#1 - March 23, 2011, 12:27 p.m.
Friends that were made, shared experiences that were enjoyed, the feeling that we always had something to do.
'Account Cancelled' pops up on the Battle.Net webpage as I slowly go through the motions of cancelling both of my accounts and filling out the few brief question multiple choice questions.. and it's done, quite clinical really, but what was I expecting? A webpage pleading with me to just 'stay a little longer'? A concerned phone call from customer service? Hardly, i'm nothing more than a simple couple of database records whose status change from a '1 to a '0' on the logical field of 'subscribed' in that database table.
As we sign off Vent, all promising to keep in touch, I feel as if a big chapter in my life has closed, which may sound melodramatic but when you consider the many, many hours spent online in the company of friends, many of whome i've met face to face and hope to continue to keep in contact with it's an apt assessment.
Then i think of what brought me to this stage, perhaps witnessing the inexorable, slow and painful the death of our small guild that desperately tried to make it in this expansion, the unfun and frankly frustrating heroic 5 mans, the queues, the complete lack of atmosphere and the frankly terrible grindy and obnoxious content which made so many people who felt comfortable in WOTLK feel like second rate gamers.
This is my bank alt/guild, I won't post on my main.
For us, for me.. Cataclysm just doesn't feel welcoming anymore, there's no sense of adventure like there was in Wotlk and frankly things are just too damned difficult, many of our guildies left after giving it a real honest go, maybe we were never that good, maybe we were being 'carried' by Wotlk's more accessible raids and heroics etc, maybe now confronted with the higher difficulty of 'Old Schoolesque' Cataclsym we came to realise that perhaps we aren't 'good enough' to participate anymore, at least that was the sentiment that many people express on the blogsphere and on youtube commentaries, maybe we were - in the true sense of the word - lowly .... 'WrathBabies'. :(
I can't help but feel a tinge of anger towrards Blizzard, Ghostcrawler and their ilk who for some reason, well....perhaps not anger.. more like puzzlement...
I can't help but feel that a somewhat distant but well meaning friend has slapped me and others in the face and now seeks to hurt and humiliate instead of support and encourage and what makes me even sadder is the suspicion that this once-friend seems to take a perculiar delight in seeing people like us suffer...
I sit in Orgrimar on my main, with a guild roster that has nobody on except me, I see the names of the characters whos players once filled guild chat with lively banter not a mere six months ago and I feel sad, these people are now gone... the 'last online' column measuring once in days, then weeks.. now months...
I see my friends list also equally barren, names of people in different guilds on this and other realms which also seem to have 'gone dark' since February and who no longer ever seem to be online anymore...
The trade chat window rapidly scrolls a constant stream of purile toilet humour, racism and general filth spelt with special characters to bypass the adult language filter, almost as a eloquant underscore of just what this expansion feels like.
A tinge of sadness comes over me.
I tried to keep my chin up, had a few goes at the handful of 'pug' raids, put up with the multi-hours wipe-a-thon LFD groups and the dreadful conduct to be found therein.
I just can't do it anymore, I finally realised that the only reason I was staying online here in wow was out of a sense of loyalty to my guild, in the vain hope that 'today' would be the day in which all those people who left at the start of this dreadful expansion had suddenly come back, but alas... it was never to be.
I was asked to post a comment on the forums, so I ramble my words here...
Anyway, writing this was somewhat cathartic for me, I suppose I could write a huge flaming vent towards blizzard, but all I feel is sadness and loss...
My little dog sits here beside me wagging his tail, I think i'll go play fetch with him.
Wishing those who remain all the best, the casuals, the raiders, the hardmore superstars, the pvp'ers, the AH'ers, the pet collectors, the miners, crafters and battleground gankers and all the others.
My final words are that I really hope Blizzard can somehow bring back the 'it' factor which has been lost in Cataclysm, bring back the fun of WOTLK in a future expansion one day, until then... goodbye and Godbless ;-)
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