Rocket Surgery

Yes, I’ve done it. I’ve broken my addiction. I’ve cancelled my World of Warcraft account and uninstalled it.

About two weeks ago, I dinged 58 on my warlock and headed over to the Dark Portal and started putzing around in Hellfire Peninsula. And while I was running around, trying not to get run over by the Fel Reaver, it occurred to me: “Didn’t I just do this with my druid?”

My druid has been sitting in Shattrath City doing nothing for months now. Once I completed my PVP-60 set on my druid, I decided to try something new–the warlock. And it was indeed pretty cool. It was particularly nice going through content that I hadn’t seen before.

But soon, I got up in levels on my lock, and it started seeming much more like my druid. I think it might be because my druid was my first character and it took me almost a year to get from 1 to 70, but only took a couple months to get from 1 to 60 on my lock (in light of my better knowledge of the game and the recent patch that increases the speed at which lower levels rise). So it really didn’t take long before I was doing the same things all over again. Reminded me of when I was a middle schooler and I watched The Empire Strikes Back twice in the theatre back to back one Saturday afternoon. The whole time through the second viewing I kept saying to myself, “Do I really want to sit through this again? I just saw this!”

So, I put WoW on hold for a while and tried a few other games. Tried out Eve online, which looked great, but just wasn’t fun. Tried Second Life, which not only wasn’t fun, but it didn’t even bother to look great. Star Wars Galaxies was garbage. Half-Life was just too much like Doom. In fairness, Civilization IV was pretty good. But each time I uninstalled a game I tried, I’d go back to WoW for a while and felt the same deja vu feeling of apathy.

So I’ve called it quits, much to the chagrin of my twelve-year-old who thought WoW was the greatest game ever and envied me for playing it (I wouldn’t let him because of the inappropriate language in the chat). I feel like I’ve just come out of rehab. I’ve also changed the tagline of my blog, since I realized I spend a lot more time talking about politics than WoW.

So what will I do with all my newly recovered spare time? I’ve thought about rejoining Netflix and catching up on movies, but for this weekend, I started trying my hand at developing a plugin for Hudson. But that’s another entry after I’ve spent more time on it…

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 10:17 pm and is filed under World of Warcraft.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.