This entire “gain an unfair advantage in the World of Warcraft economy” is on a certain level really pissing me off. Basically they’re saying people who hold demanding jobs, pay their monthly subscription, *and* stress the servers less, are worth less than someone who can put in five or more hours a day of play-time. I spent that time making real-life money, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to use that money to make up for the time I can’t spend in game.

OK, done bitching now =) Good luck to all those who encountered problems and got suspended/banned. I’ll just wait until they start selling gold on the Blizzard store (any bets if this will happen at launch or after Cataclysm goes live?!)

I started playing WoW as soon as it came out, having been a huge fan of Warcraft II while I was in elementary school. It wasn’t the first game I’d gotten wrapped up in, nor the first MMORPG. Before picking up WoW I’d spent a lot of time in Star Wars Galaxies, Earth and Beyond, and Planetside. Star Wars Galaxies, in particular, had eaten up a lot of time and money, and by the time I quit I was one of the top players on a very old server. Keep in mind, I was in 7th-8th grade at this time, when I should have been learning how to knuckle down and do work. All of these games, as most of them do, had served as means of escape from what was a very rough home life and a difficult time adjusting at school. My parents had already voiced concern about the amount of time I spent on games, but at that time they were fighting so loudly and so frequently that I didn’t think they were in any position to advise me on anything related to healthy habits.

As I got more immersed in World of Warcraft my home life continued to deteriorate, pushing me further into the game. My sister, who had traditionally helped me cope, had gotten her license and a car. These allowed her to physically escape our problems at home, while my best alternative was to bury myself in the game. It didn’t help that I had transferred to a private school that was 45 minutes from my house, meaning I was even more isolated by my lack of a car. Without even realizing it I fell into the same habit that a lot of people have been describing here: Marathon gaming sessions were the norm, I frequently missed entire nights of sleep and went straight to school without ever hitting the sheets, and I fiercely resented attempts to involve me in anything that took away from game time. My parents noticed this and moved the computer out of my room to a family space, hoping to make it harder for me to shut myself away with the game for hours at a time. This only led to more fights and confrontations about the amount of time I spent on the game. Often I would wait for my parents to go to sleep before sneaking back out to play for an extra hour or two. I was caught a few times, and these always resulted in tremendous screaming fights.

By this time I was well established in the game. I had a level 60 mage in full netherwind back when that was extremely rare, as well as an alt warrior who I’d geared out for PvP by using him on raids once we got the encounters down. At this point, I didn’t think about how strange it was that I’d levelled a warrior all the way up simply so he could take the drops from raids that I really had no reason to go on anymore with my mage. My guild appointed me class leader for mages, adding even more incentive to fritter away hours of my time, and attend redundant raids. Eventually, these two characters combined weren’t enough, and I created a rogue on a PvP server where some old Star Wars Galaxies friends had started playing. After we’d leveled together for a while, they started to lose interest, but I didn’t. I powered my rogue to 60 and started PvPing on him in the time between raids on my original server, eventually getting to high warlord without ever joining a guild. That caught the attention of some raiding guilds, netting me a spot on one of the big ones and further burdening my schedule.

Around this time my family situation finally reached the breaking point, but I continued to play relentlessly even after we were forced to move out of the house. I set up in the basement of a family member’s house where we were staying and played even harder than before, taking all of my 60s on endless Naxxramas runs as soon as it came out to try and be one of the first guilds to get to Kel’Thuzad. I didn’t care that I’d originally bought the game for PvP and didn’t even much ENJOY raiding. The game allowed me to shut out the world completely, so I stopped even pretending to do work at school, and I drifted further away from the friends I’d managed to retain.

The last summer before going to university (which I thankfully managed to get into), I played nonstop. Besides the 40 hours I put in at Panera Bread, I was glued to the screen. My diet consisted mainly of Coca-Cola and the baked goods they let me take home after my shift ended. It was pathetic.

I’m not sure how I shook the addiction. It happened gradually, as I slowly realized that I’d done everything I could do in the game. My options were limited to starting over with a new class, but that just gave me a slightly different perspective on the same old stuff. The duties I had with my guild meant that I already had a pretty good understanding of how it felt to play each class through PvP and endgame anyway. I’ll admit that I was in the 12:00 AM lineup for Burning Crusade, but that expansion is what finally did it for me. After a few weeks playing through Outland, I couldn’t stomach the prospect of grinding all of my meticulously geared characters up another ten long levels and starting the end-game process all over again in a slightly different environment. Playing through Blizzard’s attempt to keep me hooked ripped the wig off the WoW experience for me: you’re doing the same things over and over, but the rewards are slightly different each time and it feels good getting them and being told you’re doing well. But really, all the fancy new abilities and armor didn’t alter the game much at all, they just sucked away a whole lot of time before you could get to them.

My story has a happy ending: I gave my account to the SWG friends who came back for the expansion, they did something stupid with it and I am now permanently banned, no questions asked. It does give me a twinge to think of all the time and effort I poured into those characters being wasted, but I suppose wasting time is all they were good for in the first place. However vague the object, we all like to enjoy the fruits of our labor, especially when gratification is so tantalizingly meted out. After leaving WoW I managed to get my act together and transfer schools, and hindsight has helped me to see how bad my problem was. I’ll never get back the years of high school and middle school I spent in front of the computer instead of out doing the stupid things kids remember for the rest of their lives, but at least I know my weakness and can be on guard.

WoW is the perfect escape: It rewards us frequently, but not so frequently that we lose interest. It allows us to feel accomplished, adventurous, exotic and important far, far more easily than we can achieve that feeling in real life. WoW is predictable, reliable and controllable in a way that real life can never be. But everyone has to face up to certain facts about life eventually, especially those of us who have a tendency to drift off into dangerous escapes.