Midnight

This is the expansion I'm standing in right now, and I have to be honest with you about it in a way that's a little uncomfortable. I've barely played it. Not because Midnight did anything wrong. Because life did. So consider this less a review and more a dispatch from a guy watching the current expansion through a keyhole, catching what he can in the minutes he's got.

Let me give you the number, because the number tells the whole story. My playtime is down to something like 3 to 5 hours a month right now. Not a typo. I used to put in 40 to 60 hours a month without thinking about it, and these days I'm lucky to scrape together an evening's worth across four weeks. The move ate my time whole. Between selling the house, living out of rentals, and everything else a cross-country relocation drags behind it, WoW has become the thing I do in the cracks, when there are cracks, which lately there mostly aren't.

Which brings me to the housing, and to the most honest thing in this post. I love it. Twenty years I waited for player housing in this game, and Midnight finally delivered it, and it's every bit as good as I hoped. I have a house. It's decorated. I got in there early and made it mine. And here's the gut-punch. It's not where my hours go. When you've got 3 to 5 hours a month, you do not spend them arranging furniture, no matter how much you love the room. I built the thing I'd been asking for since 2005 and now I mostly wave at it on my way to somewhere more urgent.

So where does the scarce time actually go? Staying somewhat current. That's the whole game plan right now, just not falling hopelessly behind in the base game. And the wins are small and I'll take them. I finished Midnight Loremaster on Joar yesterday, which means I've at least seen the story of Quel'Thalas, walked the blood elf homeland, done the questing that matters to me most. For a guy playing on fumes, getting Loremaster done felt like a real accomplishment, the kind of thing I'd have knocked out in a weekend once and now stretched across a month of stolen half-hours.

I'll admit what I skipped, too, because the skipping is part of the honest picture. I never really touched the Void Ritual Site stuff from the last patch. Just didn't have the hours for it, and it quietly passed me by. The new patch dropped this week, though, and I've managed the first week's worth of the new zone and the new vault feature they added, and both of those seem like genuine fun. Enough that I wish I had the time to actually sink into them.

And the altoholic in me is still twitching, even now, even at 3 to 5 hours a month. Joar's at max, obviously. My hunter's at max too. And I've started dragging a druid up the levels, sitting at 87 the last time I looked, because apparently no amount of time scarcity can fully cure me of the urge to have one more character in progress. The warlock plan holds most of the time. The druid is the 20% that never quite does.

So that's my Midnight, and it's a strange one to report. A house I love and never visit. A story I finished in stolen minutes. A new patch I've tasted just enough of to want more. I'm not going to hand you a verdict, partly because it's early and partly because I've barely been here. But what I've seen, in the cracks, I like. And the game will still be here when life loosens its grip, which it will, eventually.

For now, I log in when I can, do the one thing that matters that day, and log back out. It's the least I've ever played this game. It's also, somehow, still the one I come back to.

Cheers,

Joar

Blaugust Day 22: The Warlock Plan

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write. For a while now I've been trying to main one character. Just the warlock. Park the alts, funnel everything into the one guy, actually finish something on a single toon instead of spreading myself across fifty-two of them. If you read the altoholic confession post earlier this month, you already know why that sentence is almost funny coming from me. I'm the guy who physically cannot leave the alts alone. I finished the last expansion with 52 max-level characters, and I mean that as a confession, not a brag. Fifty-two. And that's the guy who's now, nineteen years in, trying to run an experiment in monogamy.

The warlock is Joar. He's the undead one I've played since Burning Crusade, the character I sign every blog post with, and if I was ever going to pick one to go all-in on, it was always going to be him. Dark magic, a race that's already dead, the whole aesthetic fits me. So the plan was simple on paper. Make Joar the project. Gear him through Delves and renown, keep him current, and for once in my life have a single character that's actually done rather than nine that are all 80% there.

I even reshuffled the professions to do it. I wrote a whole post about that a while back. I dropped tailoring and enchanting and picked up mining and herbalism instead, which sounds backwards, ditching the crafting to go collect ore and flowers. But it's the right call for how I actually play now. Gathering you can do casually, in the gaps, while you're already out doing something else. Crafting the modern way is its own project, a grind that wants real attention I'd rather spend on the character himself. So I traded the professions that demand a session for the ones I can do half-asleep on a flying mount, and it felt weirdly freeing, like cleaning out a closet.

And the modern game actually supports this, which is the part that surprised me. Delves mean I can gear Joar up solo, on a weeknight, no raid schedule, no nineteen other people. Renown ticks up just by playing. Warbands, the account-wide stuff they added, means even the little I do earn elsewhere flows back to him. The game finally built the tools for a one-character life, right at the moment I decided to try living one. Good timing, for once.

Now here's the honest part, because these posts don't do clean victory laps. It's not working perfectly. I want to tell you I parked the alts and never looked back, that the reformed altoholic found peace with a single toon. Not quite. I still catch myself. A new patch drops and I feel the old itch to play something different, or I log in tired and end up puttering on an alt "just for a minute" and lose an evening to it. The plan is more of a strong lean than an iron rule. I'd say I'm maybe 80% loyal to Joar, which for me is a staggering number, and 20% still exactly the guy I've always been.

But the lean is real, and it's the most focused I've been on one character since maybe Wrath. When you stop spreading yourself thin, the one character you're pouring into actually gets somewhere. Joar is geared. Joar is current. Joar is, for the first time in a long time, a finished thought instead of one of fifty-two unfinished ones. And that feels good in a way the alt army never quite did, because the alt army was always about starting and this is about arriving.

Why now, this late? Same reason a lot of things are simplifying for me lately. I've got less patience for spreading myself thin, in the game and out of it. Doing one thing well is starting to beat doing fifty-two things halfway. The warlock plan is a small version of a bigger lesson I keep running into.

Will I stick to it? Probably 80% of the time. For an altoholic, that's basically a wedding vow.

Cheers,

Joar

RIFT

RIFT is the one that showed up in 2011 looking like it might actually do it, actually be the game that gave WoW a real run, and then slowly, quietly, didn't. It's the saddest kind of MMO story to me. Not the ones that launch broken and deserve to fade. The ones that launch genuinely good, make you believe for a while, and run out of road anyway.

Let me tell you how good the launch actually was, because people forget. RIFT came out polished. Not "polished for a small studio," just polished. It ran well, it looked sharp, Telara held together, and it did the thing almost no WoW competitor managed, which is that it felt finished on day one instead of like an early-access apology. The line going around back then was that RIFT was a better WoW than WoW in a few specific ways, and for a few months that wasn't even a stretch.

The rifts themselves were the hook, and they were a genuinely fresh idea. Tears would open up across a zone, invaders would come pouring out, and everyone in the area would drop what they were doing and pile in to push them back. Dynamic, unscripted, happening whether you planned for it or not. You'd be running a quest and suddenly the sky cracks open and half the zone is fighting for the town. It made the world feel alive and reactive in a way that questing-then-dungeon-then-raid never did. For a while it was the most exciting thing in the genre.

Here's the part I find genuinely interesting, looking back. That rift mechanic is a very close cousin of the dynamic events that Guild Wars 2 built its whole world around, and I wrote about GW2 already this month. Same core idea. Stuff happens in the world on its own, players show up and deal with it, the zone reacts. Two games, roughly the same era, both leaning on the same fresh idea as their signature. And GW2 is still going strong all these years later while RIFT faded out. Same defining feature, wildly different fates. A decent reminder that the idea is rarely what kills or saves a game. It was great in both. Everything around it decided which one lasted.

And then there was the soul system, built for a guy exactly like me. Every class had a big pile of "souls," sub-specs you could mix and match into your own build, three at a time, swapped around however you liked. If you know me at all from these posts, you know that's catnip. I'm the altoholic who tinkers with talent trees on a quiet night. RIFT handed me more knobs to turn than almost anything I'd played, and I spent happy hours building weird hybrid nonsense just to see what worked. That flexibility was the thing I loved most and still miss.

So why did it fade? Not one dramatic reason, which is the frustrating part. It just couldn't hold the momentum. WoW was still the gravity well, and RIFT had all my characters and none of my history. I'd built up over there without ever quite building roots. The content came, people cleared it, and the population thinned the way MMO populations do when a game is fine but not essential. It went free-to-play in 2013, usually the tell, and after that it drifted into the long slow twilight these games do, still running, sort of, but clearly past its moment.

Here's the honest part. I drifted too. I played RIFT hard for a stretch, loved the souls, chased the rifts, and then one day I noticed I'd gone back to WoW and just never came back over. No rage-quit, no wall. I let the gravity take me home, the way I do with almost every MMO that isn't the one I've given nineteen years. RIFT deserved better than that. It was good enough to keep. I just wasn't capable of keeping two.

That's the tragedy of the promising ones. They don't need to be bad to fade. They just need to be second, and second in this genre is a very hard place to survive. RIFT had the bad luck to be great in a world that already had a favorite. I still think about those souls, though. Nobody's built a system quite like it since.

Cheers,

Joar

The War Within

We're about two thirds of the way through Blaugust, so I'm feeling pretty good at this point about my plan for the month.  Today, I'm going to continue the theme of discussing World of Warcraft expansions.

The War Within is the one I just finished, the expansion that carried me right up to the doorstep of where I am now. Writing about it feels strange, because it's not history yet. Midnight is the live game as I type this, so the War Within is the stretch I was playing until about five minutes ago, and looking back on it is less nostalgia and more checking the rearview mirror. Still, it earned its own post, because it quietly became my favorite way to play the game in years.

The setup was that we finally went underground. After Dragonflight brought me back, the War Within opened up Khaz Algar and sent us down into it, a whole continent of caverns and buried civilizations. Isle of Dorn up top, the Ringing Deeps with the machine-speakers, Azj-Kahet where the nerubians live, and Hallowfall with that enormous crystal standing in for a sun. I'm a sucker for a good underground zone, and Hallowfall in particular got me. A pocket of light in the deep dark, a whole people organized around keeping the crystal lit. That's the kind of setting that sticks with me.

But the real story of the War Within, for a player like me, wasn't the zones. It was two changes that felt like the game had finally been built with me in mind.

The first is Warbands. They made your progress account-wide in ways that actually matter, so all the stuff I earn spreads across my characters instead of dying on whichever one happened to be logged in. For a confirmed altoholic, this was close to a religious experience. I've spent nineteen years grinding the same things over and over on alt after alt, and the War Within finally said, you know what, you earned that once, keep it. It doesn't sound romantic. It changed how I play more than any dungeon ever did.

And I want to be honest about what that permission did to me, because it got a little unhinged. I finished the War Within with 52 max-level alts. Fifty-two. Sit with that number, because I have, and I'm still not sure whether it's an achievement or a cry for help. Warbands removed the one thing standing between me and total altoholic collapse, the pain of re-grinding everything per character, so I did what I always do with the brakes off. Fifty-two characters at the cap. That's not a roster. That's a small guild that happens to be one guy.

The second is Delves, and I've already given those their own post, so I'll keep it short. Delves gave me a real path to good gear that runs through zero other people and zero raid nights. Just me, Brann tagging along, a bite-sized dungeon I can knock out on a weeknight. The War Within is where that clicked into being the core of how I play. Solo, semi-committed, geared enough to keep up, on my own clock. I've wanted that from WoW for twenty years and this is the expansion that finally handed it over.

I'll caveat the raid side the way I always do, because I don't live there. There's a big Worldsoul Saga going on, Xal'atath pulling strings, bigger threats pointed at down the road, and Nerub-ar Palace was the raid everyone was clearing. I got the story version and the LFR version and I was happy with that. The high-end folks got their fights, I got mine, and for once the game gave me a gearing lane that didn't run through a room I'd decided not to enter. No complaints from the cheap seats.

Looking back now that I'm standing in Midnight, the War Within reads as exactly what its name half-promised. The last stretch of a certain era, the setup expansion that laid the track for everything the Worldsoul Saga is now cashing in. It wasn't trying to be the grand finale. It was the deep breath before it, and it happened to be the most comfortable I've been in the game since Wrath.

That's a strange thing to say about an expansion that's barely cold, but it's the honest read. The War Within didn't blow the doors off. It quietly became the version of WoW that fits my life best, then handed me off to Midnight without a fumble. Good handoffs are underrated. This was a good one.

Cheers,

Joar

Writing as Joar

I've written under this name for seventeen years, and people still ask me now and then why I don't just put my real name on it. The easy answer is that Joar is a pen name and the whole point of a pen name is privacy. The honest answer is more complicated than that, because if I'm being straight with you, the wall I supposedly built around this thing has more holes in it than I'd like to admit, and most of them I punched myself.

Start with where the name comes from, since that part's simple. Joar is a character. He's my undead warlock, the guy I've been playing since Burning Crusade, and when I started the blog seventeen years ago it never occurred to me to sign it anything else. You write about WoW, you write as your WoW self. It stuck, and by the time I'd have thought twice about it there were already a couple hundred posts under it. The name grew roots.

The idea, at least in my head, was that Joar would stay sealed off from the rest of my life. A hobby identity, walled away from the buttoned-up professional world where "I run a World of Warcraft blog" would have landed like a confession. That was the theory. In practice, I blew the first hole in that wall myself, early, and on purpose.

Some of my most popular posts in the early years were breakdowns of Blizzard's earnings calls and quarterly financials. I could not help myself. Here was a company I loved, publishing exactly the kind of numbers I stare at for a living, and I was going to read those filings whether I wrote about them or not. So I wrote about them. And anybody paying attention learned pretty quickly that the guy behind Joar does something with financial statements for a living, because you don't casually dissect a 10-Q for fun unless that's your world. The professional wall came down almost immediately, and I knocked it over myself because the material was too good to leave alone.

The personal stuff crept in slower, and mostly as I got closer to retirement. Somewhere in the last several years the separation just started mattering less to me. I've written about my son's swimming, the meets, the way that took over our calendar. I've written about becoming a grandfather. Bits of real life that a stricter, younger Joar would have kept firmly on the other side of the wall. If you really wanted to sit down and assemble it, I suspect you could sketch a decent picture of who I actually am from what's already sitting on this blog. I've left more fingerprints than the pen name implies.

So why keep the name at all, if the secrecy's this leaky? Honestly, because it stopped being about secrecy a while ago and became about identity. Joar isn't a disguise anymore. He's a mode. He's who I am when I'm writing about this specific hobby, seventeen years deep, and the name carries all of that history with it. Retiring it now would feel like renaming an old friend. The wall came down in pieces, but the name stayed, because the name was never really the wall. It was just mine.

There's still a little separation left, and I'll keep that little bit. This is the corner of my writing life that's purely for love, no professional angle, no personal-brand strategy, and the name helps me remember that when I sit down here I'm not performing for anyone. But it's a low fence now, not a fortress, and I've made my peace with that. Seventeen years in, the honest version is that I let people in gradually, one earnings-call post and one swim meet at a time, and the world didn't end.

Still Joar. Just a more transparent one than I set out to be.

Dragonflight

Dragonflight is the expansion that got me back, and I don't say that about many of them. I ended the Shadowlands post walking away, gone for the better part of a year, telling myself I might not come back at all. Dragonflight is the thing that reached across that gap and pulled me home. Not with a grand story or a shocking villain. It won me back by being fun to log into again, which after Shadowlands felt like a small miracle.

Here's the thing that mattered most, and it sounds almost too simple. They stopped burying the game under systems. Shadowlands had covenants and anima and Torghast and a checklist that grew every week, and Dragonflight walked in, cleared the table, and said, "what if you just played?" No borrowed power you'd lose next patch. No agonizing over a choice that came with a math penalty. They even brought back the actual talent trees, the ones you could sit and tinker with, and for a guy who likes to fiddle with a build on a quiet night, that alone was worth the price of admission.

Then there's dragonriding, which I did not expect to care about and ended up loving. Flying in WoW had been the same hover-and-autopilot for years. Dragonriding made it a thing you actually do, with momentum and speed and a little skill to it, diving to build up steam and pulling up to gain height. The first time I really got the rhythm of it, swooping across the Dragon Isles with the ground blurring underneath me, I caught myself grinning like it was 2007 again. That doesn't happen much this far in.

The Dragon Isles themselves were the right kind of setting after a gray prison realm. Green, open, full of dragons and the Dracthyr and old titan machinery, a world that felt like it wanted you to explore it rather than survive it. The Evoker showed up as the new class, the dragon-people who breathe magic, and while I stayed loyal to my undead warlock, I absolutely rolled one to poke at, because I am who I am and a new class is a new toy.

The story was lower stakes on purpose, and that turned out to be exactly what I needed. No universe-ending threat, no cosmic force retconning everything I cared about. Just the dragons coming home to the Isles, sorting out old business, a more grounded story about legacy and stewardship. After Sylvanas and "it was all part of the plan," a smaller, more honest story felt like the game apologizing without saying the words.

I'll be straight about the part that didn't grab me, because these posts aren't ads. Dragonflight was so focused on being pleasant and frictionless that some of it slid off me without leaving much of a mark. I couldn't tell you the villain's name without checking. A few of the middle patches came and went and I logged in less. That's the tradeoff when you build an expansion around not annoying anyone. It also doesn't produce many moments that grab you by the collar. I'll take it. Boring-good beats frustrating-bad every single time, and I'd just spent a year learning that lesson the hard way.

What Dragonflight really did was remind me why I gave this game nineteen years. It took the resentment I'd built up in Shadowlands and quietly dissolved it, one fun evening at a time, until one day I realized I wasn't logging in out of habit or obligation. I was logging in because I wanted to. I'd forgotten that was even possible.

So that's the comeback. Not a bang, an exhale. The expansion that didn't try to blow my mind, just tried to give me my hobby back. It worked, and everything I've played since, I've played because of it.

Cheers,

Joar

Elder Scrolls Online

Elder Scrolls Online is the MMO I keep going back to, which is not the same thing as an MMO I stayed with. I've drifted into ESO more times than I can count, played it hard for a few weeks, drifted back out, and then found myself reinstalling it a year later when the itch returned. Nothing else has that pull-and-release pattern on me. So this is the honest accounting of what keeps dragging me back and what keeps letting me go.

I have no memory of taking this screenshot, but it seems cool.

Start with what kept me. It's Tamriel. I played the single-player Elder Scrolls games, I've got real affection for that world, and ESO lets me walk around inside it with other people wandering by. Morrowind as a living zone, Summerset, Elsweyr with the actual Khajiit at home, the whole map slowly filling in over the years. The questing is genuinely good, fully voiced, more written care per quest than a lot of MMOs bother with. You can stumble into a side story in some no-name town that's better told than the main plot of games I've paid more attention to.

The other thing that kept me is the shape of it. Buy the box, and the subscription is optional. That's huge for a guy like me. ESO doesn't punish you for leaving. I can vanish for eight months, come back, and pick up more or less where I left off without a wall of catch-up, because the whole world scales to you. Go anywhere, any order, any time. For someone who plays in bursts around real life, that freedom is exactly right. It's a game built to be left and returned to, and I've tested that promise thoroughly.

And here's the tell that I've tested it deeper than "drops in now and then" makes it sound. I'm an altoholic to the core, in every game I touch, and ESO got the same treatment. Across all those on-again stretches I've built up a max-level character of every class in the thing. That's not a tourist's résumé. The drifting is real, but so are the hours, because when I drop back in I don't roll one character and wander around. I roll all of them, because at this point I don't seem to be capable of doing it any other way.

Now what didn't keep me, and it mostly comes down to one thing. The combat never felt right in my hands. After seventeen years of WoW, ESO's fighting feels floaty to me, a little weightless, like my hits aren't quite landing on anything solid. I know the high-end players have a whole intricate rhythm to it, animation timing and weaving that turns it into something skillful. I could never make myself care enough to learn it. Every time I got to the point where the combat should have hooked me, it instead reminded me it wasn't the combat my hands already knew.

The other thing is just the size of it. ESO is enormous, and it presents that enormity as a giant menu on day one. Chapters, DLCs, zones, systems, all shouting at once. WoW at least walks you down a path. ESO drops you into a buffet and wishes you luck, and for a certain kind of player that's paradise, but for me it sometimes tips into paralysis. Too many doors, and I end up standing in the hallway.

So that's the pattern. Tamriel pulls me in, the questing and the freedom keep me happy for a while, and then the combat feel and the WoW gravity quietly pull me back home. It's the healthiest relationship I have with any game outside WoW, precisely because ESO never demanded I commit. It lets me treat it like a place I visit rather than a place I live, and honestly, that suits both of us.

I'll be back in Tamriel again. I always am. I just won't be moving in, and ESO, to its credit, has never once asked me to.

Cheers! 

Joar 

Shadowlands

Shadowlands is the one that actually got me to quit, and after nineteen years of playing, that's not a sentence I write lightly. Warlords nearly lost me to boredom, a year of sitting in a garrison with nothing to do, but I white-knuckled through it and stayed subscribed. Shadowlands I didn't. Shadowlands frustrated me so thoroughly that I unsubscribed, walked away, and stayed gone for about a year. Boredom just means the game left. Frustration means the game is right there, asking for your time every single day and making you resent it, until one day you stop giving it.

The setup had me. The afterlife, the realms of Death, an undead warlock finally getting to see where all of this actually goes. I'm the guy who plays a class built around dark magic and a race that's already dead, so an expansion about the machinery of the beyond should have been catnip. And the zones delivered. Bastion, Maldraxxus, Ardenweald, Revendreth, each a distinct take on death, all of them gorgeous. Maldraxxus especially, the undead-army realm, felt built for exactly my kind of character.

Then the systems closed in. Shadowlands is where Blizzard's love affair with borrowed power hit its absolute peak, and it buried a genuinely interesting expansion under a pile of grind. You picked a covenant, and it came with an ability so tied to your performance that picking wrong could hobble your character, and switching was painful enough that people agonized over it like a mortgage. The thing that should have been a fun roleplay choice, which faction of the afterlife do I want to run with, got turned into a math problem with a penalty for guessing wrong.

Then there was the Maw, and Torghast, and anima. The Maw was designed to be unpleasant and it succeeded a little too well. Torghast started as a genuinely cool idea, a tower you climb with weird temporary powers, and then they wrapped requirements around it until it became one more weekly chore with a timer. Anima was the grind under the grind, the currency you fed into everything, and there was never enough of it and always another thing that wanted it. The whole expansion had this feeling of a checklist that got longer every time you cleared it.

And the story, the thing I'd actually shown up for, fell apart at the end. Years of buildup around Sylvanas and the villain behind the curtain, and the payoff was essentially "it was all part of the plan," which retroactively made a lot of things I cared about feel cheap. When the lore is the reason you play your character and it lets you down that hard, it takes something out of you.

It didn't help that this all landed in 2020, when the game was one of the few social things a lot of us had left, and it asked us to spend that time on chores in a gray prison realm. I logged in out of obligation, did my anima laps, and felt the thing I never want to feel about this hobby. That it had become work I wasn't getting paid for.

So I stopped. I leveled maybe two alts into the expansion, sat with how little I actually wanted to log in, and decided I hated it and canceled the sub. I left. For real, for the better part of a year, and I spent most of that stretch playing Final Fantasy XIV instead. WoW carried on without me and I didn't miss it, and that scared me a little, because I'd never once been able to say that before.

I came back near the tail end of Shadowlands and caught up on what I'd skipped. Dragonflight was on the horizon by then, ready to remind me why I'd given this game so many years, and that's a story for another day soon. But Shadowlands is the one that broke the streak. Not the expansion that gave me nothing. The one that gave me too much of the wrong thing, and for the first time made walking away feel like the healthy call.

And the pause had taken its toll.  Instead of 43 max level alts at the end of the expansion, I went into Dragonflight with only 8.

Joar

Why I'll Never Raid At The High End

I don't have enough predictable time slots.  Thanks!  Hope you enjoyed today's blog post.

In all seriousness, if you've read any of these expansion posts, you've seen the same line show up over and over. Leveled at my own pace, ran heroics and LFR, did world quests or dailies, but never went anywhere near the cutting edge. It's practically a refrain at this point. So today's the confession post where I actually explain it, because "I don't raid at the high end" isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is that I used to feel bad about it, and somewhere along the way I completely stopped.

Let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not knocking the people who do it. High-end raiding is genuinely hard, it takes real skill and real coordination, and the guilds who clear mythic content the week it drops have earned every bit of the flex. I respect it the way I respect marathon runners. From a chair. With a snack.

Because that's the thing nobody tells you until you're in it. High-end raiding is a second job. Fixed schedule, three-plus nights a week, invite times you're expected to hit whether or not real life had other plans. Showing up isn't enough, you're expected to show up prepared, which means the pre-work of farming consumables and studying fights and keeping your gear optimized between raids. Miss too many nights and you lose your spot, because the roster is a machine and the machine needs bodies in seats. I did the corporate version of that for 35 years. I am not signing up for the volunteer version at 56.

And the temperament isn't in me either. The high end runs on performance meters, on knowing exactly where you rank, on someone being able to pull up a log after a wipe and point at the reason. Some people thrive on that pressure. I spent a career being measured on a spreadsheet, and the last thing I want out of the thing I do to relax is another spreadsheet with my name on it and a number next to it that somebody's about to question.

So for years I did the thing where I told myself I was missing out. The game didn't help. For most of WoW's history, if you weren't raiding at the top, the message was that the good gear, the real accomplishments, the stuff that "counted," all lived in a room I'd decided not to walk into. I ran my LFR and carried around this low-grade sense that I was doing it wrong. Playing the game in the discount lane.

Then, honestly, I just aged out of caring. Somewhere in the last few years it clicked that I was having a genuinely good time doing exactly what I do. Leveling slowly. Seeing the story. Running the accessible content on my own clock. And the thing I'd been calling "missing out" was actually just a different game, one that fit my life instead of fighting it. The gear I wasn't getting wasn't making anyone happier than I was. It was just making them tired on a schedule.

The game finally caught up to that, too. Delves gave the solo, semi-committed player a real path to gear that doesn't run through 19 other people and three raid nights. I don't need the mythic room anymore, and here's the part that took me twenty years to reach. I don't want it. That's not settling. That's knowing what the hobby is for.

I'll never raid at the high end. I used to say that like an apology. Now I just say it.

Cheers! 

Joar

Battle for Azeroth

Battle for Azeroth wore me out, and it did it with the one thing WoW is supposedly built on. Faction war. Alliance versus Horde, the oldest fight in the game, cranked up to be the entire point of an expansion. And instead of feeling like the payoff to two decades of buildup, it mostly made me tired. I main an undead warlock. I've been Horde since Burning Crusade. And BfA is the expansion that made me realize I didn't actually want to fight this war anymore.

It's also the expansion where my altoholism got the most out of control, at least until recently.

It opened on a gut punch. Sylvanas burns Teldrassil, the whole night elf world tree, right there in the intro cinematic, and the message was clear. This is going to be ugly and you're going to have a side in it. I'll give them this, it was a bold swing. The trouble is what came after never earned that opening. The war campaign turned into a slog of back-and-forth where nobody could win because the story wasn't allowed to let anybody win, and Sylvanas's whole arc got muddier and muddier until by the end I genuinely could not tell you what she wanted or why I was following her into any of it.

Then there was Azerite. The Heart of Azeroth, this necklace you leveled up, feeding it to unlock traits on your armor. On paper, more progression. In practice it was the borrowed-power grind at its most joyless. You'd get a new piece of gear and it would be sidegrade-locked behind a system you had to grind out again, and the whole thing had this treadmill-on-a-treadmill feel that soured a lot of the expansion for me. I'm a guy who likes the loop, I said so yesterday, but even I have a limit, and Azerite armor found it.

The zones themselves were actually good, which is the frustrating part. Zandalar and Kul Tiras were gorgeous and full of character, the troll city stuff and the vaguely-nautical Drustvar witch questing were some of the best-built leveling content in the game. Mechagon was a fun little side world. Island expeditions were a decent idea that never quite came together, and warfronts were an okay idea that came together even less. There was a good expansion buried in BfA. It just kept getting in its own way.

But the thing that actually got me was the fatigue. Twenty years of "for the Horde" and "for the Alliance," and BfA leaned on that harder than any expansion before it, and instead of firing me up it just made me notice how little I cared about the war anymore. I don't want to burn down the other faction. I've got friends who play Alliance. I had more than a dozen max level Alliance characters myself at that time.  The whole premise felt like it was written for a version of me that stopped existing around Wrath. When your big emotional hook is a grudge I no longer hold, the whole thing rings a little hollow.

The old god payoff at the end, Ny'alotha and N'Zoth, was fine. Serviceable. But by then I was mostly running on momentum, doing my heroics and my LFR, leveling alts and waiting to see what came next, hoping the next one would be about something other than a war I was done with.

And my altoholism completely lost control by the end of it, as I finished with 43 max level characters.  Basically one of each class across three servers and a decent start on a fourth.

BfA isn't the worst expansion. But it's the one that quietly retired the faction conflict for me. After that, "for the Horde" stopped being a rallying cry and started being a thing my character says out of habit. Kind of like logging in, some nights.

Cheers! 

Joar

Guild Wars 2

Today we're going to divert yet again from the regular discussion of World of Warcraft, just like I have over the years with this blog.  

Guild Wars 2 is the MMO I respect more than almost any other, and the one I keep at arm's length even though I've quietly poured a serious number of hours into it. That's the contradiction I want to be honest about. "Keep at arms length" makes it sound like I've barely touched the thing. I haven't. I've got a max-level character of every class in that game, because the altoholic in me doesn't switch off just because I've wandered out of Azeroth. The distance was never about playtime. It's about where home is.

Start with why I respect it, because that part is easy. GW2 took a hard look at everything that grinds you down in a traditional MMO and designed those things out. No subscription, you buy the box and you're in, play a session a year if you want and nobody's charging you for the privilege. No gear treadmill, once you hit max stats they mostly stay there, so a friend who quit for two years can come back and not be three tiers of armor behind you. The quest hubs with the yellow exclamation points are gone, replaced with dynamic events that just happen in the world whether you're there or not. Even the holy trinity got tossed. Everybody brings some support, everybody brings some damage, and the "we can't run tonight, we don't have a healer" problem largely evaporates.

And here's the part that undercuts my own statement about being someone who only admires GW2 from afar. I've actually done the content. My main is completely caught up on the story, all the way through the expansions, the whole through-line. One of my alts is nearly there too. Add in a max-level character of every class and you are not describing a tourist. You're describing someone who has put real, sustained time into a game he keeps claiming he only respects from the sidelines. So let me drop the pretense. I like GW2. I play GW2. I've finished things in GW2 that most people never get to.

So why the distance, then, if I'm clearly in there swinging?

Because it never became home, and after seventeen years I've learned that home is a real thing in this hobby, not just a figure of speech. WoW is where the muscle memory lives, where the friends are, where the version of me that's been logging in since Burning Crusade actually resides. GW2 is the extraordinary place I keep a second residence and genuinely enjoy, but I've never moved in. When I've got one MMO night in a week, it goes to Azeroth almost every time. Not because GW2 is the lesser game, but because the pull of the place you've lived for nineteen years is not a rational thing.

There's a smaller piece to it, and it's the treadmill. GW2 gently removes the carrot on the stick, and it turns out my lizard brain misses the carrot. I like logging in and knowing there's a number a little higher than yesterday, a piece of gear I'm chasing, a reason the session counted. GW2 hands you freedom instead, and freedom is a harder thing to build a nightly habit around than a grind is. I completed the content because finishing things is what I do. But the loop that pulls me back night after night is a WoW-shaped loop, and GW2 was built, on purpose, without one.

So I respect it from a distance, and I mean respect, not the backhanded version. GW2 is what happens when a studio has the nerve to question the parts of the genre everyone else treats as load-bearing. I've spent enough hours in it to say that from experience rather than from the sidelines. It's just never going to be home, because I already have one of those, and nineteen years in, it isn't going anywhere.

Try it. It might be the game you didn't know you wanted. It turned out to be more of one for me than I usually let on.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar