Sitting in my car on the way to meet up with my friends for some thirsty Thursday college festivities all I can see is my custom user interface from WoW in my mind. Despite the piles and piles of schoolwork, the long hours spent at work, and the fine looking young ladies all staring me down at parties all I can think about is whether not I finished my island dailies on my warrior. Even with the freshly tapped ice chilled bud light keg staring straight at me like a lady of the night saying “You and I are gonna have a great time, but in the end it’s going to cost you.” Nothing beats a great night out with friends and limitless supplies of liquid confidence and a ton of girls to plow through like a farmer dusting crops, but I just can’t get WoW out of my head.
WoW is like that persistent ex girlfriend that you can take a break from but the second you start seeing some other girl WoW will find a way to catch your attention again. Whether it’s dressing up in revealing clothing and gallivanting her singleness around or she starts hanging out with your friends behind your back. She’s sweet and soft spoken but you know there’s evil intentions directed towards you behind her actions. Patches, new content, updates, class fixes, arena seasons, dailies, reputation grinds, honor gear, and the god damn gyro-copter. The list honestly goes on depending what kind of player you tend to be, World of Warcraft has so many things for the high level elite players to do, it’s hard not to play.
The first argument by any casual player is you don’t have to do any of that stuff, of course not silly me, the game was meant for you to float around at a 1600 rating with you and your buddies because you’re too lazy to PvP for resilience gear. It’s a natural human tendency to strive for greatness, whether you’re an elite professional athlete or you’re trying to see who can hit the new guy with the eraser from across the office. Despite what some hard core gamers will say about WoW being a casual game for children and non-gamers there’s a strong hardcore contingent of dedicated gamers that rule the raid PvE content and high rating arena content. Of course the majority of Blizzard’s success has come from gigantic chunk of casual gamers they’ve managed to lasso into paying 15 dollars a month, but the real meat of the game starts when you cap out your character’s level. Sixteen heroic dungeons and nine raid instances may not sound like enough to occupy a gamer for a year if they are looking at it from a single player mentality. An MMO doesn’t actually become an MMO until you decide to play with other people and participate with the community of your server. I’ve become so close with my guild mates I’ll log into ventrilo and chat with my guild-mates while I’m playing other games or working on my homework. The social aspect of WoW transcends beyond a video game by forcing players to come together to organize, come up with strategies, and run errands such as gathering consumables for raids. Some of the best memories I have of the game come from funny jokes made while doing mundane tasks like grinding twilight texts with some guild members.
My friends take jabs at me for my condition, and I’m sure those of you who surround yourself with non-gamers probably know what It feels like the be “The wow person.” Like any addictive substance, when I’m away from my computer I have cravings; when I try to take a break I go through withdrawals. When I go on vacation or out of state to fight then I start to twitch at the thought of being away from the keyboard, my name is Jerry, and I’m a WoW addict.
Hi Jerry,welcome to WoW addicts anonymous.