One thing about WoW that fans came to love from the earliest moments, was the sense that you were in fact a part of an interesting, spiraling, sweeping, epic story. Where once, in previous games of the franchise, you were a Hand of God to units, you now ARE a unit. This is not lost on many of the game's players.
It is this sense of community, and the evolution of the story of Warcraft lore and history, that makes the game so GOD DAMN ADDICTIVE. You can walk away, cancel your account, but you always come back. It's like Heroin, literally.
Heroin kills people. And although real-world cases of WoW causing physical deaths are existant but rare, there is of course more than one form of "death". The human mind has a delicate balance of emotion and logic that must be maintained in order for a person to remain healthy. When a balance is not kept, shit happens.
Well, shit happened to me. I will extrapolate on that a little, then give my reasons for why, as of this commentary, World of Warcraft is not in my forseeable future...
I am a gaming geek. I have been thus for many, many years. Like many gamer geeks, and the stories of people meeting in a game and marrying, I met the love of my life in a game. We played together, through thick and thin, guild drama and real world woes. She came down to stay with me, and we became as close as two people can. We learned things about ourselves from interacting with each other in the game, and others, and we found a sense of belonging, between the doctor's appointments, the stomach flu, the traffic and the madness.
She became the cornerstone of my time in WoW. If I was playing, but she was not, I felt isolated, surrounded by a sea of strangers, not having fun, and generally not caring to play. When she was around, it became magic. We matched each other's play styles tit for tat, and could outplay any class/raid combo with near telepathic precision.
It was fun. It was engaging, and it was enlightening. But then one day, things started to change. The sheer dumbass fun of it all just...got old. I leveled onward, hitting the magic level 60. She was finally at 57, but lost her toon in a freak happening which resulted in a toon deletion (not a hack). Our time together in-game was cut in 1/3, then 3/4. Her internet access was out of the equation. She made time on another machine not belonging to her personally, but, there were 4 or 5 other people, all vying to play. Fighting over game time lessened her interest. The gulfs between her toons and my own toons exacerbated this, until finally, last night, it came to a head.
My love, the one who kept me in the game all this time, has lost her will to WoW. She has been frustrated by the fact most of our guildies are all ahead of her, some of them are 70 and have been since the NIGHT of the expansion. She feels that people don't respond to her, and ignore her in the guild, things that are valid, and hurt. It hurts to be left out, especially when most of the people behaving this way, have YOU to thank for what they take for granted!
So, it came down to a discussion on "what's the fucking point to it all?"
Well, I played WoW at first, for me. But then I fell in love, and when that happened, the game took on a less personal flair, and became a team event. In some misguided way, I abandoned my love. I leveled on ahead so that whenever she COULD get online, she felt as though I was leading her around like a lost puppy, and not really playing with that team dynamic anymore. It caused her frustration, and it made the game more of a chore than a "game".
When one half of a team is gone, it's no longer a team, and the luster is dimmed. I simply cannot stand the idea of playing without my love. She has decided to take a break, perhaps for good, from WoW. Therefore, I am going to follow her in that decision. Our guild is large, and strong, and I know that others are surely just as capable of keeping it alive, in the event we do return from the game netherworld someday. The best thing about WoW is just that, again, canceling your account doesn't cancel all your hours and hours of hard work. It simply puts them in a mason jar in a some basement.
So, for now, and perhaps forevermore, I bid Azeroth a Fond Farewell. It has been a remarkable journey, and in the entire history of my life as a gamer, my fondest memories are with you, oh mighty Tauren, oh hideous Forsaken, oh green Orcs. I love you, I hate you, and most of all, I miss you...
But, most of all, I miss my love being happy. Everything else in life MUST take a backseat for the happiness of the woman I love.
Saluud!
