This could be the end of the world... of warcraft.

Maybe I was just in a bad mood today (as per my previous post), but I logged on to WoW for about 45 minutes and it struck me how little I actually like playing the game. The penalty for virtually everything is time, and as an impatient man, that is unacceptable to me.
I checked the account management page, and the next time they were going to deduct my monthly fee was on October 2nd. Perfect, that's just a couple of days from now, it'll make my quitting much easier. Said and done, my subscription is cancelled.

I have a theory about quitting any online game. In the beginning, it's all nice, and you spend a lot of time in the world. After a while (6 months to a year) you begin to grow tired of the game, so you quit. This lasts for about 4 months, then you reactivate your account for various reasons. This time you play for a shorter period of time, say 4-5 months. After that you think that the game sucks again, and you quit. This time you wait even longer to start again, and when you do start again, you play for a shorter time. As time progresses the time between reactivating your account grows longer, and the time your account stays activated grows even shorter. After some time you reach a point where, after over a years absence, you think "hey, wouldn't it be fun to reactivate my account?". You reactivate your account, and within days or even hours, everything starts coming back to you, and the reasons you quit in the first place are as clear as day. You give it one more day to be sure, but after that deactivation, you will probably never ever play the game again.
I can't say I have this experience from that many games, but from the two online games that I have played and subsequently quit (Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft), the pattern has been identical. The fact that there's an expansion pack coming out for WoW doesn't bother me in the least. The game will still be the same, just more content. I might take a look, I might not, but I think that by that time, they will have launched Diablo 3 (on can only hope), and when that happens it'll be bye-bye all other games for a long time.

April Fools

I regularly read around 10-15 blogs and news sources every morning, and here are the April fools jokes (I hope) that I have come across so far:

Insane attunement instructions for The Black Temple in World of Warcraft (This had better be a fucking joke)

Registering a new domain name to complete the comic transformation. (used to be applegeeks.com)

Normal fun about syndication and selling out your webcomic. (and open source)

Wireless Power. (Actually, I'd love for this to not be a joke, but it's obviously too good to be true.)

Mozilla Foundation sues Microsoft Over Tabbed Browsing. (Had it been the other way around, I would not have been laughing.)

An easy to use device for electrocuting yourself with a using a wall socket.

And finally, a list of previous cool April fools jokes. (It even includes the classic Swedish joke about putting a nylon stocking in front of your black-and-white TV to get color, which a lot of people fell for)

Naxxramas: The Movie

I found this today over at Ming's site. It's a movie made by a French guild about the various boss encounters and wings in the Naxxramas instance in World of Warcraft.
Like he says, much like the BWL movie of about a year ago, this is more of an artistic vision of the encounters in Naxxramas, than a "look at my interface and my big crits"-kind of thing. It is, dare I say, the best WoW movie I have ever seen. The BWL movie was pretty damn awesome, but the quality and production value of this is just so much better. Also, the stuff pictured in this looks much more interesting. If you're a WoW-fan and you like good movies, then check this out. A full, high-quality download is recommended, this movie has earned it!

Edit: You can find the rest of Jack's movies here.

Back to Life

So, I guess school starts again tomorrow. Granted, I don't have class on Mondays, but it's officially on again. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as we will later see) I've been too busy playing World Of Warcraft these past weeks to a) do something productive and b) write new posts.
The good thing about playing wow is that I've grown tired of it again, so now my only hope is that TBC (not tuberculosis) will bring some new joy into the game. If not, then I'm screwed.
It's especially good that this happens now, as I have exam weeks coming up, and I don't want to be preoccupied with slaying foul demons and whatnot.

Three of my roommates arrived home yesterday with eerie timing. I was expecting only one of them, but they all arrived within one hour of each other, so now the house is full of joy and merriment again! It was really great to have the house to myself for these last two weeks, but I can't say that I haven't missed having them around. The remaining two are due sometime this week, and sometime next week. One of which has been to the eternal darkness or Norway for two weeks. It's going to be interesting to hear what she has to say.

I also got a link from my brother yesterday about a new blog I should check out. It's at http://indexed.blogspot.com, and it's full of truths and laughs.

Other than that, very little has happened. I've become very tuned in to CNN, as it's what I watch for breakfast, lunch and dinner when I'm downstairs, so I now know in detail what's going on around the world. Not that I didn't before, but my knowledge isn't normally accompanied by moving pictures.

Me and one of my roommates spent an inordinate amount of time on youtube today. We started watching some SNL skit, which quickly got followed by some nudity (of course, it's what the internet is for, is it not?), a bit of Chad Vader (hilarious stuff), and then I showed him the wonder that is LonelyGirl15. He had not seen this before, and was not familiar with the concept of vlogging (terrible word for video blogging, I know).

All in all a good, fun, and completely useless day.
Now we're all having a delicious dinner together. Fried chicken, potatoes and vegetables. Gotta run!

Off the wagon

Who am I kidding here...
I know I terminated my account, and that my game time expires on Monday, but so help me, here I am, re-queueing for the Battlegrounds over and fucking over again.
I just hope that the end will be swifter this time.
As with Diablo2, I kept going back to it around 4-5 times as I recall (not counting this fall, when I REALLY wanted to play, but didn't). Each time had a longer time span between it, and the times that I spent playing became shorter and shorter.
Now, as you remember, Blizzard is releasing "The Burning Crusade". I don't know if I'm going to try to exercise some kind of mental restraint, or if I'm just going to get suckered into the wonderful game again. The stuff that awaits on the other side of the dark portal might just prove too much of a temptation for me to not surrender to.
I do know, however, that I'll put everything else before the game. Now that I'm guildless, and I'm not raiding, I don't have to take care to adapt my playing schedule to anybody else's time, which makes all the difference in the world.

I'd love to clear Naxxramas and AQ40 and whatnot, but I realize that it's not in the cards for me. Maybe if I could spend 40 hours a week at the game, with the best people in it, but I have way too much other interesting things to do.

The Burning Crusade

I've stopped playing WoW. I don't even play around with talent calculators or skulk on the forms any more. I've stopped playing, and I couldn't be happier.
That was, of course, until Blizzard saw it fit to release the Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft. I'll agree it doesn't look even half as exciting as the original WoW did when it came out, but it's still pulling me in.

I guess I'm going to have to succumb to temptation. I do like the game, with regards to game mechanics, it's just the people in the game, and the end-game content that I'm not too happy with.
Sure, I used to spend 12-16 hours a day playing, so I guess I've seen more of it than your average player, but so help me, raiding with 39 other people just to get some timed attack just right isn't my bag.
For those of you out there who actually play, I really hope that the stuff that drops in outlands (not in the raid dungeons though) will be A LOT better than the raid epics I have now.
A good thing is that they've reduced the raid sizes to max 25 people now.

Anyway, time for school...