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[Alex]

ADMIN TEAM DECREES: From now on, all "IS WOW AN OK GAME IT RUINS LIVES NO WAY THOSE DOPES WERE ADDICTIVE MONKEYS ANYWAY WHO JUST FOUND WOW BEFORE THEY FOUND A NEEDLE AWWW FUCK YOU MAN" discussion goes here. Period.

World of Warcraft will take your friends, seduce your family, decimate your love life and if you let it, it will imprison you.

Ignoring the question of whether or not it is really a good game (it really isn't), WoW is a game that can manage to frustrate you even if you don't play it.  Dare I say even especially if you don't play it.  When I meet someone I think can be a buddy, and I find out they're into WoW, at this point I just shake my head and walk away.  I don't want to be there when that person starts prioritizing dailies over their personal lives.  I don't want to have to compete with a group of forty giant talking cows for attention.

 

Thank you for putting it in nicer words than I would have, Brentai.

[Mongrel]

World of Warcraft will take your friends, seduce your family, decimate your love life and if you let it, it will imprison you.

Ignoring the question of whether or not it is really a good game (it really isn't), WoW is a game that can manage to frustrate you even if you don't play it.  Dare I say even especially if you don't play it.  When I meet someone I think can be a buddy, and I find out they're into WoW, at this point I just shake my head and walk away.  I don't want to be there when that person starts prioritizing dailies over their personal lives.  I don't want to have to compete with a group of forty giant talking cows for attention.

 

Thank you for putting it in nicer words than I would have, Brentai.

  Brent

I keep finding that I try too hard to be 'evenhanded' saying things like, "Well, it's just a game. The amount of time people spend on it is their respnsibility, etc.", but I find myself thinking or saying that all to often and in the same way one might say that to defend a friend who smokes way way too much pot.

[Detonator]

World of Warcraft has taken perfectly good people, and it has ruined them.  You can defend the game all you want, but you know for a fact that this is true.  Everybody does.

perhaps the same could be said of all religions

[Shinra]

You know, guys, re: wow hate, how is WoW any different from any other primary hobby?

I don't understand how playing one game 40 hours a week is any different from playing 10 different games, four hours a week each, save for that you guys consider one to be unacceptable and the other to be perfectly fine - if you don't play a lot of videogames, wargaming, tabletop miniatures, dungeons and dragons, restoring a car, reading science fiction, etc. Everyone has things they do in their downtime. If someone thinks a good time is getting together with some other people and killing dragons in a videogame, how is that any of your business?

I get that you don't like WoW, and that's fine - but this visceral reaction towards people that play it is fucking stupid. And before we get into the whole "but they put it before other things!" argument, those people would probably do the same shit with any other hobby - I'm sure there's at least someone on these boards who didn't go to college because Dad spent all their money restoring a mustang, buying musical equipment or collecting coins. At least WoW only costs fifteen bucks a month. People prone to escapism are going to embrace escapism anywhere they find it - if it wasn't WoW, it would have been something else, and probably something a lot more destructive.

[Kazz]

yeah

my dad was gonna play catch with me

but he found a rare coin instead

[Shinra]

Maybe your parents were great, Kazz, but my dad cashed my savings bonds in to buy cocaine and guitars, and spent the majority of my youth pretending like he was going to be a big time rockstar. (Edit: I want to note that this was the half the time when he wasn't spending money that should have been going to putting clothes on my back and food on the table building a fucking formula one racecar in the garage. While sober, I might add.)

Does this make all music bad? Does this enable me to have an irrational hatred of famous guitarists?

WoW does not magically make people prioritize their leisure time poorly. It takes a certain kind of person to do it in the first place. If you know a guy who plays WoW to the point of losing his job over it, he would have found a different monkey for his back eventually. At least WoW isn't going to have them wind up dead from organ failure at 50.

[Niku]

Eventually, WoW got to the point where I wasn't prioritizing my own time, but instead shifting my time around the schedules of others against an encroaching deadline.  And that's when I stopped playing it forever.

[Alex]

I stopped playing when I noticed that I was playing less games overall and not having variety in my gaming diet is, in fact, the worst.  That and I realized I hate the MMO game design.

Fanbase and players sure ain't helping though.

[Rico]

I suppose it really does depend a lot on how much time you spend/are willing to spend, but pretty much any social activity ever will require shifting your time around the schedules of others.  If you're okay with doing it to watch movies with some neckbeards, that's cool.  If you're not okay with doing it to play video games with neckbeards, that's okay too but shut the fuck up about how other people do it already.

[Norondor]

Probably because he had the depression.

[Rico]

Deked by a rare occurrence of me prioritizing being right and a decent human being over being right and a total jackass.

[Bleck]

I don't really think the problem with WoW obsession lies in the obsession part so much as the WoW part - i.e the reason I disparage people who play WoW 40 hours a week and not people who plays ten other games four hours a week is because WoW is a bad game.

It's like the difference between a guy who spends all his time going to see movies and a guy who spends all of his time going to see shitty romantic comedies.

[Mongrel]

SCIENCE has demonstrated that if you take a rat and wire a button that goes directly to the pleasure centres of that rat's brain, that rat will push that motherfucker non-stop and without regard for anything else until it is dead.

I have found that humans are little different in this regard.

Is that the button's fault? No. But watching the real-life equivalent is very very difficult, and it's hard not to hate either the button or the person when you see it happen.

[Shinra]

the reason I disparage people who play WoW 40 hours a week and not people who plays ten other games four hours a week is because WoW is a bad game.
[/i]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsogswrH6ck

theoretically speaking, for someone who is not financially sound it's a lot cheaper to play wow than to play all those new and different games.

SCIENCE has demonstrated that if you take a rat and wire a button that goes directly to the pleasure centres of that rat's brain, that rat will push that motherfucker non-stop and without regard for anything else until it is dead.

I have found that humans are little different in this regard.

Is that the button's fault? No. But watching the real-life equivalent is very very difficult, and it's hard not to hate either the button or the person when you see it happen.

the problem with your analogy is that you're inferring that WoW is somehow magically different than any other videogame or hobby. The part I find most hilarious about the addiction analogies is that the game naturally devolves into a process that involves you logging on 2 hours a night three nights a week and never playing the game otherwise until you run out of things to do and inevitably cancel your account. If anything, in the world of online gaming, I'd call WoW the anti-addictive game - unlike, say, Team Fortress or DotA or Starcraft, you eventually run out of shit to do and progress to be made, and due to the imposed restriction of content based on large group dynamics and social structuring your play is naturally modulated based on the availability and schedules of your online friends. If people do log on outside of their standard raid times, it's much more likely that they're logging on simply to socialize - and not to play the game itself. In that regard, World of Warcraft shifts from being an online game to being a graphically represented chatroom or message board. You know, kind of like what we're using right now. Now, are we going to have a conversation about how internet friends aren't real friends? Because I would love to be a part of that conversation.

People who hate MMOs just come off to me as militant vegans. You don't jive with something other people do, so rather than just accept that you're two different people who like two different things, you have to make it your job to debase us for the things we happen to enjoy. Be it a steak or an online game; either way, it's irrational and self righteous.

[Mongrel]

the problem with your analogy is that you're inferring that WoW is somehow magically different than any other videogame or hobby.

I'm not saying that at all, so don't put words in my mouth. Yes, this came up for discussion because of WoW, but I was very deliberately making a general point.

I do take some umbrage with WoW in particular, because as I mentioned previously one of the biggest differences between WoW and some other hobbies, is that it does in fact literally fit a textbook guide for promoting addictive behaviour.

However, in fairness to WoW, it is hardly unique in this regard. I would think that most of us realize that addictive hobbies and pastimes with a social component have been around for a very, very long time. WoW is just the latest iteration, and one that happens to affect the nerd community at a higher proportion.

Is it fair to get angry at these hobbies or games? No. However, we are all human and it is very natural to get angry at such things in spite of good sense. That's where all those ineffectual drug laws come from, really. The anger and frustration of watching people throw their lives away on ANYTHING, be a game, or whatever-have-you, is maddening. It's also something no one has really found a way to deal with very well so far. At least, not on a level above that of the individual.

Hell, even the designers of WoW don't want addicts. They're in a very difficult position: on one hand, they must create an engaging experience so as to draw people in and and keep them paying subscription fees, but on the other hand, addicts are quite detrimental to a company's bottom line, causing bad publicity and costing a disproportionate amount of support costs. So is it fair to blame the designers or Blizzard the company? Tempting, but no, it isn't.

Finally, (full disclosure), I will allow that on a purely personal level, I dislike things that smack of creating a literal fantasy world to live in and that WoW gets lumped into this. Yes WoW and other MMOs are an incredibly PRIMITIVE form of 'pure' fantasy world. Again, can I blame people for wanting this? No. Those game designers are doing what they're supposed to be doing. And if individuals do wind up losing themselves to addiction, well, there are far worse fates for people than to become a respected leader or elder pillar of an ephemeral sub-sub-community.

I recognise that this last dislike is only my own personal opinion, nothing more, nothing less. But that's what this thread is soliciting, now isn't it?  

The part I find most hilarious about the addiction analogies is that the game naturally devolves into a process that involves you logging on 2 hours a night three nights a week and never playing the game otherwise until you run out of things to do and inevitably cancel your account. If anything, in the world of online gaming, I'd call WoW the anti-addictive game - unlike, say, Team Fortress or DotA or Starcraft, you eventually run out of shit to do and progress to be made, and due to the imposed restriction of content based on large group dynamics and social structuring your play is naturally modulated based on the availability and schedules of your online friends. If people do log on outside of their standard raid times, it's much more likely that they're logging on simply to socialize - and not to play the game itself. In that regard, World of Warcraft shifts from being an online game to being a graphically represented chatroom or message board. You know, kind of like what we're using right now. Now, are we going to have a conversation about how internet friends aren't real friends? Because I would love to be a part of that conversation.

People who hate MMOs just come off to me as militant vegans. You don't jive with something other people do, so rather than just accept that you're two different people who like two different things, you have to make it your job to debase us for the things we happen to enjoy. Be it a steak or an online game; either way, it's irrational and self righteous.

I would suggest that the opposite here is that case. I am trying to explain where some of this anger about WoW comes from. The only self-righteous militancy I've seen is in your defense.

EDIT: Apologies Frocto, one of my my addictions is reply to posts where people accuse me of saying something completely different than I did.

Everybody's dumb in their own very special way.  

[Miss Cat Ears]

the worst thing about wow is that it derails threads where we were having a discussion about something I care about

[Alex]

the worst thing about wow is that it derails conversations where we were having a discussion about something I care about

More so when it's directed at me or others who want nothing more than to divorce ourselves from the game.

Much more so when it is generally the only topic one is capable of.

[Frocto]

Everybody's dumb in their own very special way.  

no just you and shinra

can we have a threadsplit please

[Mongrel]

Everybody's dumb in their own very special way.  

no just you and shinra

can we have a threadsplit please

Actually, let's NOT have a threadsplit. 'Cause I'd rather drop it and giving it it's own thread is just gonna be another one of those WHAT HAVE YOU DONE.

[Frocto]

well, if there isn't a pedantic and unreadable dump thread about wow addiction by now, then there probably should be one for the next time you cocker spaniels lose bladder control

why did you delete your post, dn? it was good