So with that, I bid WoW farewell.
I’ve finally decided to make the break. At the end of October my current pre-paid card runs out. This time it really does look like the break is going to be forever.
I’ve been playing, with short breaks, for two years. Quite apart from everything else, that seems like enough playing. A number of creative activities I used to enjoy have been completely sidelined, and I really want to get back to them. The house has been neglected, with stuff piling up everywhere. While I’ve been lucky that most of my friends are also WoW players, so the majority of my social life hasn’t suffered too badly, I am starting to feel a bit rut-bound.
Then there’s the fact that I’m just not enjoying myself anymore. A while ago I had a raid-related spat and stopped doing those. Recently, even low-level parties have been unfulfilling. And that’s before I even get started about PUGs.
I’ve considered quitting several times before, but each time I’d just invested time or money into something that would be “wasted” if I left. If it wasn’t a paid character transfer it was a triplehead adapter and a bunch of monitors. If it wasn’t either of those it was some other sort of hardware upgrade. Or worse, it was encouraging a friend to do a paid transfer.
I finally decided that if I always rejected the idea of quitting because I’d just made some sort of investment, I’d never leave. As such, now is the ideal time to quit. My play time is running out fairly neatly just before Burning Crusade, so leaving now saves me buying the expansion — which would have been that next investment that would have kept me playing until the next investment.
So with that, I bid WoW farewell. Alas, also Metroblogging until a Perth page gets started up maybe. My parting comment to WoW players is that I hope those of you that are enjoying the game continue to enjoy it, and those of you who aren’t are able to make the decision to stay or leave for all the right reasons.
Good for you dude! I’ve been trying to quit for a while now and seem to keep coming back. Good to see someone was able to “Get out”.
Good luck! Godspeed! Get some fresh air :)
Also, an interesting read here about quitting:
http://soulkerfuffle.blogspot.com/2006/10/view-from-top.html
WoW is like crack, except there are developers who then tweak the crack based on common user complaints, and then periodically add new hallucinations and season-specific trips.
BTW, Chris, I’d like to also congratulate you on the mature and reasonable post you made here (and bidding a signoff to your readers here at metblogs). In contrast to the blog post that Veronica posted, I would say that there is a good way to announce this (i.e. talk about your decision and rationale to the people who are interested in your game progress), and a bad way, which is seen on the blog post linked.
On soulkerfluffle, the poster talks about how the game ruins his life and derides the game for being “unwinnable”. In the end, his post is simplistic, hostile, and even insulting to WoW players. I think we’re all aware of the game dynamic, but we still get fun out of the game; when you stop having fun playing the game, or if it interferes with your real life, you should quit. I would say the same thing about any other “unwinnable” pursuit, including other games such as playing Warcraft, Starcraft, or Counter-Strike online (in which you can win individual games, like, say a WSG match, but never win some greater goal).
You’ve had some great, constructive posts on this blog Chris, and it’s good to see that you are leaving WoW and this blog in the manner that you have always conducted yourself.
Congrats and good luck sir. If there is one thing I have struggled the most to balance with my rather casual playing of WoW, it would be the continued pursuit of the creative activities that bring me joy. Making comics is an exhilirating experience, but it lacks a certain opium fiend quality one finds in scouring the Arathi Highlands to wipe clean the taint of the Horde. But you know what? When I’m done making that comic, I’ve got a comic. When I’m done scouring the Arathi Highlands, they respawn.
Still, I can’t quite bring myself to do it yet. I have, however, gotten very good at regualitng myself to one night a week (a shocking proposition to many players).
Anyway, godspeed Chris. I’ve enjoyed the posts.
Thanks for the supportive posts.
As for the comments about the more famous recent goodbye message, I think people are being a little hard on the guy. It’s really difficult to explain the reasons why you’re leaving WoW without implying that people who stay are morons. You should have seen some of my drafts. (Actually, no, maybe not.) Every time I said “I don’t want to be doing X”, where X is something negative, it always implied “But people who stay are obviously happy to continue doing X”. Which was so not my intent.
I think that some of his reasons are overly complicated or overanalysed, and once you get to that point it’s almost impossible not to piss off someone. (This comment itself runs that risk.) My key point in the end was that I had been thinking of quitting on and off all year, but each time there was that recent investment encouraging me to stick it out. They were, as my mother would say, “sunk costs” and I should have decided to write them off and quit months ago.
In the end, I was able to use a two-year anniversary and the pending expansion to get the momentum up to actually leave. The expansion was probably key, because it’s a long anticipated investment and easier to consider than, for example, getting all excited over Matrox’s TripleHead2Go. That said, if I’d actually secured a Collector’s Edition, I imagine no one would be reading this now.
Of interest, though not statistically significant, it looks like as many as three other guildies might be quitting pre-expansion too. Anecdotally, it appears that the expansion is a catalyst for both staying and leaving. Some people are really looking forward to the new content and some people are using the cost (and the fact that it’s going to be tough to continue playing without buying it) to strengthen their resolve to leave.
One thing I won’t be doing is sharding all my purples and deleting my characters. I am donating all my non-soulbound stuff to my guild and “loaning” all my gold to a friend to create a “mount account” for ongoing loans. After putting almost two years into this game I want to be able to say “Yeah, I’ve got a couple of 60s in WoW”, rather than “I got a bunch of characters to 60, but I deleted them all when I left”.
And who knows, maybe in half a dozen years if WoW is still going, my friends are still playing and it’s evolved into something different I might pickup a “Classic Expansions + Pre-Paid Card” discount bundle at a local gaming store and have a bit of fun over the xmas break.
for all it lasted, it was fun
goodbye and thanks for all the fish