It’s taken me a long time to be able to say this, but my Name is Andy, and I’m a World of Warcraft Addict.

Well… I was. In around June of 2005, I purchased a copy of Blizzards World of Warcraft and quickly got drawn into the world of MMPORG’s. Why did I start? I guess it was the classic reason that draws in every addict, peer pressure. My friends were doing it and it looked so good that I didn’t want to miss out. It didn’t take long and within a few days of starting I was hooked.

It started off slowly playing a few hours a couple of times a week, but soon I needed more and before I knew what was happening, my weekends had become a 48 hour blur of Orcs, Ogres and Auctions (anyone who has played Warcraft will know what I mean here…). My real life started to fade into the background and every waking hour when I wasn’t playing WoW I would be thinking about WoW, talking about WoW or reading about WoW on forums and other Wow sites.

I was truly hooked and my life was suffering because of it. As well as having my usual full time job, I also run a smallish ecommerce website, but instead of packing orders, answering emails and improving the website, I was dedicating my spare time to the world of Azeroth. Warcraft sucks you in and keeps you playing because you just have to reach the maximum character level of 60, but it doesn’t stop there, when you hit 60 there’s raids to do, dragons to kill and better armour to obtain. It just doesn’t stop and the developers keep on adding new content, more areas to visit and more gear to obtain.

Warcraft had taken over my life.

Then one day, a few months after I hit 60, I realised that I was wasting my life. I was constantly pumping my system full of WoW and reality was becoming a thing of the past. It took the death of a loved one to bring me to my senses and it was at that point that I managed to pull myself back from the brink. There and then I cancelled my subscription, posted a good-bye to the forum of the guild that I was a member of and un-installed Wow from my computer and from my life.

It has now been around three weeks since I quit World of Warcraft and my life is already starting to look up. Suddenly I have bags of energy, I wake up on my days off and want to do something with my time, I’ve ploughed energy into improving my business and taken care of things that I’ve been meaning to do for months. I’ve even found the time to start socialising with people in reality! All those little things that I wouldn’t do because they kept me away from Warcraft have now come streaming back into my life and damn, it feels good to be back in the real world again.

Categorised as: Geeky | History