Decisions, decisions ...

Before the main post,

My thoughts go out to those people who have had setbacks this Xmas period. And especially to those people who have relatives in hospital. I'm thinking of Family Aginoth in particular here, I hope that Father of Agi will get the chance to scramble up those ladders again sometime soon ...

Now to my rather more minor concerns - I'm wondering how long it'll be before people notice and how long before the "don't go, we need you" messages start flowing in.

I'm quitting World of Warcraft ... And the reason is - I think I've seen all it has to offer, all that is left to do is to go into the high end areas over and over again, in order to farm things for item drops that are unlikely to happen.

The original reason for WoW keeping my interest for so long was the massive amount of content it crams inside itself, which holds good for quite some time through the game. At any one level range, there are probably 6 or 7 distinct areas where you can go to hunt monsters to get experience. And it's effectively a "just visiting" mentality, you move on before you get bored with the area. Until, that is, you get to level 60 (max level).

To get the full set of mage items, I'd have to :
Belt - hit lots of mobs in the high end instance (no real trouble, gets done while hunting the specifics)
Bracers - as per belt
Head piece - hit Darkmaster Gandling in Scholomance with a 6% chance of getting the item
Gloves - as per belt
Trousers - hit the end boss in Stratholme with a 6% chance of getting the item
Shoulderpiece - hit someone in Scholomance with 11% chance
Chestpiece - hit end boss in Upper Black Rock Spire with 5.6% chance
Boots - hit a rare boss that no one likes to go for in Stratholme with 10% chance

So, running the numbers on that, I'd have to go into Scholo 9 times to get the shoulder piece and 16 times to get the head piece. Into Strat 10 times hitting the rare guy to get the boots, plus 16 times to get the trousers. Finally into Ubrs around 20 times to get the chestpiece. That's only the chance for an item to drop though, the chance to actually get the item depends on how much company you have. For that chestpiece, you need 15 people, so you'd have to take the random chance that some other person gets it. For the next stage of gear, it's worse - you have to take your turn between 40 people. Oh yeah - a full Stratholme run takes around 8 hours. A full Ubrs run takes 2-3 hours. And you can't do Ubrs unless you have a key, which takes several runs of LowerBrs to acquire. Yawn.

Oh yeah - I'd have to do that treadmill over and over again with alternate characters as well. That's when a game starts turning into something resembling a job on an assembly line.

What makes it worse is that it's the same place, over and over again. No variation, except in the moronic people you have to take with you. And that's part of it ... we lost another person before Xmas because he didn't like the prospect of the WoW end game and I guess I've come to the end of what I'm prepared to put up with as well. The guild people aren't bad, but we've always struggled to get enough for those end game instances. Which means you need extras in, which means you have to take on morons.

WoW's been fun, but I've only stuck at it so long because of a few of the people in the guild. One of whom I'm sure is reading this right now. Possible future guild master ? Ha ! Run Zalzar ! As fast as you can. Who are they ? I'll give some in game character names - Zalzar/Zaphyr, Makai (retired), Fubb, Souleater, Recharge/Charge and Bolbit (retired).

Because of the subscription type I took, I still have until April to go though, we'll see how much I get involved before then. In the meantime, I think I've found something that will let me read books and play at the same time ! It's called Eve and it's a space trading/combat thing that also happens to be Massively Multiplayer Online. And, because that's fairly small, I can play that and be on the same server (game world) as my best friend from uni.