What follows is an overly long treatise on my decision to stop playing a video game. Truly a first world problem.

I used to play the popular MMO World of Warcraft (WoW). I got into it while working for the Geek Squad at Best Buy. It was a perfect fit for me at the time. Retail leaves you with very little free time for yourself. Your schedule is different every week. You can't plan for shit unless you take your vacation days. And I almost never take vacations. I even refuse to take sick days. I was fucked, basically.

This left me with very little time to myself. My co-workers were heavy into that World of Warcraft thing. Me? Not so much. It took several months of coaxing before I caved in and bought the game. I mainly got it because it was a way to socialize with my coworkers outside of work. It's almost impossible (almost) to plan a social life when you work in retail and are dog tired when you come home.

With Warcraft I can just go online and do stuff and my friends would join in whenever. This was usually late at night of course. We would go to work tired from playing the game but it was of little consequence because at that point our hearts weren't into the job anymore anyway. WoW dominated most of our conversation and we even made analogies. We referred to the customers as MOBs (game jargon for enemy characters) and serving many of their needs at once, and quickly, was referred to as tanking. (A tank is someone who can take a heavy amount of damage on his own and still make quick work of the enemy due to his high attack power.)

Now, at first I was really into this game and doing quests and killing stuff and earning gold and dueling and all that nerdy junk. But I eventually grew really bored of it. I found myself not really trying to complete the quests anymore. There was little variety. I was either sent to kill something or gather something or craft something. There are of course deviations from this but those were the RARE exception.

What I'm getting at is I didn't find the game very rewarding. The "FUN" part required me to play the game for MONTHS and level to 60 (now 70) so that I can assemble a 40-man team of players and raid castles and shit. I don't see the point in GRINDING (the feeling that you're not progressing as fast as you would like), just to reach that point. I'll tell you what I did find rewarding, selling goods at the auction house.

Buy low, sell high. I got very rich in no time. My friends would come online and see I was in an auction house and message me to play the game. "I AM playing the game," was my response. As far as I was concerned, the auction house WAS the game. I found it more rewarding than to do anything else. I was very good. I'm sorry, it’s true! I would monitor and scan the auction houses for trends and prices accordingly.

I noticed I wasn't the only one doing this. I had auction house rivals! Other users would send me angry messages. They told me my prices were too high but they paid for it anyway. One of my strategies was to buy the entire supply of something random for 5 days and on the weekend sell them for a high price. By controlling supply I CREATED demand. De Beers has been using the same practice for CENTURIES! I could write forever about my shady practices. But at the end of the day what it tells me is that there's seriously something wrong with the game when the most fun aspect isn't even what they've intended.

So, in August I quit my job and almost immediately I stopped playing. I'd say it was about a month or so after. I just didn't see the point anymore. I had my life back. I didn't want to stay home and play WoW. And I was nowhere near level 60. I didn't like the idea of sitting in front of the computer for so many hours just to level up. I didn't want WoW to become my job. So I quit that too. I just lost interest.

That leads us to the present day. As a LATE birthday gift I gave Luis my WoW account. It's official, I will no longer be playing that game. Or any MMO for that matter. WoW was not my first online obsession. Ever hear of a little thing called MapleStory? It doesn't even matter, I played that game even less, about two months. MMO's and I don't mix. Maybe it's my ADD?

On paper a game that never ends sounds good. But when you take it for a test drive it just ends up frustrating you. I guess what I'm saying is that World of Warcraft sucks.

More Stupid World of Warcraft Screenshots

You think I've just wasted YOUR time? Think of all the time I wasted playing this game. All I have to show for it is a stupid blog entry!