Played Lately: World of Warcraft

• And just like that, I'm done playing World of Warcraft. At least for now. My three month subscription does not run out until September, but it would take a lot to get me back before the next expansion.


• It's a decision I've been edging toward by inches over the last couple months. First I jumped into Age of Conan and had a lot of fun there. More recently I restarted Everquest 2 to try something different. As well, I've been playing a lot more single player games like Fallout 3 on PC and Pangya on the PSP. What I haven't done is play WoW for any appreciable length of time.


• Green Armadillo from Player Vs. Developer calls it endgame fatigue. That is exactly what I have been feeling. I've been through it one time before with Guild Wars. Soon after Nightfall was released, I got burned out and stopped wanting to log in. As a matter of fact, where I took five characters to the end of Prophecies and six characters through Factions, only one character finished Nightfall. Then when Eye of the North came out, I only played long enough to take one character through that as well. Now I rarely even think to play Guild Wars instead of another game.


• I'm at that point with World of Warcraft.


• I logged in a couple days ago and found my main character, Ashlynh, at the Argent Tournament. I immediately sighed because I knew a bunch of daily quests were coming. Because I was only a couple tokens away from completing the valiant's quest, I decided not to log back out again. I did the jousting, which I hate. I flew out to kill some undead in Icecrown. Then I turned those in and turned in my valiant tokens. My reward was to open up a bunch more daily quests. That was when I logged out.


• Looking forward to the next patch, there is nothing for me to get excited about. I'm never going to get into the new raid since I haven't even completed the lowest tier of level 80 raids, much less Ulduar. I'm not excited about another group instance. There are instances from the expansion's launch I haven't completed. And I haven't grinded out enough reputation to do the new daily quests. Literally there will be nothing in patch 3.2 for me to do, so why should I keep playing now.


• I still need to finish the Icecrown quests sometime. I'm not very eager about this since I know I'll still run up against the group/raid wall in the story. Why should I care about helping the Argent Crusade advance against Arthas if I'm never going to fight him myself?


• I know. MMOs are not single-player games. They've hit me over the head with that time and again. But that doesn't mean I have to keep paying for Blizzard's continuous second act.