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Breaking a WoW addiction

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Re: Breaking a WoW addiction

#161

Post by klipt »

forensic wrote: post #155
klipt wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the author is really saying is: "I find more meaning in the real world than in WoW." > But this isn't necessarily true for everyone. Sure, some people prefer the blue pill. But the real world is a strict superset of WoW, and thus (to me) much more interesting.

You're just telling us what you personally find meaningful. But this doesn't extend to others. Your argument is about subjective values - you value the superset - but this is wholly subjective as well. Death is a superset of life, therefore I value death more than life, therefore you should kill yourself to find true meaning. By staying alive you're choosing the blue pill. (I can make these arguments all day. You're…

> Death is a superset of life

Um, no. It's pretty well established that one can start or stop playing WoW at will from real life. There is no evidence that one can return to real life from death.

Of course there are some belief systems that claim that death leads to an unimaginably wonderful heaven, but even those belief systems tend to discourage suicide.

Re: Breaking a WoW addiction

#162

Post by silencio »

rsheridan6 wrote: post #57
slyn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you define "helped" as. I don't know anyone personally who has say, gotten a job or learned a new tangible life skill from playing. I can say for myself at least that I have met a lot of people who I would call friends without hesitation, most of whom I would love to meet up with in real life someday. It has also made it easier for me to connect with RL friends as well. Half the reason I started playi…

>I can say for myself at least that I have met a lot of people who I would call friends without hesitation, most of whom I would love to meet up with in real life someday. It seems like it would be a good thing if guilds could be set up based on the geographic location of the players. If you had a reasonable chance of making "real life" friends, a lot of the objections to MMOs that aren't made to, say, a ski club or…

I disagree. I think a lot of people that play with others geographically close to each other already know each other in some way and the reverse would not necessarily be the same. I mostly play with two "real life" friends, and most of the groupings of people I know in my guilds are couples, friends from college/home, coworkers, and similar. It's usually not "oh we know each other after we found out in-game that we're geographically close".

For every interesting person I have met in WoW, I've come across someone I can't even begin to describe...social misfit, awkward, creepy, misogynist, immature, stalker doesn't even begin to cover it. Whenever I find a random group of people to raid with, I am afraid to talk in vent/mumble because I don't want to give away the fact that my voice gives me away as being a very, very valley girl/California English spoken woman. The few times I slip and talk, some players didn't care but others split off into various assumptions, usually along the lines of my being incompetent by being female or "no way, she's a girl! (I'm going to harass her in whispers now!)". The few that didn't care and judged me based on my actual performance were the ones I ended up really appreciating being grouped with and that in turn were the ones that outright told me that they were sad to see me go before I changed servers a couple months ago. The ones that assumed I was dumb, well, I had an ignore list longer than my arm by the time I moved away. Moved away to a guild where I vetted the GM and his guild for his female-friendliness and zero tolerance to harassment first above all other concerns, including raiding. (And for what it's worth, I left my very first WoW guild because I couldn't stand even the smallest playful insults anymore. Starting with "you sure do get around" for getting an achievement for exploring a zone.)

So in an environment like that, I really hope that such a thing is never, ever, ever possible in-game and is something people do waaaaay far out of game on their own accord. Blizzard really scared a lot of people with their initial implementation of RealID and still kinda do despite all the privacy settings, and I would cancel my WoW account the day Blizzard ever considers putting in some kind of interface for geographical guild finding no matter how opt-out it is. I want to choose which basis I use to find friends in this game and I never want Blizzard to help me with that. I especially never ever want some dumbass 15 year old punk that hits on me to find out I live in Los Angeles, let alone what my real name is.

(And really, I'm sick of the people that think that WoW can't be real life. I have come across some of my best friends online, and WoW is no different from IRC or AIM or email or any means of online communications. It is as real life as it gets without being face-to-face with someone. Some people just don't learn to manage their in-game time very well and that is the fodder for all those horror stories, not the vast majority of people that do know how to stop playing a game.)

Re: Breaking a WoW addiction

#163

Post by silencio »

Luyt wrote: post #15

I play WoW for five years now. When I started, I used to be an occasional player. But when I hit level 60 (that was the highest level a few years ago) it was impossible to advance further without being in a regular raiding guild. So I started hardcoring: obligatory raids from 19:00 to 23:30, each evening, five evenings per week. Lower attendance was not tolerated. And gathering/grinding materials for potions/powerups…

I don't know how casual you are or how long it's been since you last played, but Blizzard flipped everything around for casual players not in a guild with Cataclysm. Those features you name are still there, but now they're next to rated BGs, guild achievements, and more features you can only really get while playing with a group of other players, i.e. a guild. Even basic non-raiding perks like 15 minute hearth and increased xp/rep gains are tied to guilds now.

I had an alt that wasn't in a guild or cared to raid that just recently joined the guild because I really wanted those perks while being in a guild that didn't demand anything of me. I only raid a very strict max 3 hours 3 weekdays a week on my main toon in another guild and I refuse to tie myself down with raiding on a second one, and is perfect for that...people are always online to play with, raids are always going on if I ever want to check them out, but I'm free to stay in the guild with zero commitment towards any time sink and I can solo all the content I want. You might want to check out joining a similarly large and open social guild for yours.

Re: Breaking a WoW addiction

#164

Post by kbutler »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #78

Game makers (and some website owners) are discovering what some religious and cult leaders have known for thousands of years: you don't have to give somebody a drug to make them an addict. People are perfectly capable of generating their own addictions without external chemical help. I _think_ what's going to happen is that we come up with a new moral code -- much like the thing where drinking before a certain time w…

> We have a generation of people addicted to a sedentary activity in a way that's never happened in human history.

Heh. Heard of this other addictive sedentary activity that people call "TV"?

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/americans-...

The _average_ America watches 153 hours of video per month (2009). 5.5 hours per day on average.

Looking up TV addiction yields many very similar articles.

I expect that some people are more susceptible to gaming than TV, and others the opposite.

But the results from TV seem very comparable to gaming: some is probably fine, maybe even beneficial depending on your choices. Too much is bad for your physical, mental, and social well-being.

kb

Re: Breaking a WoW addiction

#165

Post by forensic »

klipt wrote: post #161
forensic wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just telling us what you personally find meaningful. But this doesn't extend to others. Your argument is about subjective values - you value the superset - but this is wholly subjective as well. Death is a superset of life, therefore I value death more than life, therefore you should kill yourself to find true meaning. By staying alive you're choosing the blue pill. (I can make these arguments all day. You're…

> Death is a superset of life Um, no. It's pretty well established that one can start or stop playing WoW at will from real life. There is no evidence that one can return to real life from death. Of course there are some belief systems that claim that death leads to an unimaginably wonderful heaven, but even those belief systems tend to discourage suicide.

>There is no evidence that one can return to real life from death.

What about all the dead people who come back to life thanks to medical intervention?

This is an outdated perspective. Loads of people now living were once dead.

Scientific evidence indicates: Matter starts out dead, becomes alive, then becomes dead again, then rots into the ground and eventually becomes alive again.

After your corpse rots it becomes dirt, the dirt is eaten by plants and insects, who are eaten by animals, and the animals are eaten by humans, and that matter is then used by humans to create babies, and then babies are alive.

This is a fact. Dead things become alive through natural processes. But to be alive you first have to be dead.

Your superset theorem of meaning is probably a rationalization of some deep emotional bias that has roots in your genes and early childhood environment.

Re: Breaking a WoW addiction

#166

Post by jlees »

charlesdm wrote: post #117

Here's my perspective -- I've played WoW pretty hardcore for a little bit less than two years before I quit. For me, I can actually say that the experience was beneficial to some extent. This was around 4,5 years ago, before I even knew HN existed. Before I started playing the game, I heard some of my friends talk about raiding. For people that are not familiar with the concept, once you reach the maximum level in th…

I also joined a world top guild (bouncing around #2 in Europe around the time I played). It's a totally different experience from even that described in the OP, and other people's experiences getting sucked into life at the mid-level-40s. I have to say to those who found levelling addictive, hardcore raiding is going to be ten times worse.

I'd agree in general that those who really focus to zerg a new boss as fast as possible end up playing less over time, but I also found many many people of my old guild who played almost constantly once content was cleared. Several would strive to have multiple highly geared alts, clearing the same content multiple times a week on alts as well as mains in case the next encounter needed a different class composition. Few of the people I raided with had jobs or openly talked about them. People who turned up once a week for the farm raid were mocked as being casual.

It's addictive in the way a job is addictive. Once your mind accepts there is some reason for you to be in this raiding cycle, and especially if you play an integral role (I was a main tank and tank officer), you feel you have to be there every night - and it just becomes the centre of your world, despite not receiving any real world compensation. The acclaim, worldwide achievement and knowledge of being part of something that is undeniably awesome all tie into it.

Re: Breaking a WoW addiction

#167

Post by cheald »

dteoh wrote: post #160
cheald wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's good money to be made, yes. Like the app store or Facebook games or whatnot, the best benefits are realized if you're a top-tier developer, but Curse ( http://curse.com ) runs a revenue-share program with addon authors. Donations don't cover much, generally, but Curse's payouts cover about half of my rent. I use the platform because they provide git repos, automatic release management, and issue tracking, but…

Didn't Blizzard at one point say no one can charge for addons or put in-game directions to donate or pay for the addon? How did Curse manage to get past this?

They did. Curse runs ads on their website and client, and does a revenue split with addon authors. The idea is that hosting your addons drives traffic to Curse, which drives up their ad income, so they give authors a bit of it to incentivize them to continue sending traffic to them. I think the exact split is based on your addon's install base through the client.

The end user never pays for the addon. They can pay for a premium client subscription, which gets you priority bandwidth on patch days, one-click updating, no ads, and that sort of thing, but you're very solidly in paying-for-service territory then, and there are still fully functional free methods to get the same addons. I think what Blizzard mostly wanted to avoid was an environment where some players could gain an advantage over others by purchasing some addon, and they didn't want the in-game experience turning into an advertising slum.

Re: Breaking a WoW addiction

#168

Post by jlees »

Luyt wrote: post #15

I play WoW for five years now. When I started, I used to be an occasional player. But when I hit level 60 (that was the highest level a few years ago) it was impossible to advance further without being in a regular raiding guild. So I started hardcoring: obligatory raids from 19:00 to 23:30, each evening, five evenings per week. Lower attendance was not tolerated. And gathering/grinding materials for potions/powerups…

As an ex-hardcore player I'm amazed at how easy it is to have fun in Cataclysm now without even raiding. And it's actually enjoyable treating heroic instances as I used to treat progress raids - reading up on a fight at a time, watching videos, working towards gear through points but with absolutely no obligation or time commitment.

It's awesome - though the biggest change I've made is moving to the USA, where I absolutely cannot raid as the European guild I'm in raids during my workday. (And the latency).

Re: Breaking a WoW addiction

#169

Post by adriand »

It's all part of the culture of entertainment we've developed, that is surely partly to blame for the economic situation that western societies are finding themselves in. These anecdotes about individuals extrapolate easily to millions of people who are fixated on various ways to waste time.

I played WoW for about six months when it first came out, and since stopping playing it (and most video games in general) I've often wondered what our society could achieve if the immense creative and mental exertion spent on games was spent on tackling real problems instead.

Certainly some people are working hard at meaningful things and using games as downtime, but I suspect they're a minority.

Re: Breaking a WoW addiction

#170

Post by jacquesm »

xal wrote: post #111

It seems to be stated as a fact in this discussion that you can't play a game such as WoW and do anything other productive on the side, but it's a lot more nuanced. Anecdotally, I've been playing WoW almost non stop since it launched and have been raiding once to three times a week. During this time I also got married, had a kid, founded Shopify, overtook the CEO role, grew it to be a multi million dollar business. I…

There is a subtle problem with all this, which is that you don't know what your life would have been had you not played WoW, it may be that you would be living in a cardboard box or it may be that you would have ended up even better than where you are today.

The best I can glean from your description is that for some people playing a game like WoW need not be a debilitating thing. I know a person that uses a scary amount of hard drugs and that in spite of that still functions quite well. Of course everybody has been saying 'it won't last long' but they've been saying that for longer than I can remember and he's still at it.

That doesn't mean that in general hard drugs are not a negative and it does not mean that he'll never get the bill. It just hasn't happened yet.

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