Discontent

Warning: Incoming Whining! I'm very aware that I'm whining/ranting/venting a bit here, so take it with a grain of salt. :)

Lately I've been feeling a bit of... I'm not sure what to call it. Burnout isn't quite the right term. Maybe discontent is better. The past week I've been bouncing back and forth between WoW and LotRO, but I'm not so sure that has been a good idea. I'm noticing glaring issues with both games, and worse than that, I'm starting to feel a bit guilty for playing one when I could be playing the other. Yeesh.

WoW Rant-list:

• I've played the content for what seems like 12,567 times. I rolled a baby shammy alt to see if that would help the boredom, but it's slow going because I'm alt-tabbing out every 5 minutes. Cataclysm will take care of this I'm sure, but it's still a long way out.

• The community. While I'm in a fantastic guild and I love my guildies, the overall WoW community leaves a lot to be desired. I know there are other good, mature, kind-hearted people out there, but the rude ones are generally the most vocal.

• Piggy-backing on that... there's no real server community left anymore, since transfers and name changes are so easily had. Unless you count the trade chat trolls, there's some community there but it's not necessarily one I want to be a part of. :) 

• The focus on gear. WoW has always been a game about gear, to a certain extent, so I understand that. But these days between queues for random heroics & Gearscore, it seems that the focus is entirely on gear and fast heroics over all else. People kicking other people in a heroic because they just recently hit 80, people AFKing in heroics, DPS pulling mobs, tanks abusing healers, healers letting people die, requiring insane amounts of GS for lowbie raids because they don't want to "carry" noobs... when did it turn into this? When did people get so competitive that they can't take an extra 5 minutes in a heroic to help another player out?

It seems like increasing accessibility to epics has turned everyone, hardcore and casual alike, into raging gear elitists and has increased the e-peens to gargantuan levels. I don't feel like the servers are filled with other people any more, as much as they're filled with random avatars with numbers attached, if that makes sense.

LotRO Rant-list:

• It's complicated. Really complicated. This is going to sound silly... but I really don't know what half my skills actually do. Part of it is that all the icons look so much alike and really don't tell you anything about the skill. Part of it is that there's about a million different modifiers and skill descriptions, so many that it's hard to tell what exactly something does and how it interacts with your other skills. Part of it is that my hotbars are all full and I'm STILL getting new skills, when I barely use all the old ones. This bothers me, because I don't like just smashing buttons and hoping that something dies.

• Traits/Legendaries are also complicated. I get that there's room for a LOT of customization, way more customization than in WoW, and that's a good thing! At the same time, it's overwhelming. There's a ton of different traits to earn (regular traits, class traits, race traits, legendary traits) and trying to figure how they work together is a challenge. I just got my first Legendary Item this weekend, and even after reading the in-game tooltips and some out-of-game guides on how they work, I'm still having a really hard time wrapping my head around it.

• When you start getting up into the higher levels, claustrophobia sets in. You're going into more solo instances and outdoor dungeons, with more dread and quickly respawning mobs.

• The graphics aren't as stylized, and it can get depressing in certain areas. It's a darker game, for certain. Although I'm starting to appreciate their style of graphics more, at times it can be a little boring, visually.

So yeah... my yin and yang theory about WoW and LotRO seems to be correct. LotRO has a fantastic community, atmosphere, & cosmetic customization, WoW... not-so-much. WoW has great combat, skills, and build customization, LotRO... not-so-much.  They're about an even draw on graphics, depending on your preference and your mood.

Now if only I could stop bouncing between the two of them like an attention deficient squirrel on PCP.