Okay, Break's Over

One thing I learned while I was away from MMOs for a week was that the world doesn't end if I stop playing.

Okay, that's a bit of hyperbole, but given how FOMO-driven video games tend to be these days, you'd be forgiven if you thought that the weight of the (virtual) world rested on your shoulders.*

That's the sort of quip that I could see Seth
McFarlane make. From Reddit.

I have wondered whether I have the willpower to give up playing WoW again, especially given that I do have an active circle of friends in-game, which is something that simply did not exist in 2014.** That wasn't why I took the break, but the knowledge that there were people who would notice if I weren't around certainly kept me on edge to a degree. 

Sure enough, after the weekend I got pinged by my Questing Buddy to see if I was doing okay. While we hadn't actually played together in-game for close to a year now --she having gone down the hardcore route to complete all the raids (and even managing to get an Atiesh)-- we do still chat regularly, and she and the rest of the group had noticed my absence even though it was only 3-4 days at that point. After assuring her I was fine, just doing other things for a while, I concluded that I couldn't simply vanish unlike 2014 (and to a lesser extent in 2022). 

From The Simpsons (via Tenor).

So when I felt ready to login once more last Friday evening, I discovered a few items of note: my friends were doing their own thing as they always had, and that the active population on the Anniversary servers had shrunk.

The former wasn't a surprise to me at all, since everybody in our friends' group has their own goals and are currently pursuing them, but the latter was. After a few weeks of upwards of 20 layers' worth of active players on the Anniversary Servers, we were down to 9 or 10 layers over this past weekend. 

The layers as of 6:51 Server Time
on Dreamscythe-US on March 16, 2026.

Now admittedly I'm not sure if people in instances count against layers, but given that players were chain-running 5-person instances once the Dark Portal opened, I really doubt there'd be much of a change in population simply because Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and Magtheridon's Lair had opened up. I think what is currently happening is that people either burned out rushing to L70 and getting attuned as quickly as possible, or that people are merely raid logging because they can. 

I haven't been to Outland yet, but given that the main hub there, Shattrath City, is connected to the other major cities via Trade Chat, I know that people haven't been pulling out the "I'm Bored" complaint as is often found in MMOs, so I suspect it's merely raid logging for now. 

***

Well, I'm refreshed. 

And I'm back to doing the same thing I had been doing, which was leveling Briganaa 2.0, and to a lesser extent my Blood Elf pair of toons. If the in-game population of the Anniversary servers continues to decline, by the time I reach Outland I will have the place to myself as everybody will be raid-logging and not doing much else. I won't know for certain until I get there, but I expect that the people running TBC 5-person instances will have dried up just like in 2021, victims of burnout due to following the meta. 

To be honest, that would suit me just fine. I don't need the crowds, and I'm happy doing what I should have done 5 years ago. Live and learn, I guess.

*I'm quite familiar with how FOMO is used to make people play and purchase in-game currency with my limited experience with mobile games. There was a mobile game --whose name escapes me now-- that I played via PC that I simply refused to purchase anything for, but the psychological tricks utilized to try to entice me to purchase currency to buy better items for defense gradually ratcheted up to the point where I simply had to walk away or I knew I'd have broken down and bought stuff just to try to keep up with other players. I'm sure my castle or city is a smoking ruin right now, years later, because of other players who ran roughshod over it in the intervening time. But it was incredibly hard to both walk away and not buy things to improve my standing in the game. And that was.... 2014? 2015? Mobile games have gotten MUCH worse in that regard in the past decade.

**Yes, I had my blogger friends, and you know who you are, but except for the rare direct interaction we didn't play WoW together. Vidyala once offered me a spot in her guild, but as I was quite aware that she'd be making an exception for me as a non-raider I turned it down. I didn't feel it was right for the rules to be bent just because she and I knew each other outside of the game itself.