Thoughts About WoW, Both Good and Bad

Yesterday we worked and did some errands, but ended up on WoW for the whole evening. What did we do? Well, the excuse was that Steve was waiting to talk to officers about handing over the guild, and then he decided to finish up his archeology for good. Since he was doing it, I did it too.

We flew around doing archeology for hours and hours. (We did this separately, btw) What an unbelievable waste of time. You fly around from one zone to another to get to randomly generated dig sites, and when you get there, you click a button to see if you're close enough to dig up the artifact. After you collect enough of these things, you click a button and make a useless item that you sell to the vendor. If you're very lucky, you'll get a "rare" project, and what you'll eventually get after hours of flying around and picking up more artifacts is yet another useless item that does something dumb. There are a few really nice items that entice people to keep flying around and wasting countless hours trying to get the projects to pop up, but for the hours we spent last night, we got exactly nothing. Steve was trying to get a special sword and I was trying to get a special ring. All we got was useless junk.

When you get right down to it, every single item in WoW is useless junk, no matter what it is.

In defense of WoW, it has provided us with countless hours of fun times, excitement, and the feeling of accomplishment. We've met lots of great people, done so many things, and had a great adventure. It distracted us from the hard times we've had, and seemed to make life better for us when we were feeling down.

However, closing the book on this game, I look back and think about what I will take with me. Lots of great memories, many bad ones, a couple of friends that will survive the move away from this artificial world. Not much. As time passes, I'll forget why I played so much in the first place. I would like to save some of my memories here as a few posts or more, because for whatever minimal positive impact this game had on my real life, it would be good to make note of it before it's forgotten.

It's easy to become horrified, ashamed and angry at myself when I think of the days, weeks, months and years that this game has taken from me, and for all that I've missed out because of this. But it was my choice. It wasn't all a waste because I did have a lot of fun. I got to do things I can't actually do in real life. I got to be a hero in a way I'll never be in real life. I made some good friends amid all of the superficial ones and it was fun to spend time chatting with them all.