WoW. Done.

Yup, I'm done. After something like six years of paying a monthly fee, I've finally quit playing WoW.

In truth, I more or less stopped playing not long after Cataclysm came out, mostly because the game suddenly seemed very easy but partly because the novelty of the quest system had worn off. When you don't take the time to read quest details that you've never been on before, you know it's a grind.

I actually stopped the credit card payments back in October, right after we needed to make some financial concessions to the economy, but I stopped payment on the 22nd and the three-month payment had gone through on the 19th.

Today is January 19th, three months later.

I'm sorry to say I did not quite get my first character, Leonadril, my Assassination Rogue Gnome, to level 85. He's at the Twilight Highlands, hovering in the air in his Turbo-Charged Helicopter Thingie, trapped about 2/3rds of the way to the final level. He has about 4000 gold, but I'm a terrible entrepreneur and never did learn to work the farming/auction house part of the game to my benefit. '

The only other character I really spent significant time on is Amahiah, a female Feral Druid Tauren. She's at level 80, and to be honest I'm not quite sure where she's at. I never got her to any of the new areas.

In the course of the last six years, I think I tried every race and every class, although nowhere near every combination. At one point in the early days, I think I had four alts going at once to better allow my characters to rest. At the end, I don't think I *ever* rested with Leonadril, and he was getting 200% for critters the whole time. Maybe I'd saved up several months worth when he was inactive.

I played with guilds for a short time. The first one was fine, but there were a couple of people that just wouldn't shut up. When we moved down to Wilsonville and spent almost all of our free time trying to fix things in the house, I didn't play for a month and that guild kicked me out. I did not try to get back in, as they didn't ask me what I was up to and if everything was OK.

The other guild(s) I played in were a cross-faction guild that had an Alliance and a Horde side. The Alliance side broke off, and kicked me out after I'd stopped playing for a while when my mother had so much trouble 18 months ago. They were nice enough, but wanted to do heroic raids and I wasn't geared for it. I did contribute more than I took from the bank, and even contributed 200 gold (which was a lot for me at the time, saving up as I was for a cycle, which I eventually got) toward one of the leaders for a birthday present. Again, no notification, which kind of annoyed me, especially as they knew I went back and for with two different characters for long periods of time.

I had more luck with the Horde side, going on three or four dungeon runs with them. Unfortunately, at the time I had an extension in my system for DivX that was making ventrilo useless, at least for me talking, and dungeons are no fun if you can't make jokes that people can hear. I suspect that Amahiah is still part of that guild as we speak, but I haven't touched that alt for nearly a year.

There was a time early on when WoW absorbed much of my life. I originally started playing to have an avenue of communication with my daughter, who I ended up playing with for one session. When I said that I'd been waiting for that moment for some time and was very happy, she freaked out and we were never on at the same time again. Kind of sums up my experiences with my daughter, I'm afraid.

In the end, I was good for about two hours. I love exploration games where you go on to the next thing and see what's there and kill it, but there was so little differentiation between critters in the end (at least in terms of how I went about killing them) that every quest became a grind. When I heard that the next expansion was going to feature a new race of Kung Fu Pandas, I knew that the time had come, and it didn't take much for me to pull the plug.

At this point, I've had no luck in my handful of attempts to find a replacement MMORPG, and I really have no interest in doing so, even when my discretionary budget rises again at some point. The iPad has introduced me to micro-gaming with games like Ascension, and the ability to play a game within 10 or 15 minutes to completion is more in line with my mindset these days. WoW was a big part of my life for a few years, arguably too big a part of my life, but like all things it has run it's course. I suspect at some point I'll get a little nostalgic and pay for a month to get Leonadril out of Airline Hell and finish his storyline off, but it will be a while.

I'm just glad WoW wasn't around when I was in college. I would never have graduated, like many others of that age who got into it. I don't even want to think of what I'd have run into  That said, as addictions go this one was an awful lot of fun.