The reason WoW is so addictive is because once you've invested a certain amount of time into it you feel compelled to keep playing so that the time and money you've already sunk into it doesn't feel wasted. It's a part of the human psyche which has been exploited by Casinos for decades, just with Casinos it's obviously a lot more about money than time.

Like gambling though if you set yourself a limit, you can enjoy it responsibly. With WoW I think the best limit is: "I'm only going to play this until it stops being fun", that way the time you've spent playing doesn't feel wasted.

Most successful. The total subscriber base is thrown from every region that the game is currently played in. China, Korea, Europe, la da la da, and so on. Americans total only in the 3 or 4 million mark.



Do you know this from first hand xp? I'm assuming not, am I right? Have you even played the game?




All depends on how you value your time I suppose. The game is even more casual friendly than ever.



Seriously...wth...You have several options here as to buy play time, you don't even need a credit card (pre-paid game cards, ever heard of debit?)

And how does the act of using a credit card inact any sort of "toll" on the card itself?



This was Everquest...please learn to read into something.

And this story is really really really old...




I'm not even going to bother with this wall of "serious shit" as you put it.




I won't scream, but I will call you out on being uninformed as to your subject matter.

I didn't want you to say stuff like that either

I will say in terms of time to money spent ratio, WoW is far and away the best value entertainment. I saved so much money when I was playing WoW just because I wasn't spending money on movies, alcohol or going out.

Are you serious?

Stardock owns these forums, not yourself.
To quote you:



"Keep your nose out of this thread from now on"

You have much to learn when it comes to forums my strange little frowning smiley.

Where's your defense for the slanderish claims you so freely post and do not defend?

Well said Sir! And I couldn't agree more!

WoW is a "Nov. to Feb./Mostly on the weekends" relationship for the past 3 years for myself, but with the coming of spring/summer/fall, there's more to do

Northern Idaho ftl!!

I was reading this thread, and I wanted to add something. I'm in high school, and I played WoW for about a month last year. I noticed three things. One, I was addicted to the game. I would set aside all other commitments and just play as much as possible. Two, all of my grades dropped fifteen points. That really sucked. And here was the worst thing: I got bored after the eighth day. I, however, felt obligated to complete my quest. "But, wait! another quest? I guess Ill complete that as well!" This kept on going until I realized that I was flushing my hard earned money down the drain.


Also, for all of you that say blizzard sucks, starcraft is, and will always be, the greatest game ever made. followed closely by SoaSE, galciv2, Civ 4, X3, and super smash bros brawl. It will be superseded by starcraft two. of that I have no doubt. However, DON'T BASH BLIZZARD COS THEY MAKE ONE FRIGGIN CRAPPY MMO!!!! who cares if they want to make money? they are a good company, as good or perhaps better than stardock, (no offense admins) so treat them as such! You wouldn't say that Stardock and Brad wardell suck just because Galciv 2 and SoaSE were incredible, would you? I mean, come on!

Everquest 2 is better.

No offense to anyone, but I find the OP rather trollish. His attitude towards human behavior is rather disgusting.

Are people no longer responsible for their actions? If a man kills someone over a woman, should we blame the woman? Why is it different for video games or music? 'Guns don't kill people, people that play videogames kill people.'

Also, on the addiction thing - the word is ill-defined especially in a case like this. If we use the previous example of a man killing someone over a woman, you'd have a lot more ground to stand on saying the killer was addicted to women (or something along those lines) since there is actually a host of chemical reactions present associated directly with the woman in this case. But most reasonable people would tell you that such a notion is nonsensical.

Obviously, the game IS FUN to the people that play it. I'm not really sure why anyone would disagree with this. It's not as if there's some magical digital chemical released in the air when someone plays WoW that addicts them to the game.

I keep using the chemical addiction example even though I realize there are 'other' kinds of addiction where a person's body has a certain response to a certain stimulus, and they want to keep getting that response. I would not personally call that an addiction because it's so ill-defined that one would inevitably come to the conclusion that people are addicted to sleep, food, driving, watching TV etc.

Many have suggested that this alternate addiction can be spotted by additions to the definition, such as the addiction causes harm to that person's physical and mental health. This still doesn't solve the underlying problem that we don't really know what that kind of 'addiction' is or how the brain interacts with the rest of the body in such instances. It also has the problem of definition (what is harm? Is losing one hour of sleep per day over doing something you enjoy harmful? Questions like this lead absolutely nowhere.).

My point in laying all this out is that, unless there's the presence of a chemical addiction, using the word just clouds the issue with untold negative connotation that cannot be substantiated in any reasonable way. It's all just an appeal to emotion.

Also, I'd have to say that those two stories sound an awful lot like urban myths (the first being from people who've never played WoW - as Kryo points out).

I played WoW for a couple of months and then decided it was incredibly boring and that most of the good story etc. was basically lifted straight from Warcraft III (which, on the other, is very exciting to play). On the other hand, I played Guild Wars for about 2 years. The fact that I wasn't bleeding a bank account dry the whole time, and that the PvP was FANTASTIC was what caused this particular 'addiction' of mine. I haven't played it in nearly a year, but I could reinstall it and go right back in any time and not pay a dime.

Also, about your Blizzard diatribe - no other company has made such rich quality games (and game worlds). These guys are the best developers on the planet, and they are obsessive about quality control. There's not some kind of underhanded campaign, but even if there were, it wouldn't matter. Their games are top notch. No advertising or marketing campaign can change that. I would have been okay with a comment like this about EA or someone similar who hurls a few games out of the black pit of their stomach every now and then, but come on. This is very trollish.

Don't say you didn't ask for it!

I heard that Blizzard refined a super-secret technology where they can condense nicotine to its most addictive form and convert it to a digital code that they subliminally insert into World of Warcraft. Thats why it is so addictive.

On top of that, they hire Mexicans at pennies to the dollar, to create new players that will be your friend just to keep you paying the monthly subscription.

Its also rumored that the lead designer of WoW, is actually a real Night Elf necromancer, and performs bizarre rituals at the wee hours of the night, and they incorporated this as a "class" in the game to make it seem more socially acceptable to a younger crowd. Some even call it the designer's first step in a quest for global domination.

Even the advertisers at Blizzard, who make the WoW commercials with real celebraties actual BLACKMAILED all them and forced them to make those commercials for free. Mr. T for example, they tricked him into smelling perfume they were selling, but when he sniffed the samples, it was really ether, and while Mr. T was unconscious, they took incriminating photos and told him if he didn't promote the game, the pictures would surface on the internet and ruin is public image.



Don't you and I, (and all those conspiracy theorists...) know it, man!

Of Course not! that only happens when you look at internet porn!

I think GE's OP is designed to be a little over the top. It's kinda hard to put into writing the subilties of the human language (Like sarcasm).

Besides he does have a good point... Almost everyone here who has tried WoW has stated they became bored with it. So what is so special about it? Do people become so wrapped up in the perception that it's great because someone else said its great?


hehehehe, Mr. T. That commercial stil makes me laugh....hehehe

The OP was a troll post but I'll give my .02$ on WoW anyways.

WoW is extremely addictive, but the obvious elements you would think make it so are present in lots of other games that have nowhere near the subscriber base. Lord Of The Rings Online, Everquest 2, City of Heroes (to a point) all follow the same formula: Give quest, kill X number of foozles, loot, ding, gratz. It's a tried and true method that's been around since MUD's from the late seventies.

What WoW does is get rid of all the extraneous crap that detracts from the experience. The game is polished to such a high production quality that bugs are for the most part non-existent. The combat system is simplistic but smooth and responsive. The world is seamless - no loading screens unless you cross continents or go into a dungeon. The graphics are cartoony but the animations down to the last detail are believable and fluid. In short, Blizzard created a world you can get lost in. It isn't flawless, and there are those who don't like the whole or certain aspects, but you can't argue with the production values and polish.

That being said, I will say that playing WoW for me hasn't been totally a positive experience. After 3 1/2 years of WoW I find it harder to get into deeper games (like GalCiv, which I just bought today) and I'm much more impatient with games than I used to be. If a game doesn't grab me within the first few hours I'm very likely to just put it back on the shelf and login to WoW and run a dungeon or level one of my alts. I'm hoping Galciv breaks me of the cycle.

My advice to anyone who hasn't played the game would be to by all means try it out, but don't get caught up in the raid-game at the end which consumes your life.

(1) Even if he did make a good point somewhere in that post, it's far overshadowed by weasel words, insinuation, and Blizzard bashing.

(2) We're not representative of the general populace here. It's selection bias. Most people that listen to Britney Spears don't play Attack Vector, in other words. TBS fans are unfortunately (for now, at least) a fairly small minority.

(3) You could make this same argument for anything that's popular and come up with ridiculous statements. Instead of looking at it from this angle, it's more productive to think about the good points of the game and to expand that out to what people could like in the game.

The fleshed out story, humor, writing, and level design are quite good in WoW, and I can see people drawn to things like that. The PvP, while very poor from my perspective (having played Guild Wars), is actually quite good compared to other similar games. There is a lot to enjoy there.

I found the game boring because it focuses primarily on its strong PvE elements, and I'm simply not a fan of the PvE in ANY MMO-type game. Similarly, many here probably abhor the idea of playing a twitch-based voodoo reflex FPS (not me, personally) - it's likely the feel of the genre as a whole that people dislike. I'm sure most people here would also dislike Everquest, Lineage II, Dark Age of Camelot etc. etc. etc.

It's not a marketing campaign success, it's just a solid game. When Blizzard went online, they were expecting to total 400,000 users, but they were met with 400,000 subscriptions in the first month.

Healthy suspicion against large companies is always welcome in my book, but really Blizzard is a shining example of success through passion for the work. The Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft worlds were all very fleshed out before WoW even existed (though it must be said that WCIII and WoW were sort of developed at the same time). All these games are shining beacons of success, much as Valve has made their Half-life games a beacon to the often shit-stained world of FPS gaming.

By the way, Piznit's post was absolutely hilarious and spot-on.

No, he's not trying to be sarcastic. Check his previous thread ranting against Blizzard and Starcraft, and you'll see that he's just trolling against Blizzard on here. Perhaps he was banned from the Blizzard forums for trolling... or perhaps he just didn't have a Blizzard game, so he couldn't register an account on their forums to troll in the first place. Anyway, he's quite biased in his opinion of Blizzard, and many of his claims seem baseless.

As Mettra stated, it would make some sense if he was ranting against certain companies/publishers, but there's very little that he can truly rant about against Blizzard. Blizzard does their best to put out a well developed, polished, and enjoyable product. The main thing people may complain about is that Blizzard hasn't made games for different genre yet.

Thank you Mettra, I enjoyed writing it!

I used to love arguing with people who thought the exact same thing about EverQuest, because it was "addictive and it was outright killing people". I always imagined that EverQuest as a 300 pound New Yorker with really bad sweat stains killing people with his EQ knife. World of Warcraft is much more refined than that. When WoW goes on a killing spree, I envision him wearing a nice camelhair trenchcoat with Ray-ban's...

...but he probably does have a Unibomber beard.