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| You got me this time, but I win in the end |
I've been burning out on WoW for well over a year now, and looking at my guild's progression in the game, it was going to take longer than I wanted it to to finish it all up. So one day, I looked when my account was due to expire, and it was coming up in a little over a month, so I decided to do the rational thing and cancel it.
So why the burn out? Why quit when we're so close to our goal? Well, there's a lot of reasons for this, but the one that comes to the forefront is that playing World of Warcraft in a raiding guild is like having a job that you pay to be at. Sure, you can enjoy the people you're at work with, but you kinda have to be there, or else they won't be able to progress further in the game because they'll be short handed.
And boy, were we short handed. Burn out was more than evident, many times we would have less than 20 people on for the raid start. Several times we've had to all out cancel the raid because there wasn't enough people online.
So here I was, committing ~10 hours of time to scheduled WoW a week, which made me have to reschedule other things for other times in the week, leaving me less time to relax and play other games, and then I'd show up and there wouldn't be enough people to play with. You can clearly see how I began to think of this as a waste of time.
I can't really blame people for not showing up, though. When we did have a full raid (or as close to it as we dared to try), people weren't paying attention all the time, and vent would be filled with inane chatter. People would be asking in raid how to maximize their dps or what skills they should be using or talenting for, things that should have been taken care of well before stepping into the instance. Tanks would have connection problems, healers would be dead, and dps would be standing in stuff. All of this sloppyness lead to frustration and people not showing up.
The only thing that kept me going were the friends that I had made in the guild. I enjoyed coming online and talking with them about whatever weird stuff was going on while we were pulling trash mobs. There were some great conversations over the two years that I was with them, and that's the thing that I'm really going to miss.
So I let the guild leaders know of my decision, finished off raiding until the account expired, ordered my figure print, and spent the next would be raiding night at GenCon instead. I'm going to miss a lot of those guys, and yeah, sometimes I feel the urge to just hop on to check things out, but I know I'm just going to be going back to an abusive relationship. WoW, baby, sometimes you treat me right, but I can only grind on so long before we're through.
