Game over, man! Game over!

so... yeah. title kinda says it all; we've decided to quit WoW. it's partly due to boredom (we hit the level cap several times back when it was 60 and we hit it 5 more times since it was raised to 70), but mostly due to us wanting our social life back.

way back in the day, before evercrack or dark age of camelot or any of those games saw the light of day, we stumbled into a beta tester position for an online game (this was before the term MMO started getting tossed around) that ended up never seeing the light of day.

long story short, we ended up getting very involved in that game. involved to the point where one could argue that it was a bit too much. as it happened, the game never got off the ground, the developers went their separate ways and we got busy with other stuff (school, mostly).

fast forward a bit and the wonderful world of online gaming that we know today began to take shape. we were fascinated by it, read all the reviews in the gaming mags, talked to friends who played, drooled over the fancy new graphics and cool ways to interact with other players... and we avoided every single one of them like the plague. see, based on our previous experience with that little beta tester gig and knowing that we have an addictive personality, we were a bit worried that we'd get sucked into one of them if we gave it a taste.

UO, EQ & EQ2, DAOC, SWG and many more all went unplayed. we did pretty well avoiding them over the years until WoW was released and a few of our co-workers, most of whom were old hands at EQ, convinced us to try it out. three years later and we were still playing... and not doing much else.

that's where the real issue lies for us. depsite our best efforts, we were never able to strike a good balance between WoW and everything else. it was just too easy to get into WoW and our social life suffered as a result. while we were making new friends on WoW that all lived thousands of miles away, we were losing touch with our local real-life friends. we'd get home from work, fire up WoW and play until the wee hours of the night. the weekend would roll around and we were far more likely to be playing WoW then doing anything else. it got to the point where when we did make time to hook up with old friends, we really didn't have much to say when people asked us what we'd been up to for the last few months; we'd played a lot of WoW and that was about it.

now, don't think that we didn't enjoy our time in WoW. sure, there were crappy moments but the reason we've been playing for three years is because it's fun! every time we hit the level cap was a magical moment for us. nabbing that drop we'd ground away forever for, hitting each new level, killing a new boss for the first time, meeting awesome people through the game, rolling yet another alt... these are all things we've enjoyed and things that we'll definitely miss.

however, since we don't trust ourselves to balance WoW with real life, it's time we parted ways with the World of Warcraft. we did not, of course, go full-on /emo, shard our purples and delete all our characters, but we did terminate our WoW account. so, while we don't have any plans to come back to WoW, never say never and all that.

in the meantime, good luck to all of you and thanks for reading :)

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