About a week after Warcraft came out, I'd just moved to California, I was temporarily bored waiting for classes to start, and I needed something to do. Since I'd just moved, my old consoles were out of the question: couldn't bring them with. All I had was clothes and a laptop. So I bought warcraft. The game utilized a lot of features I already have as pre-requisites to loving any game: solid combat, heavy rpg influences, and a fantasy angle. However, being a general misanthrope, the multiplayer aspect took some getting used to. I'd say about a day. Day two of Warcraft was the beginning of addiction. I played with every class and every race trying to find that ONE that I'd like. I finally settled on an Night-Elf Hunter and an Orc Shaman, eventually dumping the Orc in its mid-50's due to the fact that the Horde's character skins are fugly. My elf hunter, though was not. My elf hunter was a female toon because I'm a perv like that: the Alliance characters in the game are generally more aesthetically pleasing, and the Elf female skins had the added bonus of wiggling when they walked. Sold. Played that bitch out. And by "played out" I mean just that. I played that character DAILY from 2004 until 2007. For those first few weeks it was in a horrifying push of psychosis requiring 16-18 hour sittings. Once the novelty of the game wore off, that died down a little and I was playing more like 3-5 hours on weekdays. My weekends were enveloped by it.
Upon hitting level 60 with my hunter, I was content to bounce around and do nothing, occasionally switching over to alternate characters and plaything those. The idea of dungeon-raiding at the time didn't seem very logical to me...do the same dungeon over and over and over for minor upgrades? No thanks. That changed after a while, with the main impetus for the change being my discovery of JUST HOW FREAKING COOL those dungeons were.
Bam. Raiding guilds. 4 hours a night. 4-5 nights a week. Cooperative play with the sole purpose of pimping out my character to look her greatest.
Now, it probably seems like I was a complete addict. I certainly wouldn't disagree. Hiccup there: Never missed school. Never missed work. My homework was done. I was shooting films simultaneously. I DID, to my credit, get my shit done. I just completely avoided any semblance of a social life (for the most part), instead using "socialize" time to play a video game.
2007 was the release of warcraft's first expansion. After nearly 6 months continuing on with my hunter, I switched mains to a recently-levelled Alliance Shaman and went to a new guild. I was heal-bitch until 2009. The addiction got worse: I'd joined a new guild that was a dedicated raiding guild the was FAR more productive than my previous...and they also raided more often than my old guild. By the time I quit playing in May of 2009, I was the best healer on a highly-populated server, and certainly the most pimped-out. I also had almost every bell and whistle you can imagine...mounts, toys, pets. And I was DEVOTED to that character. When the 2008 Expansion was released in in November, the profession of jewelcrafting was introduced, and armour/weapons became customizable --- add new stats to your armor with gems! Huzzah! And some of those gems were EXPENSIVE. But I would spend each day post-raids analyzing my performance and theory-crafting with my gear, seeing how i could eke out just a LITTLE BIT MORE performance. I spent thousands of gold re-gemming my gear...and gold in that game, while not hard to come by, took time to get.
Why did I quit? Not because I wanted to. Although at this point I wouldn't go back...I still have the discs sitting here nearby, I just don't reinstall the game. But I don't have time to do that kind of devotion to a single game anymore. Throwing out the 200 hours needed to play Oblivion (still sitting on my dresser, almost two years after purchase...again, I just don't have time) is a hard enough thing to coordinate.
So. I still love the game. It's a great game, I'd recommend it to everyone. It's a fully-immersive environment with solid gameplay. The only real downside to it is that it's popular...one of the ways I was able to justify to myself the quitting part was the fact that each server had 10,000 pure idiot assholes on them. The popularity of video games has changed their audience: before it was techie-geeks like me playing them. Now they're popular, and the jocks, assholes, hillbillies, and douche-bags that used to hate me for loving them play them.
This explains shit like Halo, of course.
I'm kind of an elitist with gaming. People who say they game and then add up with "I love shooters" or "I love my Xbox" deserve a kick to the crotch.
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