Recently, through sheer dumb luck and a POETS day, my wife and I acquired a pair of keys for Lord of the Rings Online. I had played its 14-day trial before and had fond memories of it, but I had never got around to upgrading my account to the full version.

I started downloading on Friday, I finished some time on Sunday. This is normal for us, we are lucky to get 60kB/s on our 8-Mb connection, so we just live with it. I think we might have been slightly negative-disposed toward it for this reason. I was happy to wait, because those good memories kept me going.

I finally got to play it and I started getting bored. Something just didn’t work for me. It was sort of fun, but not the exciting adventure that I remembered. I persisted, but it still wasn’t grabbing me. The abilities I had were not very intuitive, I hit them out of habit more than intent. The world was washed out and uninspiring, it lacked the immediacy and vibrancy that I had got used to.

I did it, I committed the cardinal sin; I started to compare it to World of Warcraft…

Every time I go back to an MMO, I play for a little while and then get bored or frustrated and start to crave World of Wacraft. I want to blame it on rose-tinted spectacles, but that is not it. I have left and then gone back to Everquest (one and two), Rappelz, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies (pre and post ‘upgrade’), D&D Online and now Lord of the Rings Online. Some of them have big flaws, some have small ones, but I can come back to that later.

I keep going back to WoW and I love it every time. It is dumbed-down, it is mass market and it is cartoony. It has been enjoyed by more people than all the girls of the Moulin Rouge through history.

World of Warcraft is just not art, but I find that I still love it every time I come back. I surrender; take me back to Azeroth…