When I came back to World of Warcraft at the end of Dragonflight’s cycle, I’d been away for over two full expansions. I’d been leery of all of the negative press around Shadowlands and tired of the borrowed power systems that crept in since Legion, which is why I stayed aloof for several years. But it was the word that Blizzard was genuinely trying to turn the ship around with better content flow and more evergreen systems that caught my attention, so I came back.

And while I had great fun from the end of Dragonflight through the entirety of The War Within and into the first half-year of Midnight, it became overwhelming. There’s almost too much to do with more stuff coming all the time, and it became exhausting. So today I want to explain why I politely excused myself from Blizzard’s MMO and found myself far more at peace because of it.

As a long-time World of Warcraft player, I recognize that there’s a weird irony in complaining about “too much” content. After all, content droughts are part of the infamous history of this game, and most of us remember times where we were starving for something, anything, new to do.

What I see happening is that Blizzard became sensitive over the criticism and so afraid of ever letting another content drought happen that it amped up the release cadence and refused to let that slow down, even if QA suffered for it. And for a good portion of the past few years, I wasn’t complaining. Exciting stuff was being added to the game all the time, and it was fun being part of this fast-moving three-expansion cycle.

However, it wasn’t all rainbows and murlocs. It didn’t take the keenest of observers to realize that Blizzard was creating a series of treadmills at the endgame that it would reset with each “season” to make us run again. Gear progression felt perfunctory and meaningless. The leveling journey was all but swept under the rug by the company as it pushed you to get to said treadmills.

“It was like being a little kid in a playpen who was happy with a couple action figures and eager for one or two more, only to have an adult tip over a huge box of toys every 15 minutes.”And every two months or so, the Patch Dump Truck would beep beep beep back up and unload a ton more activities and events for us to do. I wasn’t alone in being bewildered as I sorted through all of these new features, trying to figure out what was actually worth doing and what was merely distractions to keep us occupied.

If I may use an infantile analogy, it was like being a little kid in a playpen who was happy with a couple action figures and eager for one or two more, only to have an adult tip over a huge box of toys every 15 minutes. Choice paralysis becomes a real thing — as does overload and content fatigue.

In many ways, World of Warcraft is in a great place. It’s focusing on evergreen systems (good!), the delving system is one of the most solo-friendly activities it’s ever added, and housing is a triumph. It’s not a bad time to be playing.

But the toys keep coming and coming and coming. I had to laugh when the last patch came out because on that very same day, Blizzard immediately pivoted to testing and talking about the next big patch, not even giving the latest update time to breathe and players time to process.

A couple months ago, I left World of Warcraft. Not forever, but it may be a good long while. I wasn’t having fun trying to “keep up with the Jonses” and running those treadmills over and over again. I wasn’t thrilled at spending a good chunk of my Tuesdays trying to plow through my weeklies. It was draining my enthusiasm rather than filling me up, and that’s a sign that it’s time to take a break.

Right now, I’m in a waiting pattern to see what’s going to happen with WoW Classic Plus. I have hope that this game mode might give me that World of Warcraft experience with some new content — but not so much that I’m broken under the weight of it. We’ll see. If not, there are always more worlds than these.

War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with over two decades of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join MOP’s WoW fans for new installments of WoW Factor as they examine the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.