My 10-month-old daugh­ter is sick, cough­ing, con­gested. Con­fused. She doesn’t under­stand why my wife and I don’t just fix it. It’s impos­si­ble to explain that we would use this awe­some con­ges­tion power on any­one but her. So, lots of sooth­ing, lots of grumpy dia­per changes, lots of naps inter­rupted by vicious chok­ing on mucus. She finally goes to real sleep late in the evening.

Par­ent free­dom time! How­ever, said par­ents are absolutely exhausted. Need to do some­thing before sleep, though. We’re not parent-bots.

“Hey, you know what would be great?”

“No, what’s that?”

“Want to do some dailies? Just to relax for a few min­utes. Get you closer to that rep sword.”

“That sounds good!”

Ok then! Let’s log on for fif­teen min­utes or so and do some dailies.

Position in queue: 429
Estimated time: Calculating...

The cal­cu­lated time ended up being twenty-four minutes.

Back in the days when we were sit­ting down for a three or four hour block, a twenty-four-minute delay was just a minor irri­ta­tion. But now, we’re (try­ing to) log on for a half-hour or even ten-minute ses­sion. A twenty-four minute wait? It’s the whole thing.

This got me thinking.

Don’t get me wrong–I appre­ci­ate Bliz­zard reach­ing out to us casu­als with dailies, shorter instances, and eas­ier raids. The sys­tem mechan­ics and con­tent are the best ver­sion of WoW yet. All great fun, and I wish I had more time to play and enjoy this ver­sion of WoW.

I was just dropped from my server this morn­ing (3:30am server time), and couldn’t log back on. I was fish­ing in Stormwind. The server was as empty it gets. No notice of server restarts or any­thing like it, just boot then hang at login screen. (Other WoW game servers were up.) Oh, they’ll prob­a­bly have it worked out in what, fif­teen min­utes? An hour? I’ll be com­mut­ing to work by then. For me, it’s the same as being offline all day.

Raid instances are just per­form­ing poorly over­all. A two-second lag when I try to heal some­one? I just don’t have that time for this kind of expe­ri­ence anymore–I don’t have time to block out an evening and then have it be wasted for basic mechan­i­cal rea­sons. For all that peo­ple are argu­ing about class rebal­ances and what­not, every spell I try to cast in a raid takes two sec­onds before it begins. (Imag­ine if they put that in the tooltip? “Time before cast begins: 2 seconds”)

I had time recently to go through a heroic that was new to my guild. The oppor­tu­nity to learn new con­tent with my friends, woohoo! But then an unan­nounced, three-hour server main­te­nance down­time in the mid­dle of the instance. In the mid­dle of Sat­ur­day after­noon.

The abil­ity to log in and play a nor­mal ses­sion at any time is more impor­tant than every­thing else put together.

I’m shocked as to what the day-to-day real­ity of play­ing WoW has become: rolling restarts, patches that break more than they fix, game-effecting lag, server crashes, a fre­quent event that kills game per­for­mance, and so on. It’s like we’re all play­ing a mythic ver­sion of WoW, hop­ing that things will get better.

My wife and I are hop­ing that they’ll get it all worked out; that the basic game­play and per­for­mance will soon be more like it was before Wrath came out. But it’s been months now. The crush of the hol­i­days is over, and yet basic game per­for­mance isn’t any better.

WoW has become the high-maintenance boyfriend or girl­friend. Yes, you can get enjoy­ment out of the rela­tion­ship, but it takes so much more effort, time, and patience than it should. I can have fun if I can suc­cess­fully log on. If the server stays up for the time that I play. Just wait for Win­ter­grasp to fin­ish. Wait for Bliz­zard to fix raid per­for­mance and basic game­play response time.

If, if. Wait, wait.

In fact, if I were going to describe the game expe­ri­ence to some­one who was curi­ous about WoW, I wouldn’t rec­om­mend it. I would say to hold off and see. I would say it cur­rently sucks and that they’re try­ing to fix it.

And once I real­ize that the word sucks could be used to describe the game that we’re pay­ing how much each month?

Well, there’s only one ratio­nal piece of advice for some­one who is on the wrong side of a high-maintenance rela­tion­ship, and my wife and I are think­ing about it.