Finally off the WoW?

It's official, I think I am finally done with the great and almighty World of Warcraft. I canceled my account today. After nearly 5 years of playing including time in the closed and open beta phases, I've had enough. I tried to do one last raid, a simple 10-man Naxx run... it was so boring I pulled the plug on my router to fake-disconnect.

It's funny, even though I'm probably quitting the game and not going back, never to see the geeky denizens of Azeroth again... I still did not want to 'man up' (as much as you can in a game raid) and just say I wanted to leave. I'm not sure if this is a personal defect or not, but I don't appriciate any game that makes me feel that I'm going to be letting these anonymous people down by leaving them short a healer (I played a holy paladin). Psychoanalysis aside, MMOs need to find a way for players to be able to invest time when they want to, off a schedule.

It's really the cardinal sin of MMO's. If you want to get anything done, you need to either join a guild with strict attendance rules and a DKP system, or hope that someone with enough charisma and say in that server's community decided that they need your class that night for a PUG raid. Not to mention the pug raids really only came to the general public with the release of the far to easy WOTLK content. You want accomplishment, but at the same time you really want something that you can jump in and out of, without bothering the progression of others. The company that can figure out how to have a MMO that is large but you are able to jump in and out of, without affecting real accomplishment, will truely innovate the genre. Unfortunetly, real innovation in the MMO market is few and far between. Even WoW, for all it's splendor, copies most if not all of the standard MMO technology.

For those of us who played the original Everquest, or before it Ultima and all it's revisions, WoW was in many ways more of the same. It takes most of the same game mechanics, if better refined and polished, and reuses them to it's benefit. In small doses, I have tried the other MMO offerings of this year and the previous year. All I see is more of the same. There are small bonus' to each game, Warhammer online had a very good idea with public quests, Age of Conan's keeps were very cool. But each game, when boiled down to the technical way the game plays, is very much the same thing.