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A few things happened in the span of the holidays...


Basically, we're taking a break from WoW. I would not say it's indefinite, we might still come back, but this time it's less " we're bored, we're burnt out, we don't want to keep pushing uphill" and more "We're not having fun with our toons, even with new content" ...and it would seem that it's a common situation, not only the two of us. I would say that burn-out would be common after an expack hits, but Cataclysm has been out for a month...next Friday. A month. Err...that's not very promising. Sure, there will be content patches...but what, the next patch could come out sometime in February, it's not going to come out after a month. We're already bored, and we're not even level capped.

This presents a problem. I still like playing some, but I can see where I'll be bored in the next months, and I can't bring myself to paying more money to be bored. Moreover, we had plans for this expack... our plans consisted of having a healer/tank pair that would be our main pair. We had decided to do a priest and a warrior, because those were our favorite classes. Well, warrior tanks are more or less useless now, in comparison to, say, paladin tanks, so there's really no reason to play one. No one needs a warrior tank over another kind of tank. And my girlfriend had made a disc priest. There's no reason to play one. If you have a priest healer, you play as holy.

Given that state of affairs, we decided we've had it. For now anyway. I was thinking we could come back for another expack, but news of Blizzard selling inactive accounts to gold sellers really freaked me out. I know my toons are rented. I don't know, I failed to read the agreement, but the way I see it is this- I rent time and a space from Blizzard. But my content...I rent MY created content? That's like going to a pottery class, paying for the pottery class, paying the fees for the materials and the use of the kiln, and then at the end of the class term, having to leave your stupid fucking ashtray....now, there's no way I could take my level 82 DK with me, but god damn it, if I want to come back to him, let me come back to him!


Anyway, another thing happened, to add insult to injury. I got Mass Effect. I had wanted to play Mass Effect for a while...it was essentially the one game that interested me from the Xbox camp.

Why does this matter? Because it's Bioware, who are now making SWTOR, our next MMO home.

I had played KOTOR 1& 2 and Dragon Age. Those to me were not indicative of what Bioware is, as a company. KOTOR was super fucking fun, although it did not age well, and the story telling was last-gen, and it suffers for it. The IP carried the experience for me. KOTOR 2 was actually an Obsidian game, and while it was a great game, the ending and production mishaps hamper the game incredibly. Dragon Age is an INCREDIBLE game which I never grew to adore...despite how good it is. The world of Thedas is not my favorite, for one thing, and also, the fighting was fun albeit lacked a bit of oomph, in my opinion.

Mass Effect though, is...well...let's say in the 48 hours of last weekend, I played 20 hours. See, I woke up at 8 AM that Saturday, so that left 40 hours to play. I played roughly 10 hours that day. I took bathroom and eating breaks. I also took about an hour or so to tend to 'relationship' with the significant other. Now that I recollect, I feel I lost precious time. I went to sleep at around 1 AM, woke up at 9. Another 8 hours lost. The following Sunday I had another bout of roughly 10 hours. I went to sleep at 12 on that Sunday evening. This means that there are roughly 10 hours unaccounted for at this point in time, and I am beating myself up for I cannot say I spent those precious hours playing Mass Effect.

It scares me to think what an MMO produced by the same developing team could do to my waning social life...