I accidentally fell out of World of Warcraft the other day. It was an unfortunate combination of apathy, fatigue, annoyance, and a bizarre billing muck-up that got me this time. In the UK, we have a payment system called ‘Switch’, which is basically like a credit card, but much less irresponsible, as it pays direct form your own bank account, rather than turning into the potential landmine of an high interest loan. I prefer it, but very few online games allow payments in this manner, being mostly US-run affairs.
World of Warcraft does offer it’s UK players this option, but from some reason, I’ve never been able to make it take a recurring payment, and I never pay for longer than one month at time – using online games as a form of mental self-flagellation, as I do, this would be folly! So when the month expires, to the very hour, WoW kicks me out, and won’t let me back in again unless I fill in the payment screen again. This happened a few weeks ago, again, and this time, I really couldn’t find the energy to fill it in again. This might possibly be progress...
So anyway, I failed again, at possibly the easiest MMO currently available, and didn’t even make it out of the ‘tutorial’; levels 1 to 59. I think I got my warrior to L54 or 55 or so, and was just starting on Silithus quests. Nice change of scenery, I guess, but still the same old list of monster guck to find, the same old combo of hotkeys: Battle Shout, Demoralising Shout, Sunder, Sunder, Sunder, Sunder, Heroic, Heroic...
I’d always intended to hang the thing up at L60 on the dot anyway, but when I thought about that, I realised that there wasn’t much between there and here I particularly needed, or wanted to do. Other options included massive faction grinding with furbolgs in Felwood to get at Winterspring, more hack and slash in the two Plaguelands, poking about at the far end of the Blasted Lands, or the whole pick-up instance warm-up circus in preparation for life after 60. And PvP I guess, although Planetside generally seems more satisfying somehow.
Of course recent announcements from Blizzard HQ don’t help either, where they seem unrepentantly hell-bent on making the post-60 Catass Raid Calendar game nothing if not more so, perhaps not understanding that on the whole, the reason their game is so popular is that for the first 59 levels, you don’t need to rely on random idiots to get anything useful done.
Can’t be arsed, so back in the box for World of Warcraft. I expect I’ll be back again, being weak, and something of a mind-masochist, but this does now put me in the strange position of having three MMOs on the go, and not paying for any of them, which I could quite get used to. The silly part of it all is that had the subscription payment been automatically renewing, like Credit Card ones do, I'd have probably just let it happen...
Roll on Planetside Reserves…