Lazier Than Thou said:
Now, I have to go back to ignoring my pathetic life by killing some imaginary monsters in an imaginary universe that will do no more good for the real world than if I had done the EXACT SAME THING in a different imaginary universe.
Wall of text incoming.
Don't hate me but, as a former wow player myself I can tell you WoW is a lot more destructive. Simply because if you want to excel in wow you have to commit time and maintain the social aspect. There is no "quick match" you have guilds who can or pugs who fail and the great thing about pugs is wasting another hour waiting for them to fill. You can pick up a first person shooter, kill people for ten minutes and then put it down. You could play it all day every day but you don't have to. WOW
requires five hour raids, multiple nights a week, appointments, guild meetings, human drama and all the other turgid shit that comes with having a second job. You don't just have to worry about your own numbers you have other people worrying about your numbers, their numbers, vying for your spot and all this other political crap nobody needs.
At worst it is the official spokes game for dead babies and broken marriages and in the very least cold dinners. I personally knew a girl who got a divorce over this game. And the sad thing was she still couldn't stop playing. I would be like "don't you think you should get out of the house, maybe remarry?" She would say "I know I should, but I have my friends here." When I told my guild mates they simply replied "that's why you marry somebody who plays." Or some variant there of respectively and they were all deadly serious. Honestly, what is this heroin? Is it really better to have two addicts in the house? Has it gotten so bad people are altering their life-plans to accommodate this game?
My guild leader would constantly shoo his kids away in vent, his little girls that just wanted to spend some time with "daddy", I constantly urged him to put down the game and go spend some time with his wife and kids and he'd be like "oh... that WOULD be nice." Like he couldn't.
I knew another girl who was beautiful and had degrees in zoology and business but was unmarried, 26, living at home and working at a grocery store because she spent every other waking moment playing wow.
Another man, a pally healer, good friend of mine there was unemployed for four years but was always on wow. He was smart, clever, funny. Before I quit I asked him "Why don't you go get a job, why don't you just quit man?" he just told me "Good question. I honestly don't know. I guess... I don't know why I keep coming here. I guess I just can't stop." He's still playing. I come in every now and then just to try to get him to stop.
I myself was not immune. There was a reason I got along with the jobless pally healer I think. I had a human warrior, a tank and had no job for two years. I lost my job because I was always coming in late due to our late night raiding schedule. I always knew it was wrong to play this game when it was destructive, I always tried to get people having problems to quit, I myself couldn't heed my own advice. I honestly could see everything wrong, I hated the game for it's lop-sided development but I felt I owed something to my guild mates.
I was not alone. We had a gnome mage that flunked out of college, we had a paladin who lost his girlfriend and almost flunked out of college, a single-mom hunter who could not keep a man and who's baby was always crying, a copy-writer druid from hong kong who played at work, took his work from the office home to finish at night and thusly had a suffering marriage and poor job performance and another fit young couple that started playing wow together and both got horrendously, horrendously fat. Worth noting the wife got Diabetes. I could go on and on. I have never seen so much of a detriment to the
quality of people's lives from another game. And not just their lives, but the lives of the people around them.
This game would be no more harmful than any other really if you didn't care about excelling in it. But 90% of the people who do play eventually want to be considered "accomplished" in some way, whether it's arenas or raids or battlegrounds or just reaching max level. It's DESIGNED to make you want that, like Yahtzee said it programs you and that is evil. And then the time sink kicks in and the demands on you do too. And unlike many other games, this is one that never ends. There was a time I would have defended my wasted time there the same way you did. When the truth is ugly it's a lot harder to admit to it.
You will not convince me otherwise, I am sorry. I have seen people struggle there and achieve fantastic things when they quit. I have seen people suffer there and keep going on a self-destructive course. You're not going to out argue my experiences man. I'm not saying everyone who plays the game will play it too much or successful people can't play wow. I have known some. But the risk doesn't match up to the rewards. I urge you to quit if you play.
