mdlake.net

It’s official: I am cured of the World of Warcraft virus. Last night, I joined my guild on a raid. Despite enjoying the company, and even despite the opportunity to offer fresh tactical ideas, I was bored stiff.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it did. It’s the end of a long line of steps away from an intensely engaging hobby of two years. Online strategy guides took a lot of fun out of it: most players want to win more than they want to grapple with figuring strategies out for themselves, so raids felt too much like just following instructions. I stopped attending raids when it became clear I couldn’t play enough to get ahead of the exploration curve and see stuff before the strategies got posted. Our weekly 5-man sessions, dubbed the Kneecappers, disbanded when one member couldn’t handle work conflicts, and his wife decided to depart with him. I lost all interest in grinding materials to craft a powerful outfit.

Each step left me less eager to play, until I dropped out entirely. Last night’s run was my first in months, and even then, my participation was a favor to friends in my guild, which needed to fill out a roster, rather than for my own entertainment.

I don’t really want to leave my online friends behind. To my surprise, playing in regular groups, mastering tactics together, is quite engaging. Unfortunately, there’s no longer enough game to serve as a foundation for my participation.

I’m not alone. MMORPGs are addictive, and WoW is the best of the lot, but people still get bored and drift away. Blizzard works hard and well to produce new material, but “been there, done that” complaints are on the rise. The difficulty of meeting an insatiable appetite for new content is compounded by the simplicity which made WoW such a success in the first place; tactics are not evolving fast enough to keep tacticians like me engaged. Player population (in English-speaking nations) has finally crested, and is on the decline. So now that I’m done with WoW, perhaps I can take my cue from departing players who have gone through the discovery-exploration-boredom-departure cycle before.

And there’s the mystery: where do those players go when they’re done with WoW? Some drift back to games other than MMORPGs: 4x games for the strategists, shooters for the twitch players. But where do the players who specifically like MMORPGs go, when there’s only one game in town?

That’s something of an exaggeration; other MMORPGs have carved out niches around WoW, offering much more technical play for the perfectionists, more grinding for the masochists, even a combat-free game for the pacifists. A Lord of the Rings game has earned some critical success, and Guild Wars is hanging on to its perch. Nonetheless, they remain very much niche games, and their populations are either stable or shrinking, too; they aren’t absorbing recruits from WoW. That means that joining now would leave me still behind the curve, still playing catch-up with players with more accumulated abilities and direct experience, just in a new environment. And it still doesn’t answer the question of where the retiring WoW players are going.

Apparently, they’re going back to living. Leaving behind the addiction of WoW, they may be rediscovering all the interests that went ignored under years of pressure to level up, or to completing a set of powerful gear. Thinking it over, that’s my cue, too, isn’t it? Instead of following players to a new MMORPG, it’s time to follow them back into the light of daily life: family, work, noble causes.