Officially Cancelled

So about five minutes ago I officially cancelled my membership to Warhammer Online.  My account will still be active for 12 more days, but it's highly unlikely that I'll ever sign-in again.  Rest in Peace, Lexaeus.

Part of me feels a bit of remorse for not being compelled by the game.  I was really excited about it from the get-go, but, alas, it failed to captivate me.  Rather than go into a sort of mini-review of the game focusing on what it didn't give me, I'll try to discuss what I didn't give to the game.  I think we approached this whole experiment all wrong, expecting too much from a game that launched only two weeks before we started playing.  I certainly invested a considerably amount of time playing the game, trying to fall in love with it.  I think my lack of experience with MMOs in general made it hard for me to become engrossed.  For about the first two weeks, I had close to no idea what I was doing, simply running around, questing, and engaging in random battles.   I think most of my experience with the game was random fiddling, as opposed to actually trying to process what was going on regarding the interface and all that good stuff.  

I admit, I enjoyed myself when playing with my fellow WarJammers, but that's probably because I had some general idea of what I was trying to accomplish.  For the most part, that goal involved things that weren't exactly in-game "norms."  So did I master the game mechanics of Warhammer?  Not at all.  Did I master a sort of counterplaying?  Probably.  To be fair, this doesn't allow me to justify calling it a "bad game."  Frankly, I wouldn't have the slightest idea of what would constitute a "good" MMO.  

I didn't hate my gameplay experience, but rather didn't quite understand it.  I actually gained some sort of insights about MMOs from the experiments, but the times I actually sat down to play didn't enlighten me much, probably because I was spending too much time trying to figure out what I was trying to do.  The learning curve was a little steep, and I'm sure that's the primary thing that turned me off of the game.  It may be something applicable to MMOs in general.  As I've made pretty clear, this was my first experience with one.  Suffice to say, the genre could benefit from being a little more "n00b friendly" if it wants to step away from the stereotype associated with it.

Another crux, which is inherently related to my last epiphany, was the splitting of the teams.  All the noobs were on one side, the MMO "experts" on the other. (Shhh.  I need to justify Chaos' embarrassing performance in the skirmishes for my own ego's sake.)  Had we split up more intelligently, that may have done something to ease the learning curve.

All in all, I don't regret having played one bit.  I was exposed to a whole new [online] culture, populated with players ranging from defensive fanatics to bored newbies like myself.  I just feel my experience could have been more beneficial had I actually been able to understand what was going on.  As other WarJammers have already pointed to the game's pitfalls, I don't feel it's necessary to elaborate on that.  As a moderately competent gamer in other genres, I can attest and agree with most of their complaints.  But overall, I feel Warhammer, and MMOs in general, require a certain degree of experience and familiarity with the genre.