My Life as a Retired Raider

(but not a retired MMO player)

It’s been over a year since I quit World of Warcraft, and quit raiding. The reality of it was that my personal life, despite not being married, is just no longer compatible with the raiding life-style, and hasn’t been for quite some time. I seriously stressed over it for a long time in WOW before I gave up, and I would have probably stuck with it even longer if my friends had remained playing. But, people moved on, and the reasons I had to stay evaporated just as my patience with trying to revolve my life around a 3 or 4 night a week raiding schedule ran out.

But even though I’ve quit raiding, I’ve not stopped playing MMOs. After WOW, a group of my RL friends began with The Old Republic, which we started when it came out. After the initial rush, we settled  into a 2-night a week schedule, where we leveled as a group and did instances. It took us a long time, four months, to hit level 50 (in a game where even semi-core people were hitting 50 in 2-3 weeks). And in that time I played several different characters, getting 3 others into the level 35 range, and another to level 50.

The SWTOR end game is very much like WOW. It revolves around raiding, and hard mode instances for gear in PVP; and badly unbalanced PVP grinding for PVP. Raiding is pretty much a no-go for me. Even if I was interested in it, none of my friends are, and those that do are in the same boat as I am. Raiding is fun, but it’s not worth the time commitment anymore.  

This has completely changed the end-game for me, for obvious reasons. It means that as a level-capped character, I am pretty much limited to daily grinding for tokens for better gear…and I’ll pretty much never be able to keep up even if I wanted to. And daily-instance grinding just isn’t that fun by itself.

Playing with a group of RL friends really helps with an MMO, but the specific way we went about playing the game also hurt us. For one thing, we formed our own guild. It was only the 4 (and later 6 of us), it was just a group for us to have a shared channel, etc, and in that regard it was perfect. But it also meant that when we were together, we never really made contacts with anyone else. The entire experience of the game became very sheltered—I’ve yet to do any instance with anyone outside of my friends (even though I’m a Sage healer, and shouldn’t have too much trouble getting a group).

And since I played SWTOR much more casually, I never even now understand all of the mechanics of the game. MMO mechanics—changes to game systems, item lists, crafting, new vendors, etc, are usually pretty cryptic. The developers pretty much expect you to look this stuff up yourself. And even now I find myself out of the loop. SWTOR is a game that needed a lot of polish and changes, and I’ve not really tried to keep up with them.

Of course part of the problem is that as a group, I’ve pretty much just played with my friends and have no outside contacts in the game. And as a non-raider, there is something of a glass ceiling—already I’m slowly reaching the point where better gear becomes a near impossibility without taking the next step. I’ve hit level 50. I’m in the instance-grind. But when I’m done, then what?

This is a core issue with most MMO’s I’ve played, but one that’s never been a real issue because I’ve always been on the other side of the ceiling. Most of the raiding guilds I ever played in were always in the top 5 of the server I was in—capable of doing the most intense raids, but not as quickly on the uptake as the best.  And most PVE end games cater to the raiding crowd, at least in the games I’ve played. And that leaves the rest to always sit in second place, at best.

I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. But it also means that my commitment to any one game isn’t as great, unlike it was in WOW. My time with SWTOR is almost done. I’m ending my subscription in 2 months, when Guild Wars 2 comes out. My friends and I are pretty much committed to making that switch. And in a lot of ways the game sounds like it will fit my new play style very well.

In the meantime, I’ve tried Tera, which I’ve also had a lot of fun with even with the short amount of time I’ve spent with it. It shows me that even now, I like the MMO style. Tera may have an interesting combat mechanic, but in every other respect it’s a traditional Everquest/WOW like MMO. Yet, I’ve enjoyed the questing, even if it’s as generic as it gets. Everything is fun, and new, and interesting. And I’ll probably stick with it for the next 2 months, or until I hit 60 (which is the level cap in that game right now). I may even do some PVP and other activities. And then I’ll move on to Guild Wars 2 and start the cycle all over again. And then maybe I’ll try the Secret World, or another MMO that has already come out, but I never checked out the first time through.

This is my life now as an ex-raider. I’m still playing, still having fun, but as my commitment towards a specific game is much lower so is my loyalty to it. It’s not that I’m burned out. But, as the best rewards require more commitment than I’m willing to make—or more specifically the methods of obtaining them are simply not fun enough to go far—in most cases I’m not even bothering to try. I’m much more willing at that  point to switch to something new and different than stick with the grind. This is a perspective that I know most hard-core people strongly abject to, but the reality is that the non-raiding game just isn’t as interesting because of the lack of social context. And because of that I have no incentive to continue, and little loyalty to any one game.