The end of the blog

This is my last post. After today, I will be writing no more posts for WoW Philosophized, because I have canceled my subscription to World of Warcraft. I have written a farewell letter to my guildmaster, removed my authenticator, uninstalled WoW on my laptop, removed all WoW-related bookmarks from Firefox, and now, only this last goodbye remains: the farewell post. Oh god, this is going to be difficult.

I could have put this off. I spent a lot of time in the latter days of Wrath of the Lich King not playing at all, yet still blogging consistently, relying on other WoW websites for sources of inspiration when the game could give me none. Had I so desired, I could have done the same thing for a few months, possibly even longer, before anyone caught on that I wasn't basing my posts on any in-game experience. It's a tempting thing to do, too, because I really do enjoy blogging about WoW, possibly more than playing it. But I have decided to quit WoW cold turkey by dissociating myself with everything regarding the game, short of my faded druid t-shit I still have in my bureau. As part of doing that, I won't be reading any WoW blogs now that I have stopped playing, and I certainly can't write about it. So I am bringing this blog down with my account, as I think it will help prevent me from regretting this decision.

I could turn this post into an excuse to complain about everything I think is wrong with the game, but I'm not quitting because I believe WoW has become a subpar game. I may be a vanilla baby (though the fact that I really came of age as a player during Burning Crusade probably makes me more of Burning Crusade teenager than a vanilla baby), but I was never the type to claim the game had been "ruined forever" by any change that was made to it. I have stayed with WoW as it has evolved through its various phases, and though I enjoyed some more than others, the fact that I have stuck with this game for five and a half years is testament to how much I enjoyed it. WoW has been a major part of my gaming hobby ever since I began playing it, and I do not leave now because I have suddenly gone from liking the game to thinking it is awful.

No, my reason for quitting now is because, thanks in no small part to the introspection brought about by writing for this blog, I have realized that WoW is just no longer made for players like me: the loners, the soloists, the people who play WoW as a largely solo venture because its solo content is (or was) good enough to keep us entertained. You would think that I would have taken the hint from the fact that it is an MMORPG, but the gameplay was enough to draw me in and bait me into playing a game that I didn't fully realized when I started playing that I was expected to play with others. And I tried to like this game, I really did. I tried battlegrounds, heroics, raids, auction house PvP, but nothing other than the solo content could keep my interest. And now, though I enjoyed Cataclysm's 80-85 quests thoroughly, having finished those and moved back to the "daily grind", I've realized that I just can't bring myself to keep playing WoW's solo content anymore. I used to enjoy the daily quests. Outland had some of the best dailies WoW has ever seen, but they have become less and less inspired with each expansion pack. And I finally realized that I was only doing the Cataclysm dailies for the prospect of gear. Yep, I had fallen into the trap of playing for the objective rewards, but the fact that I had managed to switch out of that mode of play not long before made it easy to find my way out.

I'm reminded of what Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation said in his review of Cataclysm, when commenting about player's motivation for doing end-game content.

I asked someone who raids, "Why do you raid?" "To get the best items," they said. "What do you use the best items for?" I asked, to which they could only answer "To raid with." But it's not about items, is it? You don't honestly care if your new Crystal Nethersword is going to clash with your elite boss clogs. It's about the numbers. You want the items with the best numbers so you can use your numbers to decrease the enemy numbers until your numbers are the best in the land and all the other guilds flock to regard your numbers with jealous awe. And before you argue that lots of games are about numbers when you get down to it, no one ever ruined their lives to get 100% items in Super Metroid!

The whole review made me realize that there was less to my enjoyment of WoW than I had initially believed, but that particular passage made me really realize that it really was about the numbers. I was trying to get better gear (numbers) so that I could go into heroics with a bit of a buffer, but why was I trying to go into heroics in the first place? Yes, I enjoy taking, as doing the Crucible of Carnage reminded me, but if I only did heroics for their own sake, I would probably grow tired of them as quickly as I grew tired of daily quests (which means I would have grown tired of them after about two weeks, maybe a month because of the added group dynamic... no, the group dynamic would probably bring it down to a day). So what's left to sustain my interest in heroics after I have stopped enjoying running them? Why, the gear (numbers), of course! Yeah, sorry, I can't do it anymore.

But the biggest reason that I have given up on WoW (that's really a more accurate description than "quitting") is because I have realized that the only reason I continued playing was out of familiarity. The game was familiar to me, and having tried unsuccessfully to get into other RPGs (Fallout 3 and Fable 2, to be exact), I resigned myself to continue playing WoW to get my fantasy RPG fix. The fact that I had already accomplished so much also motivated me to stick with the game rather than trying something new, perhaps out of a hobby-related version of the sunk cost fallacy. But once I stopped valuing the objective rewards I had already obtained and started to value the process of obtaining those rewards more than the rewards themselves, I realized that I just didn't enjoy the game much anymore, in spite of all of the things I had earned (lesson learned: "things" will not make you happy). I have now realized that WoW and I are like a brontosaurus: recognized as a mistaken combination long ago, lingering only out of misplaced affection for an imagined past.

Well, that affection just isn't enough to sustain my playing anymore. My enjoyment of the game isn't going through a burn-out phase, it's passed on. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to motivate me to play other games. It is a late enjoyment. It's a stiff. Bereft of exuberance, it rests in peace. If I hadn't insisted on continuing to play, my WoW folder would have been in my computer's trash can. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-WoW-player.

And this is an ex-WoW-blogger, as well. But will the blogging itch strike me again? It very well might, and I very well might start blogging about something else on a different blog. But if I do, I will do it the same way I started this blog: I will start from nothing and earn my readership again. Whatever my new blog--if, indeed, I do start blogging again, which isn't a guarantee--is about, it will likely have nothing to do with WoW, so though I may be tempted to say, "Hey guys, come check out my new blog!", I won't do that unless someone likes my writing enough to ask me to keep them updated if I decide to write again. And as for this blog, I will leave it up as long as blogger decides its worth keeping up, and since I have it set to e-mail when I get a comment, I will still respond to any comments I get that I feel are worth as response. However, the "wowphilosophized.com" domain name will likely expire at some point, at which point you'll need to go back to typing in "wowphilosophized.blogspot.com" if you're still coming back for some reason.

So there it is. This is the end of my time as a WoW player, and there are no hard feelings on my part. This game has given me an amazing five and a half years, as well as an amazing year and a half of writing this blog. I never thought this blog would get as far as it has, and it's something that has made my time spent playing WoW better in many ways. I've had the opportunity to communicate with some truly wonderful individuals as a result of this blog, as well as be a part of the larger WoW community (the online part of which really isn't so bad), and without it, I might not have realized just how much I like writing. Thanks for reading; it has truly been a blast.

Adieu, adiue; parting is such sweet sorrow.

And yes, I'm still bitter over the removal of Tree of Life as a permanent form.