Friday, November 30, 2018

Life After World of Warcraft

November 30, 2018

This isn't by any means a new turn of events. I've been playing World of Warcraft (WOW) off and on for over a decade. I started playing back in 2006. I never got to level 60 with my first character before the expansion, The Burning Crusade, came out. I played more than 8 hours a day from then all the way through Wrath of the Lich King. I was never really patient with WOW during the time that I was most active with the game. If I had been I think it would have been a lot more fun for me. I look at WOW as one of my biggest failures in my time gaming.

I've come back to the game for every expansion, and I've gotten to max level on several characters over the years. I keep thinking, "This time I'll make it work." and I never really do. Here's a little background on the kind of person I was back in the Burning Crusade and Lich King days. I was your typical WOW elitist. I've kicked people from my party many times if they didn't perform to my standards. To put it simply I was an asshole. Move forward a few years, and I've grown a bit, but it was too late I had contributed to the kind of player base that are outright assholes to play with. During Cataclysm I did a few dungeons, and the people I was grouped with got bent out of shape way too easily. I feel bad because I know I was the same way back when WOW was my life.

Things are a little better now but I've changed too much as a person to be part of the WOW community anymore. I manifested schizoaffective disorder and now I have extreme social anxiety. I simply get too anxious when I'm in a dungeon I don't know, which at this point is anything past Cataclysm. That's a lot of ground to cover form me. I just don't feel the connection I used to have. I'm still addicted to the game though. I enjoy doing old dungeons and making gold. I came back yet again this time for "Battle for Azeroth." about a week ago I unsubscribed and uninstalled WOW. I still catch myself thinking about the game. I had some great times with my fellow elitist assholes, but I feel my time with the game is over.

I'm not trying to persuade people to stop playing WOW. I'm simply admitting defeat for myself with the game. I burned myself out so many times, but for some reason kept coming back to the game. I have a mountain of games backlogged in my Steam and GOG libraries. I really want to find a new game to grind. I know it seems weird but I enjoy a good grind. It's one of the things that kept me going back to WOW. I love to work hard to see all the minor improvements add up. Before WOW I played a lot of turn based JRPG's and other role playing games like Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate and Diablo. I still have Diablo 3 installed.

At this point I'm trying to decide what to make my new grind. Tomorrow I'll be playing Total War Warhammer 2 with an old WOW buddy. I still don't know what I'm going to make my main game for a while. I am writing the blog entry to cement the fact in my mind that WOW is over. I'm tired of always feeling like I'm missing out on something for not playing it. Don't get me wrong as I'll say again I don't hate the game or anything I"m just tired of failing at it.

I think one thing I can do is get back to streaming. I started back to school this October. I'm currently taking English Composition 2. It's a lot of fun but the thing that strikes me is that I have a lot of free time on my hands despite having the class as a responsibility. I think I would love to start streaming again. I feel pretty comfortable with you English class that I think I can do it. I'll try to get it all together to stream next week. I had to restore windows on my PC so I have to redo all of the artwork for my channel.

I really want to stream on Caffeine.tv but my connection isn't really up to it. I'm hoping that my neighborhood gets gigabit internet soon. For now I'll be streaming on twitch. Eventually though I'd love to stream on Caffeine. I have all my financials in order for the site so it will be interesting for me to see if I can make it work on the site. That's further down the road though for now look for me on twitch.tv/greyed1 and on twitter for updates about when I start streaming twitter.com/greyed1. That's it for now. I hope to see you soon in my stream! I'm also going to be making this blog a bigger priority. I'll be talking about all the various games I'll be trying out to fill that void that WOW will be leaving.