Blaugust 2022: The Evolution of Wow Alt Addiction / MMO Casual

I started this blog a little over 13 years ago, in June 2009.  My youngest son, who is heading off to high school this year, was just a little over a year old.  My oldest son, who is now married, owns his own house and works in IT, was 13 years old.  A lot has happened over that period of time.

These pages have evolved pretty significantly over that period of time.  It really started as a way to document, what I thought was a fairly ambitious plan - to level a character of each class to max level.  The idea behind the blog was to document that journey, share any tips or tricks learned along the way and share thoughts on the current state of the game from the perspective of a casual leveler / altoholic.

I started the blog during Cataclysm, although I had been playing, primarily on my warlock, since early in Burning Crusade.  The goal was achieved fairly quickly, with the mission accomplished in September of 2010.  

I didn't really start branching out and covering other games until things started to go stale towards the end of Cataclysm, and I picked up playing Rift in September of 2011 and spent some time discussing that game.  From there, I continued to bounced back and forth between Warcraft and some other games, playing and talking about SWTOR in January 2012, 

Mists of Pandaria brought a refreshed focus on WoW, along with a new goal of killing the final expansion end-boss, Garrosh, on all of my max-level characters.  Fortunately, that raid ended up being out for so long, that goal was easier to achieve than one would have liked.

In 2014, after that LFR goal was achieved, I added the goal of leveling a character of each class alliance-side as well, so started embarking on that once I had gotten all of my Horde characters to max level in Mists.  The summer of 2014 also involved the introduction of Wildstar, so I gave that a shot and spent some time talking about my impressions of that game.  

It was also late in this year that I started doing regular discussions of Activision-Blizzard's quarterly earnings releases.  This was something that I only did for a year or two, because it quickly reached the point where Blizzard had so many different properties, that there stopped being specific disclosures in those releases related to Warcraft.

I hit the goal of a character from each class and each faction at max level in May of 2016, almost 7 years to the day after the initial birth of the blog.  From there, things stayed pretty steady with Warcraft for a very long time.  I think I finally ended up with something like 42 max-level characters.  Basically 3 of each class, with a few extras besides.  

In September of 2020 I started to play FFXIV much more than I was playing WoW, while I was waiting for Shadowlands to release.  And I will I picked up and leveled three toons to max immediately upon Shadowlands release, it was then that I hit a while.  I ended up unsubscribing from WoW in March of 2021 and spent the next 15 months or so focused entirely on FFXIV, Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online.  

Then about 2 months ago, I got the urge to pick up WoW again and see what had changed.  So now we're back to having WoW content in the feed again, along with a little interspersed from other games.

Tomorrow, I'll talk a little bit more about how I decide what to write about each day and what kinds of topics I am, and am not usually interested in pursuing.

That's it for now.

Cheers,

Joar