Some of you might not know this, but I am a voracious and avid gamer. For the most part I’ve kept this blog Warhammer centric and had a side-project running for the everything else blogging. However, I like this blog and have spent much of my blogging career with the same persona. I wouldn’t want to hassle people into changing bookmarks for what would essentially be the same writing with a different focal point. Not to mention, the online persona has been difficult to shake. People just like to call me Grim or Grimnir, and I’m pretty fond of it. At any rate, the wallpaper around here is probably going to change relatively soon, be forewarned.

A week ago I got an email that my subscription to WAR would be ending on the 25th, normally this would be set up to auto-renew but I recently got a new credit card which had a different expiration date causing it to be declined instead. In the past, I might have been more inclined to hop on the account management page and update my information, but I hesitated and ultimately let my subscription lapse. It’s a subscription that’s been running since launch which adds up to nearly two and a half years. The posts as of late have slowed down as my interest in the direction of the game has become a point of conflict with the actual direction. It’s time to cut ties and move along.

This brings me back to the point that I made in opening, that I am an avid and voracious gamer. Over the past 2 years that I’ve been blogging I’ve had my hands on no less than a half a dozen other MMO’s just to get a feel for things. Perhaps to validate that WAR did indeed have the best “feel” for my style of play. I’ve also bought up another 50 or so games on Steam at various points in the year with their insane deals, and occasionally just to play with some of the other people I’ve met on Twitter and from blogging over the years. Add to this perhaps another dozen AAA titles ranging from Need For Speed, Borderlands, Section 8, and smaller more indie-ish games like Mount and Blade, Minecraft, or Magicka.  I particularly LIKE having one game to focus on since it keeps me a little more focused on things to write about instead of being all over the place.

Right at this moment, I’m looking at a transition to Rift. I’ve intentionally invested a fair chunk of change into the game, buying the CE and a 6 month sub at the 10$ per month discounted rate. I’m in a guild of people that  I consider peers and connoisseurs of the gaming industry being the Circle of Trust from Multiplaying.net . Then there’s the merits of the game itself, which so far are unprecedented in an industry all too eager to release broken, buggy, and unfinished games over and over again. Rift is a complete product that stands out from the rest and deserves the respect it’s been given so far. When literally the only major complaint that can be made about the game is the server queues, connectivity issues, and generally too many people trying to be in the same place at the same time, you know you’re probably onto something.

It’s funny, today, the official launch day for Rift, the 1.4.1 patch for WAR goes live, then on top of that they’re giving out renown bonuses as well over the next week.  I think their aim might be a little off, Rift is so well put together that most players have been willing to wait upwards of 5 hours in a queue just to get on a server. Where does that leave the target audience that WAR is pandering to? You’re not getting any of the high quality players, you’re getting the ones that are going to be complaining about how terrible it is that an MMO on launch day/week has server queues (gasp!). I wouldn’t exactly call these players high quality at all.

Maybe they’re trying to keep other players from leaving WAR at this time, but I wouldn’t be too worried about that. If they’re going to stay, Rift likely isn’t even a factor in their day to day life. You’ll be rewarding the players who are going to stay anyway for staying, which is cool I guess. To be fair, it isn’t unprecedented for WAR to offer renown bonuses during patch weeks anyway, so maybe it’s all about timing and coincedence. Eh, probably not. Much as I like the game, it’s changing in ways that I just can’t swallow any more and I don’t expect things to change on account of a single blogger who is just plain tired of the same old same old after a solid run of two and a half years. I’ve had my fun, as is well documented, but it’s time to give something else a shot.