Blogging my life

I'm still angry and a bit scared, and put off from gaming since Sunday. I haven't played anything all week, watching The West Wing on DVD instead every night. As the regular readers among you know I really stopped playing World of Warcraft actively two months ago. Last weekend I read a badly formulated guild MOTD which annoyed me a bit (even if I'm sure that in reality the situation in my guild isn't that bad), and which reminded me that I was still paying for a game I wasn't playing any more, and that the next 3-month billing cycle would start soon. So I cancelled my WoW account. That was supposed to be a mere footnote. I only blogged about it because I don't think you can write a MMORPG blog without saying for which games you are paying a subscription. But that evolved into a nightmare, with over 50 mostly negative comments, and that is after deleting the worst of them. Plus a lot more even worse comments on the sites that linked to it. My remarks were ripped out of context, misrepresented, suspected of all sorts of ulterior motives, and a rabid horde of obsessed WoW fanbois generally totally overreacted to what I said. Not fun!

Some remarks especially annoyed me. On WoWInsider several people accused me of being an attention whore. Doh! It wasn't me who linked that blog post on WoWInsider, and I certainly wish they wouldn't have linked to me. I wouldn't have posted an "I quit" post on the WoW message boards, because I'm aware of the kind of reaction that evokes. I just don't see how I'm not allowed to say what games I stop playing on my own blog.

The other annoying sort of remarks were the snotty "more pewpew, less QQ" ones. I really would have expected something better from otherwise intelligent bloggers like Kinless. Instead he tries to put me down with unimaginative leetspeak nonsense. And the worst is that I'm absolutely sure that in the next two years he and many other bloggers will stop playing World of Warcraft. And I don't see how they will avoid posting about quitting and their reasons for it on their blogs. You just can't have a WoW blog and not mention when you stop playing.

Thanks for listening, and thanks for proving that intelligent discussion is still possible here on yesterday's essay on difficulty.