2009, 2011...no big whoop

Uh, so I may have missed a few posts. Only two years worth. Life happens, and I re-discovered my own blog and thought that maybe I would pick it up again. Two years can add a lot of stories to a person just venturing into geekdom and now I have a place to share them. I think a good place to begin might be how World of Warcraft almost ruined my life.

World of Warcraft was pretty much my second lover for about five years. It is a fantastic game for people who didn't play games as well as "gamers." Perhaps the real appeal for me was the social aspects of WoW. It really felt like I was hanging out with friends. My final toon that I played religiously was a tankadin. There was nothing more exhilarating than holding aggro as my raid group downed a boss, of picking up new gear, or of jumping into random dungeon queue and never having to wait. Unfortunately, it was my experience that being in a real relationship with someone (my husband, Z) who does not play WoW means there will be bitterness on both sides. I resented the fact that he resented the fact that I played. Ha! That is a ridiculous sentence. What happened, long story coming to a quicker close, is that he felt I was spending more time with my online friends than I was with him and he didn't like the time commitments/obligations of guild life and dungeoning. Certainly I can understand that now, but at the time all I could think was "how did I manage to be with the one guy who is mad his girl is playing games!?" At this point in time, there are hundreds of these "WoW ruined my life" stories and mine isn't really even that exciting. I certainly do not believe that it ruins everyone's life because seriously, that would be 6 million ruined lives. Some kind of record or something. No, in my puny and unimportant case I realized I was hurting Zack's feelings and more importantly this:

If I am playing this one game religiously, I am missing out on a lot of fucking games. For someone who wanted to introduce myself to this (now large and growing) subculture, it was dumb to limit myself, and also to pay so much stupid money to stupid Blizzard.

So I know I could have sold my account and made some money, but I did the cathartic thing and sold all of my gear, donated my gold to my guild's bank, and deleted every single one of my toons on each of my servers. Lator tators, thanks for all the memories. Or something like that. I don't actually remember all that much now, probably due to the corresponding drinking that went with playing.

I have been WoW free since right before Cataclysm. I would say that my life is so much more awesome, but honestly, it is pretty much the same except now I play many more games and my husband is much less bitter. Sometimes he even plays with me.