sighed and chuckled to myself, shaking my head for having ever been so foolish. It was the same exact game that I had quit quite some time ago, and I saw how ridiculous it was to want to go back and play the game when I never really truly enjoyed it. And I would be lying if I said that I never wanted to play the game again, because I did have a few occasional urges every now and then, but of course it takes time.
Maybe it was because I had already wasted time both playing WoW and wasted so much time in real life not telling a certain someone my feelings (romantic subplot) that by the time I was anywhere near graduation, I did not want to have anything to do with WoW at. All. My desire for it had been completely and irrevocably shut off. It was like a man with erectile dysfunction but didn't ever want to have an erection again anyway. In the summer after graduation I was convinced that everything was over and life was desperate and full of despair and I had ruined everything by wasting so much time. A very bleak future was ahead of me.
Of course, from just my first day ALONE as a freshman in college, I saw that everything was wonderful and amazing and better than life has ever been before.
I am SO over WoW
10-16-2009, 08:08 PM
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