I’ve gone through cycles where I date a girl for awhile, maybe 6 months, and I don’t play at all, I just cancel my account. I’m not married yet, and since every relationship you’ve been in previously ends somehow, after they’ve ended I eventually start playing again. I really enjoy the game. The reason why I found this site is because I like to look at how Blizzard (Vivendia) works as a company, and how their business plans might look. So I just typed in “why I quit WoW” to see what people under what circumstances would quit.

But I don’t really have any problems in my life, I have a good job, and I do good work. Although yes, sometimes I do stay up late playing and don’t get much done the next day, but I don’t live for work, nor should you. And I honestly can say I love my job (software engineer).

I’m slowly getting to know a girl now, she just got out of a serious relationship with a guy who always partied (addiction?), and the instant I know we are going to do something , /leaveparty. I have no problems offending people, even if they take offense at all. RL comes first.

I’ve tried very hard to find a great girl, one that likes going for hikes, mountain biking, art galleries, everything, they are very hard to find. There is simply not much to do, and WoW is entertaining. I tried a lot of ways of meeting someone at the point of becoming psychotic as in movie style romance kinda guy. It’s simply not realistic, you need hobbies and need to enjoy life, if your single don’t freak out. If your ignoring your BF and always playing WoW, maybe you don’t like him that much? I would love to find a girl that had the same interests as me, and yes, play WoW now and again. I would be annoyed however if I was tryin to be affectionate to her while she was playing and completely ignore me, but I would understand if she was on the last boss

Every friday night, I goto my best friends house and we have some beers, watch a movie, and play some WoW. It’s interspersed with me going out with my friend so he can have a smoke, playing with his cat, and talking to his girlfriend.

The people I’ve met through playing WoW have always been there for me, yes, some of them are RL friends, and the game has brought us closer. I look at WoW with intellectual interest, not just to get gear, so I’m not so focused on getting gear, I enjoy watching how raid leaders conduct raids, where the people in our guild are from and what they do for a living. I also try to be a friend and give advice to younger people if they ask, help them with their math or computer science courses.

I can’t really give advice on why/or why not to play WoW, or any other game, activity that takes up a lot of your time. It’s nice to have RL friends that play, and play on a laptop so you can goto your friends house and play.

-_-

For the first 6 months I just leveled different classes (3 70s eventually), PvP’d and ran a few 5-man dungeons here and there, I was obsessed BUT having fun. Then an in-game friend invited me to his raid guild, which consisted of a bunch of people he knew in real life.

We started raiding, at first I hated it because I could see how it was eating my time, but eventually they got to Black Temple and end-game content, and I joined all of their raids and got T6 gear. I had the same problems you did of feeling bad for missing runs and drops for my character. I scheduled my REAL LIFE around this game; even hanging out with my friends. I also ignored my cat when I was home for the summer, and even my own family. My grades also suffered (my GPA went from 4.0 to 3.25, I had never even made a B in my life and here I made my first C)

This Thanksgiving I unplugged my computer for a whole week and LOVED it. I am never going back to WoW. I had so much fun with my sister and her husband, and all of my family. We made nachos, watched movies, etc., I even played some old single-player video games like Final Fantasy (this game even taking away from other video games I once loved). WoW turned from being fun into feeling like a STRESSFUL JOB that I’m not getting payed for.

It will be hard to say good-bye to some of the friends I made in that game, they are good people (though obsessed…) but it’s worth it.

For me I think what got me was two-fold. Firstly I am a big fan of role playing games. Customizing and collecting are two things I find addictive and fun in almost any game. Also, and this was ultimately what helped me get out, I loved the social aspect of the game. I would spend a large portion of my time online chatting in 2 or 3 channels or whispers with a large number of people.

I started feeling sick about it when I realized I had become one of “those guys”… the one who seems to be online EVERYTIME you log in and still on EVERYTIME you log out. I’d start getting messages (tells) from people saying “Wow, how do you level so fast?”, and sadly that made me feel proud.

When one of my best online friends (I don’t play with a single person I know in real life) lost his wife, who took the kids and divorced him. He played a lot more than I did, and in fact managed to catch up to my account, which had existed four years, in just six months.

I google’d wow addiction and found what was for me a very useful question: If you could go back to the day you bought the game, knowing what you know now, would you still buy it?”

For me this was an emphatic “No.” I will never again play a game without an end, a game which favors investment of time over all other things.
Please don’t let anyone you care about start playing if you think they might be anything like me.