... your virtual life? While there are lots of stories about doctors telling people they only have X weeks to live, in real life I don't think doctors would be willing or able to give you any accurate estimate on how long you still have to live. But in virtual lives it is often easier to foresee the end: your subscription might be running out, or you know the release date of the next game you want to play. In my case I checked and double-checked, the date for the EUROPEAN pre-order access to Lord of the Rings Online is the 14th of April. (US players can already start playing a beta character from 30th of March, and take that one into the release version, albeit with a level cap of 15.) That gives me exactly one month to still play World of Warcraft. I'm not cancelling my subscription yet, better to have a back available in case the LotRO servers aren't stable on release. But in all likelyhood I'll start playing LotRO in a month, and if all goes well won't have much interest in WoW for some time. So what do I do in that month?
For me MMORPGs have always been about setting myself goals and going after them. That can be reaching a certain level, or skill level; doing all quests in some area; making a certain amount of gold for some purchase; or even beating a raid dungeon. There are short-term goals and long-term goals, and so having only a limited time available changes the equation. For example it appears obvious that in one month I won't reach Mount Hyjal, so activities that just serve to check off another case on the complicated Mount Hyjal attunement chart aren't top priority any more.
So right now my top priority is leveling up my warrior to 70. Not because I need him to be at 70, but because that way I can do all the quests in Nagrand, Blade's Edge, Shadowmoon Valley, and Netherstorm, which I didn't do with my priest. I'll get to know the zones I don't know all that well much better, and get the maximum of "content" out of my Burning Crusade purchase. Doing this in one month is perfectly feasible. And of course if I get bored by LotRO, or WoW comes out with the next expansion and I want to restart playing, having two level 70 characters gives me a good start for that.
Secondary goal is to do 5-man instances with my guild, whenever the opportunity presents itself. 5-man groups still are, and always have been, my favorite mode of gameplay in World of Warcraft. In fact, if I should find that LotRO dungeons aren't that good (I simply don't know that yet), it is perfectly possible that I'll play both games, switching to LotRO for soloing fun, while doing group activities in WoW. Again, having two level 70 characters would be ideal for that purpose.
What I am not going to do any more is trying to raid Karazhan, unless there is a situation where 9 people from my guild stand in front of the place and can't play unless I join. I'm simply chickening out on that one. Karazhan is very hard. I don't enjoy very hard. And I enjoy even less the guild drama developing from the fact that it's very hard, and not everybody is equally suited to go there. I'll leave it to the l33t, the kind of people who think they are superior human beings because they enjoy harder dungeons. It is one of the advantages of age that I don't need to succeed in a raid any more to keep up my self-esteem. The only difficulty will be resisting peer pressure in my guild. Some people think that raiding is awfully important, more important than having fun or playing together. But my priorities for what might be my last month of WoW lie elsewhere.
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