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Winding down FFXIV

Might be bad timing with 6.1 coming out next week or so, but I’ve not been feeling like logging in to FFXIV a lot lately.

The person who is usually filling in for someone missing in our static was showing interest to join anyway and so I took the chance to bow out and they raided without me for the first time last night, progging on P3S. I was there at the start but let the others (who actually want to play) play despite the transition only being planned in 2-3 weeks.

We’ll see, maybe 6.1 is exciting and I absolutely plan to have a look at the Alliance raid, but I’m having much more fun with Guild Wars 2 and a bit more fun with WoW at the moment.

I plan to run a few more dungeons for irregular tomestones before reset but I’m not pushing it, really. I got my hairstyle and headgear, everything else is optional. One more mount probably, maybe two of them.

I resubscribed in August, that’s 8.5 months (+ the two weeks that roped me back in), and 4 of them in the new expansion – and I played nearly every day for most of the time I was subscribed. Probably the perfect time to take a short break.

Blizzard and this train wreck

I’m usually not one to comment here on anything that’s going on in the outside world, I have other outlets for that.

But when I read the California sues Blizzard thing I became more than a little mad because it doesn’t sound like a single case (which would be bad enough) but more like a general problem there, and probably in the whole industry.

But Blizzard should be ashamed at every level of management, but the higher up, the worse it gets.

As someone said so aptly, it shouldn’t be too hard to not be a sexist asshole, but apparently the low bar is too high.

As I wrote in a comment in Naithin’s blog, I find the phrase “separate the art from the artist” very problematic if you talk about something like a book by one author on the one end of spectrum and a 15 year old game like WoW on the other hand, where hundreds of people were and still are involved.

So for all the people who think just voting with your wallet and unsubscribing right now is the correct way of action, my hat is off to you, I think it’s the best way to proceed.

For those others (like me) who spend like 50% of their spare time in WoW at the moment… I think it’s valid to not sabotage that for yourself and keep playing, after all we should assume that the majority of people working there are decent. And yes, you can call me a hypocrite for that, but currently it’s not simply “one of many games” I play, so unsubscribing to vote with my wallet feels a lot harsher than many things I can imagine in regards to any form of brand loyalty regarding physical goods.

Goodbye MMO Fallout

It’s kind of rare (I think) that blogs have dedicated “Goodbye” posts, most linger on without updates (guilty as charged) only to be removed from RSS readers after years of inactivity.

In line with the more professional tone of the website, I nearly missed the announcement that MMO Fallout is shutting down. Why did I miss it? It’s one of those blogs I don’t check very often – I’ve been reading it regularly for years, but only checking what happened in a burst once or twice a month. I also might have mentioned that I mostly read MMO blogs where I follow the authors – no matter what they’re playing at the time – more than a single game. Connor was an exception insofar (as hinted above) as there wasn’t much “Let me tell you a story what happened ingame last night” but writing about topics I *usually* don’t really care much about (lawsuits, financials, Runescape :P), but MMOFallout was always interesting, so thanks for that!

Hat tip to Wilhelm where I read about it (as I often do) because in the summer months when I don’t commute by public transport, my MMO blog reading goes down significantly compared to the winter.