Hello there you few brave souls who have stuck with me through the *crickets* and sounds of silence my blog has become. I recently realized how much I’ve missed blogging, so I made a commitment to start writing again. I’m taking an hour a week to see how much I can get done, both here on my fun blog and elsewhere on my business blog. I’m even using a program called Toggl to make sure I get in a full hour. This week, some of that time was spent finding images to break up the wall of words, but a lot of that time was spent contemplating what gaming topics I might cover. I got pretty tired of being emo about games. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all isn’t going to work with this commitment to write stuff.

This “armor” is ridiculous!

Lets face it, for those of us who play MMOs, things have been a bit weird/bad/boring… meh. Wildstar’s cutbacks gutted that community, WoW has been chugging along like those perpetually looping soundtracks you hear in malls and eventually ignore, and SWTOR’s new content lasts as long as an ice cube on a hot sidewalk. I still see Rift and Defiance pushing out community enthusiasm posts, which is great to see. Games like those and LOTRO are still out there, but no longer feel vibrant and enticing to me anymore. I won’t even go into my reasons not to try out BDO (Boob Desert Online), but you probably get the gist of it.

People are hyping upcoming games like Star Citizen (that feel to me like they’ll never be ready to play). “Super Secret IPs” keep being hinted, but lets face it, if you can’t tell us what they are yet, they aren’t coming anytime in the near future. Slow trickles of writers and developers away from other games have me confused about them. Are those people leaving for bad reasons, or horrible reasons, or maybe the games are mostly done and they don’t have stuff to do anymore? I remember a time when I had a lot of enthusiasm about games. There were joyful noises being made and a lot of really positive vibes going on. Now, it really feels like many of us are just going through the motions, trying to recapture those glory days of old. This tweet from today sums up my feelings about this perfectly:

I even went back to play WoW for a while. I sub’d for a game cards worth, then used in-game gold to buy a couple of months worth of tokens. The garrison stuff kept me going for a while. I played a monk with my hubby up through level 60ish. Tried to grind rep in Tanaan. But when all was said and done, I let the last two weeks of my last token evaporate without logging in. And I have no regrets about that.

On a positive note, I did join an active SWTOR guild recently and they are still doing things to keep folks interested and involved. I ran a trooper themed Op with them that went… interestingly… I ran a couple of Ops with my other guild to shake out the dust on my Gunslinger and had fun and started to gear her up. It was funny seeing the contrast between mass chaos and a well oiled machine. Considering how much doing Ops content keeps me involved and having goals, I REALLY hope SWTOR’s team understands how important it is to keep creating new operations for us.

So I ask you few, you proud, you brave souls who are still reading this: What games are you playing and do they give you joy or do you go through the motions of playing them? Convince me I’m wrong about being MEH, I dare you!