December 10th, 2006

I’ve played [World of Warcraft](http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/) since closed beta. When the game was released I was at the shop first thing in the morning to pick up my pre-ordered copy and went about levelling up my characters.

2 years on and I took a ‘break’ from the game. I got sick of the mindless instance grinding, the repetitive end game, and in general the broken servers. It’s been maybe 6 months since I last played for any period of time. Sure I’ve logged in every few weeks to make sure everything is there, but I haven’t run any instances or what not.

I realised recently that I probably won’t ever play it again. It bores me silly now. Even the approaching [Burning Crusade](http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/) expansion release doesn’t really offer anything that I am overly interested in. In my experience, it’s just more of the same old grinding, farming and mindless quest doing.

Levelling from 60 to 70 might be fun. The new instances along the way may make the game a bit more interesting, but ultimately it’s going to be exactly the same at level 70 as it is currently at level 60. Mindless end game instance raiding, mindless farming and the same old ‘epics > skill’ metaphor that seems to be the driving force behind the game.

Recently a new patch has added a lot of ‘expansion ready’ content including new talent trees, arena pvp system, etc. Out of curiosity I logged in the other day and respec’d my 60′s, just to fiddle with the new talents trees. I even joined a few arena games to see what they are like. In the end I concluded that it’s still a waste of time.

2+ years on from release and the servers are still terrible. Constant server lag makes playing a total pain. Battleground queues are still insanely long. The new arena queues are better, but I think it’s only because the games are insanely fast since most people who pvp are fully epic’d out. I even got randomly booted off the server once while I was playing for no real reason.

So yeah, for me, World of Warcraft is pretty much a total waste of time now. Any new content being added is just the same old farm/grind that makes the game such a pain. I kind of hoped [Blizzard](http://www.blizzard.com/) could do more with World of Warcraft, since i really like the whole world/story behind it, but it doesn’t look like much is changing anytime soon.

I just wish Blizzard would go back to making off-line games. (Starcraft 2? Warcraft 4?) /sigh

No other PC games really spark my interest at the moment either except for [Spore](http://www.spore.com/), which looks totally awesome but isn’t due for release until sometime next year.

Been keeping busy since Melanie went back to America. Had to take care of some last minute xmas shopping which, at this time of year, is an absolute nightmare. Needless to say, I got it done as fast and painlessly as possible.

Looks like I’ll be heading back home early this week. At this stage I’m planning on heading off on Tuesday. Will be only going as far as Dalby on the first day to stop over and do some quick tech support. So I’ll probably be on the road to home on Wednesday morning. Dalby is only around 4 hours from home, so it will be a good short drive.

Haven’t read much lately, or worked on the latest coding ‘project’. I’m hoping to do some more work on it at home.

So yeah, pretty short update really. I’ve got a concise list of things to get done tomorrow which should be pretty easy to do, then I guess I will get into packing my clothes and stuff. I hate packing…