So it's been a while since I've written anything, mostly because I didn't want to bore myself or anyone else about the sort of stuff I complain about pretty regularly to the people who read my blog anyway.
Something that's been weighing on me lately is my sudden onset lack of motivation to do basically anything in WoW. I'm not really sure what kicked it off- Well, that's a damn lie, I know exactly how the transition came about. I'm just sort of marveling at the complete and sudden about-face that happened.
Claire wanted to check out XIV. I was on board for this, I was actually one of the last of us to give up XIV initially. It sucked, yeah, but I'd usually log on to see if I could find armor or a new hammer or something, or I'd mess around with my leves. Of course, I canceled my "sub" when the game went pay-to-play like the rest of us but I always held out hope that XIV could be fun. It just really, really wasn't.
Most of the NB ends up returning to XIV, anyway. We pick a great time to return, as it was right after a major renovation, and also the worst time ever to return, since the character-migrations weren't completed yet for the folks who'd been Inactive. This means that yes, the game was fresh and playable and new, but no, we couldn't bring our old folks. For some of us, this wasn't a big deal: Claire had barely done anything worth saving on her old cat, and while I goofed off with my character I was more interested in moving over the gear and gil I'd collected. We rerolled new characters with our old names and I began exploring while everyone else reinstalled. Suckers.
Once we're all in the game and getting our footing back under us, the whole kaboodle goes down for maintenance. This is okay, because we had a WoW Raid that night. It went okay, but I'll admit most of my excitement wasn't for our weekly loot-doesn't-drop-and-we-shard-everything run at Dragon Soul, it was for getting back to the new game. After the raid, character migration was live. Mai, who had put a lot of effort into his old character (37pug, 20-something LNC, lots of gil) decided to delete his new Mai and take the old Mai. However, due to a glitch or bug or something, simply deleting the name of a character doesn't free the name up immediately. So when Mai Ikari got erased to make room for Mai Ikari, Mai Ikari was already taken by Mai Ikari.
Mai, like most RPers, is attached strongly to the name. Proceed for Mai to flip shit.
We spent the weekend goofing off and doing leves as a group. It was fun. Imagine that, fun in FFXIV! Strange, I know.
Something happened last week though, that I didn't count on. The Easter event hit Warcraft and with it, a ton of achievement points. There's a meta-achievement you get by doing all of the seasonal achievements for an entire year. I started in July when we returned to WoW last year and was steadfastly carrying out my goals; the reward is a purple proto-drake and I wanted it for the pile. The Easter event, however, is a bunch of bullshit. A cities-wide egg hunt where you use chocolate for currency to buy things to get achievements. Or, you hope to get lucky and have your eggs contain stuff for the achievement. Of course, everyone is doing the event, so the egg hunt ends up being several people parking on a spot and mashing right-click on the spot where the egg spawns, hoping to loot it before everyone else.
Also, it takes something like 500 chocolate to finish the achievement. I called it quits at 80, which took me a couple of hours due to the competition. I simply had no urge to sit in a single spot with intense competition and collect things, maybe, for hours on end. Realizing THIS made me realize that I'm sort of... Tired of WoW's bullshit, I guess we can say. Our raid is successful on Normal and none of us really have the want to push into Heroics beyond casually dabbling. As a group, we've obtained a large portion of the list of things to obtain, but there are some hold-outs that we've never seen. Everyone in our raid knows I complain weekly about my never-dropping boots, which have a 12% droprate and have never been seen by our eyes, despite having killed the guy who drops them 18 times.
Realizing I was sick of THAT made me realize I was sick of hunting Anzu, too. He's a once-per-day boss that spawns in an outdated dungeon and has a chance to drop a rare mount. I killed Anzu every day since about Thanksgiving. Well, up until about a week ago. 120~ kills, give or take, no mount. Three guildmates began hunting him after me and all of them obtained in maybe a month.
We've gotten to the string-and-carrot portion of WoW. There's things left to be had, but they are no longer in my power to obtain. I, personally, have nothing to do with it; I cannot achieve these things without the dice rolling my way. Droprates have never been my friend.
Meanwhile, XIV is over there, fresh to be explored. I heard rumors of a dungeon filled with pirate treasure in a faraway land so I airshipped my ass to a new place and looked for the dungeon. I found it, and I found lots of keys and lots of chests. I figured out that leaving the will-o-wisps alone will let them arrive in a destination where they turn into monsters that drop valuable keys. I learned those keys can open chests that have BETTER KEYS in them. I never did find any pirate-specific treasure, but I did find myself surprised when my battle music started playing when I wasn't in battle only to turn around and find a sea monster and a dozen of her babies streaking towards me. I didn't find any treasure but I did find a pirate's bandanna in her belly. I have an idea what happened to the pirates.
I killed NMs, I felt clever when I realized the dogs dying made the Lone Coeurl appear, I lost myself for hours in a lightless cave filled with monsters and I realized... That's exactly what I wanted from an MMO. XIV currently plays like an action game with RPG stats and a shared playerbase. I realized that, while I'm in XIV, Kingdoms of Amalur has zero chance of me picking it up since XIV does exactly what I wanted out of KoA, only with my friends.
WoW is in a holding-pattern until Pandaria comes out. I feel bad, because I appear to be the only one who caught the bug this badly, but I also feel as if we've beaten Cataclysm. Deathwing is dead by our own hands; We did it more or less on our own, fuckwads in GDI be damned. Every time I read about TOR being a muddled piece of shit, the vengeancey part of my brain considers it kharmic whiplash for those fuckers being fuckers. I hope their precious guild bank got eaten and all of their characters were logged in removed areas.
Bile aside, XIV is fun, WoW was fun. I got into the Diablo 3 beta and haven't even touched it yet because XIV has been something new every night. I don't know how the others feel, and if they all bounce when our month is up I'll probably go too, but I'm getting a lot of enjoyment out of it and I want to have my fill.
When did XIV become fun?
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