I guess that's it

I finally bit the bullet and canceled. I just didn't care anymore. There's not much more that I can experience. My schedule doesn't fit raiding very well. I'm not willing to twist my life around to fit it. My closest friends rerolled on another server, but I'm tired of rerolling. Of course these are just the immediate reasons why I quit. The more general and important reason is the not caring.

Why did I stop caring? I suppose you could read all my posts to see, but that would take far too much time for the payoff (nothing).

The game is too focused on gear and it drags players with it, so if you're not chasing gear, there's no one to play with. I don't want to spend my time in arenas, but that's where the gear is these days.

The raiding system is not fun. The focus is on gear, but the random system is terrible, including doing bad things for the mind. Each boss kill is little more than another pull of the level on a slot machine. The costs are high. I once met an engineer (with every single schematic in the game, including the old-world raids) who was switching to LW in a few days just for drums. How fucking stupid is that? Did Blizzard never realize that something was wrong when shit like that is happening? Yea, I'm swearing, I try to avoid it here, but being nice and polite never seemed to help anything. Oh right, raids... They're supposedly balanced, which really means designed for a certain minimum gear combined with chain-potting, specific professions, and all sorts of flasks. Don't bother to try without these, or just wait a few months before it all gets nerfed, or another expansion hits and no one cares about the old content anyway.

Solo content is almost exclusively grinds. Reputation grinds are not content. They are not fun. They are massive time sinks, a distraction to keep people from noticing that there's not much to do if not with at least 5 other people, or preferably 25. What happened to the long quest chains?

The stories are dying and poorly told. Outland was a failure at story-telling. Except for SMV and the Dark Portal, none of the zones carry a ton of weight. I'll excuse Nagrand since it's just plain beautiful and we can't always be in the Apocalypse. Netherstorm could have been better, except it just doesn't look right. The mana forges look like giant pretty machines which never fail (the pipes are supposedly leaking, but the effects are barely noticeable). It doesn't look like a land torn apart by magic, it looks like purple, lots of purple. The zones are too small, except for Nagrand there is just not enough space between enemy factions to make it believable.

PvP gives gear now, really good gear. It's attracted all the loot whores, all the people that don't care about winning or losing, just gear. AV was nerfed from an epic battle to a 15 minute zerg race. Why must PvP give gear? Just prevent the use of PvE gear. Now killing can be its own reward and the raiders can go back to raiding for gear rather than doing arenas. But hey, can we criticize them for going to a system that isn't random?

I suppose I'll say later. My account doesn't end until September 20, so I'll try to sort out my mailboxes and whatnot before then. I'm sure I'll be back to try WotLK.