Do You Feel Like You are Being Pushed Away?

It is a week ago today from when I downloaded wildstar to give it a try and while I did play it a lot this past weekend, during the week I had to try and see if I could still enjoy it in small doses when I could not really spend much time on it while I continued with my standard gaming on warcraft.

If anything my week in warcraft pushed me further into wanting to play wildstar.  It did nothing to try and keep me interested in it and by the end of the week it got two of my guild mates to say they are going to buy wildstar this weekend to join me over there because they too need a break from warcraft.

It reminds me of the first weeks of rift when 3 of our regular raiders decided to give rift a try and they have since disappeared never to be heard from again.  Well, that is an exaggeration, I still speak to one of them, and they just do not play warcraft any longer.

I still raided this week, albeit with a really rag tag group of people.  Some of the regulars, the few we still have after most seem to have quit.  Also have a few away for summer reasons.  Not sure if the ones that quit have just quit for the summer, forever or what, but it is really hard to get a decent group going when you have to start considering which one you want to take, the rogue that is 560 item level and doesn't listen to anything you tell them or the lock that is 560 that should be doing twice as much DPS and needs to have even the fights he has done 20 times explained to him again because he can't seem to remember from week to week.
Sadly enough these are the best that are available right now, or at least available to me.  Needless to say, we did not do any heroics this week.  The last thing I need is to bring these people that I would not even call LFR ready into a normal, there is no way in hell even in a dream would I bring them into a heroic.  I always bring in these people from guild as I always choose guild first and feel maybe we can train them so they can become better but still needed to pug two people.

We grabbed a friend of one of the raiders, a healer who we asked to DPS even if she had not DPSed, well, ever.  Her friend, who she referred to as someone that knew all the fights was pretty low compared to what we are used to but was okay I guess. At least she knew the fights unlike the lock I mentioned (and we ended up not taking), and did not need everything explained to her again and she listened to me when I said something unlike the rogue that will just tunnel sun all fight even if I keep saying off sun, off sun, off sun, because she doesn't like to move and sun never moves so it is easier for her to do her whooping 100K in 560 gear if she does not need to move.

The other fill in was a known twitch caster who likes to stream whenever she plays and has a small following.  At least she knew the fights and listened to instructions as well but you ever get someone that talks and you just think to yourself, please, just stop talking.  Yeah, that was her.  At least she only talked when she needed to but it sounded, at least to me, like she was trying to sound "cute" and I am sorry, I am not a 15 year old boy living at my parents house that would get all googly eyed over that.  If anything it has the completely opposite effect on me when I hear a girl trying to sound "cute" on voice chat.  It annoys me.  Needless to say, we will not be inviting her back even if she did not do poorly, she also did not do so great that I would be willing to set aside my dislike for the the "cute" talk.

We had always played with a lot of female gamers even if "girls don't play wow".  Throughout the history of the guild it has always had a lot of very strong female players in it.  If anything I think that has always been a huge strength for the guild.  Females that wished to play and not get hit on all the time and just play the game knew that our guild was a safe place for them.  We are all about the playing, and do not like the game to feel like a bar where you are there to pick someone up.

Over the years it has brought a few great female players our way including two female gamers that were in top 10 guild in the US in the past.  Sadly however, when they come to our guild because they want to take a step back and just raid casual we know it is with a time limit.  They usually quit after one tier of raiding.  We were a stepping stone to them quitting the game but I am still glad to have had them for the time we did.  It was kind of cool to say that at one point we had the number one healer in the world, according to WoLs at least.  That doesn't mean she was a great healer because for healing numbers aren't everything but it sure as hell meant she knew how to put out great numbers even if it was cheesing the charts.

Even with our long history of having female gamers in our guild I do not think I ever ran a raid where 6 of the 10 people were female.  Sadly one of those females came off as one of those female gamers that give female gamers a bad name, even if it is not intentionally and one of those female gamers really came off as the poster child for the saying that girls can't game.  At least one of those two I believe can learn, in time.

We only managed to make it to shaman in our 2 hours which is not half bad for a scraped together group that had me tanking on one of my low geared tanks, 529 as it was.  Over all it was not a bad run.  We had no wipes at all which is pretty darn good for the people we had with us if you ask me.  My tank replaced a 489 weapon with a 553 one which made holding aggro insanely easier thank you very much and I managed to nab 5 sigils on the run.  So it is a start for the character at least.

The lower DPS of the group put a lot of pressure on the two healers but they were both very geared and very skilled which made the fights lasting longer not as much of a problem as it would have been with lesser skilled or lesser geared healers.

It was not a bad run, not at all, if it were just some pug I picked up I would have even called it a very good run, but not being able to play with my people, the people I have been playing with for years, left me feel as if I were wanting more.  It left me feeling as if I would rather be doing something else.  Something else like wildstar.

I also managed to get the 4 runestone dropping LFRs done on one of my two hunters that are on that part of the quest.  The big problem is that usually I would have had them both done but as the first two really stressed me out, as I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago, I just logged out and gave up and went to play wildstar.

This is not a situation that is good for blizzard in my opinion.  More and more pushing me away from the game instead of keeping me interested in it.  I will, of course, come back to the game, but there are many people that are put into this position that will leave and never come back.  It is not a good idea to have he game ever hit a stage where people would rather not play it and that is exactly where I am right now.

I would rather be playing wildstar.  Heck, I would rather be watching reruns of law and order all day long.  Hell, I would rather go to the dentist and get elective root canal after that one LFR experience.  Things are rough when the game is effectively pushing people away from it and it has reached that point for me, or at least it feels that way.

I logged on to some characters to clear out mail that was about to expire.  Instead of bouncing it to another character because I often use the mailbox as a sort of storage medium I just left it in my bags thinking I will get to it later.  On the character I could of, or maybe should have, listed some stuff on the auction house to clear out some room I did not bother.

I logged on to other characters with the intention of doing some dailies to get some valor but after logging in and standing there for a few minutes I decided I did not want to.  I thought maybe I would do my ordos runs on all my characters like I usually do on reset day but decided against it.

In a way you can blame wildstar for that.  I had another option I could take advantage of right now and as it was my new bright shiny toy, it did draw my attention.  So I did not do as much as I would have normally did and it makes me wonder, am I popping on to wildstar more often than I thought I would because I actually like it or am I popping on to wildstar now because it is there and it really needs to be nothing better than just something to do because that is what I needed.

If I am so willing to find something else to do.  So willing to leave junk sitting in my bags, so willing to skip doing ordos on my characters this week, so willing to not list auctions, so willing to say I would skip this weeks raid, so willing to forget about doing things in warcraft maybe it is because warcraft is not really something I was doing because I wanted to any longer, it was something I was doing because it was habit, because it was something to do, because it was the standard way I pass the time.  I wasn't playing because I wanted to play.  I was playing because I always do.

Something games like this need to do is to keep you hooked, it needs to keep you coming back, it needs to always make you feel as if there is something to do, or you will go and find something else.  It is the nature of the beast.

I am not saying wildstar can replace wow, way too early to say that, but it is a very nice distraction right now with the lull in the game and with the feeling that blizzard is pushing me away.  I just wonder if there are others out there that are experiencing the same feeling I am right now, the feeling that the game is pushing me away, and maybe some of those people won't come back.  I will, I always do.  But as people love to say, I am not your normal player.  Maybe those others being pushed away right now won't come back.

Do you feel like you are being pushed away?  I sure do.  I feel like warcraft is giving me reason after reason to find something else to pass the time.