But the nearest cooking fire is all the way upstairs!

I had a mission that I'm pretty sure was a story mission. It told me to fly somewhere that, surprisingly, was in the same sector as Earth Starbase, so I didn't have to spend fifteen minutes flying to the other end of the galaxy to do my next quest. Honestly, where are the quest hubs in this game? It's great that I can talk to most of my quest givers from anywhere, but that doesn't help me when I've only discovered three places I can access the auction house, and none of them are anywhere near where I'm questing. I can "hearth" back to Earth Starbase once per hour, but getting back out to where I was questing can be a pain.

So I flew to the other end of the sector to do my quest, logged into the map, and hey look, "Go destroy 4 Klingon squadrons hiding in this asteroid belt." Progress: Klingon Squadrons defeated: 0/4.

*sigh* okay. Fine. As fun as the ship combat is in this game, it's getting really repetitive. Fly in, hit spacebar to turn on auto-fire, shoot a volley of photon torpedoes, emergency power to weapons, Tyken's Rift or a Tachyon Beam. Fly around in circles alternating torpedoes and dual phaser beams until it 'splodes.

So I fly in to the nearest group of enemies, hey look, they're disruptor turrets set up on the asteroids. Despite their lack of shields, they take about as long to take down each as a ship. But guess what? They don't count for my quest, since they're not ships. After taking down two groups of these things without finding a single ship, I zoom out on the edge of the belt and fly around looking for an actual SHIP. I fly in and kill it, but the two groups of turrets surrounding this one ship come close to tearing my ship apart like tissue paper.

I limp away from the battle and head towards the next one. Again, a ship surrounded by two groups of turrets. Except that this time it's a warship. And one of my shields is down before I'm even within range to shoot at the thing. I'm really not in the mood to go pick off the turrets one at a time so that I can get at the ships inside. I logged off mid-combat and decided to take a break from the game until it feels fun again.

I'm really not in the mood for ship combat, but there isn't anything else to do in that game! It's not like I can go fly off to some ocean world and enjoy some fishing-related shore leave. I can't saunter onto the holodeck and explore a sherlock holmes-style murder mystery. I can't spend an evening leveling up my crafting, because there really isn't any. I can't even roll an alt to explore a different form of gameplay, because there are only three classes and they don't really make a sizeable difference in how the game is played.

I can shoot Klingons in space; I can shoot Klingons on the ground. I can shoot Klingons who are NPCs; I can shoot Klingons who are other players. If you want to shoot Klingons, you've come to the right place.

However, if you remember Star Trek for all of its "encountering new life forms and new civilizations" bit, well, there's not a lot of that to be found around here. Even the star cluster repeatable randomized missions aren't unknown, despite the quest that leads me to them saying something about exploring the unknown, because I swear half of them have me saving some random colonists from hey guess what? Klingons. Or one of their affiliate races at random. Or some other race I've never heard of, but "sir, we can't let them get their hands on this technology because they're (Race X)!" as if I know what that means.

In WoW, I can check my auctions. Level my professions. Maybe I'll learn how to cook! Or go fishing in Ironforge, in search of the rare and elusive Old Ironjaw. Or maybe I'll go fight some ice trolls and get to level ten. Or maybe I'll decide I'm tired of snow, and go do some quests in a forested night elf area instead. So many options!

But for now, I'm going to head off to the doctor. Stupid doctor canceled my appointment tomorrow and I can't get another until Thursday. Maybe if I march over there and tell them that I probably have strep throat and they need to give me antibiotics so I can stop infecting people and go back to work, they'll get me an appointment. Bah. Stupid doctors.

This afternoon, after much thought, I decided that $15 isn't really all THAT much money anyway, and re-opened my WoW account. Amazing how a month away from a game can make you see every little thing from a new light.

I immediately hopped over to Argent Dawn to make a character in the US chapter of Tamarind's new blog community guild, Single Abstract Noun. Spent a bit of time ditzing around on a draenei hunter, but decided that I'd played too many draenei, and too many hunters, and that maybe this might be a good chance for me to finally get a gnome above level 15 (and the thought of riding another elephant was making me sick -- I've never had a mechanostrider before!). And what's more adorable than a little gnome warrior tanking big giant scary monsters?

So I spent the better part of the afternoon trying to come up with a name for my little gnomeling. The bad part is, this server's been around since 2004, and anything resembling a good name was taken a long time ago. I was sorting through plant/spice-related names because things like Hazel and Cinnamon sounded good, and I thought maybe Paprika sounded like a good name for a red-haired gnome girl -- but then I remembered Tam's story about his troll named Kumquat, and decided against it. (Though honestly, given it's a real word, it was probably taken years ago, I didn't even check.)

So I changed a letter so that it would nickname into something more palatable, and my new gnome warrior Kaprika was born. Though with that letter change, now her name looks like I was going for an alternate spelling of Caprica. Dammit, why does this keep happening to me? First my dwarf rogue, now my gnome warrior. I never even watched that show! It just happens to make a really good character name!

Anyway....

They weren't kidding about the the neutral mobs changing in the starting areas -- I could just run right through those frost trolls, up to their leader, kill him for the loot I needed, then run back out of the cave without any of the trolls bothering me. Not like before, where I had to clear the place until I got to him. And it's the weirdest thing, I picked up the quest to bring the scalding mornbrew back to the town "before it got cold," but it doesn't have a timer on it any more! I could carry that thing in my bags for however long I damn well please! They didn't even bother to change the quest description so that it's not telling you to hurry any more!

But overall, I'm really enjoying myself. This is probably just about the best guild I could hope for. Everybody's off doing their own thing, laughing and chatting and not caring how fast everyone else is progressing, and it feels like you know everybody. What's more, everyone loves to write and read blogs about the game, so the literacy count is amazingly high. I really hope this guild survives so that years down the road, I can say I was there from the start.

I've been putting a lot of thought into this lately. I can theoretically see a future in which I am subscribed to two MMOs at the same time. I like STO enough to want to keep it around and support it, yet WoW is constantly pulling me back -- both in changed game mechanics that make me really want to go run battlegrounds with my level 40-something dwarf female subtlety rogue, and on the social side that I'd love to be able to join the US chapter of Tamarind's blogger guild.

But realistically, I barely play a few hours of any particular game per week these days. I'm not sure that amount of playtime is worth $15 a month, and I feel increasingly guilty that I'm barely level 15 in STO after playing for over a month. I barely play at all these days. I've been trying to get through Warcraft 3 (for the third or fourth time, I really suck at RTS games -- I'll get to Frozen Throne someday) and maybe eventually beat Torchlight (I do not understand all of these people complaining that the story mode was "too short") and I've got a list of other games I'd like to play too. It's too much. Especially when I spend the majority of my free time sitting around sighing to myself about how bored I am, and don't really want to play anything I've got sitting on my computer, and end up spending my weekend watching random TV episodes on Hulu.

I know in my heart that I will eventually return to WoW. It is familiar, my friends play it, I can talk to them about playing it. I can read blogs about playing it. I know the game inside and out to the point where I *understand* what people are saying when they're talking/blogging about it, even when I'm not quite familiar with their class.

For now, I can hold off with WoW, knowing that there's nothing new since the last time I played. But I know that when Cataclysm is released, I will no longer be able to resist. Will I have enough time to play STO for enough hours that I don't feel guilty about spending my money? Or will I make some kind of justification like "well, even if I only play a handful of hours a month, it's still cheaper than seeing a new movie at the theater" and keep subscribing anyway?

STO is a good game, it's a beautiful game, it's a fun game, but I think I'm a bit burned out on hobbies in general. I just can't get excited about much of anything these days.