World of Warcraft: The Addiction
I’ve heard the tales from many a recovering WoW addict, they suffer from urges to play the game again but, having gone cold turkey, are now deterred by the knowledge that, without an entire life to dedicate to the game, you’re really going to get nowhere.
World of Warcraft caters for two particular brands of players. The casual who will happily plough through the quest content and a few dungeons before getting bored and quitting, and the hardcore who will dedicate almost every spare waking moment to the game.
Both of these camps are content with their experiences of the WoW content, but there’s a middle-ground of people, like me, who are semi-hardcore gamers with every desire to see end-game content and experience 10 or 25 man raids but absolutely no desire to piss away hours, nay, days or even months of time playing the same monotonous game.
But that’s what a title like World of Warcraft expects from you, it doesn’t scale to the length of time you’re willing to put into the game, why would it? Blizzard make money from every single month you pour into it. As a player just starting Naxx, and feeling the insurmountable WoW frustration again, I’ve got in excess of 35 days played time clocked up, and that’s a casual amount of time by World of Warcraft standards.
“35 days isn’t a long time to have been playing WoW,” you might say if you didn’t realise, or couldn’t quite fathom the fact that it’s thirty five solid days of actual time spent in the game. Yes, your average RPG might clock up 100 hours, or 4-5 days of solid play time if you’re a completionist, but this absolutely, utterly and completely pales in comparison to the 840+ hours that I, alone have put into just one single character in World of Warcraft.
Now, my frustration meter has, again, gone off the scale in respect to this relationship, life, health and time destroying curse of a game and I’ve summoned up the strength to cancel my subscription and see it for the incredibly devious, evil, financial cash-cow that it is.
World of Wacraft is, in effect, no different from recreational drugs. It has proven, demonstrable and detrimental effects on health, it causes a massive lapse in parental responsibility (yes, we’re parents, too!), it destroys relationships, it wastes money and it draws the unwitting player into a world of destructive escapism during which they do nothing worthwhile, nothing constructive and nothing energetic. It’s all too easy to get emotionally attached to your “character” and virtual World of Warcraft existence in much the same way as people do with their “Second Life” and waste. Again it’s easy to get attached to your “friends” in the same world, form a guild, and get gradually removed from reality and steadily more “addicted”.
I, however, quit WoW as easily as I could quit stabbing myself in the testicles with a rusty knife. We were in Sanatorium at the time, attempting to run a 25-man Naxxramas in the longest time possible. Or so it seemed. The raid leader, not too happy with my insistence that the person we were waiting to come back so we could actually play the sodding game had probably dropped dead kicked me from the raid, and I subsequently did a Leeroy Jenkins into the boss. Hahahaha! Now that’s how to make a game fun!
Since my departure from the game my partner, who insists on continuing to play (hopelessly addicted), has moved on to greater things… it seems being a priest is a good way to get somewhere in the game, so if you’re thinking of playing then either a) shoot yourself to save time or b) become a priest.
Of course… I’ll be the first to admit that the next add-on will see my playing and singing its praises again.