The Post-WoW Era?

Silvermoon raiding guilds have been dropping like flies lately.

Last week, the guild leader for Manifest Destiny announced he and some key members were quitting WoW. Another MD member posted a few days later that he and some others were going to try and keep the raiding guild alive, but certainly their raiding potential is in dire straits. A few days later, Chaos and Mayhem also indicated a halt to end-game raiding in WoW. Just this past weekend, I read that Apocalyptic is also done.

A forum poster quipped that it would be easier to create a thread of raiding guilds that weren’t quitting.

So what’s going on here?

Well, Age of Nanoc is certainly a factor. In nearly all the recent guild-disband announcements, a poster responded with “See ya in Age of Nanoc!” MMOs have come and gone and few if any have put a dent in WoW’s hegemonic control of the market. That may very well end with the official release of AoC. I say “may” because AoC is largely untested. I have no idea if it will have the casual and raiding appeal that is unique to WoW. It’s very easy to get all excited about the latest, greatest MMO. It’s quite another for that game to prove itself as solid a game model as WoW.

However, I do think that many, many people are burnt out on WoW raiding. Eager for a fresh start and a new experience, I can foresee people shelving their uber-WoW raiding toon (at least temporarily) to try a novel spin on the MMO concept. Will Age of Nanoc prove as appealing at WoW? It’s just too early to tell, but I think a lot of people are going to check it out and see for themselves.

I myself have to admit that I am beginning to resent WoW a little bit. The game’s demands on a guild member’s time are immense. Case in point: Requiem raids four nights a week. Some sessions last a short time, maybe three hours, while others last five plus. For the sake of argument, let’s say the average Requiem raiding night lasts four hours. Multiply that by four nights and that’s sixteen hours a week.

Compared to a forty-hour work week, that’s nearly a part-time job.

I used to raid three nights a week a few months back. To stave off burn-out, I trimmed it back to two. Which is manageable. And yet, killing the same bosses over and over again, it takes its toll. Sometimes I feel like I’m sitting in front of a slot machine and the instant a boss goes down, I’m pulling the lever and waiting for the cherries to line up. End-game raiding has for me, to a large extent, condensed itself down to learning a movement and attack pattern for each boss and executing that pattern week after week, month after month for a chance to win gear that will . . . allow you to repeat this same pattern with new and more difficult bosses. I’m not experiencing new content as much as gambling at each boss’s loot table.

And that’s where I start to resent WoW. Grand Theft Auto IV came out last week to much popular and critical fanfare. The hype that surrounds that game gives me pause: wouldn’t it be fun to run around an urban setting pretending to be a criminal instead of killing Naj’entus for the fifteenth time? I don’t even have a console to play GTA IV, but hearing and reading about it sparks my most base enthusiasm for gaming. It hearkens me back to the days when a new game would come out and I would rush to the mall after work to pick it up and then spend frantic days playing the hell out of it. It’s been too long, too infrequent since I’ve felt that way about a game.

And that’s largely because of WoW. Mass Effect is coming out for the PC at the end of this month. By most accounts, it’s a great game. Will I buy it? Probably not. It would be a waste of money. It would sit on my desk gathering dust because of the time WoW raiding demands.

Which kind of depresses me as a gamer.

I think the release of AoC may be perfectly timed with a general apathy for WoW. If the game turns out to be good, with a nice balance between casual gaming and raiding, it could very well shift some serious market share from WoW. At the very least, it’s going to make people rethink why they raid in WoW: what am I actually accomplishing? What do I contribute? What do I get out of it? Is this new content, a new experience? Or am I just spinning a giant treadmill, full of artificial blocks and time sinks to keep me subscribed and playing?

It could be I’m being unfair of WoW and I’m just in the middle of one of my many low ebbs with the game. Maybe I shouldn’t blame WoW for a game model that most other MMOs share, including AoC in all likelihood. I probably shouldn’t blame WoW for taking my time away from other games I could be playing because I am after all an adult and more than capable of making decisions for myself that might lead me to more enjoyable gaming experiences.

I shouldn’t blame WoW, but I am beginning to. And if there are more like me, we could very well be at the beginning of the post-WoW era.