The End of the World (of Warcraft), Part Three
There’s only so much that can be said about a game I don’t intend to play again. The last leg of this journey is maybe the least exciting, but it’s the leg that made me feel okay with who I am and why I don’t think WoW is for me anymore. Let’s dig in.
No Option, Pancake Redux, and the End
I’ve talked about my youthful excursion into Azeroth, and growing up online, watching my friends in the real world move on to bigger and brighter things, while I stayed glued to digital dungeons of ever-increasing complexity. The truth of it was, I was depressed. When I quit WoW in 2011, I was practically suspended from my college, had incredibly few friends around town anymore, and really didn’t know what I was doing.
The years in between 2011 and my eventual return to the game in 2013 are a little hazy, honestly. Brain troubles tend to have that effect on a person. I slept a lot, held down some shitty jobs, and tried to just exist. The people I left behind in Azeroth tried to make the best of it: several of us tried Guild Wars 2 for a month or two, but even that wasn’t quite what we were collectively looking for. Guild leadership passed from me, to Nih, and then to Satake, as they tried to keep some semblance of a raid roster together. I was so checked out that the idea of going back never registered. Mists of Pandariawas announced, and I got into Dota instead. I played other games, I tried to write a novel; all the things you try to do to make yourself feel like there’s stuff the world has to offer. I kept in touch with a handful of the Powers, but we were all off doing our own things. I think Cariono was the only one still consistently playing at that point. Our official forums went more or less dark in the back half of 2012, though I suspect they were largely dead sometime in 2011.
It's September, 2013.
I’m on our Mumble server, futzing around with something. I don’t remember what, but I was in the channel with Geth and Nih. Nih had recently gotten back into WoW, playing an Alliance monk on Earthen Ring. He’d had the expansion from launch, but only recently dipped back in, dragging some of his friends from the TF2/Battlefield clan he’d become a part of along for the ride. The offer was extended to come give a Monk a try, free from the burdens of the Pancake lifestyle we’d more or less left behind. I was nervous, but going back into that game effectively incognito didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world.
I made a monk named Tostado, vowing at the time that I would never play my warrior again. Lucky for me, Monks as a class ended up being everything I’d enjoyed about the latter-day Warrior and then some: mobility, solid crowd threat generation, and a thematically-consistent wrapper. We burned through the early content, and I adopted a much more casual, much healthier response to the game as a whole.
No Option was a casual guild that, despite being on a role-playing server, didn’t adhere much to the unspoken rules of the RP community, something I was sort of thankful for. The people there were nice, even though I don’t think I can pull a single name from that roster that wasn’t a Pancake refugee in some way or another. Nih, Geth and I sought out a handful of other friends from the heady days of our guild’s prominence, but we never actively sought to put a raid roster together. In total, we maybe put together one non-LFR raid in that guild in the time we were there: the vast majority of our time was simply spent dealing with the mundane busywork of dailies, reputation grinds, and dungeoneering. It was comfortable, if a bit boring at times. I saw the Siege of Orgrimmar from the viewpoint of someone mindlessly queueing into Looking-for-Raid matchmaking, all semblance of skill and coordination thrown out the window.
It's December, 2013.
After a few months, I was bored again. It was nice to play with some Pancakes again, but the game itself was in such a weird state, caught between feeling like I had to spin eighteen different plates of dailies and faction grinds, and nothing of import beyond that. The Timeless Isle grind was exactly that, an attempt to take some of the “living world” ideology from Guild Wars 2 but not really iterating on the concept in any measurable way. I took some time off again right before Christmas, with one idea in mind: when Warlords of Draenor came out, I’d come back, and we’d be going home.
August 2014 was there before we knew it, and the Draenor release date was announced. Tostado moved from Earthen Ring to Dragonblight, morphing from a plucky Alliance Pandaren into the Tauren he was probably always meant to be. Word spread that we were getting the band back together, and before long, we had a shocking number of Pancakes from our old roster returning to the fold, people I didn’t expect to ever come back to bear our banner. A handful of new faces found from the games we’d all been playing in the in-between bolstered our ranks, and the modern incarnation of <with Pancakes> was reborn, a bizarre phoenix in the ashes of a largely-dead realm.
There was something pure about much of our time with Draenor. The game itself petered out pretty quickly, and the endgame became a grueling chore. The raiding felt cleaner than ever, like we were in lockstep with the best moments from WotLK, unburdened by petty squabbles and a raid leader who was barely keeping things together. We stayed ahead of the curve through all but the last raid, and had a blast doing so. When personnel issues came up, we were able to handle them with some level of clarity (for once). When we had nights where we couldn’t raid due to staffing, we tried to come up with some back-up plans (for once). We felt more adaptive, more responsive, and more like the family we’d always aspired to be.
It's June, 2015.
Hellfire Citadel was awful. A categorically, completely, confoundingly awful raid, and my frustration with it was reflected in the ways I was starting to revert back to the Toast of Cataclysm days. In a moment that was important for me (and probably dire for the guild itself), I actually saw this reversion happening (for once). Combining that foresight with where my life was at the time - a new relationship, school starting up again, the real world finally opening up for me in some respect - I punched out accordingly. I didn’t want to be that person anymore, who was getting angry at a game because other people weren’t doing exactly what I thought they should be doing. It seemed so pointless, so utterly ridiculous a feeling to be experiencing again. Sure, there was some level of validity to it, but at the end of the day, we were raiding together to have fun.
I wasn’t having fun.
I told them I’d be back for the next expansion, and left things in the hands of my officer corps. From what I remember, they raided about two more times and then called for an end-of-expansion recess. I wouldn’t say I feel bad about pretty directly causing that, but it was a bit disheartening to feel like I had been the lynchpin keeping things together, and that my excision caused such a dramatic toppling effect in the guild. I kept out of the spotlight, hung out with the Powers I’d dragged down into the Dotahole, and felt okay being gone from WoW.
It's April, 2016.
Legion was, and in my opinion remains, the best incarnation of the <with Pancakes> roster. When I came back to the game, I expected to have to rebuild some vast portion of our personage. Instead, nearly everyone from the Draenor roster was still there, primed and prepared to tackle things with aplomb. Surprisingly enough, we actually did. We progressed steadily, we staffed raids regularly, we killed things and earned achievements.
Maybe most importantly, we realized that breaks were necessary, and acted accordingly. When we’d cleared the raids enough to sate our loot lust, we took time off. Even having a few weeks off from our scheduled raids were a godsend, giving me time to remember the reasons I enjoyed the game. We focused on dungeon runs, we spent time goofing off; sometimes, we just didn’t play the game, because there was no seemingly-mandated pull saying “you have to keep at this, or you’ll fall behind.” We weren’t behind, we were on top of things. We never sought to become a Mythic guild, despite Cariono’s desire to do just that (sorry, Ono), but we had more than enough fun with the Heroic encounters. Legion’s raids were well-designed, interesting, and - with the exception of one particular fight in Antorus - all seemed like they were going somewhere.
It was, by far, the most fun I had playing World of Warcraft. It took thirteen years, but the family we’d always sought to build in <with Pancakes> finally felt like something we’d made. When people weren’t there for the night, their absence was felt. When we cleared an encounter we’d been stuck on for weeks, there was palpable joy, a shared celebration. It very rarely felt like someone was thinking, “oh, thank god, we don’t have to do that again.”
Except for the Coven; Christ, fuck that fight.
It's March, 2018.
Our roster stayed more or less the same over the course of Legion. We lost a few folks due to the rigours of real life, but we were able to push on and clear everything, staying ahead of the curve once again. When we called for our end-of-expansion break, a few months before Battle for Azeroth, it wasn’t a matter of being fed up with the game. From my own standpoint, I was just comfortable being done with it for a while. We’d done what we set out to do, and it felt silly to keep dredging that well for things that would be invalidated in a few months anyway. At the end of it all, we saved the world and our guild lived to tell the tale.
For once.
It's August, 2018.
Battle for Azeroth releases to some tepid fanfare. We all dive back in, but in the time in-between, my life has gone through dramatic changes. An end to a nearly-two-year relationship and the cautious, world-upending steps back into the dating scene; a job that demands more of my time, social obligations proving more and more prominent; and a move between apartments resulting in a vastly different headspace...all of these things added up to me realizing that I just didn’t have the time I used to think I had for Warcraft.
I gave it a fair shot, but upon realizing how much of BfA felt and feels like a vestigial modification to the fundamental shift that Legion was, it was hard to care, to run that eerily similar treadmill again for who knows how long. I still love the people I raided with, and remain incredibly proud of all we’d done over the years. We built a family and brought in people from every era of Dragonblight under one roof: I jokingly refer to <with Pancakes> as the Home for Wayward Dragonblighters, and that name seems all too fitting with the additions to our roster in BfA.
Most importantly, though, I realized in the singular raid I ran in this expansion cycle, that the Pancakes don’t need me to stick around anymore. When I left in Draenor, raiding ground to a halt almost immediately. Now, they’re doing just fine, progressing into Heroic Uldir with extra tanks on retainer in case someone can’t make it. I’m proud of them, and proud of myself for being able to finally say, “yeah, I’m good, you guys go on ahead. You’ll be fine.”
It's September 24th, 2018.
I quit World of Warcraft two weeks ago, and I don’t plan on going back to Azeroth. My game time expires on October 5th, but I’ve already uninstalled it. It’s weird to think about, but when I wake up on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and think, “Oh, right, I don’t have to raid tonight,” it’s a feeling of relief, this wave of possibility. I’ve got a lot going on in the real world, between trying to co-exist with an anxious mind, exploring my feelings and how they relate to people I care about, and just trying to find Dylan again.
I'll miss Toast and Tostado, but those characters were rarely more than extensions of myself: I don't really have an online vs offline persona, it's kind of just me. I’ll miss the people I spent so much time in that world with, and in a perfect world, there will be another game down the road where we can all reunite under the Pancake banner.
I just don’t think it’ll be WoW anymore.
