Demotivation and Future Articles

For several years, I've been publishing articles at a relatively consistent rate. While it's slowed over time in favor of attempting to improve quality, I've at least tried to get out something every week or two weeks. Given my view count and general lack of regular readers over the entire lifespan of this blog (feel free to comment and prove me wrong if you are a regular reader), I'm not sure if there's anyone who particularly cares that out of seeming nowhere, I haven't published anything for nearly a month. Despite that, I think I owe an explanation for the sudden, extreme decline and this article will provide that explanation.

Reduced Interest in WoW

This phenomenon is rather familiar to me at this point since I've played World of Warcraft long enough to know that even despite how far content design has come, there's going to be points where I'm bored enough of the game to take the closest thing to what I can call a break from the game. What this basically translates to is that I end up playing other games more and focusing on other hobbies. However, I think there might be a little more to the story this time around too in regards to my waning interest in WoW.

Back in Wrath of the Lich King, someone I occasionally played with quit at the conclusion of that expansion because he felt like he "finished" Warcraft. This was understandable considering that the defeat of the Lich King marked the end of the Warcraft 3 story arc that focused largely on Arthas and how he eventually became the Lich King. As someone who was drawn to the Warcraft universe by the same game, I was more interested in the defeat of the Burning Legion that was strongly prevalent in the base game and with that faction largely beaten in the Legion expansion, I'm starting to feel like I might have "finished" Warcraft myself.  At the same time, I might be able to console with this idea by telling myself there's more out there and despite Battle for Azeroth not interesting me too greatly, I do see some story potential in that expansion and beyond. Unfortunately, there is more to the story.

While I enjoyed playing the Legion expansion, I also recognized many problems and wrote articles on a few with possible solutions.  This in turn has led me to disagree with some solutions or lack thereof. For example, Artifact retirement has recently started but it feels pretty bad to have the high amount of progress put into the Artifact devalued. I'd argue this issue would've been negated by not implementing traits like Concordance of the Legionfall in the face of seeing the negative effects of the first set of "Paragon traits" on player behavior. That would leave many Artifact traits that could be added as baseline abilities and effects, meaning the sense of loss can be more easily rationalized. The point I'm trying to is that I (and from what I can tell, some others) find myself in disagreement with some of the design philosophy driving the game at the moment and the impact of said philosophy is much greater than the something fluid like class (im)balance.

This brings me to why the next expansion doesn't interest me that much. There's some interesting content such as Island Expeditions, but there also appears to be a lack of renewal such as with the time-gated raiding gameplay or the apparent forced obsolescence, which in this case, is part of the Warfronts feature. Also, given my recent article series, I also think leveling still needs to be improved because if comments on various WoW-related news are anything to judge, there needs to be more new blood to help wash out the salt produced by more experienced, knowledgeable players. Ultimately, the gameplay of Battle for Azeroth doesn't seem to grab me all that much and the design philosophy being employed, while not terrible and capable of strokes of genius, is questionable in some aspects and what I'm most concerned about is Blizzard may fix some of their mistakes too late if at all.

With all of that said, I'll at least be playing Battle for Azeroth because farming gold shouldn't be too bad to do and it's nice to remain at the Battle.net balance cap so that I can buy any Blizzard games I want. Therefore, the most likely outcome is that I'll play less and in turn have fewer ideas and even less passion to publish what I primarily have done on this blog for the last few years, which is WoW-related articles about relatively recent topics and suggestions to improve the game.

Filling the Void

In a sense it's fortunate I was already aware of this waning interest since it led to me to quit raiding Antorus much earlier than I normally would quit raiding any tier since it's allowed me to consider what other articles I could write. Personally, I preferred gravitating to writing articles about other games rather than going in the direction of politics or real life stuff in general and because of my experience with handling "breaks" from WoW, I found myself playing or replaying many games. I even found a few that I was remotely passionate about, so that means I can write some articles about those, right?

Unfortunately, that is not the case since the games in question are meant for audiences aged 18 or above as I've implied in a relatively recent tweet. Since I would like to think this blog is family friendly in some sense, which in turn allows me to freely link it on forums or other public discussion platforms, I don't think it would be a good idea to publish any articles related to those games. To compensate for this fact, I've been making contributions related to these games in other ways, which is where a fair amount of my free time lately has been going.

As for other games, I only have a few article ideas relating to them, meaning inspiration is lacking there. However, I do have an idea and that leads me to my closing thoughts.

Closing Thoughts

Without divulging too much about my personal information, I haven't ever been particularly good at being passionate about something. What this means is even if I focus my efforts on some activity, it is unlikely that the outcome will be that great, which would explain a lot of things why many of my Youtube videos and articles seem half-assed. Maybe I'm being a little too harsh on myself and admittedly, lack of confidence is another issue to consider among many others. The only exception to this lacking passion has ever been gaming, though even then, I've rarely made a serious attempt at trying to make a living off of that activity and I think I have good reason to avoid doing so.

I bring this up because aside from needing to sort out some overarching issues somehow, I'm surprised that writing what amounts to forum posts about a game I enjoy was something I could do consistently for years before my desire to do so faded and part of why is because of disinterest in the game in question. Since as I mentioned above, I have limited inspiration for article ideas regarding other games at the moment, what I considered was an idea to get around my waning interest in WoW.

While this won't do a lot to increase the rate at which I publish articles, I've entertained the idea of focusing more on major projects about theoretical concepts in WoW such as reworking an entire specialization or class that, unlike my smaller suggestion articles, would have no chance whatsoever of existing in any version of the game. I reason that if I'm not going to be seen, let alone heard, I might as well try to let loose some unrestrained creativity for fun. To put it another way, expect more articles like this one, but a tad shorter. Going in this direction may also provide some relief from my increasingly cynical view of the ongoing development of the game.

To summarize this article: My diminished rate of publishing articles is no accident and is largely a product of personal issues and decreased interest in my primary publishing topic of WoW in addition to other reasons. I may write articles about other games but for now my plans for the next article, if not the next few, will involve grandiose theoretical concepts for a fictitious version of WoW that will never happen but is fun to imagine the possibility of anyways.