Not long ago my manager asked me if the 3DS was worth buying, since I'm a gamer and all. After giving my opinion on it and whether a casual gamer can justify that amount of money, she commented on how nice it is to have someone around who knows about "this sort of thing". I replied that I've just always been into gaming and I'm pretty much a geek so "this sort of thing" is right up my street.
"Well at least you're not a total geek who plays World of Warcraft or something!" she laughed.
Actually...
I stopped playing WoW two months ago after three years continuous subscription. Most of the people I enjoyed playing with had either jumped ship, cancelled their accounts or simply disappeared. It seemed like a good time to stop. My sub was being renewed automatically every three months and when I cancelled it there was still two months left, so I had plenty of time to reconsider. In the end I completed everything I wanted to do, so just let it expire. I've not really thought much about it since despite retaining my officers' position in the guild. The community had expanded far beyond just WoW to many other games and meetups at LANs are now pretty regular. My mage is now another footnote in the guild history.
However, a few days ago we had what could be described as a "diplomatic incident" in the WoW side of the community, as several members left together to join another guild. For some reason the staff decided to remove all their alts, got confused and kicked out the wrong people, which led to them getting banned on our Minecraft server and almost getting their forum permissions removed. After a good couple of hours talking with another ex-officer/current guild website admin we got a basic idea of what happened and most of the people involved are ok with how it's turned out. Mostly, anyway. Can't please everyone.
But what it made me realise is that despite all the complaints, boredom, rubbish game updates and poor service from Blizzard and WoW, I still miss and care about the game massively. Perhaps not the game itself as the sense of community. I miss being able to log on after a bad day and unwind. I miss the laughs and jokes on Ventrilo, the staying up til 4-5am with a small team of friends deep in enemy territory fighting and evading hundreds of furious Alliance players.
Yes, I was a pretty major PvPer. Not the best in the world but smart enough to not die. And compared to the average players on our realm I was pretty bloody awesome. My videomaking skills, not so awesome.
At its peak we were co-ordinating the entire Horde side of Wintergrasp battles and organising massive server-wide battles through friends on both factions. But when the Cataclysm expansion hit things rapidly declined and within a few months we'd lost most of our core members. I'd lost motivation and ended up spending more and more time playing alone. Eventually, just a week before my subscription ran out, I got the last achievement I wanted - the Conqueror title. But with nobody left around to see it or celebrate with, it was massively hollow and underwhelming. I logged off at the top of a mountain alone and left the game quietly. Nope, not even a forum thread about it. Go me.
Anyway, that sense of community doesn't seem anywhere near as strong at the moment. All of our old circle of friends are spread across all sorts of games, and some no longer game at all. The former officers have all taken up their respective roles as admins over various parts of the community with the exception of me. Compared to how it used to be with not being able to get 5 minutes peace without someone asking about the next/last event or any number of other guild related matters it's hard not to feel like dead weight.
Maybe Guild Wars 2 will turn things around when it's eventually released. But a lot is being pinned on it not being a letdown.
And I'm still not sure it'll be able to match the mayhem of Tram Time. Apparently they don't like it when you occupy their transport network.
At least in GW2 you can destroy buildings. I'll destroy all the buildings.
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