After a solid four hours of playtime in the wee hours this morning, Vaktor is sitting at 38.4 and ready to head to Mudsprocket. Progress in Dustwallow has been very solid, if not spectacular in the light of what I’d been grinding through in Stranglethorn and Desolace. I’d entered the session feeling bored and unmotivated – it took me an hour just to work up to logging in – and although that’d gone away by the end, I’m left with the feeling that I’m getting a bit tired of WoW. Again.

Now, the time is fast approaching when I said I was going to make a Big Decision. Probably the default thing to do would be to just stick with WoW for another month and see how it goes. But this won’t help my MMO-hopping problem go away, and I would really like to try to stick with one MMO title for a while – at least long enough to get into and see the endgame, and I’m farthest along in WoW (not that I’m all that far behind in EQ2 or Vanguard.) I do enjoy WoW, and it’s something that I am very much able to turn my brain off and just play, but sometimes you want something more. But path of least resistance and all that.

I’m tempted to go back to EQ2 or Vanguard. And Age of Conan appears to finally be on the horizon, and word that I’m hearing out of the tech beta is actually positive. Hell, I’m even tempted to join in with Tipa’s nostalgia bunch and give EQ1 an honest whirl for the first time. But I’ll move on from all of those sooner or later, just like I will from WoW. It may not happen for months, but the chances are better that it’ll happen some time in the first six weeks, regardless of any perceived progress.

But I am absolutely screaming to go back to EVE Online. I know that I will get bored with WoW sooner or later. If the point is to get into a game, make it my bread-and-butter title and stick with it over the long term, EVE has a better chance of doing that for me than WoW… or, really, anything else out there. It’s by far the deepest MMO, it’s the one with by far the richest variety of possibilities, and the title that comes the closest to really achieving the true potential of an MMO — and one needn’t fear that it’ll get watered down to attract the Least Common Denominator, or that it’ll stop being substantively improved and expanded (as opposed to continuously getting padded out with more of the same content.) There’s my pay-for-one-MMO-at-a-time rule, but that’s easily circumvented by just signing up for a new trial account – I’d be inclined to start fresh anyway – which would give me 14 or 21 days to feel it out again, putting me more than past the expiration of my WoW account.

I’m kind of torn.