I finally decided it was time to hit that unsub button. But here’e the thing… It wasn’t out of spite or rage for queues, overwhelming premades in PvP, or even black lotuses.
It was because I simply just slowly stopped enjoying classic. There’s a few reasons that I believe I felt this way. Read ahead if you’re feeling the same.
1.) This game has been extremely restrictive to play with friends since the start. Almost all of my friends were scattered across multiple servers and factions due to server queues, faction imbalance, too many initial servers, and the snowball effect that once you’re committed to one server you’re committed (minus a steep $32CAD fee that came much later). We all had our mains and guilds and no one wanted or had the time to do the insane grind to 60 again and prebis again. Understandable. It just killed the fun for me. I probably had a dozen friends playing and they’re all across 4 servers and different factions.
2.) The min/max culture. You’ve heard this one before so I won’t dive too much into it. Every time I started to approach a level of significance on an alt on a friend’s sever, I began to dread the prebis grind and subsequent rep grinds that I’d need to do. There was no “do this at your own pace,” anymore. It is the standard. Everything is a race and a very binary one at that. The low level world is nearly dead because everyone is just paying for runs now. I just can’t do it anymore. My character is geared to the teeth, and yet here I am wondering what I just did with my life for the last 8 months of my life. 55 plus days of my life, and I’m just left here feeling like it could have been so much more enjoyable under the right game development/management.
3.) Spell batching. Nothing else to say here.
So here I am, back to normal life: exercising, socializing, and even playing other games and enjoying myself. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying this game; vanilla WoW is still one of my favorite games of all time, and classic had it’s moments of excitement. But overall mismanagement of server and faction populations, as well as restrictive transfer policies and player made min/max culture made me lose interest
Here’s my PSA: if you are like me and just don’t enjoy the game anymore… Who cares about whatever commitments or work you’ve put in. Your physical and mental health trumps all that. You will be much happier if you just hit that button and move on. Plus there’s hundreds of other games you can play with your friends… and a lot of them don’t require weeks-months of effort and a paywall just to play with your friends.
Good luck everyone. And have fun.
Edit: Also as a final kick in the nuts, I actually logged in to “give my stuff” to friends and was met with a >60 minute queue. I had 30 minutes left on my account. What could be more telling of the current status of the game than that?