The three of us have decided to shut down our WoW accounts this week. It's mostly because the game has lost its excitement. I can't explain it. I still find it fun, but it's an ordinary everyday kind of fun. It's the SAME fun I've been having for the past four years. The only reason I've really logged on at all since 3.1 came out is to gouge idiots on the auction house for massive amounts of gold. But with 40k in the guild bank, that's really starting to feel more like a part time job that I'm not even doing for fun any more.

And I keep looking longingly at my 360, at the games I have sitting on my shelf, reading about awesome games that I can actually PLAY now because I have an awesome PC. I'm having so much fun now, exploring Free Realms, reacquainting myself with Oblivion, playing this awesome game that Khoa just got for me as a gift, and hell, I even plan on playing the game I'm testing at work once it comes out (I made a second secret account so I can play without the GM tag next to my name). I'm totally also checking out Champions Online and that new Star Trek MMO in the next couple of months.

It's not just that WoW is boring, or that there are other games to play. It's that I'm realizing that Khoa is right, Blizzard is not perfect, and there are some serious flaws in WoW, mostly in the social systems, from my perspective. Things that I want, that it will never provide. That maybe no MMO can provide.

First, it is practically impossible to play with my friends without EXCLUSIVELY playing with them. If one of us plays even for an hour by ourselves, our quests are all out of sync and someone is going to have to repeat quests with no benefit to themselves. And if you're way higher level than your friends, it just doesn't make sense to play together. If Nikki can't play very often, for example, it's just frustrating to me because I'm not "allowed" to play that character without her. Either I really love that character and I'm forced to not play it, or I don't like that character at all and I'm forced to play it with her. I'd love to have a game that lets me play with my friends using my high-level character, but without feeling like I'm trivializing everything for them.

Second, guilds are little more than glorified chat channels with a collective friends list. I want some way to do things together with guildmates that don't involve everyone being at the level cap and well-geared and meeting at a specific time to kill some boss just because it would be impossible to do it alone. There's no cohesion, no rewards for being part of a guild as opposed to just pulling random people together to do those things. We proved it when I managed to gear up my druid with best-in-slot gear at the end of Naxx in what was basically a PuG. Not that I'm a very social person, I really prefer doing most things on my own, but it would be awesome if my solo play could somehow help make my guild more powerful, rather than just increasing the amount of gold in the guild bank.

Also, one of my biggest pet peeve about WoW, is how despite having 11 million players, and the fact that most gamers I meet do play WoW, how hard it would be to play WITH those people. With so many different servers PLUS the faction differences, it boggles my mind that I have even met one single person who USED to play on my server years ago. And if I meet friends at work, and they play on a different server, it's practically impossible for me to join them.

I'd have to either pay large sums of money (because it's per character of course, penalizing people who like to play multiple characters like I do) to transfer my characters to their server (and in the process, leaving my friends on the other server behind) or reroll a new character from scratch. I'm realizing I'd much rather play a smaller-scale game that only has one or two servers, but with each of those servers having multiple "realms" in the PW or Free Realms style -- keep crowding down by separating players into a dozen or so channels, but letting them switch to a specific one to play with their friends if they want to.

I'm looking for something fresh and new. WoW is starting to get stale. Bloggers have been giving up and quitting for real life and other games. I haven't even been to Ulduar, and I have no intention of ever going there. It has been said that an MMO only really has a 4-5 year lifespan before the continuous additions make it too complicated to continue growing. I think Blizzard is realizing this, since they're already hard at work on their next MMO, a brand new franchise unrelated to Warcraft, Starcraft or Diablo. I'm really looking forward to seeing it, to see what they have learned from WoW and how they will make this next game even more popular. But until then, I will be exploring all of the amazing games that have been coming out for the past four years that I was too busy playing WoW to notice.

And when I close my WoW account, I will make very sure to list as my reason (because they let you specify exactly why you are leaving) the game I am currently working on. Because hey, somebody at Blizzard might take a look at my account, see my vast numbers of characters at high level, the fact that I have had a continuous subscription for almost exactly 4 years, and then see that a loyal customer such as myself is leaving for this new F2P MMO. Ha!

And yes, I'm still going to Blizzcon. Even if I'm not still playing WoW, I believe in Blizzard as a company (and I'm hella looking forward to playing Diablo 3 now!)