(no subject)

My WoW time runs out on the 3rd, and I can't even bring myself to log in and poke around one last time. The only people I really care about already know, or are reading this so they know now. As if my two month absence wasn't hint enough. As if most of my friends haven't already quit, or are in the process of doing so.

I don't think I'm coming back this time. My previous cancellations have been for school. This time, though, there's just nothing left in WoW for me. There's really nothing left for a casual to do in this expansion: heroics are out of the question because most pugs suck (even if you have a guild run with one or two pugs, the group could end in disaster) and I'm not raid-geared, so as time goes on the odds that I'll be berated for poor performance grow exponentially despite not being any worse than I was when my performance put me at the top of the list. On top of having to set aside a 2 or 3 hour block of time for a dungeon that may or may not end successfully, leaving you with nothing but wasted time and repair bills.

Dailies? The dailies are hard this time around. I know that someone on my flist was all "lol, isle of QD anyone?" but that's when I first quit WoW, so no, I never did isle of QD, and even if I'd been playing, I probably wouldn't have done it if it was anything like this. I could only do Firelands dailies with pocket healer because otherwise getting down to half my health each fight was annoying for having to sit and eat each time (pocket healer couldn't do them at all without me) and eventually we looked at the return on investment of the time spent doing this and how long it would take to even join a faction, let alone get fun stuff, and decided that it wasn't worth it. I went back to Argent Tourney dailies for pets and mounts, then stopped doing that, too, because a voice in the back of my head would go "don't you want the fiery hippogryph? Shouldn't you be doing Firelands dailies? It's the only way left to get gear...."

I don't want to raid anymore and I don't PvP. All I have is chatting in guildchat and crafting, and, uh, that's not worth $15 a month when I can talk to anyone I care about outside the game.

Honestly? I miss Wrath. I don't care that people get all het up about "Wrath was so EASY!" because it was fun for me, and if that makes me a scrub, then you can kiss my ass. I think the easy was part of the appeal: I can ask myself what I want to do, and I can get whatever that is done in a reasonable amount of time and usually see some tangible reward for my efforts. And because it was easy, no one talked. I wasn't listening to abuse every time I stepped into a dungeon (for all I QQ about my sensitive feelings, I rarely got yelled at or spoken to, I mostly observed other people yelling which can still spoil a person's afternoon). I showed up, I blew things up, and I left feeling like I accomplished something. In Cataclysm, all I feel is worse than I did before I logged in. Maybe I wasted time, or maybe I feel incompetent, whatever, but the game brings me down every time I log in, and that's not why I play games. That's probably not why anyone plays games.

I've reached the point where I don't care about having to prove myself anymore. I just want to sit down and have some fun for a while, and banging my head against a wall or cursing about having to wait for another spawn isn't fun. Waltzing in and blowing shit up is.

So that's what I'm doing in DA2 with my exceptionally hot mage Hawke. Waltzing around and blowing shit up. I was futzing around with the character creation screen wondering: so when do I get a fun MMO where I can make pretty people? Oh, that's right. I can't. There are no fun MMOs out there right now.