My subscription is no more as of Friday the 30th, and the screed below is nothing more than stream of consciousness mind fluff, so read it or don’t.
I really do not know if any developers/managers look at these kinds of posts or not. They always said post on the forums when you cancel your sub to let us know why, but the Blues seem few and far between these days, so who knows if anyone other than us inmates read what is scribbled out? But this is really not a post for them. This is just a way to wrap up my 20+ year relationship with Blizzard, say thanks, grumble a bit, reminisce, and then move on.
Like many of the original WoW players I knew, the developers that tried to create an amazing online and immersive fantasy world are gone. I stole some of that last sentence from a post I read in the forums a few days back and believe that sums up the game now. WoW is a shell of what it once was to me. But that could just be me as a guy who only played Atari and Nintendo games growing up, and then never really played any PC games, other than WoW/Diablo, for almost 30 years. Things change. I obviously changed. That’s how it is. But Shadowlands was the proverbial final nail. I’ve said a few times over the last 10 years on this very forum I was quitting if “x" happened, but never did. Now it really is time. The game is removed from my system and my account will end around noon (western) server time Friday. While I feel some sadness, I also feel good about the decision.
In December I looked back at previous expansions and felt there was true care put into most of them. That in turn led me to think maybe I was just being grumpy and needed to step back and take a break from Shadowlands and visit the other areas with some alts. In stepping away from the content in Shadowlands I ran two of my alts through BC content up through Legion. That took a couple of months playing for each character, but I felt it was time well spent. It was enjoyable if you want to know the honest truth, and apparently I was not the only one who felt that way. Every day I would see several level 60 players or a higher level alt doing the same quests I was doing.
On the other hand, at least to me, Shadowlands did not feel like time well spent. To me it felt like it was cobbled together and merged from ideas that did not fully pan out in the past, so they mixed and mashed in some mad way just to put out an expac to keep us mice hitting the feed bar in the Skinner Box. Obviously WoW has had that play style since the beginning, but I felt like they upped the number of times you needed to hit the bar to get the food pellet in Shadowland.
Last month, after running two toons through BC, Wrath, Cataclysm, Pandaria, WoD, and Legion content, I went back to Orbios on this character after my imposed ban on being there to see if I could get back into the swing of things… I could not. As soon as I got there I ran inside the main area, thought “meh,” and hearthed back to my garrison. It was that day I cancelled my subscription. Unlike other expansions, I finally realized I had enough. Shadowlands bored me. I did not care about covenants; I did not care about Anima; and most of all I did not care about finishing the story. I hit 60 several months back, left in the middle of the Revendreth storyline, and never wanted to go back.
Shadowlands just didn’t grab me. I understand this outlook may be coming from a position of I just finished “past content rose-colored glasses good old days" syndrome, but that’s how it is. I just don’t care about the new things being offered, so I’m hanging up the bow.
While my last month rolled by I realized there were some things I miss/remember from the past:
**Flight time across the map by taxi in Vanilla that took close to 20 minutes top to bottom, if I remember correctly. It’s not that I miss it, but the fact that the world was so huge that I could make and eat lunch before I reached the other side of the map amazed me. Add to that the transition from zone to zone was seamless with no load screen. I had never seen anything like that.
**My Nightelf run through wetlands as a level 10, which was my first real taste of danger trying to get to Iron Forge from Darkshore. I still wish death upon any and all Razormaws and Crocs to this day.
**Hearing “that” noise and looking behind you to see the Fel Reaver. Later, any time I found myself in Hellfire I purposely sought out the Fel Reaver. I don’t care if all I got from it was a 30 silver vendor item I killed it on sight. Other than swarms of Murlocs there is nothing more evil in this game than a Fel Reaver.
**Training skill points. Skill Points in Classic was something I looked forward to when I hit another level. I loved running back to the trainer to learn something new. That kept me going early on, and I do miss how it used to be. Slam me for that opinion, but I will never change my mind.
**I remember my first ground mount at 40 and 60% speed, I think level 60 was for 100% speed, and 70 was for 110% flying. Funny how I had almost no gold back then and scrambled to scrape together the gold not only for the mount but also for training, and now I have about 5 million across my main and two alts and don’t think twice about dropping 100K on something in the AH.
**I should make a shirt that says I survived the great zombie invasion of 2008.
Stupid things I did:
**When I first played I would sell trash to vendors, but thought I had to log out when their buy back inventory was full. I thought they would not buy anything else from me, so I logged out and back in. At that time in the game if you sold something to a vendor and logged out everything you sold was gone. You could not buy it back like you can now.
**Up until Wrath I pronounced Reagents as Regents… I just didn’t look closely at the spelling of the word. It wasn’t until we were running ICC that one of the NPCs says something about getting “more reagents for Finklestein” that I realized I was reading it wrong all those years.
**I was a clicker up until Wrath.
There’s so much more, but I know it doesn’t matter to you.
There is sadness because I really do know this is it. I started playing in (I think) December 2005, and hitting /played on my main shows I have played just over 260 days in total time. Minus a few months off just after Cata, I have been subbing pretty much continuously. But over the past three years I have watched what friends I had leave and remain gone. While I know none of them will ever see this, I would like to say hello and goodbye to:
Blackhawk, Greymatyr, Mau, Gorer, Illwind, Yappy, Lilliyana and Onyxrose…
You all made it worthwhile.
My bank alts are now happily sitting around the large table at the Pig and Whistle in Stormwind, and this guy and my two goof-off alts will spend their retirement back where it all started for me, in the NE starting area of Shadowglen.
That’s where they will stay, locked away in my little sector of the server quietly waiting until the day Blizzard decides to pull the plug for good. It’s funny to me, being as old as I am, having some deep emotional attachment or concern for a group of pixels, but I won’t lie… I will miss them.
I will also remember the friends but not the jerks, the joys but not the disappointments, and more than anything I leave here remembering the good, because that’s what this game started as for me: good friends, good times, and now good memories.
So thanks to Blizzard who made a game that kept me wanting more for so many years, and also to everyone here. You have provided me with some good reading, good laughs, and some true get off my lawn moments. Thanks for that.
And finally, no you can’t have my stuff or my gold, and no, you will not see me next expansion. For me, it’s just time to move on. And with that I say…
TL/DR: All the best to all of you.
'Cheese
