About a week ago, I quit World of Warcraft. For the umpteenth time I felt annoyed and angry while playing the game, so I walked away from the computer for a while and realised I was completely and utterly stressed out. Quite literally almost every muscle in my body was tense. I made my decision there and then: no more. Not everyone in-game was happy with this decision (I guess I had made myself somewhat useful, or some such thing) but I’d made up my mind. So the day after that I sold/gave away all the items and money my characters had, and accordingly I deleted them all. I know myself, if I don’t eliminate all reasons to go back I’ll forget about the bad part and start playing again at some point. So, for a week now, I’ve been WoW-free.
I play Guild Wars now! ^^
Quick summary about Guild Wars: it’s got much better graphics and runs much better on my laptop, it’s much less time-consuming and you can always play with anyone in the world. About the latter: in WoW you can’t change servers with a character unless you pay for it, so playing together can only be done if you start on the same server. On top of that, there’s the horde vs alliance thing, so you can’t play together if you’re from different factions. Then there’s the part where a character from a PvE server can’t be transferred to a PvP server, or to a role-playing server. And last but not least: Europe and the USA have their own games, so it’s impossible to play on servers in the USA if you’ve got the Europe game. That’s a total of 4 factors why playing together in WoW can be impossible. Guild Wars has districts in which you play, but you can simply change districts and then you can play with anyone you want (provided you go to the same district). There are no different factions and no different types of servers. The difference is immense.
There are only 20 levels in Guild Wars, of which I did 4 in a couple of hours. It’s much easier to put this game aside since you don’t need all sorts of crap to get anywhere in Guild Wars. It has seperate chapters which you can buy and play (or not), so you get to decide how far you go (as opposed to WoW, in which the expansion was simply necessary to keep playing – nobody wants a level 60 char anymore). Additionally, I noticed that every hour the game will tell you how long you’ve been playing, and that you need to take a break. It’s easy to forget the time while playing, so it’s good to get a reminder.
All in all, I’m very positive about Guild Wars and I hope to see more of it (but at an easy pace).
Hey Akasha, I remember you well ^^
Whatever happened to Shinmai btw? (Were you in there too?) It seems the forum is down and instead there’s a youtube-film on it… I suppose they disintegrated too.
My stress level has decreased a lot the past month, it’s been relaxed :)
What are you currently doing?
:O, I just found this site through google. I don’t know if you still remember me though. I was the weirdo warrior in StarRock ;).
Sorry to hear (read) about your bad experiences that you had to take such drastically steps. But it might indeed be for the best.
I’ve cancelled my account too last month so I could finally focus on my studies but haven’t deleted my chars though.
Good luck with Guild Wars and I hope you’ll be able to keep your stress level at a more acceptable level from now on :)
Akasha
Try not to take it as a personal thing, please. It’s not meant like that…
Point taken.
To be brutally honest, I’m not looking for an ex-wow-convention at all…
Just want a few afternoons of fun every once in a while, which at this point goes fine on my own. I actually enjoy not having to team up for once.
Yup…. I also picked up GW a few weeks ago… stil only played it on two evenings, but I did enjoy it a lot.
We need to hook up some old wow-players who switched and maybe party together sometime.
Good to see that you apparently enjoy yourself in GW. I’m growing more and more fond of the game the more I play, especially since it’s easy to play in much smaller chunks than WoW, making it easier to sneak in “just one more quest” when I feel like it…
I’ve got fairly advanced chars in all three chapters, so give me a poke if you need a hand; particularly, I’m thinking of rounding up a few ex-WoWers for a bit of mindless fun. :) I’ll see how far that idea goes.