A Pilgrim's Digression

I didn’t make it through the weekend.  Ironically, I was so worried about not making it through the day alone on Saturday, but it was Saturday night, after L. returned home from shopping, that I gave in and resubscribed to World of Warcraft.

L. wasn’t pleased, but she didn’t protest loudly, either.  She joked that she might have to stage an intervention at some point.

I could easily keep silent about my failure to quit WoW, not tell any of my friends.  No one would know the difference, except me.  It would keep the story nice and tidy: I wanted to quit World of Warcraft, and I did so after a brief struggle.  Life is rarely tidy, however.

I told L. I am going to play differently, this time.  I’m not going to allow the game to take over so much of my life.  So far, that seems to be holding true.  According to my playtime log, I played only three hours this weekend, most of it on Saturday night after resubscribing.

One thing I did was return to my Alliance guild.  No hiding Horde-side.  After a little over a month away, I found that they had beat their summer doldrums and were finally progressing in ICC 10.  Many people who had quit around the same time I “quit” had returned.  It felt good to see familiar names in gchat and to feel like I belonged to a group again.

Still, I don’t know why I had to resubscribe and come back.  I simply went back to the old routines with the same old characters: I ran Heroics and did some dailies.  I’m not going to raid.  I still don’t feel like working on any of the achievements like Loremaster or Seeker.  I don’t feel like PvP-ing.  So why come back?

I think I came back just because I felt I needed it to fill up some space in my life.  However, I did enjoy playing this weekend, though perhaps that was merely the effect of not playing my Alliance characters for so long.  For once, I was playing because I enjoyed the game, not out of routine…even though the things I was doing were routine, to me.

It felt good setting fire to creatures with my Warlock, or healing a Heroic with my Shammy.  What I really enjoyed was playing my Paladin, whom I left at the end of June sitting in Darnassus with unleveled professions.  I had dropped Mining/Blacksmithing for Herbalism/Alchemy right about the time I left Alliance, so I still had some skilling up to do.  I worked on that much of my playtime Saturday night.  It was relaxing, running around gathering herbs even though I could have bought them.  While gathering herbs in Feralas, I even made a brief detour through Dire Maul, just to get back in practice with my Retribution rotation.

It’s hard to tell where I will go from here.  I’m in the game for at least another thirty days, at which point I may try again to quit.  Or maybe I will keep playing.  I’d like to think things really are different this time, but that may be like the return smoker’s promise to only smoke half a pack a day, rather than the whole 20 cigarettes.

Tonight, I don’t want to play.  I want to watch the last two episodes of season 2 of The Legend of the Seeker.  We’ll see whether that works out as planned, or not.

I am finding it difficult to talk about my quitting World of Warcraft without resorting to the language of addiction.  Thus the word of the day is “trigger”: “Anything that has been repeatedly associated with the use of alcohol and drugs, thereby becoming a “conditioned stimulus.” Although it was initially psychologically neutral, exposure to it now will stimulate a thought about or craving for the substance.”

It’s a rainy Saturday, windy and cool, so there is no reason to go outside.  My wife and son have been gone all day, back-to-school shopping.  This would normally be the kind of day that I’d indulge for hours in some WoW playtime.  It’s been tough resisting.  I’ve thought again and again about reactivating my account.  I’ve tried going over in my mind all the reasons I quit to begin with, but it’s tough thinking of them when the alternate part of my brain, the part that still wants to play WoW, is thinking of many more reasons why I ought to play.

A little bit ago, I even went out to Wal-Mart, just “curious” if they actually sold the game cards.  I went in, thinking, “well, fifteen dollars for 30 days of play isn’t that much, after all, and just because I reactivate my account doesn’t mean I have to play.”  I can control it, I said to myself.  I won’t play as much.  I’ll use the parental controls to limit my playtime, or at least send me that weekly report about number of hours played.

Wal-Mart does sell the cards, but the only ones my Wal-Mart had in stock were the 60 day cards for $29.96.  In the end, I couldn’t justify the purchase, even to my addiction rattled mind.

I left without making the purchase and instead sought comfort in some greasy fast food.

Back home, feeling tense, and still wavering on my commitment to quit, I sat in my son’s room and began sorting his LEGOs by size/style.  I’ve always found that doing something organizational sometimes relieves stress for me.  When I was in Graduate School and needed a break from writing, I’d work jigsaw puzzles.

I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to keep this up, though.  There is nothing but my own willpower stopping me from going in there right now, activating my account, and logging on.  Even L. can’t stop me, really.  I called her up when I was on my way to Wal-Mart and told her what I was doing.  Her attitude is sort of laissez-faire: there are worse habits, and I’m a big boy who can do what I want.

I guess the question is, am I putting myself through this hell for nothing?  There are men with what might be called addictions to sports and other activities.  No one suggests they quit, do they?  I used to read rather compulsively, and it would never have occurred to me that I read too much and ought to cut back or quit.

So what’s wrong with video games?  Why do I feel like I need to restrict myself from a game I enjoy?

I have to remind myself: “Because I wasn’t enjoying it.  I wasn’t enjoying it much at all.  I was playing compulsively, not for the fun of it.”

I think if I’m going to get through this, I need to do two things: I need to stop listening to WoW podcasts, and I need to stop reading WoW-related news.  Both of these things also act as triggers, reminding me of the game and what I’m missing.  It’s sort of like how smokers find it difficult to quit if they continue hanging around with smokers or continue doing the same activities, in the same way, as before.  I had a psychology professor in college who spoke about quitting cigarettes and how he’d deliberately go to smoke-filled places like bars, just to inhale second-hand smoke.  And after awhile, he started smoking again.  He had to leave all those places behind in order to really quit.

I just don’t know that I’m going to be able to do this.  If I get through this weekend, next weekend, L. is going to Charlottesville, and I’ll be home alone again all day Saturday.  As tough as it has been so far this weekend, I think it’s going to be tougher next Saturday.

Maybe I ought to just give in and get it over with.  What I’d like to do is tell my old Alliance guildmates I’m coming back, reactivate my account, log in, and…

And I don’t know.  Do what?  What is there for me to do?  Will anyone even care that I’ve returned?  No, probably not.  But I’ll have to live with the fact that once again, I tried to quit and couldn’t do it.  Another week or a month will pass, and I’ll be bored out of my skull again, angry at the game for its hold on me, angry at myself for being so weak.

I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.  It’s so easy just to give in, and maybe after playing again for a little, I’ll discover that the desire was pretty illusory after all.  Maybe what I need to quit is not abstinence, but just to give in one more time, just to prove that whatever fun I think I’ll have will be as ephemeral as the smoker’s first nicotine high after a week of being smoke-free.

A Troll Priest confronts his inner turmoil

What I’ve found hardest about quitting World of Warcraft is filling the time I used to spend playing the game.  On weekends, that is a lot of time to fill.  Particularly over the last few months, I’d formed a habit of getting up earlier than my family and playing WoW for as much as three or four hours.  When my first WoW-free weekend rolled around, I still got up early on Saturday, but couldn’t settle on anything to do.  I felt restless and bored.

I could have went back to bed, of course.  Instead, I watched Mad Max on Netflix.  I’ve watched a lot of Netflix recently as a way of coping.

Perhaps there is an argument to be made that watching lots of movies isn’t much better than playing WoW for hours.  At least in WoW, there may be some human interaction, and of course playing WoW engages the mind more than watching movies.

I’ve heard people make that argument before.  ”Well I could be frying my brain on reality shows, but instead I play WoW.”  To each his own.  I grew up on TV.  I grew up on video games.  It’s like comparing apples and apples, as far as I’m concerned.  We’d all be better off living in a 19th century entertainment wasteland, I sometimes think, our only diversions being books, traveling theater troupes, and each other.

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Spirit Healer in World of Warcraft

After one failed attempt at quitting in July, I believe I have finally given up WoW.  Last Monday, I cancelled my account for the second time, and so far it has remained cancelled.

That wasn’t the case back in late June, when I announced to friends and guild mates that I was done.  I cancelled my account, but within a couple days had renewed it.  Then I left for a week-long, WoW-free fishing trip to Ontario.  When I got back, after being free of WoW for nearly seven days, I should have tried cancelling again.

Instead, I began playing again, secretly, because I couldn’t admit to anyone that I had failed.  Instead of playing my Alliance main characters, I leveled my Horde alts that no one knew about.  I played guildless and friendless, mostly alone although I did group a lot using the random dungeon finder.  The main character I was leveling was a Troll priest.

As a testament to how much I was playing, compulsively playing I should add, I got that priest to 80 and began gearing him by healing Heroics, and then I turned my attention to an Orc Shaman.  I’d created her years ago and never leveled her past 16 and never imagined I’d ever level her any farther, but I was in the throes of something beyond my control.  By the time I quit last Monday, she was 62 and in Outlands.

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Yes, I play a video game as a hobby.  Some would say World of Warcraft is a lifestyle choice, not a hobby, since it consumes so much of its players time and lives.  But I still call it a hobby, like playing golf with one’s buddies on a Saturday afternoon…er, playing golf four or five hours a night, five days a week plus weekends.

I am often ashamed to admit to my lifestyle in mixed company.  Saying that one’s hobby is a video game is often, to another man, a signal that he can feel superior to you.  It allows him to say that in his free time he goes to the gym/plays a game of football with his friends/rides a bicycle/runs a marathon/makes love to multiple women at the same time.  Or just watches sports on TV.  Yes, even watching sports on TV trumps video games in manly culture.

Never mind that in his man cave, you will probably find an XBox and a Rockband setup, which he uses to jam to “More than a Feeling” when he’s feeling special.

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I’ve been thinking about cancelling my World of Warcraft subscription.  I’ve gone as far as downgrading my subscription to a month by month basis, rather than the every three month subscription I was paying for previously.  It sounds kind of wasteful to even talk about it, since just a few weeks ago I bought the latest expansion pack for forty dollars.

But the expansion has been somewhat responsible for these thoughts of abandoning the game creeping into my head.

I’ve said to anyone who has asked that the Wrath of the Lich King is the best product Blizzard has created to date.  It’s fun and immersive.  The quests have definitely been upgraded from the “kill 10 boars” style that used to be standard in Online Role-Playing Games.  One evening while I was playing, my wife asked me what I was doing and I said, “Trying to get this bull sea lion to mate with the cow.”  She has been making fun of me ever since, and mentioning to friends and relatives that I play a video game in which one task is to help sea lions mate.

Yet that is indeed the quality of the quests Blizzard has provided, and if you don’t think that’s a measurable improvement, well, you haven’t created a human mage and leveled her up in Elwynn Forest and rapidly grown sick of killing wolves and boars and various other woodland creatures.

The game is fun.  Blizzard has returned to its fantasy roots, with a few medieval and Norse stylistic touches thrown in for flavor.  The background music is beautifully Celtic.  The story is interesting–I am actually taking time to read quest text, for the first time in a long time.

So why am I thinking about leaving?

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It’s one of those mornings where the alarm clock must have been going off for ten minutes before the sound penetrated my sleeping brain. I was in a deep freeze of undreaming sleep. When I finally did come out of my coma, I rolled out of bed into the morning dark and staggered around my room trying to get my bearings.

What time? What place? What am I supposed to do?

I try to gather up the things I will need in the bathroom. Towel, contact solution and contacts, toothbrush. I end up standing, swaying in the dark, trying to get straight in my mind whether I have everything.

Ugh, my head.

Fifteen years ago, this might have been the morning after a night on the town. Instead, it is the result of playing World of Warcraft until ten past midnight, then not being able to fall asleep until one A.M. Then the alarm went off at what time?

I look at the clock for the third time. 4:50 A.M. But I know that’s not right. I always set the clock fifteen to twenty minutes fast, so that I feel like I am saving time. It sounds silly, especially when I have barely slept and I’m standing there looking at the clock thinking “It’s really 4:35 A.M. Can I go back to sleep?”

No, I can’t.

I hadn’t done this in awhile. I thought the addiction was over, after more than a month of being able to quit playing and go to bed at 10:30. But last night, I went on an impromptu Karazhan raid with some people I hadn’t played with for a long time, and we had so much fun. There was Frenchy and his wife, the two Quebecoise who everyone loves to hear speak over Vent. There was the middle-aged, retired guy from Vancouver…who plays a petite, pretty female Draenei mage. There was the newbie, our novice Paladin healer we took along just to gear him up out of greens and blues. There was our guild leader, female cancer survivor and tree Druid, never letting our health fall much below 5%.

It was a wonderful time. We almost could have made a Karathon of it, running the whole instance, but we started too late. So we went through Shade of Aran, then did the Chess event just for kicks (and to try to get our Paladin the shield that drops). Then we all quit, dead tired.

And this is the morning after. I feel like crap, but am happy as can be.

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My wife tells me that when I write a post about World of Warcraft here at my blog, she doesn’t even read it. I’ve heard the same from other people, as well. Thus in the interest of further segregating my “real life” from my “WoW life,” I have decided to create a World of Warcraft blog as a kind of diary of my daily adventures in Azeroth and Outland.

Kilrogg Was Here is my WoW blog. I decided to use the free WordPress domain for this blog simply because, due to time constraints, I desire ease of use more than anything. I don’t want a lot of control over the page design, or a large amount of disk space for pictures. I want a simple blog where I can log in and write an entry, then post it and forget it. WordPress.com gives me the same functionality as my personal WordPress install, without having to do the install or the maintenance.

Anyway, if you want, you can read about my goals for the site over at Kilrogg. Lately I’ve just come to recognize that although this is a generalist blog (hence the word “Digression” in the title), I can’t expect everyone to be interested in the same things I am. Especially in terms of this particular video game.

Personally, I think it’s a cultural phenomenon. Others, especially non-gamer spouses of players , think otherwise.

Although this was not the first time my guild successfully cleared Karazhan, this was a first time for me. We began work on it Tuesday evening and had a really successful run that first night. No wipes. We killed all the bosses in one shot up to Illhoof, the optional satyr boss in the library. We resumed the fight Saturday night with Netherspite. I was expecting a pretty easy time of it, since the trash was basically cleared for the final three boss fights. Kara was empty except for a few Shades and Horrors, plus Prince Malchezaar and Netherspite.

Netherspite gave us fits. I think we spent a good hour and a half on him, trying and wiping, over and over. I had no problems riding the blue beam on my warlock–I just drain tanked through the hits I was taking–but I wasn’t seeing the void zones when they would open up beneath me. Finally our raid leader, Jimby, asked me if I was zoomed in to first person view.

I wasn’t in first person, but I was zoomed in pretty close. That’s how I have always played, normally. He told me I needed to zoom out as far as possible for these bosses so I can see more of the area around me. It makes sense, but had never occurred to me that something so simple could be inhibiting my playing better. It made all the difference though. Netherspite is a huge, blue dragon, and when zoomed in, one can see very little of what’s going on around the room.

Next up, we took on Prince Malchezaar. If Netherspite was frustrating, this fight was impossible, at least that night. Prince is a giant Draeneii-looking creature who, by himself, would be a pushover. But he summons Infernals who fall from the sky, landing and, while standing in one place, casting a Hellfire-like area of effect spell that forces you to move around. Where the Infernals fall is totally random, but if luck is against you, they fall in such a way as to isolate your casters from being able to cast spells on the boss, or else they fall in such a way as to hem in your tank and melee DPS, essentially forcing the healers to heal through the Hellfire. He also casts a spell called Enfeeble that takes a random two or three players and reduces their hit points to one point. He then casts a Shadow Nova after a few seconds that, if you get caught in it during the Enfeeble, will essentially ensure death. You cannot be healed during the Enfeeble. It wears off pretty quickly, though, and actually proved to be no problem at all, since as a caster I was standing at max range anyway (out of range of the Shadow Nova). Still, it is rather shocking to see your health bar drop down to one point, and to know there is nothing you can do about it.

What killed us again and again on Prince were the Infernals. They just weren’t dropping right for us. The fight is all about luck in that respect, and I could tell it was frustrating people. It was frustrating me. We were a good group. We had the tank and the DPS and the healing to take him down, but we were getting bad drops on the Infernals.

We finally gave up about eleven-thirty. We are all East coasters, most of us with families, and so we rarely play after midnight.

Then last night, it happened that most of us were online anyway, so we decided to make one final try to kill Prince. Again it seemed like we were going to be unlucky. We got him to 3% health on the first try. Second attempt we brought him down to 6%. The problem was we were getting him down in health, but people were dying to the infernals. It was getting late and people were making mistakes, too, such as not being at max range (sometimes the Infernals make that difficult though). And in one case, we just had to laugh because after all our meticulous preparation prior to starting the fight, the hunter misdirected aggro onto a healer instead of the tank. I looked up and all I see is this big blue demon charging towards the DPS/Healer group instead of towards the tank standing out there on the balcony. It was a prime “Oh shit” moment.

Finally, finally, we did get him down, though. And again it all came down to luck: the Infernals didn’t pin us down, and we didn’t lose anyone. He dropped some pretty good items, too, which was a relief because after all the time we spent on him this weekend, I think everyone expected him to drop crap. I got my Tier 4 helm token, for the Voidheart Crown. I think it’s incredibly ugly, so I will probably leave “Show Helm” unchecked in my preferences. Occasionally in PvP I see people wearing it, and to me it just gives away how well-geared you are to your opponent. I’d rather my opponents be in the dark about me and my gear.

One of the two hunters with us also got the Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix, so all in all, it was a good kill.

At this point, it was about eleven fifteen. We decided to make one shot at Nightbane, another optional boss that you have to summon. Nightbane is a fiery, skeletal dragon that has a number of abilities, but he proved somewhat easier than Prince to kill. We had a wipe the first time we tried him, though. Our pally was supposed to pick up the skeleton he drops on us so that I could AoE them with my Seed of Corruption. I waited for him to tell me he had the skeletons, and then I cut loose with the Seed. Well, he didn’t have them. Not all of them anyway. Two of them attacked and killed me, and with no one else to AoE them, the group was facing Nightbane and his skeleton minions. Wipe.

However, one of our Priests was still Soulstoned from the final Prince fight. She rezzed us and we re-grouped without having to run back from the graveyard. The Soulstone was about to expire anyway, so I stoned her again, and we tried one more time. This time we took him down hard. The pally waited an extra three seconds to make sure he had aggro on the skeletons, and it was smooth sailing. I don’t remember what dropped from Nightbane. I already had my purple for the night, so I wasn’t rolling on anything anyway.

As people were hearthing out, I took this screen capture of the flaming pile of bones that is Nightbane (clicky click on the tumbnail), and us standing around gawking. I like the imposing mountains in the distance, and I think this shows how well-designed the instance is aesthetically. Karazhan is definitely a work of art, both in terms of game art and game play. I’ve never experienced anything like it.

Last night in World of Warcraft, I ventured into Karazhan with my guild for the first time. Since everyone else has been inside Kara multiple times, I needed some one-on-one instruction and lots of patience from our raid leader. It was a memorable and throughly enjoyable night worthy of a blog post, I think.

Raiding Kara has been a long-term goal of mine since I first began hearing about it several months ago. Friends venturing inside brought back stories of the ferociously difficult battles and the superior loot to be had inside its crumbling walls. Having seen it for myself, now, after all this time, I have to say that everything was true.

It is a beautifully designed instance that shows off Blizzard’s attention to detail and sure grasp of what makes a game fun. Although we use the term “dungeon” and “instance” to refer to these special places in Azeroth where the bosses hit harder and the better loot drops like rain, what I thought of when I first climbed the stairway from the stables to the banquet hall was Hotel California.

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