I've been cut off of WoW for several days due to work trip: no checking AH's, no second guessing the quests, no killing AI driven mindless mobs.
Just being and working.
It's quite refreshing, really. After reading Dechion's excellent post on answer to Kestrel's as excellent question I've noticed how the game has let off it's hold on me. The competition season for the dogs is looming ahead, the new blog is starting to gain momentum and honestly speaking the weather is working against playing for hours on end. And then I read Oakstout's remarkably interesting rants . Both of them.
The latter really blew my mind.
Is it really so that we're getting bored on WoW because it's dumbed down to the basics and made as easy and available to all so that all other games which try to offer us some different experience feel too hard, unplayable and strange to us? That's the thought that popped up in to my mind after reading and thinking about the latter post Oakstout put out.
And in a sense I agree. All the games that are released nowadays are being compared to the 1k pound gorilla called WoW, which after four years of tweaking and patching with YAP's (yet another patch , term coined by Tobold and very descriptive in WoW) is being compared to the games released with at least as many bugs and twitches as WoW had after it's second expansion. One could ask if that's fair, but then again you always compare the newcomer to the market leader, whether it's jeans, soda or MMO.
Note that I deliberately left the RPG off, because IMO WoW has been turned more into a persistent world arcade game (MMOPWAG) rather than MMORPG. Go figure, I'm not the first one to claim that.
Now I feel like an outsider, after a few days off the hook. I know that when I return back home I will sit by the computer, trying to find reasons to quit playing WoW and I cannot come up with any.
The big question would be, why do I play it then.
I play because I want to see the content, want to play with my brothers and good friends and because WoW is very familiar. The familiarity is the card that plays the biggest role if I take the social connections off the equation.
How about you? Do you play only because you enjoy the pointless and endless gear updates or because you have some social connections to check within the game? Has WoW turned more into a social connectivity tool than a MMORPG?
