Slowly drifting out of WoW

My guild imploded this weekend, with all of the officers and the guild master resigning, and many of them leaving. That was pretty much inevitable, the guild had been drifting for some time. A guild is a complex structure balancing personal freedom against the need to cooperate, and my guild was leaning more and more towards the personal freedom part, until it tipped over. At level 60 there are several different activities one can pursue, raiding, doing 5-man groups, or PvP, but each of them requires other people. Some guilds specialize in only one activity, for example a guild I know on a French server is specialized in raiding, and does not allow their members to waste too much time in PvP. If you want to do everything as a guild, the trick is to rotate, doing raids one day, PvP the next, and 5-man groups to equip the members on the third day. In our guild there were not enough people ready to do anything else but their favorite activity, and the guild policy was to not exert any pressure on anybody. So we had lots of situations where for example the only priest online was doing PvP in a pickup group, while the players who wanted to visit a dungeon couldn't go without a healer. Saturday we even had a 4-man group with healer and tank, but of the 20 people online nobody could be bothered to leave whatever he was doing to make a guild group of 5 possible. Of course if there are no more guild groups, people quickly lose any interest in the guild, and then in WoW itself, and either leave the guild for another one, or quit the game.

Now I'm not a big fan of military style uber guilds where everybody only does what he is told. But I think successful guild leadership consists of exerting gentle pressure on the members to cooperate more. Unfortunately that is a rather stressful job, and I don't blame anybody if he doesn't want to do it. I ran a guild in Dark Age of Camelot pretty successfully, until all the members came to me with their personal or inter-personal problems, expecting me to sort it all out, and in the end it was too much stress and I quit the game. And of course how much leadership is required is also a function of the game design. Blizzard with World of Warcraft is to blame in making level 60 content so dependant on having the right group composition, and the raid content dependant on having so many well organized people.

So the current plan for the guild is to wait for City of Villains to come out, and play that. Sure, I'll be there, at least for a while. I resubscribed to City of Heroes already, but found that the game hadn't changed all that much since I left. A nice addition was that besides sidekicks (temporarily raising somebodies level) there are now also exemplars (temporarily lowering somebodies level). But the mission dungeons seem still to be the same old tile sets of sewer, warehouse, abandoned warehouse, office building, abandoned office building, cave, with laboratories added at higher levels. I left because I was bored of seeing these over and over again, and they are still boring. So I'll only play a bit of CoH to get into the controls again, and then see how CoV is when it comes out end of the month.

I'm not quitting WoW yet, but I plan to play a lot less. No more spending whole evenings with my level 60 logged on waiting for a guild group that never happens. If there is something announced on the guild forums, I'll be there. And I might play my cleric occasionally, or my shaman teamed up with my wife's mage. My D&D group is thinking of forming a permanent WoW group on a French PvP server, which plays at a fixed time during the week, always together. That could be fun too. But the WoW addiction is gone, and that leaves me more time to have a look at other games too.

I'll play some of the games I bought during the last year, and never had time to play. Sunday I started Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, on the Gamecube, and it is fun. Fun because it is mainly "turn-based", not requiring the reflexes of a guy half my age to succeed. And for me the most important thing is gameplay, I don't mind if the characters are overly cute and childish. Whether you kill a cute Goomba or a hellish demon doesn't matter, what matters is what exactly you have to do for that kill, whether there is thinking and strategy involved, or how twitchy it is. I'm not old enough yet to regress into childishness, but I found that games designed for children are often more fun than games designed for teenagers, because the teenager games are often just offering needless graphical violence and hyper-fast action instead of good gameplay. I like a game like Legend of Zelda Wind Waker more than I like the Doom or Half-life family. But maybe that is just because I was able to finish Legend of Zelda, while in a first person shooter I die around the first corner.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:37 AM Permanent Link