The Game Dame

I haven’t officially discontinued my WoW account, but I’ll probably do it this week. I realized after looking at SpartanUI that the lovin’ feeling is completely gone. A few months ago, I would’ve absolutely LOVED this UI. It’s clean, stylish, and out of the way. But now I look at it and I think two things:

1. It looks a heck of a lot like Aion’s UI. Wouldn’t surprise me if some add-on developers got some under-the-table “help” from Blizzard to combat the competition.
2. It made my skin crawl to think about playing the game again: leveling, button-pushing, doing dailies, putting up with pugs…

I just got this really depressed feeling like I have let my friends down by having zero interest in playing the game.

It is interesting learning about Aion, but I’m not sure about when I’ll go back to playing that either. It’s also very button-pushy. As in: push button one, wait for cooldown, push button 2, wait again, take a potion if necessary, flash heal, repeat.

The game I’m enjoying most right now is Fallout 3. It’s very immersive. It’s like BioShock meets Oblivion. I’m totally geeking out on it!

Photo by TehSext

We’ve all had them, bad WoW days. I’m not talking about horrible PuGs or multiple wipes or guild drama. What I’m talking about is taboo to discuss in a game where so many players need/must-have bigger and better e-peen so as to proclaim to the world they are OP.

I’m talking about times when your brain or your hands just can’t cut the mustard. Yes, you’ve had them: days when your skill just wasn’t there. When your keyboard rebels against your every wish and the mouse has a mind of its own. Your brain acts like the Kungaloosh has had a real-life effect on you. You forget your spell order or your shot rotation. You can’t keep track of your pet’s attack status even though you know (and your friends tell you, of course) that you’re so not a huntard or a locktard. (See what I did there? I just made that up!) Or maybe for just a second you forget that you can slow down or push back attackers during a frenzied fight — long enough to die embarrassingly. Then there’s that lonnnnnnng drop off Thunder Bluff, am I right? (I’m not sure what the Alliance equivalent is. Maybe Allies are lucky that way.) You know you’ve done it; we all have. You get that ice-cold lurch in your stomach as you flail through the air on the way down and you say — either out loud or in your head, but you know you say it — “This is not going to end well.” And, of course, it doesn’t.

I had one of those days in WoW today. I felt like I was playing with mittens and fuzzy goggles on. Either I knew which keys to press and just flat-out missed them, or I got that brain-lock, deer-in-the-headlights feeling of not knowing what to do next. And then, of course, there was the standing and facing in the wrong direction part. Now that is embarrassing.

I don’t pretend to be a great player of this game and I never did. (I actually don’t want to be one of the “greats,” but that’s another post.) But normally I play a perfectly competent elemental shaman so it kind of demoralizes me when I have a day like today. It makes me want to either stay away from the game for several days or level an alt so it’s “okay” to fail. What do you do when you have a bad WoW day?