Monthly Fees Redux

I was talking to my friend Jeff at work about MMOs and he mentioned that even if monthly fees could be worthwhile if you spent enough time playing he didn't want to have the pressure of needing to play enough to make them worthwhile. He didn't want to be in a situation at the end of a month where he hadn't played enough to justify paying a monthly fee and therefore felt obligated to play the MMO instead of going out with friends or such.

I'm in a similar situation right now. You see, there are currently 5 computer games I really, really want to play. It's been a good couple months in my computer gaming world, you see, and some excellent sequels have come out recently to go with some longstanding games that demand time as well. Those games are:

• World of Warcraft. We may be in a pre-expansion lull but I still have things I want to get done. I haven't decided on my "realm first" yet but whichever way I go I'm going to either want to level mining on my DK or finish leveling my druid to 80. On top of that there are still achievements I want to get, notably some reputation based ones and Loremaster.
  
• Jack Bridge. I enjoy playing the game and it generates a lot of the recent content for the blog. I'd posted my last played deal yesterday so I played 3 more to build a minor buffer last night.
  
• StarCraft 2. It came out 2 months ago and I still want to play it a lot. I finally finished all the single player campaign achievements off but I really like playing on the different ladders. 2v2, 3v3, 4v4... All awesome. But if I'm not logged in to the system my friends don't ping me to play games with them.
• Civ V. This came out on Tuesday and has a lot of innovations I really like. 1 combat unit per square, cultural borders growing 1 square at a time, cities having innate defenders, and the reworking of ranged attacks are all awesome. I'd one more turn myself into oblivion if society would let me.
• Final Fantasy XIV. The came out on Wednesday and is the new Square MMO. I thought FFXI was a better game than WoW and it looks like FFXIV is a better version of FFXI. They've done a bunch of things differently and I like them all so far. Only problem is despite trying to get my friends to play no one else has. Since they're all going to stick with WoW it seems pretty likely that I'll have to quit this once the next WoW expansion comes out.

Where's the monthly fee related problem? Well, since I'm going to be committing a lot of time to WoW when Cataclysm comes out it doesn't make much sense to pay monthly fees for two MMOs. As such, once my free month of FFXIV runs out I'll put it aside and won't be able to play it any more. But that means I bought the game for just a month of play, so if I want to get my money's worth I need to play it a lot this month. Even if I don't care about money's worth so much I want to get through a lot of the story and I have a very limited time to do so.

I'd rather play Civ V. But I can play Civ V next month. I can play it next year. Civ V will always exist. FFXIV won't. If I want to play it, I need to play it now. And I do want to play it. But more than that, like Jeff said, I feel obligated to play it.

There's a new Magic set being pre-released tomorrow, with a Grand Prix coming up in Toronto next month. I want to play in both of those events. Will doing so cost me critical FFXIV time?