Towards the end of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion WoW lost all of its entertainment value for me. I struggled to find a reason to log in on a continual basis. I greeted Cataclysm with great enthusiasm but once again I lost interest in ‘the game. I stumbled into Rift hoping to find my new something to “do” but in the end it too has become nothing more than an application on my hard drive.

That brings us up to today. Star Wars: The Old Republic has caught my eye and every time I log in I have fun. In all honesty I am having more fun with SWTOR then any of my previous MMO experiences. This raises a question, if I am having so much fun why am I not playing SWTOR as much as I played WoW?

To be perfectly honest I have been struggling a bit with the answer to that question. Unlike WoW, I only want to log into SWTOR when I have a decent amount of time to play, this being in the hour plus region. In the early WoW days I would log in even if I only had 10-15 minutes. Of course there were times when that 10-15 minutes would become a long drawn out full night of gaming but maybe subconsciously that is what I was hoping for.

Maybe just maybe at certain points in my gaming past I was hunting for something “fun” to do. Because I am a gamer it was logical that I be logged into the game. Now that I look back I spent a lot of time doing a whole bunch of nothing in-game. I did the obvious thing such as leveling because the game doesn’t really start until max level right? I admit it wasn’t always fun but it was something to do. The other thing that stands out, I would ride around in circles while I would talk to buddies over Vent/Mumble.

Hind sight reveals that most of the time I would get ninja-ed into a heroic or talked into helping someone with a quest or at times even pulled into a raid. Sure I did all of the other crap such as leveling professions and grinding out rep but none of that was fun and it was really just a time waster until something fun came up. Looking back, I wasted a lot of time waiting to have fun and that bothers me.

Now my problem with SWTOR is I am having too much fun. I know when I log in I will have a good time. Unfortunately on some deeper level I think I am afraid it will end. I think I am afraid that some time soon (max level maybe) I will once again be wasting time waiting to have a good time.

Who knows? Maybe I am the only one in the world who thinks of these things and I just wasted 4-5 minutes of your life while you read these words. Am I crazy or do other people spend (waste) an incredible amount of time in MMORPGs waiting for something fun to come up?