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When WoW becomes M'eh.
Jaded
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Ever get into the habit of doing something and you just keep doing it, even if you don't enjoy it?
Smoking, drinking, rampants acts of a sexual nature?
I have a devil on my shoulder, and it's name is WoW.
I need to pull myself away from it, at least to some extent, does anyone have advice on how to "cut your ties" with an addiction?
I'd like to start doing something a little more physical, but money is a little tight right now, and honestly, I am not motivated to do something on my own... I'd need something with other people there.
Help me H/A, help me with on this !
Smoking, drinking, rampants acts of a sexual nature?
I have a devil on my shoulder, and it's name is WoW.
I need to pull myself away from it, at least to some extent, does anyone have advice on how to "cut your ties" with an addiction?
I'd like to start doing something a little more physical, but money is a little tight right now, and honestly, I am not motivated to do something on my own... I'd need something with other people there.
Help me H/A, help me with on this !
I can't think of anything clever.
Jaded on
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If you can't, give someone trust worthy your u/n and password so they can do that for you.
I've heard of people doing things as simple as doing pushups whenever they felt like playing their MMO, or going for a jog. Take up a more constructive hobby, like gardening (that can even save you money and result in much healthier eating habits).
every time i wanted a cig, i would do push-ups until i could do no more. if it had been a long day, and my arms were noodles, i'd do sit-ups.
Seriously, the only thing kept me from eventually going back was by blowing up my old computer with a hammer and buying one with no graphics capabilities. Desperate times, desperate measures. My problem is my entire friend network in RL plays and is addicted. Whenever one person gets out, the rest pressure them back in. I finally just gave up both because it was getting was too out of hand.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
I'd like more.
Wow can still be there, it just can't be one of the top three things I do.
Make WoW your "reward" for doing other things (preferably including your woman... wait, that didn't sound right), and also set strict time limits for how much you play. Have your woman help you regulate that (women are great at that kinda stuff =P).
in my 2 or 3 months worth of WoW play taught me, that if you want to do all that "cool" stuff in WoW you must make it a priority (make time for groups and grinding) - which is a fuckload of stupid, and why i don't play.
Except you just put it in your top 3 things and listed it first.
edit: honestly, it's as simple as just stopping. Just do not play it. After you stop yourself from playing, say 5 times, you'll be fine.
I think he was saying it's currently in his top three and he doesn't want that.
Thus why he wants to quit ... o_O
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
however
Do you pay with a subscription? Call your bank and tell them not to make payments to Blizzard from your anymore. Don't go into a Best Buy, and stay away from anywhere that sells pre-paid cards.
Get on your characters and look up your time played. Add all that time together and just really, really think about what else you could do with that time. I have some friends who could have mastered a -few- languages with their playtimes.
You accept you have a problem, or are at least tired of the routine. Now comes the easy part- Manning up and doing something more positive with your time.
This is the only post worth a damn in this thread. You can still enjoy WoW and do other things. Absolutely nothing stopping you from doing so.
Making WoW be a "reward" for spending time with RL friends, etc. is exactly the problem - it's designed to be habt-forming and to make you ant to exclude other, ultimately more rewarding things for the easy feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction WoW gives you. You'll be much better if you start doign regular physical activity - physical exercise creates endorphins and will itself be, to some degree, habit forming. Except tihs time the habit gets you outsid,e in better shape and avoiding icky things like obesity and cardiovascular disease. I'd go cold turkey on WoW. If you want to do something more physical, i'd suggest the following:
1) Are you in shape? If no, start running. You can do this with other people (woman is a good start), or strangers via meetup or your local shoe store.
2) If you are in shape - try team sports. Lots of cities have ultimate frisbee, kickball, etc. leagues which tend to be less douchey/jocky than trad'l basketball or softball leagues.
delete the game
it isn't one of those things that you can just "play a little bit of"
i tried that
you get frustrated because all of your friends level ahead of you and you can't do anything with them
so time, even when you try to regulate it, sneaks up on you and goes overboard
you need to replace the MMO
find something else to "level up" in that is actually respectable
take an art class. a pottery class. a cooking class.
go running, start lifting weights, start your own business.
these sorts of things you can advance in, see yourself getting better, and "level up" in the real world.
Physical activity is a good idea.
I agree with you completely, if he was trying to quit the game outright, but it seems that he doesn't want to give it up completely, he just wants to find ways to make it less a part of his life. There's no reason he needs to quit completely, and he's not going to anyway if he truly doesn't want to.
All things in moderation works just fine.
I agree with this too, but that's just my personal opinion about the game.
I also realized the freedom I had been missing out on. So many times I had to cancel plans with friends, or struggle to talk with the head of the guild so I could miss a night here and there. If you were a hardcore raider like I was, you'll find that not having to worry about logging on from 8pm to 1am is pretty nice. I sure don't miss it.
I played WoW because of the goals. If you are also goal/achievement oriented, find a different goal. "I'm going to lose 3 pounds this week." "Within 2 weeks I'm going to walk 'x' miles." Get a pedometer. Or "I'm going to accomplish 'x' goal in 'x' time." It helps.
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I did the hardcore raiding thing as well, for me it was Naxxramas that helped get me off WoW, it was just so incredibly insipid and pointless that i didn't feel any sense of accomplishment blitzing through it night after night after night. So i quit and told myself that i'd start playing again when Uldamar came out, that came around, but becuase i'd been away from it so long that my need to play had completely abated and i just don't give a crap about it anymore, when you get right down to it it's an incredibly bland game and once you get some distance from it you see how boring and pointless a lot of the bullshit you go through is.
With that said, I used to play WoW. I had 2 70s, and was close to getting an 80 after Wrath came out. I found that my favorite part of the game was starting a new character, because it was fun to explore a new class. Once it got past level 10ish though, boring crap is all WoW became. Grinding for levels doesn't make a game fun, it makes it boring. It really became a matter of whether or not I was actually having fun with my time in that game, turns out I wasn't. I was also pumping 15 dollars of income into that game for no reason every month. So I just quit, and didn't look back. I tried to come back once, but all my friends that played were way ahead of me, and there was no point wasting my life to get to their point, and that was the stopping point.
I suggest what many other people have: just quit playing. You will find it refreshing!
Have you just convinced yourself you should quit, or do you honestly want to quit? If you're still having fun with it, let's be honest, WoW is a pretty economical way to have fun. If your playing is interfering with your life that's really another issue entirely.
On the other hand if you're not having fun, just go do something else; you'll be surprised as how quickly the urge to play WoW goes away.
For me it was really helpful to specifically occupy the time I usually played WoW with other things. Go work out during your raid times, find a local pickup game of something during those times, whatever. If you're just hanging around during times when you'd normally play, you'll find yourself playing again.
edit: don't do any silly, contrived things like deleting everything, giving account control to a friend, or whatever. If you want to quit you don't need those steps, and if you don't they won't stop you anyway.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
All you need to make quitting possible is to want to quit. Here is what I did (in a more sensible order than the way I did them):
1) Tell your friends in WoW that you're leaving and how to contact you. This way you should never feel any need to check back in on them.
2) Uninstall WoW. If you really want, delete your characters, sell your account, throw away your discs, etc. But it doesn't really make a difference.
3) Delete all your WoW-related bookmarks.
4) Delete all the phone numbers/IM contacts/email contacts etc of people that you only talk to about WoW-related stuff. I know you might think "but maybe they'll want to hang out and do something outside of WoW one day!", but they won't. Ever. Forget them.
5) Never ever read anything involving WoW if you can avoid it. If, for example, you're reading Gabe's latest post, and he mentions something about the new WoW patch, do not investigate further. Every link to WoW-related content should be considered a swirling vortex of death which should be avoided at all costs.
6) Find something else to fill your time. This is probably the most important part. Idle hands and all that. Spend time with your girlfriend. Play other games - you mentioned money is tight, but you can fill in a hell of a lot of time with older, classic games which you can pick up on the cheap. Do you work out? Do it more. Read? Read more. At school? Study more. Find something to fill in that void.
Also, silvermoon server sucked.
I ended up un-installing WoW and shredding my discs and not caring about that dumb game anymore. Just realize that game is an abomination towards anything real in life. It will not help you in the real world and steals time away from loved ones and important things.
You have to just completely quit outright or you'll never stop playing.
I started by announcing to my RL friends (who i played WoW with) and my guild that i was going to quit, after that you sort of feel obliged to.
If you don't raid then, why on earth are you bothering to play?
Get a new hobby, exercise is a good one thats been mentioned a few times here.
It's not a chemical addiction, but it is a learned behavior reinforced both by the game and by, in some people's cases, social pressure. You won't get the shakes if you quit, but it's certainly possible to feel depressed, anxious, directionless or lonely after quitting, and many of the same rules of handling "real" addiction will apply here as well (staying away from people who want to see you fail, finding new things to do, pursuing a healthier lifestyle, et cetera).
I once played WoW regularly. I've quit twice. I started playing on Day 1 (Nov.23rd 2004), was level 60 two months later, and was raiding Molten Core by that summer. The guild I was in raided 5 nights a week, Sunday - Thursday with Friday and Sat nights off. Raid's started at 6pm PST (9pm EST) and went till 10-11pm (1-2am), 4-5 hours every night of the week for 20-25 hours of raiding. It was very demanding, felt like a job and while fun at the time, was not very rewarding use of my time. When I had spare time and wasn't raiding I leveled alts, and when those alts reached 60 I would use them to raid with as well.
When Burning Crusade was nearing launch, all the top guilds on my server collapsed, and my guild never made it to the level 60 incarnation of Kel'Thuzad in Naxxaramas, we were only half way there. I had been plugging away 20-25 hours a week on this game for 2 years now. I farmed the Auction House to make money for consumables/repairs etcetera as I didn't have time or a desire to make it by grinding mobs. With my guild gone and no raids to be had, I took temporary leave of the game until launch of the expansion. After BC launch I leveled my characters to 70 - this time with a new outlook on endgame. I promised myself I would NEVER EVER get into the raid game again, Karazhan once a week was enough for me, I didn't need to be doing 20-25 hours a week. However I broke the promise I made to myself. One of the raid leaders of my Karazhan runs wanted to expand the horizons of our group, so we started doing merged runs with another Karazhan group on early 25-man content. It just snowballed from there. We only had 2 raid nights a week, Tues and Thursday nights, for 4 hours. Saturday afternoons started getting added in. 10 hours a week was a lot beter than 20-25. But then real life and work began getting in the way. Guild was short staffed and I was expected to show up for every raid and would get bitched at if I missed raids. The raid group was turning very elitist, not the casual raiding mindset that I had gone in with. It finally came to a head and I couldn't take anymore of the demands the game/guild was putting on me and I quit cold turkey in June of 2008.
From June 2008 - Februray 2009 I stayed away. During that time I found other productive things to do as mentioned in the thread already, exercising, Netflix to watch movies on occasion, etc. It was very rewarding. By Feb Wrath had been out for a few months. Some friends were still playing it. So I decided to do the 2 week trial membership to start fresh new character. Leave all my old baggage behind and rolled a Death Knight. During the two week trial I leveled the death knight from 55 to 70. After the trial ended I took a break to test my limits, It took another 2-3 weeks before I actually bought Wrath of the Lich King. After buying it I spent the next several months casually playing and leveled the Death Knight to 80. After reaching 80 and being there for several weeks I finally realized that I had no desire to play this game anymore. I had no interest in doing PvP or running 5-mans to gear up for raiding again. It was the same circle of death that I'd done before. Only the people with lots and lots of time and effort can really succeed (the way I want to succeed) at this game, kinda like Magic: The Gathering - the people willing to spend the most money on the best cards are the ones who build the best decks and win tournements. This realization was a huge turn off for me and finally snubbed out the burning ember of desire to raid that I had left. I cancelled my account 2 months into the 3 month plan I bought.
I would also like to note that the Acheivement system really pissed me off. I really hated the fact that all of my previous efforts in the game on my old main characters were locked to those characters, meaning you had to complete each acheivement seperately for each character. Being the perfectionist/completionist I am this was also a huge turn off for me, as I will try to get every acheievement I can on X360 games. I really think the acheivement system should have been designed to account bound, not character bound. But that's neither here nor there.
The bottom line is I've finally closed WoW in my life, and all it took was the realization that there are way more fun, better, and healthier things to be doing. You don't need to destroy your account, get it banned, sell off your stuff or any of that. Just have the willpower to walk away and stay away.
Which is funny cause both are fun and new at first, but then they become addicting and rot your teeth..
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That's what did it for me. I didn't have the addiction as bad as a lot of people do/did, but it was bad enough.
I was forsaking my friends too often to play, it would be all I would do after work or school, and when I started dreaming about the game mixed with some aspect of my personal life, that was it.
The same could probably be said of any amount of game playing, but I'm talking about the time commitment that comes with MMO addiction specifically.
It has progressed beyond a hobby to an addiction and it is going to take your willpower, and hopefully, the support of those around you to stop.
You may have to go the extra mile in seeing their "support" the right way. If they are hopelessly addicted as well, look at how it is affecting their lives. It's a perfect opportunity to be on the outside looking in, and you just might see your reflection... or some other bullshit like that.
Seriously, it will be up to you to make it happen. Step one is realizing that it's an addiction and it is negatively affecting your life. You seem to be on that path, so just keep up the effort and really, seriously try to find a different hobby or activity to overtake the WoW time. You have to find something else to fill that time or it just won't work.
I could go back to my account if I wanted to. I have my characters there, but shit, I really don't WANT to. I know what a waste it is. You have to sink far too much time into it, and you get literally nothing meaningful in return. The only real redeeming quality of the game would be the social aspect, and the relationships that can develop. That's always great, but otherwise, it's really detrimental to life management.
I'm only speaking from an addiction stand point. I don't mean to say that people can't play the game and manage their lives, of course they can. Many people do. We don't hear about those people. We hear about the ones that do have issues and there are many of those folks as well.