As of today, I have not played World of Warcraft in a little over 3 months. Before that, I'd played since just after the game went retail in late 2004. I'd taken a few breaks before that, but always went back. This is by far the longest time I've gone without playing and I hope that I can make it a permanent break. WoW is nothing but a huge waste of time and money and Blizzard (the company that makes WoW) is doing everything they can to keep their subscribers addicted so that they will keep spending that $15 a month.
Some people who play WoW truly do get hooked on the game to the point where they neglect family, friends, work, and other far more important parts of their lives. I honestly don't think it was ever that bad for me - I didn't neglect my kids, my work performance didn't suffer, and I never got upset when asked to miss a raid to do something out of the game. I'm sure my ex-wife would probably disagree and say I neglected her, but if anything, WoW was, for a while, my retreat from the living hell she was making of my life. After we divorced and I started seeing the lovely girl who is now my wife, I introduced her to WoW since she is a computer geek just like me and she enjoys playing it now. She isn't playing quite as much now, since I don't play any more and she would rather do things with me than sit in front of the computer and play without me. So, as far as addiction goes, I feel I've dodged that bullet. But I know that there are others that haven't. I posted a link to Wowdetox.com - there are a lot of stories on there from people who are trying to get over addictions to WoW - I go there every day and read the new posts and it helps me remember why I quit playing WoW.
Like I mentioned, I played WoW for about 5 and a half years. I didn't neglect anything important in my life, but I spent pretty much all my "down" time on the game. There's a command in the game where you can view your "played" time, which is the amount of time a given character has been actually logged in the game since creation. I had 6 characters at the level cap and 4 more characters that I was levelling up. I checked their played times and added it up... it averaged out to several hours a day, every single day, for well over 5 years. That's too much.
If you are unfamiliar with WoW and similar games (MMORPG's or Massively-multiplayer-online-role-playing-games), let me just say that there is no end of the game, you are never ever finished, and there is always something else for you to do. In order to succeed at the game and maximize your character's potential, you have to spend a lot of time in game doing things you don't want to do to gain money and items to allow you to do the things you don't want to do. It really can become like a second job. On top of that, you have to pay a monthly subscription to Blizzard in order to maintain your access to the game. So you end up, over time, spending hundreds of dollars for... nothing. You don't get anything out of the game for your efforts but virtual gold and items that you don't even own. If Blizzard shut down WoW tomorrow, the players would be left with absolutely nothing for their efforts but a set of installation CDs.
Maybe some of it is simply burnout on my part. Given the amount of time that I've spent on the game that's certainly possible. But the fact remains that we are less than a month away from the release of the game's third expansion, and I have absolutely no interest in purchasing it or playing it. I've spent the last few months rediscovering some of the things I used to enjoy doing, such as reading and movies and, yes, playing other games that are not such a time sink. So, it's time to move on...
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