Comments on: A weird obsession

By: Marmaduke

Marmaduke — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 03:40:11 +0000

My experience with WoW was almost identical to yours - reading this post brought back some memories.

I also left cold turkey after hitting 60 (the cap at the time) and not having enough time or patience to grind items.

I do wonder about the people I met, I find it funny that I spent so much time with certain people and then just left, never to see or speak to them again, almost as though they were virtual people.

I dont regret it though, despite the fact that I probably sacrificed a bit of GPA in my law degee.

By: Legal Eagle

Legal Eagle — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:09:56 +0000

Yeah, I played D&D at high school too - I was a halfling thief. I even wrote simple adventures for my sister and other friends to play (with a normal six sided dice). I wonder what happened to that book of adventures? We moved to the UK, and I’m not sure what happened to it then.

By: DeusExMacintosh

DeusExMacintosh — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:56:36 +0000

I was a half-elf thief called Kellen for several years of D&D (even went on the 7.30 Report to defend the practice). I actually wanted to be a half-drow assassin with chaotic neutral alignment but my DM wouldn’t let me on the grounds that I’d have too much fun.

By: LDU

LDU — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 13:41:47 +0000

I never knew you were a gamer lol.

By: skepticlawyer

skepticlawyer — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 08:41:58 +0000

I played Dungeons & Dragons at school, and for that reason thought it very much in my best interests if I left WoW well alone… otherwise I think there’d have been a lot of neglected work, unhappy clients, abandoned thesis etc…

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 06:39:40 +0000

Yeah, a lot of my friends got very seriously into WoW (as they had previously into Neverwinter Nights, and previously into MUDs).

They formed a guild, or as I called it, a debating society, since they spent all their time arguing about how loot should be divvied up.

I started working on a module to track and calculate everyone’s contribution to raids and even held down a trial account to run around and test my code. To be honest I just couldn’t see the attraction.

In any case, Blizzard rather wisely disabled the ability of third party modules to use networking facilities, so there was no easy way for my code to upload logged data for analysis. I lost interest at about that point. The debating club was disbanded some time later, and everyone is good friends again.

By: Legal Eagle

Legal Eagle — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 06:20:36 +0000

Sinclair, oh dear, I certainly never wanted gold that badly. If I really wanted gold, it’s easy to farm stuff, just time-consuming - not worth selling your body for.

JC, too true. You’re just hoping that rare Hunter epic will drop this time…just one more run of the instance and it might drop… I knew someone who did 18 consecutive runs of an instance to get a particular drop, and it still hadn’t dropped. Dunno if it ever did - I gave up helping after 2 runs.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 03:57:32 +0000

WoW, like gambling, is a variable ratio reinforcement activity.

Rewards come at relatively random intervals in relatively random amounts.

The variable ratio schedule produces both the highest rate of responding and the greatest resistance to extinction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Effects_of_different_types_of_simple_schedules

By: Sinclair Davidson

Sinclair Davidson — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 02:10:38 +0000

Not everyone quits while they’re ahead.

http://yobbo.wordpress.com/2007/04/14/world-of-whorecraft/

By: Legal Eagle

Legal Eagle — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:13:31 +0000

Tysen, I wonder how many players are like you and I (get to Lvl 70, realise that it’s a bore at Lvl 70, then quit).

SL, poor doggy! Cute pic, but.

Conrad, I’m not surprised that it ate into Yobbo’s earnings. I’m sure it ate into my thesis time too. In some ways I was lucky to have a child to limit my time online during the day otherwise it could have been much worse.