I looked at the date on my last post and I realized that I was rapidly approaching a month without a post and I wondered why that was.  In the past few weeks I HAVE been sick, but nothing too major.  I was also busy at work for a little bit, but nothing too bad.  What happened?  Well, the honest answert is “the end-game happened.”  I have been level 80 in WoW since March.  Unlike the rest of the world, I have only one level 80 in WoW.  I am, by far, the slowest person I know when it comes to playing MMOs.  I have always been behind the curve of my friends.  In the days of vanilla WoW, I was lapped to level 60 multimple times by friends.  I didn’t hit level 60 until months after TBC was out.  When Wrath came out, I was still level 64.  Mind you, this was not with constant play time.  I had a sea of abandoned alts, many of which that are near level 30 or 40, which seemed to be my burn out point.  Also, the time it took me to get to level 80 was fraught with many months of being unsubscribed to WoW.  Something clicked earlier this year and I finally forced myself to grind out ot the end for once.

People always say that, with MMOs, the game truly begins at the level cap.  I always thought this was absurd given all the pre-cap content I was enjoying.  Now that I have been at the level cap, I am finding mysefl agreeing with them.  I always imagined that I would be less busy once I hit 80.  After all, there would be no grind to do.  Log in, bang out a few dailies, call it a night whenever I am ready, on my own terms.  It turns out that once you hit the cap, the world opens up to you.  You are powerful enough to do so many of the little meta game things seeking achievements, doing old quests for the fun of it, or running around testing the waters of PvP for a night.  Before hitting the cap, there was one solitary goal:  level up.  Log in, do your quest lines and reach out for one more bar of exp before calling it.  At the cap I find myself logging in, doing a slew of daily quests, running out to work on the loremaster achievement, help a friend with a low level dungeon, hit up that battleground, etc.  Before you know it, I find myself awake at 3:00 AM on a weeknight for the third night in a row.

And that, my friends, is the real truth behind why I have not updated my blog in a month.  I have been playing too much.  Whats funny is that, now that I have experienced the end game, I have nearly zero desire to level an alt.  If I am going to make progress, I want it to be on my one character.  Granted, I have designs in mind for a goblin character when Cataclysm hits, but even then I bet that I focus on getting my Paladin to the new cap first.  Similarly, getting heavily into the end-game content of WoW has also killed my MMO ADD.  I haven’t played Aion in weeks and I already canceled my subscription to the game, despite liking it quite a lot, I still havent redeemed by EVE online account code to start my free 30 days of it, and despite being handed a free weekend of LOTRO, I didn’t even log in once.  Maybe getting to the end-game is the cure for those of us that get seasonal bouts of MMO wanderlust?

The odd thing is that I find myself seeing other games in a new light.  I feel a desire to play other games like EQ2 right now, but I want to because I want to see if the EQ2 end game is anything like the WoW end game.  Before, my love for EQ2 was fuled by a love of the lore and setting and the enjoyment I derive from building up a character in the various settings the game provides.  Now I am wondering “Hmm…  Does EQ2 have daily quests at the end game like WoW does?  What about something similar to the emblem system of gearing up?”

I know I can’t maintain the pace I have been setting the past few weeks, and sooner or later I know I will give in and start playing another game, splitting my focus again, but for now I am completely sold on the WoW end-game.  The Halloween seasonal events started yesterday and I found myself giddy with delight at the thought of all the new stuff to do.  I somehow doubt that that is how a 32 year old man should react to such a thing.