I like the friend, I'll enjoy his company but I won't have much issues with his behaviour because he told me what his intentions were & why he's different from the others. Alo, I wasn't expecting much from him :-)

Posted by: darkchild82 on October 19, 2006 04:36 AM

He's dead on in a number of ways. I quit WoW with a 60 rogue, up to about 40-50 days played in about a year and a half (which put me right on the cusp of casual/hardcore in my guild). I was with a raiding guild that had always tried to focus on being accessible to casual players. Eventually, at the end, that fell apart - the pressure of trying to finish AQ40 caused a split in the guild, and the more hardcore raiders left, trying to take the best people with them. Lots of ill will from that.

Anyway, I quit raiding and WoW once for a couple months, came back, raided again for a couple more, and then quit again. Most of the writer's thoughts on the subject are dead-on. The biggest issues I see with WoW and that high-level raiding grind is that you -are- chasing something you'll never satisfy, and that it becomes so amazingly easy to forget to prioritize your WoW life in the context of your real one.

It's certainly possible to not go the route that guy did and overcommit in such a terrific fashion. But, holy crap is it tempting. The whole game is built around you being a major asskicker, and the most major of them all are those people decked out in the purples.

Once I got into raiding, that was definitely the high point. But once you get in, get some purple loot... it all becomes a matter of degree. I'm really glad that I have my head on straight enough that I could ask, "Ok, so... I'll spend more and more time and effort getting what are incremental upgrades for a character in a virtual world...?"

Natch, over time, the stresses started to show. I was playing most nights of the week, and lopped off 3 of my 5 weekdays for raiding.

The final straw was when, as I was discussing my love/hate relationship with the game yet again to my fiancee, she said to me, "You realize that you sound like someone in an abusive relationship?"

Ouch. I thought about it. I was making all sorts of excuses to her and myself as to why I was spending so much time doing this stuff, how I hoped the future would be like A when really we both knew it would be like B... It was time to get out. Glad I did.

I will most likely go back and play again with the expansion. I have RL friends who I'll enjoy doing it with. But I won't be going back to raiding. And if I even talk about doing so, my fiancee is under orders to kick my ass all over the place. ;)

Posted by: CommanderTso on October 19, 2006 09:52 AM

It's funny to me to read that. It reminds me of hundreds of "I quit" forum posts on clan forums.

Whenever I read one of those, I had mixed emotions - on one hand I was happy they were going to get out of the house and try to have some fun, sad to hear a about a friend going through gaming crisis, happy that they would more than likely be back soon, but mostly I tried to ignore it and get on with things because if I thought about it too much I would start to see that they were probabaly right and feel bad about my life.

I knew a guy who played in a family guild. He played with his son and daughter and dad. I would be in parties with these guys sometimes and it was the stangest but coolest thing. Three generations of family telling stories and communicating to each other every night of the week. There was also a girl who played ffxi who played with her son every night. They had suce a genuine rapport it was hard not to envy it.

In the end, it's just a way to monitize your free time.

Fuck it, lets go bowling dude.

Posted by: Octagon on October 22, 2006 11:33 PM