Not Addicted

So, yeah. I'm back on the wagon. Or I fell off the wagon. I'm not sure how that saying goes, really, but the point is that I'm back to playing WoW. I got hit(1) pretty(2) hard(3) during the fabled Banwave of May 2008, all because I was too fucking lazy to level up another 70 to play with a group of my old friends in America. There are a few funny things about that last sentence that I'll dive into in a sec, but let's just bask in the warm glow of WoW for a moment, and savor its flavor on our tongues together.

When I had been banned from playing WoW, it actually came as somewhat of a relief. My three 70s, while all pretty decently geared (Vashj and Kael kills, early Black Temple), were more of a pain in the ass to play than they were worth.

 

 

I had transferred to Oceanic servers a while back to play in my time zone (foreshadow: effectively abandoning American time zones), and wound up on Thaurissan, where I actually found myself in guilds that got shit done past Kara. It was good, and I bopped around for a bit there until Dreadmaul opened, and Thaurissanites were given free tickets to transfer away. The horde to alliance ratio on Thaurissan was ridiculous, and I figured only a fool would stay behind, so I took the transfer. My current guild did not, and in retrospect, I can't remember if I was happy about that or not. They had a silly tendency to destroy perfectly good loot, and worshipped at the Altar of De'Kaypee, but there were actually some pretty cool people in that guild --never mind the one who had a stick up his ass with my name written all over it for some reason-- overall the officers were cool, we were just getting into BT, and I was actually playing with my rogue as my main (which unto itself is a feat when you have a spare prot tank and resto druid on the bench).

Regardless, I moved all of my toons over, and found myself once again applying for guilds, a horrific endeavor I totally hadn't even considered. All of a sudden, Dreadmaul sucked ass, and I seriously just reached a point where I couldn't be fucked to log in anymore.

I went to America to visit the folks, and found myself at a friend's house where I heard his lament of not having enough in the guild to clear Kara consistently. Ouch. They were a small group of mostly real life friends on Zul'jin (PVE) that played Alliance. At that point I should have notified him that that was officially strike three, and to have fun in prison for the rest of his life. Instead, I offered to roll an Alliance toon when I got home, and asked what classes they needed. Hunter? Sure, why not... never had one of those before, see you online in a week or so. I knew these people face to face, and missed being able to hang around with them since I moved to Japan. Nevermind the fact that I left American severs in the first place because trying to line up playtime with my old American friends sucked ass, and usually resulted in me being the one active person on the server online in the dead of night, trying to scrape up a heroic run with the random meth head that was standing around the AH.

At this point, I was botting pretty regularly on my main account (never a good idea), just running around in circles in the Bone Wastes farming Netherweb Spidersilk. It's the only thing I really bothered to use Glider for after I bought it to level my fishing for god knows why. I honestly had like zero gold, and was trying to scrape up enough to get my druid epic flight form. I'd leave it running overnight, and would dream about getting tells from GMs that I wasn't around to respond to. Weird dreams like, I'm out shopping for groceries, when all of the sudden I realize my toon has gotten a tell and I need to go home and respond or be banned for botting. It was all very surreal, and when I finally did get banned, I think that's where the relief came from.

Building Glides for my hunter became the new use for it, and hunters and warlocks are pretty much ‘built to Glide'. Sending a pet in for three or four seconds to build up some aggro, then unloading on the mob means zero downtime, even less than zero if you're a lock and your pet has no happiness issues to deal with and can heal itself by Consuming Shadows. I'd be running around in STV (remember, this is a PVE server) for hours at a time, killing tigers or whatever. When I was actually at my keyboard, I'd run SFK or something. The hunter was actually really fun to play with the working out of shot rotations; but after trying to level it all the way, it was just too much. I was trying to take every shortcut I knew of, and skip straight to level 58. It really became a hassle, especially considering it was my first Alliance toon, and I really didn't ‘know' the shortcuts. I kept ‘wasting time' in Ironforge trying to figure out where weapon trainers were. Eventually you end up in the same zones, but the quest givers are in different locations, and enough is different that it was just frustrating. Wowhead open on the second monitor helps, but it's still a whole lot of grinding. I wanted to be level 70 already and get to playing with my friends, not be dicking around with turtles in Shimmering Flats; therein really laid the problem.

Got banned May 20th. Hooray, no more WoW, Age of Conan here I come!

AoC was the new girl on the block, and after rice pudding every day for three or four years, even boiled cabbage is a feast. I feasted on cabbage for about 9 days before realizing it was just cabbage after all, and then I began to wonder why I was so excited about it in the first place again. Combat, while new and exciting at first, was kind of a pain in the ass. I couldn't pour myself a fucking beer in the middle of doing anything, and picking my nose during a fight was impossible.

I love beer, and the only time my finger isn't in my nose during a WoW play session is when the hand it's attached to is reaching for my beer.

I cancelled AoC three days before I would have been billed for my first month (banned from the AoC forums for posting said info), and found myself in the firm grip of fear. What will I play now?! FPSes are fun for an hour or so every month, and I only did the first three missions of C&C3 after buying it. I think it's still installed! Oh! Mass Effect just got released! A 7gb torrent? Is that normal these days? More importantly, will it fill the empty void in my soul?

 

 

It didn't.

When I finally broke down and logged onto worldofwarcraft.com and set up a trial account, another wave of relief swept over me. It's hard to explain. Getting banned liberated me from being tied to the level 70 grind that 'end game' is. I tried explaining the game to my wife, and how there's times where I play the game with people shouting and joking around on vent, and then there's times where I'm either alone, or just chatting with one person while we grind. How the 'fun' part is when we're all together, but that requires the alone time to pay the admission price. When I discovered just how easy botting actually was, she 'got' it right away. She thought it was fucking awesome that I could set the rogue up to ‘go make money' for the good part of the game, and then we could go do something else, content with the knowledge that when it came time to raid, there would be money in my bags to go buy the flasks or whatever. I could watch Japanese Dramas on TV with her. We could go grocery shopping or whatever, and the rogue was still making money.

That isn't to say the entire game sucks ass, just the full time job portion of it.I am FULLY convinced that a future MMO model will incorporate botting into normal gameplay. Letting your toon run around on autopilot, without the need for 3rd party bullshit. Make the XP or money earned halved... half is better than nothing, and would probably satisfy 98% of the people who bot in the first place.

Anyway. When I was actually driving my new hunter around, it was really a lot of fun to discover all the new ‘hunter shit' that I didn't know about. Things like Sorren's Easy Shot rotation. Hell, the entire section of new and interesting hunter addons on Curse (I'm a UI whore) that I had no idea about before. Learning a new class can be really cool, but there's this whole drag associated with it. It's like ‘oh, weaving steady shot and arcane shot in and around my auto-shot rotation so they don't clip, while keeping a sting up if needed'. Okay, I got it. Can I be 70 now and run Kara with my friends? Plus running around on my newb hunter on a totally different server meant the bot wasn't running and contributing to the gold sink that is raiding. At that point, I was just in too deep, and had lost the ability to enjoy the game for what it was. A game. Being banned removed all of that.

 

 

Coming back once that was all gone felt a bit like crawling back to my parent's house after I pulled a big ‘I'm all grown up now' routine and stormed out the front door. But the fact is that I'm fully content with knowing that WoW is the best game there is on the market, and now I actually have a goal that doesn't involve ‘being in guild #7652b to down endgame raid boss #6253.2x'. I want to get another new hunter leveled up to 70 so when Death Knights drop I can roll one. I want to show my friends how to noob it up in Kara. Honestly, I've been so in and out of Kara that I could probably run it blindfolded. Some of the best raids I've been in have been Kara pugs where 4 friends and I just slop our way through it as fast and ugly as possible, dragging the other 5 pugs behind us in a whirlwind of confusion and deaths. Boss explanations go like "okay this is Maiden step in the thing when she does that thing and don'tforgetthatotherwhateverCOMMENCE". Throwing ‘commence' in at the end of raid strats on vent leaves no room for arguments, as the fight is already underway.

Plus the whole ‘nerfing' of end game is something I'm excited to see. Yeah, reread that one. If every dungeon will have a 10 man equivalent, then I can grab my Kara team (honed to a razor's edge) and go kill anything new the expansion will throw at us. Suddenly having a guild of ten people is an honest to god viability. It's a relief to be back to playing the game I love to play, for the reasons I love to play it. Whether or not this stays the case, only time will tell. I like to think of myself as a "good player" (who thinks they suck, right?). Will I be able to keep the experience light? Will I drag myself into a pit of endgame later down the road when my friends' utter noobishness makes me want to kill myself?

 

I mean... it's a PVE server, no one is gonna do it for me, right?