I was supposed to talk to you today about my Resident Evil marathon (finished RE3, moving to Veronica) but I stumbled upon Kurn series of reasons for quitting and it resonated with me, especially the last part because not so long ago I felt like she did and I was pretty certain that I was done forever and ever with WoW, having done all there is to it and having satisfied my curiosity.
I have a few words of wisdom for Kurn that were passed down to me by Foton of now defunct afkgamer.com
WoW is never out of the question.
A detour with Swtor
Last year at about this time I was waiting for Swtor like a kid waits for its Christmas presents. I was tired of WoW, burned out of raiding and I wanted a change of scenery… badly. I knew WoW quests and raids by heart and there was no more excitment playing it. I figured that after 7 years of playing the same game (2004-2011) I was done for good.
And Swtor came out and it was all great for a while. But Swtor turned out not to be the perfect game I envisioned. I got myself to blame for setting my expectations too high because Swtor turned out to be like all other new MMOs, with its strengths and weaknesses.
Then the Swtor endgame began and I learned a valuable lesson. Toward the end of 2011 I thought I was tired of WoW because it was WoW. Certainly playing the same thing for a long time didn’t help but what I failed to realize was that I was tired of the endgame formula. The grind gear, do raids everyweek and repeat ad nauseam formula. Swtor uses the same formula and it got to me. Suddenly, all the bugs and annoyances were magnified and my experience soured. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy raiding with the people in Snark and some of the encounters are very enjoyable but Swtor didn’t reinvent raiding and the burnout I felt with WoW I started to feel in Swtor.
What I came to realize late this summer is that I’m tired of the current model of endgame design. I love the actual raids and the challenge but I hate the commitments that come with it. Maybe its age or I just did it for too long but I hate having to grind gear and set aside time to be able to raid. I find it boring and it’s getting me down to have to do all these things.
It’s a bit weird to explain but it’s not even the grinding or the dailies themselves that get me. It’s that feeling of being forced to do the same thing over and over and over… or not having the freedom to decide what I want to do and not set my own goals….
WoW in a new light
Now comes my time for a bit of wisdom. You don’t play an MMO multiple years without loving something fundamental about it. Raiding alone couldn’t have kept me in WoW for seven years and it’s always been my default MMO. I couldn’t even tell you why that is… just that’s the way it is.
So with raiding out of my mind and me wanting to try out a ton of crazy ideas, I saw WoW in a new light. For the sheer volume of content and the opportunities to do crazy stuff on a whim, WoW is still the king. It’s not that the other games are bad… just that WoW allows me to step in, do whatever I want for 30 mins and then log off satisfied.
And right now that’s what I want.
As with all things, I think it’s important to take a vacation in WoW from time to time as well. I’ve done so a few times, usually just a few days, but it always helps.
Just being willing to say “I’m taking a break from raiding for a couple of weeks” is a big deal. A lot of people feel like they’re letting the team down without realizing that if they get burned out, they’re doing no favors, either.
This obviously doesn’t apply to those hardcore raiding teams. They’re the Quantum Mechanics of game-play, a region where reason and causality fall apart, have no meaning. Issues of mental health just don’t apply.
I felt pretty much exactly as you’ve described, I just think it caught up with me sooner because I had little enough raiding experience that the shine hadn’t quite worn off for me yet and I continued to convince myself that it would get better. But with changes in my work requirements and a growing desire to find time to play other games (whether other MMOs I wanted to dabble in, or just single player games I had skipped due to filling my limited gaming time with raiding and dailies) the commitment aspects of raiding started to get to me. This is part of what I love so much about present-day WoW (aside from the truly beautiful storytelling they’ve put together in Pandaria): LFR lets me get a taste of raiding whenever I have a chunk of time available and for as many (or as few) repetitions as I want. Yes, it’s not “real” raiding, but I get to see the stories and participate in kind of version of the endgame gear chase without the necessary schedule and play commitments that are a requirement even of casual raiding groups. I just hope that LFR continues to get used across all tiers even as they release new tiers of raid content, because I am still WAY behind and would like to catch up someday.
You have to come Horde with us!
Totally planning to at some point. I lost Internet (stupid cable) during the big storm, so I got on this kick playing Steam games that I had purchased and luckily already downloaded during the big summer sale this year. I’m currently playing the original KOTOR (I know, I know…I’m a terrible gamer for never having played this back when it was released) and having a difficult time tearing myself away from it to get back into WoW now that I have Internet again.
Original Kotor is awesome. I understand you cannot pull yourself away.
I think it’s great when people can rediscover the fun in something they thought they were already done with, but I have to admit I really resent the attitude represented in the quote you mentioned. It implies that nobody could ever really dislike the direction WoW is going (it’s always just “burnout”) or be genuinely done with it (it’s just a phase, you’ll be back!). Sometimes you really are just done.
I take that quote as a way to say that WoW players have a tendency to return even when they swear they are done with it.
And yes, I do agree that you can be completly done with it.
As a former WoW hardcore raider (5 years worth of 5 days a week) and two months of SWTOR raiding I refuse to grind in any more MMO’s. I am completely burnt out on the grind concept. I prefer MMO’s that give me interesting options and a variety of activities without forcing me to do annoying things. At my age I am no longer interested in the tedium of old style MMO design.
This is why I find Guild Wars 2 so appealing. I am not forced to grind anything to experience the game content. I want my MMO to deliver everything up front and hand me everything on a platter. That is what I pay for and what I deserve. I refuse to play anymore MMO’s that force me on to gear treadmills.
I have enough grinds in real life with work and family and certainly do not want that to carry into my precious couple of entertainment hours after work.
I tried the return to WoW thing recently with the MoP 10 day pass…. I logged about an hour. The graphics are just far too dated for me and I just feel I’ve lost connection to it. I do miss its dungeons and soloing old raids but hey its just not enough to warrant me subbing.
Enjoy your return
I understand completely, Lono. SWTOR is a great game and I have a lot of fun playing it, but like you I just got burned out. WoW provides what I need, at least for right now. I played for 5 years before getting on the Bioware/TOR train and much as you describe, I found the endgame to be a tad derivative in TOR. There’s such a disconnect from leveling to endgame (almost all MMOs have this too) that it’s really jarring. It’s even more jarring because the story of the game focused so much on the players that the transition to 50 and raid content is awkward.
I’ll of course be checking out what the F2P transition offers, but I can completely sympathize with the ‘home’ feeling that WoW provides. Hell, I swore off WoW forever when TOR was ramping up, swearing that TOR was the end-all, be-all MMO for me (even though it was still 6 months from launching) … just shows me that I shouldn’t really make definitive statements!
Hi, Lono. Found your post thanks to mmomeltingpot.com.
First things first, I’m a “she”.
Nice to meet you.
Second of all, it’s absolutely true — you do not play a game for seven years without loving something fundamental about it. My posts, I hope, point out that… these things I have loved have eroded over the years.
Attunements, gone.
A static challenge (ie: no across the board nerfs during current content), gone.
The sense of community and camaraderie on one’s own server, gone.
The knowledge that the fights worked as they were supposed to, time and time again, gone. (Seriously, Heroic Blackhorn. FML.)
My own sense of interest and engagement in the new content, gone. This is very subjective, obviously, but I can tell you I am not remotely interested by the sha, the klaxxi or the different races in Pandaria. And it’s not like I haven’t quested to 90. I have.
My sense of wonderment and curiosity and desire to explore? Gone.
What kept me going after my guild broke up in early Wrath was the knowledge that I was a better player than my progress showed. So I progressed through Wrath without many of my in-game friends. I spent 9-10 months in a guild where I was MISERABLE, but I was progressing. So I rounded up my friends and we planned to restart my guild for Cata. And we did. And it was great, but many of my friends who had returned quit again, for a variety of reasons, but knowing that I had done quite well in terms of progression (in my eyes, anyhow) and knowing that I hadn’t quite recaptured the atmosphere of my Burning Crusade days… there’s nothing left to keep me there.
Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoy the mechanics of the game. I love screwing around on my hunter, I probably would have levelled up my paladin next and explored healing again, but without raiding, without my social community, there was nothing left for me there.
I’ll probably go back at some point — I’ve left the door open by keeping a nest egg of over 200k gold on me — but probably not if some of my important things that I loved about the game aren’t returned to a reasonable facsimile of what they were. Or the new expansion, because I’ll probably resub for a month to get Kurn up to the new level cap, just to see what it’s all about.
I think it’s fantastic that you can login for 30m, do what you need to do and be done, but that’s not what I want. What I want out of the game is something that doesn’t exist any longer. And that’s okay. That’s Blizzard’s choice. I said it on the latest episode of my podcast, that I WANT to want to play. But I don’t want to play. And so the door closes on a seven year long adventure.
It’s not that I hate the game. I will never hate WoW. I’ve made too many friends, had too much fun to ever hate it. It’s just not my game any longer and I doubt it will ever be “my game” again, although, like I said, it’s possible.
Finally, if people are happy to play the game, I fully encourage it. I just wanted to lay out all my reasons for quitting, for my audience, for Blizzard’s cancellation survey and for myself. Not trying to convince anyone of anything, just documenting it.
Thanks for the post.
Hi there and sorry for the gender issue. I get the same sometime and I took a chance since you avatar is male. It’s fixed in the post now. I wasn’t familiar with your blog but I’m going through the past posts right now so that will be fixed soon.
Like I was saying I fully understand your reasons and I was in the exact same spot once. What happened to me is that my needs and wants as a player changed.
I truly wish you to find what you’re looking for in another game. Best of luck!
PS: I just realized you live in Montreal and I didn’t even knew! The tragedy. I’m in Quebec city
“A static challenge (ie: no across the board nerfs during current content), gone.”
Kurn, for whatever reason you decided you didn’t want me to post this on your site, perhaps you could respond to it here?
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First, I’m the GM of a 10 man heroic raiding guild that raids two nights a week (despotism.enjin.com). We formed at the very end of WotLK and built up our roster during t11. We killed Heroic Ragnaros about two months before 4.3 hit and killed Heroic Madness the day of the 10% nerf. We had a 2% wipe at the 5% nerf which was heartbreaking. After that, we went back and cleared the entire place at 0% nerf (we were 6/8H pre-nerf, for reference) to prove we could and because we were really annoyed with the rapid nerfs. In short, if anything you’d think I’d be the most against nerfs because of our limited schedule and we want to beat the content at 0%.
But I’m not. Well, I’m against the incredibly rapid nerfs of Dragon Soul, but I’m not against them in general.
The fundamental question to me is: what happens when you reach your limit?
In other words, what happens when a guild faces a boss it simply cannot defeat. The raid team as a whole simply isn’t skilled enough to beat the boss, even with gear from months of farming. It simply won’t make enough of a difference, the people just are not good enough. To be clear, I am *not* talking about being able to overcome the boss with some extra gear in a few weeks (or even month or two). It’s a situation where you’re wiping on Heroic Ultraxion at 20% and you can only get 15% more DPS from gear eventually.
A guild in such a situation has two options:
1, replace people. Easier said than done, especially when friends are involved. And again, we’re not talking a top world guild here. Attracting capable recruits can be incredibly hard and drama can easily arise from someone being told “Sorry, you seriously just need to pull 5% more DPS or we can’t beat this boss.”
2, stop trying. In other words, be content with being 1/8H in Dragon Soul for 6+ months.
The former breaks social bonds that Blizzard wants to preserve in these guilds because it’s one of the strongest ways to keep people subscribed. The latter gets people to quit the game since there’s no forward momentum. Neither of these solutions is ideal. Blizzard wants these less skilled players to be able to still get a feeling of progression instead of saying “Well, we came as far as we can, might as well quit until the next raid tier.” So they slowly (hopefully) but steadily nerf the raid. In theory, people who are serious get done with everything before nerfs hit and anyone who wasn’t done wouldn’t have finished anyway (again, in theory).
This obviously does have the effect of it being less respectable to finish a tier only partly. My guild, in the midst of being formed, only went 7/13H in tier 11, but we were proud of it. Had we formed in Dragon Soul (or in future tiers), there would be an expectation that we’d be 8/8H by the end. But I think Blizzard’s concerned with the guilds that would simply give up without nerfs since they’d literally hit a brick wall (for THEIR guild) and potentially quit. So Blizzard tries to let them see more content via slow nerfs.
If the DS nerfs had started at the beginning of May, would your guild have been as upset (that would have given you 5 months instead of 2 months at 0%, and yes, the fact that those 2 months included holidays really sucked)?
Note that no one is really up in arms about people clearing t11 in t12 or t13 gear. I don’t really see the slow nerfs as anything different as a general principle, just a matter of timing. Exceptions like Herald of the Titans and Challenge modes are just that, exceptions where difficulty is effectively locked in place. But that’s not the case for the vast majority of the game and I’m not sure it should be the case for raiding.
Do you think challenge mode type scaling should be applied to older raid tiers within the same expansion (aka, scale down players to 502 max for heroic vaults or something similar)? If not, why not?
Actually, it is possible to become dissatisfied with a certain feature and, if the feature is one of basic concepts, with a game as well and I do not think WoW is an exception. There are important features WoW has to combat this – mostly the fact the developers keep changing it constantly, so most of the features do not last long enough for most people to get bored of them, and also the huge number of options – however, for example the combat mechanics and content gating have stayed relatively similar and I am sure there were players who decided they had tolerated a feature long enough and didn’t want to any more.