I’ve finally, finally, come to a decision. It took me a long, long time to make. That’s kind of the way I am, I guess. I tend to hold off on making decisions until I’ve had a good long time to look at all sides. It makes for badness in my real life. In the MMOGness, it means I tend not to make rash decisions.

But, eventually, I had to make a decision. For the last 25 months, I’ve purchased my WoW subscription in 3-month chunks. My last three month chunk ran out today … and I’m not re-upping it. For the first time since World of Warcraft released, I’m not going to have a live account. It’s been about two months or so since I played regularly, and I just can’t convince myself it’s going to happen anytime soon.

I’m playing EQ2 every week for about five hours, and almost every other minute of my week is taken up by writing or playing non-Massive games. So, I’m hanging up my Paladin hat, and I’m saying goodbye for the time being to what has, for two years, been my favorite Massive game.

In point of fact, I don’t expect to be picking up WoW again even when Burning Crusade comes out. I’m certain that I will be playing World of Warcraft again, of course. I’m not saying that. There’s just so much other stuff coming out in the next three to four months, I can’t justify purchasing the expansion. Heck, I didn’t even get a collector’s edition, so it’s not like I’m going to have the shinies. Someday, I’d really like to play Horde-side. I’ve gotten almost nowhere playing that side. I’d like to play from lower levels with a regular group; I’m loving it on EQ2 and I know I’d love it in WoW.

For the moment, though, I need to step away from Azeroth. I read everything, of course, so I’m sure I’ll know what’s good and bad about the expansion anyway. It still feels sad to do this.

Part of my sadness is that … for various reasons I really feel like WoW has passed me by. The expansion is the start of ‘the next phase’ of Warcraft. Even though I have a level 60 character, and second character fairly close to 60, for the better part of the last two years I’ve played for the most part alone. My schedule never synced up with my RL friends who played regularly, and the guilds I’ve been in have been wastes of time.

What I lament most of all are the groups I never hooked up with off of Argent Dawn. My co-workers have played regularly on two servers now. The Pod People, the Taverncast guild, gave me a very nice invitation to play with them right after the interview. I had it in my head that I had to play on the server my level 60 character was on … not thinking (lo these many months ago) that if I was playing with people I would have leveled faster than my almost-solo Paladin grind to 60.

Sigh.

Good luck, Azeroth. I’m sure I’ll be back eventually.