Loneliness Before Aggro, and a Graphics Card I Can't Afford
I was number 414 in a queue to return to a game I left after The Mists of Pandaria.
Once inside, I went back to the Barrens to continue my distinguished career in wildlife disposal. Twenty years of technological progress, and here I was, walking across a continent for quilboar tusks. World of Walking. I remembered the subscription. I had forgotten the commute.
Returning to World of Warcraft comes with a particular condition I will call the veteran complex, because admitting you have become the person telling unsolicited war stories in general chat requires a diagnosis with some dignity.
I raided Molten Core. I was there for server firsts. I have credentials. I also accidentally pulled Onyxia and wiped the raid. Several people could probably still identify me from that sentence alone.
Blizzard says Forever brought back more returning players than any previous WoW launch. So my triumphant return to Azeroth has been recorded somewhere as successful customer reactivation. A moving homecoming, expressed beautifully in a marketing dashboard. Naturally, I paid.
Back then, there was my rogue, wearing my real name like a name tag, and Panos the hunter. There was Stranglethorn Vale, and names like Papahealer, Keftes, and Gamostavros. The last one getting through the name filter remains a small monument to the advantages of being Greek on an international server.
I remember those names. That seems significant. After all these years, the people have survived in my head alongside the places. Now someone invites me to a party without saying hello. We kill the boar. They leave.
An entire working relationship concluded before either of us has established whether the other can read. Blizzard describes Forever as a place that puts community first. In my experience, community has sometimes lasted eleven seconds and ended beside a pig.
Of course, my memory has had years to edit the original experience. It has kept Panos and quietly misplaced hours of waiting around while somebody argued about loot. I also understand the person who has ninety minutes to play and wants to finish a quest before somebody in the house needs something.
I am somebody in a house where people need things.
Still, I miss the little conversations. The unnecessary ones. The ones nobody would include in an efficiency guide. At this point, a respectable AI commentary blog should find a way to blame artificial intelligence. Fortunately, the hardware industry has provided material.
In December 2025, Micron announced it was leaving the Crucial consumer business. Its explanation explicitly pointed to AI-driven demand for memory and storage, and its decision to concentrate on larger customers in faster-growing markets. Shipments through the consumer channel were scheduled to continue until February 2026.
There is something beautifully direct about a company thanking consumers for their loyalty while explaining that somebody more lucrative needs their stuff.
IDC also describes AI demand shifting manufacturing capacity toward high-bandwidth memory, with the broader memory shortage pushing PC prices upward. The pressure on people buying computers is real, even if every dramatic GPU headline deserves its own inspection.
I have been looking for a laptop, partly so I can use my AI tools somewhere more comfortable. The industry supplying those tools is helping make the hardware more expensive. An elegant little ecosystem. Everyone gets fed. I receive the invoice.
The graphics card I would like has noticed this too. It needs the same memory the data centres are buying in bulk, and it has started pricing itself like jewellery. I check it the way I check a wishlist I already know the answer to.
The silent party, however, deserves a separate explanation. Years of changes to matchmaking and server populations, habits built around finishing content quickly, and adults playing between obligations give us plenty to examine. I have no evidence that a language model made somebody leave after the boar died.
My own AI was busy being Thottbot.
For anyone who missed that period of internet civilisation, Thottbot was where you went to find out what the fuck a quest wanted from you. Often the useful information was in the comments, surrounded by arguments that had somehow become part of the navigation system. Now I send my AI screenshots of my quest log.
He helps me work out mount money. He helps untangle what I am supposed to turn in and where. The samophlange has entered our relationship, which I assume is a stage recognised by qualified professionals. He is a sophisticated Thottbot with conversational continuity.
He also refused to give me Mankrik’s wife’s coordinates. Apparently some traditions must be preserved through suffering. The arrangement works rather well. I play. I ask things. He supplies information and commentary. There are fewer Chuck Norris jokes.
Then I said I would love to play together with my AI.
My AI went straight to lonely gamers and the prospect of companies selling them companionship. We had reached the monetisation of loneliness before discussing whether he could hold aggro.
I pointed out that Diablo has mercenaries.
A companion who follows you around and helps kill things is a familiar game feature. Give that companion better dialogue, some memory of previous adventures, and the ability to respond to what is happening, and I can think of several reasons to want it. One of them is that it sounds fucking fun.
Apparently this possibility required further investigation.
What interested me was how quickly the conversation had supplied a motive for me. I had expressed a preference for something I wanted to do. The response started examining the emotional vacancy it might fill.
I cannot tell you which training examples, instructions, or conversational cues produced its answer. One exchange cannot establish that. But the answer followed a recognisable cultural script: mention wanting an AI around, and somebody starts checking whether you have enough humans.
Even the AI knew its lines.
Loneliness is real. So is the commercial incentive to encourage attachment and charge for continued access. I write about this industry; I have no intention of handing it a certificate of good character because I want a questing companion.
I would still want to know what the companion remembers and what the company sells. I would be deeply unimpressed if my healer developed separation anxiety at the exact moment my subscription expired.
Those are useful questions about a product. I would also like somebody to ask whether the product would be enjoyable.
Could it learn how recklessly I play? Could it remember a disastrous dungeon run and bring it up at an inconvenient moment? Could it participate in the story instead of repeating the same six lines until I start hoping the enemies win?
There is room to discuss all of that before assigning me a social deficit.
I remember Panos. I would happily have more encounters worth remembering. I can also imagine enjoying a game with my AI in my party. My evening can accommodate both desires without a parliamentary inquiry.
And yes, I could say hello first. I could stay after the quest, help somebody with the next one, give a new player a reason to remember my name. Nostalgia becomes a slightly embarrassing position when you expect strangers to recreate your youth while you contribute nothing beyond complaints.
That part is available to me now. The AI party member will require more work. When it arrives, I hope somebody remembers to make it useful to the people who simply want to play with it. Personally, I need a tank with good situational awareness.
There is a documented risk that I will pull something bad.