1 May
Where have all the flowers gone?
Author: Game Dame
Well, there’s Slig in his Noblegarden outfit. He’s resplendent in all his primitive glory, is he not? And by “resplendent,” I mean “goofy.”
Yesterday I spent about an hour gathering eggs filled with chocolate and other trinkets while I was polymorphed into a bunny. It feels odd doing all this so long after Easter. (Okay, to be fair, it feels odd doing it ANY time; he’s a giant male COW for peetsake!) And indeed I only spent an hour doing it. It’s really a phone-it-in kind of holiday.
Now all the silly eggs and flowers are gone and today we start Children’s Week, where you get to drag around an orphan, exposing him to your violent lifestyle and buying him ice cream whenever he whines. Isn’t it bad enough that he has no parents without adding more bloody trauma to his life? Is the ice cream supposed to make up for that? And why do we do it? So we can get a pet rat or Mr. Wiggles. How is this not exploitation of children?
I think my ambivalent feeling about WoW holidays is a metaphor for how a lot of people are feeling about the game lately: bored and unchallenged. Patches and expansions offer new content that not only people rush through, but only last a few months even if you take your time. I have got to be the slowest leveler on the planet and I’m already yawning about the Wrath expansion and Ulduar. It hasn’t even been six months since Wrath came out!
I guess raiders are motivated by the desire/need/compulsion to finish the high-end content, which is designed to be purposefully frustrating so they continue to beat their heads against it for several months. How fun is that! As a casual player, I have not even the slightest wish to die a jillion times – and endure the pugs (now with 80% more asshats!) that will allow me that pleasure – or to devote that large a portion of my life and ego to besting a set of pixels. Daily quests don’t get it done for me either. I want the game to be a game, not a job.
From Javã Társis on Flickr
WoW relies heavily on its social component to make it worthwhile to come back to. Most people really do like the folks they play with, but if we’re honest, there’s also a sense of obligation to it sometimes: “I don’t want to let them down so I’d better log on.” To me, I think this feeling of responsibility and loyalty is the thing that makes the game hardest to leave. Blizzard knows this, but instead of making the social interactions more enjoyable and less tedious, they have concentrated on making more content. I mean, the few nods they’ve made to improving the social aspect of the game were (1) adding the calendar, (2) tweaking the still-disastrous LFG system, and (3) implementing a half-assed voice system which no one above Level Noob uses.
To make matters worse, some of my friends are cutting back or outright leaving the game. My ennui grows. Maybe it’s time to spend that money on Xbox Gold instead…
Filed under: Shaman Blog
