The Siren Song of the MMO

After the last bout with Rift I swore I had grown out of the MMO phase. The samey environments, the tedious bland grind sandwich. The contrived and highly repetitive quest equation: Kill x number of monster y for lazy asshole z. The only part of the experience that was fun was playing with other people, but after all our friends had left the social interactions felt hollow and token like a high school teenager’s facebook page. I swore I would never fall for those luscious siren notes again and in its place I would catch up on my reading, learn to play the cello, and maybe even see the world.

I was standing on the back of my high horse like Napoleon riding into Sicily when suddenly the IM window popped up. It was Praznaga, my friend and guild leader from World of Warcraft. After the usual set of pleasantries, the following conversation occurred.

“I started playing WoW again.” The instant message read.

“Haha.” I replied, “How is that going with the pandas?”

“I know, seriously. It’s not a bad expansion though. I started a new guild. It’s called ‘We Belong in a Museum’” 

A muscle beneath my eye twitched suddenly. “Oh?”

“Yeah it’s made of casual players over 25 years old who just want to have fun. Our symbol is a tombstone. Drusus is back and so is Natsuma. We’ve been doing 5 mans.”

The muscle twitched again. Praz linked me the guild page and I began scrolling through. Dear God... I know if Bob and I picked up WoW again, all Praz would have to do is announce a return of the old team and they would all come back. All our friends. Bob’s brother has been begging him to start up another MMO. It’d be back to the old days. Back to “drink to make it hard.” Back to... NO! Tara you were going to play the cello and see the world and stand on high horses and...

Ah who the fuck am I kidding?

Praz’s message might as well have been the siren call of a medieval mermaid luring a sailor into her arms and Bob was not helping.

"Guild Wars 2 doesn't have a subscription fee." He suggested to me the evening after the exchange. "If we started playing it and you were busy, it wouldn't matter because there is no monthly fee." And thus ends the tale of how the Bearral Role Academy guild on Yak's Bend came to be.

Guild Wars 2 has gotten an incredible reception and there are a lot of very tempting features to it. For one, your level automatically adjusts if you want to quest with lower-level friends which eliminates the problem of my guildmates skyrocketing ahead of me because I don't have time to power-level. Additionally, while Guild Wars 2 costs substantially more out of the box than Pandaria, it doesn't have a monthly fee which was downright prohibitive for me given that I only have a night or two to play a week. Another point deeply in Guild Wars favor is the fact that it has no daily quests that I must complete day after day after day in order to get the gear I need to do the raids. I'm just going to cut a long story short and say that dailies are the reason I hate Tol Barad in WoW with a deep loathing passion and never want to kill another fucking crocodile for the rest of my days.

But, as with all MMO's, it still has the same problems. It is mind-bendingly boring playing by yourself and while people of differing levels can still play together, who the hell wants to travel for 15 minutes to go to a low level zone where only crap gear will drop? 

Still, as MMO's go it's very well done and getting a new set of abilities for every different kind of weapon you pick up, while confusing, does add a nice layer of depth to the experience. Despite my best intentions, it has become the latest thing preventing me from learning the cello.

Okay, in all seriousness, who actually works on their bucket list when they get free time? Nobody. That's who. We just buy more video games.

Trufax.