Reinstalled FFXIV, Still Logging Out of WoW

I reinstalled FFXIV and resubscribed last week. I’ve even played a little bit, which seems like a useful step beyond simply paying for it again.

Not much yet. Mostly I’ve started getting caught up on the story I missed while I was away. I’m still at the beginning of that process, so this isn’t going to be a detailed report on everything that’s happened since I last played.

The thing that finally pushed me to reinstall it was Guild Wars 2. Specifically, a jumping puzzle.

I had fully intended to get caught up on the current story there. Then I reached a part that required completing a jumping puzzle to continue. As far as I can remember, this is the first time they’ve gated part of the story behind one.

I’m terrible at jumping puzzles. Playing on a laptop may be part of the problem, but I can’t give the laptop all the credit. I’m generally just not very good at them.

This is the part of the story where I currently am

I tried it for a while. Eventually, my frustration with the jumping overcame my interest in finding out what happened next in the story. That’s where I left it.

I may go back and give it another try, but I may also be done with Guild Wars 2. I haven’t decided. What I do know is that getting stuck there, more than anything else, is what sent me back to FFXIV.

After writing recently about how hard I’d found it to get back into FFXIV, I figured actually reinstalling it deserved an update. Catching up had helped kill off at least one previous attempt to return. This time I’ve made a start. We’ll see how it goes.

World of Warcraft, meanwhile, continues to be a game I open and then close again.

There have been plenty of times lately when I’ve logged in, looked at my character, or looked at whichever alt I would normally be leveling next, and then logged right back out. Apparently choosing a character is about as far as I’m getting with the whole process right now.

I wish I could explain why. At this point, I’m not sure I can. I can describe what I’m doing a lot more easily than I can explain what’s behind it. There’s an obvious next character to play, but looking at that character isn’t making me want to play it.

I’m not saying I’ll never go back to WoW. I’m just not feeling it right now, and I don’t have a prediction for when that will change.

For the moment, I’m playing a little FFXIV and catching up on its story. Guild Wars 2 is waiting on my willingness to attempt that jumping puzzle again, and WoW is waiting on an interest in playing that I can’t seem to find right now. I hadn’t expected a jumping puzzle to be what got me to resubscribe to FFXIV, but here we are.

Cheers,
Joar

Catching Up in Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has been getting most of my gaming time since last week’s post. There hasn’t been a huge amount of that, which isn’t particularly unusual these days, but it’s been good to spend some time getting caught up.

I’m a couple of major content patches behind, so there’s still plenty for me to work through. At least for now, I’m enjoying that more than doing the same old grind in WoW. Nothing especially dramatic to report on that front. Guild Wars 2 is just holding my interest a little better at the moment.

It feels like they’re moving toward some kind of wrap-up, although that’s more an impression than a prediction. I’ll see how that feels as I get further along. Being behind does mean I have some catching up to do before I start getting too confident about where things are going!

Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about resubbing to FFXIV to finish out the Dawntrail storyline before Evercold drops. As I mentioned last week, Dawntrail was the expansion that made me stop playing, and trying to catch up got in the way of my last attempt to return. So there’s a little history working against that idea.

Even so, I’m interested enough to be considering it again. Finishing the storyline is the thing I have in mind for now. I haven’t actually pulled the trigger on a subscription yet.

That leaves me with some Guild Wars 2 catch-up underway and a possible FFXIV return still at the thinking-about-it stage. We’ll see whether that second one turns into any actual playing.

Cheers,

Joar

Guild Wars 3, Evercold and Another Try

Guild Wars 3 and FFXIV's Evercold have both caught my interest. I've played both of their predecessors, although my relationship with FFXIV is a little more complicated at this point. Guild Wars 2 is still a game I enjoy hopping back into. FFXIV is one I've tried to return to without managing to make it stick.

Dawntrail was the expansion that made me stop playing, and I still can't entirely put my finger on why. I've tried to write about it before, but I haven't arrived at a particularly satisfying explanation. I can identify the expansion where I stopped. Explaining what changed for me has been harder.

I've tried coming back at least once since then. On the last attempt, the issues with catching up pretty much killed it. That makes Evercold a harder sell. A new expansion can get me interested in what's ahead, but there's still the question of getting from wherever I left off to the part I want to try.

I haven't followed everything being announced for Evercold, so I don't have a detailed opinion on its features yet. It's currently scheduled for January 2027, and I'll probably at least give it a try when it releases. Apparently, even having trouble explaining why I left doesn't prevent me from being curious about coming back.

There's also Beastmaster, the new limited job that arrived with patch 7.56. That has caught my eye too. I haven't tried it yet, but it's something I'd like to take a look at. Whether that turns into another serious attempt at returning to FFXIV is a separate question.

Guild Wars 3 has a more straightforward appeal for me. I've been playing Guild Wars 2 off and on for a few years now, and I still enjoy it when I go back. I'm not entirely caught up on the latest two content installments, but that hasn't stopped it being a game I want to return to.

My history with it wasn't quite that simple at the beginning. I played at launch, but it didn't stick then. I didn't really come back until much later, around Path of Fire, if I'm remembering correctly. Most of my time with Guild Wars 2 has therefore been with a game that had already had quite a while to grow.

The chance to start fresh with a new Guild Wars is attractive. I like the idea of giving the next one a try from the beginning, with the benefit of knowing that its predecessor eventually became something I enjoyed. Of course, I was there at the beginning of Guild Wars 2 as well, so launch attendance apparently isn't the whole answer.

There's still a wait ahead. ArenaNet's announcement points to a Guild Wars 3 beta in fall 2027. In the meantime, I still have Guild Wars 2 content to catch up on, and Beastmaster is already there if I decide to take another look at FFXIV.

For now, I'm interested in both. Evercold has some work to do to bring me back, while Guild Wars 3 offers a fresh start in a series I still enjoy. I'm curious to see where each of those goes.

Cheers,

Joar

Loremaster, Two Tier Pieces, and then Nothing

I finished Loremaster for Midnight, picked up my first two pieces of tier, and then stopped playing entirely. All inside about three weeks. Let me back up.

The patch dropped while we were in Vancouver for Jake's meet, which meant I was in a hotel room in another country with a laptop and a lot of downtime between sessions. Best possible timing. I played more that week than I had all summer sitting at home with nothing stopping me.

Loremaster got done while I was waiting on week two to unlock, and that one actually felt like something. I don't chase many achievements anymore, but Loremaster is the one I still go after every expansion, and knocking it out on Joar at eleven at night in a hotel room was a genuinely good couple of evenings.

On the patch itself. I liked the story for the most part. What I did not like is what a production it is to get out to the new zone. Every single time. There's no reason that should still be a chore.

The new Vaults area I'm just not a fan of. I did everything there the first two weeks, looked at what week three wanted from me, and decided I was done. It's another grind in a new hat. We have all played this one before.

The two new delves in the zone are good though! Really good. Delves are still the best thing they've added in years and these two hold up with the better ones.

And I've got two tier pieces now, which is a little ridiculous for a guy who has played roughly one week of this patch. Delves doing the heavy lifting again.

Mining and herbalism are fine. The switch works about how I hoped, gathering is low-commitment in a way modern crafting absolutely is not, and I can do it in ten minute chunks without planning my evening around it. I also still regret dropping the crafting a bit, and I don't think that regret is going anywhere. I'll live.

Now the part I didn't plan on writing when I sat down.

I have not logged in once since we got back from Vancouver.

It isn't a time problem. There have been plenty of open mornings and evenings. I've sat down at the computer with nothing scheduled and no reason in the world not to play, and I just wasn't interested. And it isn't only WoW. I haven't wanted to pick up anything at all. Not Guild Wars, not anything else sitting installed and waiting on me.

I don't know what that means yet. The obvious guess is that gaming filled a slot in my old life that my new one doesn't have. Which is backwards from what I expected, because I distinctly remember thinking retirement was going to mean more hours in Azeroth, not fewer. Apparently the hours were never the constraint.

I also noticed that, despite my efforts to post every day for 31 days and filling out the self-reporting form, I didn't get credit on the final Blaugust awards for my efforts.  I was upset at first, but then I realized that my blog name showing up on a list wasn't really why I was doing it anyway, so that quickly faded.  I know the folks that are running that now are busy and overwhelmed by the participation, but it was still a little disappointing.  Neither of my blogs got mentioned at all.

Anyway. Loremaster done, two pieces of tier, and a warlock standing in a capital city exactly where I left him three weeks ago.

Cheers,

Joar

August Month In Review

August came in at 2 hours and 24 minutes.

That number is wrong and I want to say so before anybody gets attached to it.

Here's what the tracker gave me. 1 hour in WoW. 56 minutes in Guild Wars 2. And then 28 minutes filed under something, somewhere, doing who knows what. I have no idea. It's a rounding error with a mystery attached.

The real number is more like 10 to 15 hours, and almost all of the missing time happened in Vancouver.

We went up for Junior Pan Pacs. Jake was traveling with Team USA, which means he was with his team and I was a guy in a hotel room in a foreign country with a laptop and a lot of downtime between sessions. So I played. More in that week than I'd played at home all summer, actually. And apparently almost none of it got recorded, because I forgot to update the app, and then the new patch also updated the game, and I don't think I ran a new scan.  Whether being outside the country made it worse, I honestly don't know. Seems like the kind of thing that could matter.

So there it is. A guy who spent an entire career on the quality of reported numbers, publishing a monthly figure he doesn't believe, in the same month he wrote thirty-one blog posts about the game he apparently only played for an hour. Beautiful.

Speaking of which. Blaugust. Thirty-one posts, thirty-one days, all of them up.

I have never finished Blaugust before. Not once, and not close. I've started it plenty of times and always trailed off somewhere in the second week when life got loud. This year I got all the way to the end, and doing it for Bel is the only reason I made it. I'm still a little surprised.

In terms of the play itself, I ran through all the new content and the new zone.  It's interesting, but I'm not sure I'll be doing a ton more of it.  Seems a bit grindy to me.  I also finished up Loremaster for Midnight on Joar, which is something I'm always proud of.  I like to see all the quests and side stories.  

The brief excursion into Guild Wars 2 is because I'm not fully current on the content there, so I did a little bit of that and unlocked some new areas and things.  It had been a while, so I'd forgotten a bit about where the story left us, but I'm getting back up to speed.

September should be a normal month, whatever that means anymore. Back to a weekly-ish posting schedule, back to the warlock, and back to a tracker that I will now be checking before I start playing rather than three weeks later while writing one of these.

Cheers,

Joar

Why I Still Log In After Everything That Has Changed

Day 31. I made it.

I want to sit with that for a second, because I've signed up for Blaugust before and I have never once finished it. Not close. I'd get eight or nine days in, life would do what life does, and the whole thing would quietly stop. Thirty-one straight days of posting has been on my list of things I'd get to eventually for years.

This was the year. And this was the year for one reason, which I said on Day 1 and will say again on the last day. Bel built this thing, Bel isn't here, and finishing it properly was the only tribute I actually had to offer.

So let's close it out with the question the whole month has been circling.

Everything about my situation has changed. Not gradually, either. In the last twelve months I've retired out of a thirty-five year career, sold the house we raised our kids in, watched the youngest leave for college, become a grandfather for the second time, and moved most of the way across the country into a string of short-term rentals with everything I own in a storage unit. My playtime went from 40 to 60 hours a month to 3 to 5. Every single structural reason I ever had for playing this game has been taken apart and put somewhere else.

And I still log in.

Not much. But I still do it, and I've spent this month trying to work out why, and also whether I want to continue.

It isn't the content. Let's be honest about that. I've written eleven expansion posts this month and there are maybe three I'd call great. The game has been up and down for nineteen years, and I've quit it once, for about a year, and I've been bored by it more times than that.

It isn't the achievement either. I finished Loremaster on Joar last week and it was satisfying for about an hour. I have 52 max-level characters and I could not tell you what most of them are for.

If it's anything, it's continuity.

That's the closest word I've got. Almost nothing else in my life has run unbroken for nineteen years. Jobs ended, houses sold, kids grew up and moved out, the whole architecture of who I was for three decades got dismantled in about eight months. And in the middle of all of it, there's a dead warlock in a hood who has been the same the entire time, standing in a game world I know better than the town I now live in. I can log in from an AirBnB in a state I've been in for a few months and be somewhere completely familiar in about ninety seconds.

I don't think I understood that was what I was buying. I started playing this game to stay connected to my oldest son. He was ten or eleven, living with my ex-wife 450 miles away, and an MMO was somewhere the two of us could actually be in the same place on a Tuesday night. That was the whole reason I made an account. For most of the years since, I'd have told you I kept playing because the game was fun, and it was.

But fun isn't what keeps something in your life for nineteen years. Fun runs out. And my son stopped playing a long, long time ago. What kept it was that it was always there, unchanged in the ways that mattered, while everything around it got rearranged.

That's not nostalgia, either. I'm not logging in to remember 2007. Joar's not a relic, he's just still going, and so am I, and that turns out to be the point.

There's a version of this where I'm the guy who couldn't put down a video game for nineteen years. Some days that's exactly what it is. And I don't know whether I'll still be logging in a year from now, in whatever this new stage turns into. But I've come to think that having one long unbroken thing in a life that changes this much is worth more than it looks like from the outside, and I've stopped needing to defend it. Everybody's got a thing. Mine has an auction house. 

So that's Blaugust 2026. Thirty-one posts, eleven expansions, six other MMOs, and a fair amount of stuff I've never actually written down before. Thanks for reading it, all of you who did, and thanks especially to the people who've been reading this blog since the very beginning.

Bel, this one was for you. I finally finished the thing.

Cheers,

Joar

Gaming As A Married Adult

This is the post I've rewritten the most times this month, and I still don't love it, which is usually a sign the subject is real.

Here's the situation, stated plainly. I've been married a long time. I have three kids, now 30, 21 and 18. I spent thirty-five years in a career that took a great deal of me. And through all of it I have played this game, most weeks, for nineteen years. Those facts have never sat comfortably next to each other.

The time is the easy part, and it's not actually easy. There is no such thing as free time when you have young kids and a job with a travel schedule. There's leftover time, and leftover time happens after everyone else is down. So for a solid decade my gaming happened between about ten at night and midnight, in a quiet house, with the volume low. That's not a complaint. That's just where the hours were. It also explains a lot about why I ended up an altoholic instead of a raider. You can level an alt in ninety minutes of leftover time. You cannot commit to a raid team.

The guilt is harder to talk about, and I think it's nearly universal among adults with a hobby that looks like nothing from the outside.

If I spend two hours on a Saturday reading a book, nobody in my house registers it. Two hours on a bike, that's admirable. Two hours in Azeroth and I catch myself preemptively justifying it before anyone has said a word. Same two hours. Same me. Completely different internal weather. And nobody put that there but me.

The disapproval is real too, and here's where I'll be careful, because it's not only my story to tell. My wife does not like this hobby. She never has. She doesn't play games, has no interest in them, and I don't think she has ever once looked at the screen and seen anything other than a grown man clicking on a dragon. That's a fair reading from where she's standing.

We've never had a war about it. Nobody has ever issued an ultimatum, and I want to be clear about that, because "gamer versus disapproving spouse" is a tired story and it isn't ours. What we have is quieter and more ordinary. A hobby I mostly don't bring up, and a mild ongoing sense that she'd rather I was doing something else, and both of us being adults about it for a couple of decades.

What I've worked out over nineteen years is that the disapproval was always about attention, and only incidentally about dragons. Any hobby that removes you from the room for two hours is going to register with the people left in the room, and games remove you more completely than most, because you can't half-do a dungeon while somebody talks to you about the calendar. Reading, you can look up. Gaming, you cannot look up, and the person talking to you knows it.

So the honest accommodations, arrived at slowly and never negotiated out loud. I play at the edges of the day. I don't schedule around it. I never once told my family I couldn't do something because of a raid, and I never will. If somebody needs me, the game gets abandoned mid-fight and it can go ahead and be annoyed about it.

Is that the right balance? I genuinely don't know. There's a version of this where I've been quietly apologizing for nineteen years about something that harms nobody, and there's a version where I've been mildly checked out at the edges of a lot of evenings and calling it fine. Both feel true depending on the day.

What I'm sure of is that the hobby has never cost me anything I actually cared about. Not a swim meet, not a graduation, not a conversation somebody needed to have. That's the line, and I've held it.

Everything else is just a man clicking on a dragon after everyone's gone to bed.

Cheers,

Joar

What The Blog Gave Me

Seventeen years is a long time to keep doing anything voluntarily. It's longer than I held all of my jobs. It's almost as long as my youngest kid has been alive. And if you'd asked me in 2008 why I was starting a WoW blog, I'd have given you an answer about wanting somewhere to put my thoughts on the game, which was true and which turned out to be about a tenth of what actually happened.

What I got was people.

That's the whole post, really, but let me do it properly, because it's the last week of Blaugust and this is the one I've been circling all month.

When I started, the WoW blogging scene was enormous. Dozens and dozens of us, all writing into the same small room, reading each other, linking each other, arguing in the comments about talent trees like it mattered. And it did matter, in the way that things matter when a group of people agree together that they do. You'd post something, and within a day somebody three time zones away would post a response, and by the weekend four other blogs had picked it up and taken it somewhere you hadn't thought of. That's a conversation. It just happened to be about a video game

The community outlasted the game topic, which is the part that still surprises me. The people I met through that blog are people I've now been in contact with for over a decade and a half, through expansions, through blog rebrands and hiatuses, through people getting married and having kids and changing careers and losing parents. I have watched entire adult lives unfold in the sidebar of a hobby website. I know things about these people that I don't know about neighbors I've lived next to for years.

And they know a version of me. Not the whole thing, and I've written this month about how that wall came down in pieces rather than all at once. But a real version. The guy who can't stop making alts and gets grumpy about faction war storylines and posts his hours every month. That's genuinely me. It's just me with a different name on it.

Bel is the obvious one to name here, because Blaugust was his, and because this entire month of posts exists for him. He built a thing whose whole purpose was to get people writing and keep them connected to each other, year after year, and he ran it with a generosity I don't think he ever fully clocked. That's what he gave the community. Not content. Infrastructure for a friendship network, disguised as a blogging challenge.

I've thought about that a lot this month, twenty-nine days into doing his event properly for the first time. The thing he understood is that the writing was mostly an excuse. The point was that a couple hundred people had a reason to show up in the same place every August and read each other.

There's a practical gift in here too, and I'd be dishonest to leave it out. Seventeen years of writing two or three hundred words at a time, week after week, will make you a better writer whether you intended it or not. Nobody edited me. Nobody paid me. I just did it, badly at first, for a very long time, and somewhere in there I stopped having to think about how a post is shaped. That skill has been worth more to me outside this hobby than I could have possibly predicted in 2008, and I'll leave it at that.

But the friends are the answer. If I quit WoW tomorrow, and one of these years I probably will, the blog is not the thing I'd lose. I'd lose the reason to keep showing up where those people are.

So I'll keep showing up.

Cheers,

Joar

Why I Started Tracking My Hours Every Month

Every month I post how many hours I played. Not roughly. Not "a fair bit." A number, down to the minutes. May came in at 7 hours and 30 minutes. June was 5 hours and 5 minutes.

I've only been doing this for about two and a half years, which surprises people who assume a guy who blogs his playtime has been at it since Wrath. I hadn't. I'd wanted to for ages and never had a decent way to do it.

What changed is that my friend Kevin Brill built an app called TempusGameIt, and the moment it existed the whole problem went away. That's the honest origin story. Not discipline, not some resolution I made. A friend made a good tool, I started using it, and about a month later I realized I finally had the thing I'd been vaguely wanting for a decade. It does exactly one job and does it well, which is my favorite kind of software.

People ask why I bother. The answer has three parts and only one of them is flattering.

The first part is that I'm an accountant. Thirty-five years of it. I have spent my entire adult life around people who say things like "we're spending a lot on that" and I have spent my entire adult life answering "how much, exactly?" That's not discipline so much as damage. If a thing can be counted, some part of my brain has already started counting it, and once counting it got easy I was never not going to.

The second part is that I did not want the number to be a secret from myself.

There's a specific lie available to anyone with a hobby and a family, and it goes like this. Oh, I barely play anymore. You say it out loud, everybody nods, and nobody checks. I noticed at some point that I didn't actually know whether it was true. I had a feeling about it, and a feeling is not a number.

I mostly wasn't lying, as it turns out. What I found instead was more interesting than a gotcha. My hours don't drift, they cliff. There's no gentle decline. There's forty or fifty hours in a good month and then something happens in real life and the number falls off a table.

Which brings me to the third part, and the one I didn't see coming. The hours aren't really about the game.

Look at this year. A normal month for me is somewhere in the 40 to 60 hour range. Then we put the house on the market and started moving across the country, and May was 7 and a half hours. June was 5. The last few months, in the thick of it, have been running 3 to 5 hours a month total. That's a life statistic wearing a gaming costume. You could hand somebody two years of my playtime log with no other context and they could point at the exact month my life came apart at the seams and got put back together in a different state.

That's what I actually got out of tracking, and it's why I kept going long after the original question was answered. The number measures how much room there was, far more than it measures the hobby.

There's a version of this habit that would be miserable, and I want to be clear I'm not doing that one. I'm not tracking hours to cut them down. No target, no budget, no monthly limit I'm holding myself to, and no guilt attached to a high number. When the number is 60 I don't feel bad about it. That's not what the ledger is for. I've spent enough of my career watching people weaponize a metric against the thing it was supposed to describe, and I'm not doing it to myself over a video game.

It also gave me a post format that writes itself. Here's the number, here's what it went into, here's what was going on in my life that month. Two years of those and I already find them stranger to reread than I expected, which makes me wish I'd had the tool ten years sooner. There's a whole stretch of expansions I have no numbers for at all, and I'd love to know what Legion actually cost me.

Number's low again this month. There's a reason, and it's a good one.

Cheers,

Joar

The Addons I Play With

This seems like an obligatory thing for someone who plays WoW frequently to write about, so I'm not going to fight the obligation.  The list is shorter than you'd think for a nineteen-year player, but it has been obviously impacted by the recent addon apocalypse.

Baganator. Bags. This is the one I'd fight over. When you have as many characters as I do, the bag addon stops being a convenience and becomes infrastructure. One search box, everything I own, across every character and every bank tab. Do I have that reagent somewhere? Which of the fifty-two is holding it? Baganator answers in half a second and saves me the twenty minutes of logging in and out that the answer used to cost. If you're an altoholic and you're still using the default bags, I don't know what to tell you. You're playing on hard mode for no reason.  This is also the newest one on the list.  I used to use AdiBags, but it got killed in the recent transition.

Auctionator. The auction house, made usable. I've said I'm not a gold tycoon and I mean it, but I still don't want to shop in a spreadsheet with no sorting. Auctionator turns posting my gathering hauls into about ninety seconds of work instead of a project.

Titan Panel. A bar at the top of the screen that quietly tells me things. Gold, mainly, and experience per hour when I'm leveling something. And I've come to believe the visible number is the whole point. Nobody tracks gold on purpose. You just put it on screen and after a month you notice you have opinions about the trend. Same reason I track my hours every month, which is tomorrow's post and not a coincidence.

Tidy Plates. Nameplates that tell me what I need at a glance. Who's on me, who's not, what's about to be a problem. It's such an old habit at this point that playing without it feels like driving with a dirty windshield. Everything's still there, technically, you just can't see it.

DBM. Deadly Boss Mods, and not for the reason people assume. I've written a whole post this month about why I'll never raid at the high end, so this isn't a guy optimizing a pull. I run it for delves, world bosses, and my occasional wander into LFR. The encounters I walk into cold, having read nothing, where a large calm voice telling me to move is the difference between finishing the thing and eating the floor.

Details! The damage meter. I know I just said I'm not optimizing anything, and I'm not, but I still want to know what happened. Not to rank myself against strangers. To answer the small questions that come up when you play a warlock badly for nineteen years. Is that new talent actually doing something? Did that trinket do anything at all? Details! answers it, I nod, I move on. It's curiosity, not competition, and I'd have a hard time playing without it now.  It's also the most recent in a long string of damage meters I've used over the years.

World Quest Tracker. Show's me a little bit more info about the currently live world quests and provide a nice little summary off to the side of what's available across all the zones today.  So if I'm looking to upgrade a particular piece of gear or searching for particular renown tokens, it's easy to find them at a glance.

Crap Away. Sells your junk automatically at the vendor. That's the whole thing. It's a tiny addon that does one boring job and it has probably saved me actual hours over the years, because otherwise I am the guy standing at the repair vendor dragging grey items one at a time like it's 2007.

Livestock. Random mount on a keybind. Purely aesthetic, zero function, absolutely staying. I've collected mounts for nineteen years mostly by accident and I'd rather not use the same one every time. One button, surprise horse. It's a small joy and small joys are the ones that survive.

What's not on the list is as telling as what is. No full UI replacement. I've tried ElvUI and the big all-in-one overhauls a few times over the years and they never stuck, because the setup becomes its own hobby and I'd rather spend that time playing. No WeakAuras, and I know exactly what I'm giving up there, and I've made my peace with it. My rotation is not the reason I log in.

Look at the list long enough and there's a pattern in it. Bags, gold, junk, mounts, nameplates, a voice yelling about the fire, and a meter I read out of curiosity after the fact. Almost all of it is inventory management and quality of life. What performance tooling I keep is there to tell me what already happened, not to coach me through what's about to.

That's a pretty honest picture of how I actually play, and I didn't design it. It just accumulated and adjusted, until it was clear what I'd keep and what I wouldn't.

Cheers,

Joar

SWTOR

Star Wars: The Old Republic launched in December 2011 with a promise that sounded, at the time, close to impossible. Eight class stories. Fully voiced. Every conversation, every quest handoff, every throwaway line from a random NPC on Nar Shaddaa. An MMO built like a BioWare single-player game and stretched across a whole galaxy.

I bought that promise immediately, and I want to be clear that it delivered on it.

Here's why it hit me so hard specifically. Eight class stories is altoholic catnip of the purest kind. You want to know how to get a man with a documented inability to main one character to buy your game? Tell him there are eight completely different narratives and he has to roll eight characters to see them. That isn't a game design, that's a personalized trap. I made a Sith Inquisitor. I made a Jedi Knight. I made a smuggler because the smuggler's dialogue was the funniest thing in the game and I have never once regretted that choice.

And the class stories were genuinely good. The Inquisitor arc, going from a slave in a collar to somebody the Dark Council has to take seriously, is a better power fantasy than most of what I've played anywhere. The agent story, which I got to later, is the one everybody talks up and they're right to. When SWTOR was doing the thing it was built to do, nothing else in the genre was close.

And that's not even getting to the part where you could choose between two Advanced Classes for each of those eight, with different play styles for each.

So where did it drift?

The first crack was the one every 2011-era MMO ran into. You can pour years into eight voiced stories, and players will finish them in weeks. Then they look around for what's next, and next is a much thinner thing than what came before it. The endgame didn't have the weight the leveling did. That's not a knock on the people who built it. It's the arithmetic of making content that can only be consumed once.

Then it went free to play in late 2012, and the model they chose was restrictive in a way I found genuinely tiring. Not the concept, I have no problem with free to play. The specifics. Bars on things that felt like they should be basic, unlock tokens for pieces of the game I already thought of as the game. It made every session feel like it had a turnstile in it somewhere.

But the real drift, for me, came later, when the story went from eight to one. The expansions moved to a single shared narrative with your character slotted into it, rather than eight parallel ones. And I understand the decision completely. Eight fully voiced storylines forever was never going to be affordable. It was the correct business call and it also removed the exact reason I was there. The thing that made me roll eight characters was that they were eight different games. Once they became one game with a costume change, I had no reason to be an altoholic in it anymore, and being an altoholic is most of what I do.

So I drifted too. Not with any drama. I didn't quit SWTOR, I just found myself logging in less, then rarely, then not, in that slow way an MMO leaves your rotation without ever announcing it.

It's still running, which is not nothing. Fourteen years is a long life for a game people were writing obituaries for by year three. And the class stories are still sitting there, still voiced, still good. If you've never played it and you like Star Wars even a little, go make an Inquisitor and just play the story and quit whenever you want. Nobody will stop you.

I think about it more than I expected to. It's the only MMO I've played where I can remember specific conversations, years later, the way you remember scenes from a movie. Whatever else drifted, that part stuck.

Cheers,

Joar