What sparked YOUR return to Azeroth?

[Nyxxiana 28]

....what was YOUR longest time away from Azeroth....and WHAT precipitated your return?

Hey there everyone!!! Ive missed you all, and the wonderful community here.honestly. but you know what its like when life starts taking twists and turns that need 100% focus. Ive been gone for a while, mostly because of ...well, life. As with any of you, we had a lot of things, some good, some terribly bad, that kept us from gaming for a while. As i logged into my main after several week to two week at a time breaks from Azeroth, my chat windows exploded with messages from those types we ALL KNOW....

You know what im talking about. Those people who we have never met in person, but who we know sometimes better than our own flesh and blood friends and family. It made me even more convinced that the people we meet through our digital travels are not ANY less important than the ones we can shake hands with in person.

So as i return fully to my Guild, Role as Dungeon Mistress of Stormwind, punisher of those who stand in fire, and other roles on Silver Hand, i was longing to return here as well. The holidays are a time to come together as friends and family, and it had me wondering......

....what was YOUR longest time away from Azeroth....and WHAT precipitated your return?

For me, almost 3 months was too long to be away.... and what brought me back was simply having a change in life that allowed for me to slow down, rekindle old friendships, and ENJOY the gameplay that i had been msising.......besides.... i had to make VERY GOOD use of the Alienware M14X my daddy got me for my birthday last month :) Just goes to show that even at my age, you never stop being Daddys little Rogue!!!

[Peelyon 416]

Welcome back Nyxx :) to both here and the world :)

Although I've never really unsubbed I / we / the guild and my closest WoW friends have taken "time off". Most recently was last year around this time in the lead up to Christmas. We had completed normal DS 10 and we have never really been a guild interested in heroic content. As we had a mini break for the festive season we just never really reassembled until perhaps a few weeks before MoP.

The combination of Christmas and the already boring (for us) Dragon Soul nearly finished us all off!

Hopefully with content still "fresh" for us (nowhere near clearing content right now) hopefully it will be a quick return after the holidays :)

[Vlad 411]

I've never unsubbed from WoW, and the only times I didn't play for weeks was when I was traveling, so i can't say I quite relate. But welcome back! :)

[Fel 42]

Welcome back :D

I left the game for the final 8 months of Wrath, due to guild issues related to running a 25man raid team. Without going into details, the officership burned out trying to keep things going at the level we wanted to, and a series of minor events over several months put us all in a bad place. Seeing as me and my closer friends in the guild are raiders first and foremost, we decided to call it there due to the effort to reward ratio being skewed too far in the wrong direction.

With the impending release of Cataclysm, my closest friend (and the GM of our guild) and I got to talking about options, restarting the guild, and so forth. Given our past experience it's possible we were being overly optimistic at the time, but we decided to set up a new guild in Cata, running two 10 man raid teams (one each) rather than a single 25man. As it happens, this worked well for us and though it's been a bumpy road, over the past 24 months we've steadily progressed and improved. There are still and always will be issues with running guilds and raid teams, but so long as we can keep the reward/effort balance firmly in the reward camp, we'll be sticking around for the foreseeable future.

So what brought me back? Friendship, desire to be a part of a team, desire to progress and just plain fun. I play a holy paladin and love it to pieces, plus I have my warlock off to the side. Poor thing never sees raid time but I keep the dust off her because I'm incredibly passionate about the gameplay style.

I love and am impressed by a lot of other games, but warcraft has always managed to stay right at the top. :D

[nicolash07 0]

Stopped shortly after getting to 80. Was gearing up then exams came along and I didn't pick it back up until very very late into Cata. Also stopped cus I was so loss as to how to make gold and still am to be honest.

But the reason I got back in was when my mate told me about scroll of resurrection and being able to get another 80 for no effort lol. ...a tiny bonus was when someone hacked my account while I unsubbed and made 10g. So I guess I was lucky haha

[GothFvck 0]

Well, this last break  was  broken simply: my guild mistress  asked  me  to come back and I  logged in the next day and haven't left since. :D

 

...even hired a maid to feed me and bathe me. Don't  even leave the computer for... well, anything. >_>;

<_<;

[jpru2001 1]

I played seriously during wrath, had a great guild that I really enjoyed playing with, naxx and ulduar time period was raiding hardcore...however raiding was taking up too much time in my life and at the same time when Cata dropped I honestly didn't really like Cata...I leveled a couple guys to 85, did not really enjoy the 5-mans and was not raiding...so quit playing for a while.  Restarted for Pandaria, leveled a couple guys to 90, lost interest again...or actually most of my guildies started playing SWTOR, played that for a while...came back to pandaland at 5.4 and found another guild I enjoy playing with and am enjoying it alot again but without the hardcore raiding time commitment.  Mostly just LFR and flex when I can and although I'll never get great gear its a better all around fit for my life.

[Kensou 0]

Give me some rope, tie me to dream...

 

 

I find that whenever I go on break from wow, Community (see above lyric reference) is the one thing that always brings me back to wow.  Most of my time raiding has been with a mixture of RL friends and people I've been raiding with since Vanilla, and generally as we explore new games or xpacs, we do it all together; it's a great tool for keeping in touch with friends I don't get to see too regularly due to distance.  I just recently joined a new guild, and I'm hoping that I can build good relationships there so that the time I spend playing wow, either raiding or otherwise, is enjoyable and filled with people that are chill.