Monday (18 Feb) - The Last Spark, the Final Chord

Monday (18 Feb) - The Last Spark, the Final Chord

I have been playing World of Warcraft since it was released in 2005. I am now in my ninth year playing this game.

Raiding has always been the biggest draw for me, and my support group for raiding has been my "cabal" of long time friends. The core cabal has inexorably shrunk over the years and expansions, but there are still a good handful of players that know and have raided with Wildshard.

I was introduced to plaver-vs-player (pvp) by good friends who convinced me to give it a try and a patiently taught me what it was all about. The peak of my pvp play was the Hunter Fortress team of twinked out hunters that was a huge amount of fun.

Most recently I have been enjoying the Pokemon style pet battles, as anyone who has read my blog recently know is just about all I do in game anymore.

One thread that has been consistent from very early on is the character Happyface. Through thick and thin, Happy has always been there, almost literally every single day, working the Auction House so that the rest of my toons could buy the things they needed.

Now, the thought of raiding no longer entices me to play. I could complain that the cabal is barely breathing, and that raid leader/guild leader Bloodknuckle is again dealing with real life and not daily entreating Wild to return to the raid. As good a friend as Bloodknuckle is, I just haven't felt like raiding. If I had to point to one thing, it was the Looking For Raid (LFR) addition that did me in. LFR is great for a lot of things, and frankly it helped Wild immensely when ramping up to tackle the next raid. Unfortunately, it also seems to have killed any desire to raid, having seen the bosses in the LFR a hundred times already. Raiding no longer felt fresh and new to me.

Pvp is fun with friends, and still is. But it isn't really my thing on anything but a very casual basis. As something to do now and then, I still like it, but pvp alone doesn't hold much lasting interest.

I even took a look at the new Brawler arena - by accident. I was looking for a pet I could purchase there, but when I checked the prize NPC in the brawler area I learned I had to reach rank 4 brawler before I could get it. I watched players engage in five battles, and all of them lost their matches against the level 90+ elite opponents they faced. It was kind of fun to watch, but Brawling is really not much of a draw for me, either.

I still enjoy collecting wild pets and doing pet battles. I have a baker's dozen of level 25 pets now, and at least one pet in each of the ten types. I expect I'll keep playing pet battles for a while longer, even though the Tamer quests are currently broken for me, for how long I don't know. I did get a response back from the game CEO, Mike Morhaime (or whoever checks his mail for him), thanking me for my support over the years and promising to look into it.

At my worst level of frustration, I considered suspending my accounts, at least for awhile, to see whether I would miss the game. For the moment, at least, I've decided not to do that. What I have decided to do, though, is not to renew my subscription. I pay six months at a time.

It was most annoying, then, when I tried to do that online and could not. I could cancel my subscription, and I could change the terms, but I could not simply turn off the recurring payments while playing out the time I had already paid for. So I called Blizzard, and of course the accounts office doesn't open for business until ten. So I had a couple more hours to kill.

It's now 10:30am and I called Blizzard a second time. I got a very straight, though automated, answer - we're busy, don't call us again. Well, it was couched a little more nicely than that, but that was the gist. No human person would be answering the phone. Ever. I did figure it out, though. In the online forums under Customer Support, I found a thread that had my answer. If I want to end recurring account payments, I had to cancel my subscription. The remaining time that I had already paid for was still valid, so I can continue to play until that time runs out. Happy's account is paid until 7/31/2013, and Wild's account is paid up to 8/8/2013. It costs me $25.98/mos to play this game. I canceled both accounts, but I still have five months of playing time to decide whether to renew.

I also plan to spend more time writing my novel, which I have gotten behind on. For those who are following the novel progress, I'll have an update out shortly.