I haven’t really blogged since I quit World of Warcraft a little while back on the topic of World of Warcraft. Despite the fact that I did purchase Legion, I really have zero intention of playing it, at least for now. Many people have sung praise over the expansion, the launch being one of their better (or best yet) launches while the content is plentiful. I’ve watched streamers and believe that the game does look appealing. Nonetheless, the game may not be for me.
The primary reason for me avoiding World of Warcraft is that I simply don’t want to tangle myself up at the moment in a game where I devote most of my waking hours to the grind. At this point in time, I’m not entirely convinced that the expansion is as great as people say. Whenever a new thing comes out, people will sing praises mostly due to its freshness. I suspect that Legion is not different and that the addicts mostly needed new content to keep them occupied.
A lot of people for Warlords of Draenor sang praise on launch mostly because of the questing. Certainly, the praise wasn’t for the servers because those were highly unstable and many people weren’t able to login at all. But once the server problems were solved, most people found the questing and story compelling. Even the Garrison Missions at the start seemed interesting.
Unlike Mist of Pandaria, Warlords of Draenor attempted to correct the overwhelming amounts of content with a few selected daily zones that were mindless and just kill percentage or small task grinds. But the problem whenever you put a good portion of your non-instanced content in that manner, you’ll end up shooting yourself in the foot because of the monotony. People once again complained about the overall lack of things to do.
The overall goal at that point was to belt out more expansions quicker which is why there were only three raids and barely a handful of dungeons. The content gate mostly, in my opinion, was that stupid Proving Grounds, which made Heroics blocked off along with the Legendary Ring quest. The major PVP open world zone that they were hyping turned out to contain too much PVE content and the raids either were too easy or too hard as always.
But the real problem in all of this is just the lack of vision and consistency with how the game should move going forward. The only thing that is certain no matter what is the lengthy amount of time you will lose by getting lost in the grind.
For me, I realized that the overarching structure of the game will never change. Small bits seemed to have altered like more world content and how that part of the content gets presented. Yet I feel that most of the game will end up being one sided raiding or arenas at the end of the day. Yes, there is the new Mythic+ dungeons that might allow you to progress a little further in having better and better gear. But the real trick in all of this is just the sheer dependency upon having consistent people to play with who aren’t total asshats to enjoy this type of world.
I suppose if I were supremely wealthy and not trying to complete a novel within a short time span that I might consider participating. But even without playing the game, I have monstrous difficulty providing enough creative, satisfying content on a daily basis for my own works. So having a time sucking game around like a vampire bat isn’t in my deck of cards right now.
Truthfully, this situation is for the better. While there aren’t a lot of games I feel compelled to play at the moment, I really shouldn’t be wasting too much time getting distracted. There’s a lot of things I need to do professionally for my career to satisfy myself that goes beyond game addiction.
But one other thing beyond lacking time made me decide to stay away. I’m tired of the World of Warcraft community at large. I know that you should never go to the forums and generally stay away from streamers who collect toxic chats. But eventually that mentality spills into the game and creates enough negative emotion for me that I just lose it. The best option to prevent myself from being affected is simply to stay away. Unfortunately, Blizzard won’t budge on allowing more singular play for this game where you can do a lot of similar things without the headaches of dealing with in game jerks. So I just figure that at the end of the day, I can save a good $15/month and repurpose that into say my new web server hosting which has made this blog go pretty darn quick.