Trying to keep up

It's been slow going recently. I really want to try to stick to my goals, but the amount of free time I've been getting just seems to keep decreasing. It's not exactly a bad thing. I like to stay active, and being on two softball teams, plus an indoor soccer team that will be starting next month, I would consider that pretty active.

It's just not going to help my leveling much, and with multiple characters that I need to get up to par, it looks like a the goal I set, which seemed very realistic at the time, may in fact be beyond my reach.

Am I sad? Maybe a little, but I can be happy in the fact that I did get a character to 70 before the expansion, and that's really a bigger accomplishment for me.

I'm hearing confirmations all over the place that the leveling through Outland will be 30% faster, so it looks like my assumptions were correct. This is good for me because I have so many characters that will hopefully get there at some point.

I know there are people who don't like this faster leveling thing. They argue that it takes away from the accomplishment of making it to the top. Well maybe it goes faster, but it's still an accomplishment.

The main reason I think they implement this is to not discourage new players. It took so long to get to 60 when the game first came out, and while everyone who had made it that far just had the 60-70 grind to go, for a newcomer they would have 1-70, and that's really hard to do when you've read about how cool end game is and want to get there.

I know I would have probably gotten discouraged long ago if they hadn't done something about it. With all my alts, if it took the same amount of time to get to 60 as it did when I first started, there's no way I would have even bothered trying.

Actually, I probably would have quit. I have considered quitting a few times, but something always comes up.

I stopped for about 3 months when it was taking too long to get my first character to 60, but my friend eventually got me playing again.

I was going to quit last year because my alts were taking too long to progress, then they announced the leveling speed increase and I decided to keep going.

More recently I was going to quit from lack of time between WoW and all the Xbox360 and Wii games I had, but then all that stuff was stolen from my house and I turned back to WoW again.

I do want to play through to at least 60 as Horde though at some point. While the quests form neutral NPCs are the same, all the faction quests are different, and it's almost like having a fresh start at the game where you don't really know where everything is yet. I'm looking forward to it.

I don't know what the future holds as far as my WoW playing, but I am going to stick with it as long as I play enough that I think it's still worth paying $15 a month to keep going. Hopefully that will last long enough for me to accomplish everything I want to.