8 ms·

playing World of Warcraft can cost you dearly

by whatcd 8y ago

minimaxir 8y ago
Nowadays (EDIT: anecdotally, sourced from myself, friends, and forums/Reddit), there's been a player exodus in WoW, as the latest expansion (Battle for Azeroth) has an unrewarding and mandantory grindy endgame, in addition to other player-unfriendly changes which the playerbase suspects is to pad out time-played metrics.
- vlunkr 8y ago
  Even if that's true, the game has had incredible longevity. That expansion came out 14 years(!) after the original release of the game. I'm sure the player base isn't what it used to be, but that has to be some kind of record.
  - minimaxir 8y ago
    It's a big downgrade from the previous expansion (Legion), which had a playerbase close to WoW's peak.
    - basic1 8y ago
      That information came from a blog post which was later refuted by Blizzard.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    There are longer running MMO's, and the playerbase has faded a bit, but you're absolutely right - it's still a monolith, and to which all other MMO's are compared. Regardless of the BFA problems, it still wields a huge amount of power.
  - JCharante 8y ago
    Eve Online is still kicking with its frequent updates (they shifted from an expansion every 6 months to a release every 6 weeks about 2 years ago)
  - ergothus 8y ago
    > the game has had incredible longevity I'm not a WOW player (or really any MMO), but it's always impressed me how willing Blizzard is to throw out all the investment people have made in learning the game system details. Talent trees (or whatever they are called) are rewritten practically each expansion to follow very different rules. I suppose it has to do with knowing that NOT changing is a guaranteed loss over time, but still, it feels like an unusual attitude.
    - HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
      It's a trend-setting attitude. Relearning skill builds is easy and relatively fun because you already have the skill points/levels and all you do is just allocate them again( provided the new ones are balanced and fun). What blizzard is doing is basically reseting the entire progress of every player in the game every expansion. You might spend 2 years building up your end-game gear and then an expansion comes and the common drops from one level higher are more powerful than the highest drops from the previous one.
  - bspammer 8y ago
    That's gotta be some sort of record. I can't think of any other game which is still releasing full expansions 14 years later.
  - tzs 8y ago
    EverQuest is 5 years older than WoW, and still chugging along. They aren't doing two expansions a year anymore like they did from 2003-2007, but they have done one a year from 2008 onward (the 2018 expansion is coming out next month). There was some worry earlier this year that it would abruptly die because of US sanctions on Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg who owns the investment group Columbus Nova. The sanctions were freezing assets and blocking payment processing. There had been earlier reports that Daybreak Games, the company that acquired EverQuest years ago from Sony, had been bought by Columbus Nova. Daybreak later clarified that the person who bought them had been a partner at Columbus Nova, but he bought them personally, not for Columbus Nova, and he was not under sanction. That was 10 months ago, and they still have their assets and can still accept payments, so apparently they were indeed not part of Columbus Nova. (Although at the time they were bought, a lot of Daybreak people did mention that name, rather than the name of the partner who now they say is the owner, so it is all still confusing). Anyway, EverQuest today is worth a look if (1) you used to play and want some nostalgia, or (2) you never played but would like to see what one of the classic MMORPGs was about, or (3) if you would like an interesting game, good for grouping or solo play, that has a massive amount of content even if you are playing free. There were three big changes on the "live" servers (which are distinct from the "progression" servers, which I'll describe later) that made the game a lot more friendly for casual and solo play. First, a few years ago they added in-game NPC mercenaries that you could hire (one mercenary at a time per character). You can hire a tank, healer, melee damage dealer, or ranged damage dealer, and the AI for the mercenaries is pretty good. They "understand" group play. With mercenaries, a whole lot of formerly full group only content can be taken reasonably by a couple players each with a mercenary, and even a lot of it can be done with one player with a mercenary, at least up to level 60ish if you are playing free, and up to at least mid 90s if you are paying [1]. Second, they introduced a new line of armor and weapons, Defiant Armor and Defiant Weapons. These things drop from a lot of normal encounters, but the stats on this stuff is comparable to top raid gear from a few expansions earlier. With Defiant, you don't have to dedicate your life to equipping your character to be able to handle the top content from an older expansion. It's only the people who are chasing the leading edge that have to make EverQuest a second career, unlike the old days. Third, on the role playing server, Firiona Vie, there is a big experience bonus and very very items are marked NO DROP. So if you do need gear better than Defiant gear, you can trade for it or buy it from other players. Mana and healing rates are also higher than older players will remember. Fourth, there are some new great quests. You start out with a book called the Tomb of the Heroes Journey in your inventory. When you open it, it tells you several zones that would be good at your level. If you open when you are in one of those zones, it suggest several NPCs who have task, quests, and problems you might help with. Just following the Heroes Journey will give you plenty of fun stuff to do, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. With a mercenary and a free account on FV, you've got an excellent solo game for a long time. Even better for a group of friends. For those who played before, and are nostalgic for the old days, they have "progression" servers. There are several, but the overall theme is the same. A progression server starts with some old version of EQ, and then progresses through the expansions. Progression servers do not have mercenaries, or Defiant armor. Heck, they are even missing later UI features when they start, such as the wonderful multiple target tracking system that the live servers have. Progression servers have others rules, varying depending on server, to try to recreate the classic EQ experience that server's players want. For example, one of them is a "true box" server. That means you can only play one account per computer at a time. If you are one of those people who wants to play N characters at once on the same server, you have to have N physical computers if you are on a true box server. They also differ in when when expansions become available. Some do it on a fixed time schedule. Some do it when the endgame content of the previous expansion is defeated. Some do it by vote. They also differ in how far they go. For example, Agnarr unlocks expansions on a schedule, but will stop at Planes of Power plus the two smaller expansions that followed that. Many consider that the best era of EQ, and Agnarr will be frozen in that era. Progression servers are not available to free players. So for those who want a shot of nostalgia, or who never played and want to check out the classic game, the best thing to do is watch for the next progression server launch, and subscribe. A new progression server is always a high population server, with population density comparable to the old days. [1] The difference is mercenaries. There are apprentice mercenaries, with 5 skill levels (tier I to tier V) and journeymen mercenaries (tier I to V). Free players can only hire apprentices. Around mid 50s a tier V apprentice starts to struggle.
- IMcD23 8y ago
  Source? Even though Battle for Azeroth had a rocky start, WoW still has a massive player base.
  - minimaxir 8y ago
    Fair: added an edit.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  Loud critics make up a tiny percentage of the player base. You have no idea what the numbers are and won't until blizz releases them.
  - ArchTypical 8y ago
    Blizz stopped releasing numbers. Now they make PR statements that are intentionally misleading. Given the popularity of addons, some addon makers have a good amount of data that reaches beyond "no idea".
    - Drdrdrq 8y ago
      Curious - have they made any of the numbers public?
      - xenostar 8y ago
        As far as I’m aware not since wrath of the litch king expansion.
      - deong 8y ago
        They used to as part of their quarterly earnings reports, if I remember correctly. They stopped during the latter part of WoD when by all accounts the subscriber numbers were very low (by WoW standards).
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      Wow I didn't realize they stopped publishing sub numbers so long ago. I'm not convinced that add-ons give us great insight beyond a certain level of player who tends to use specific add-ons (e.g. DBM), but yeah it's better than nothing. Still, historically we know that bid drama does not correlate to mass drop in sub numbers. Hell, GC just posted something about that a week or two ago[1]. >Dropping a game because of a specific design change (despite what you might read on forums / Reddit) is actually pretty rare. I know it happens, but if you’re stack ranking the reasons why people quit, those specific responses end up being so far down the list that it is hard for a development team to take actionable feedback. WoW remains massively successful as far as I'm aware. [1]: https://askghostcrawler.tumblr.com/post/157080214673/unsubbing-is-often-seen-as-the-only-real-way-by https://askghostcrawler.tumblr.com/post/157080214673/unsubbi...
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  I'm not sure if this is a proper place to discuss WoW, but as a long standing player I can say that BfA is much better in terms of grinding than previous expansion Legion. You don't really need to grind anything, exactly because that grind is unrewarding and you was obliged to grind in Legion exactly because that grind was giving too much power. Again, according to my experience I'm not seeing big player exodus, most of those who started playing in my guild are continue to play, but that's only a personal anecdote, of course. Legion was much better in terms of perceived development cost: new gameplay systems, loads of new art and content, while BfA feels like cheap addon to build upon Legion investment, but that doesn't really makes it bad, it's just feels that they could do better.
  - minimaxir 8y ago
    > You don't really need to grind anything, exactly because that grind is unrewarding and you was obliged to grind in Legion exactly because that grind was giving too much power. Interesting perspective. I've always wondered if rewarding grinds or unrewarding nongrinds are better for both player enjoyment and monetization. (I think the former does better; it's how addiction works)
    - vbezhenar 8y ago
      There are different players with different needs which are often contradictory. I don't like to spend many time in-game. Ideal WoW for me is 3 hours/3 days a week, when I log in, enter raid with my friends, spend some time inside trying to kill some bosses, log out. But there are many people who want to play 8-12 hours every day and they love when they can spend that time improving their character. So developers are trying to balance game for both types of players. Basically they are doing rewards which diminish in geometric progression. You can spend hour to get 1% power increased. Next hour will get you 0.5% power increase and so on, so you can spend hours and get that increase, but there's some limit and different players can draw it for themselves. Those who spend more time will be more powerful and those who don't want to spend too much time won't be too that much behind. But still some players think that they are obliged to spend those hours to farm those few % of power even if they hate the process, they just want the rewards. It's unhealthy behavior and only self-control might help there, I guess, otherwise player will burn out and unsubscribe from the game. Probably a hard balance from game developer perspective.
guildan 8y ago
I know you're probably saying this in terms of money, but I had to stop because it was an addiction to play Wow... This game is so addictive to me (I'm sure not just me)! I can't watch streams because it will give me the urge to play. I hope one day I'll be able to play it normally, but I'm not sure. So yeah definitely it can "cost" a lot to play.
- dmos62 8y ago
  Can you elaborate? I'm genuinely interested. I seem to have addictive tendencies, but there's a whole multi-dimensional spectrum, as far as I can tell. In my case, when I'm working overtime, I'll jump into a game every few hours for 30-60min just to let some of the stress off. It's quite effective, but I end up popping figurative gaming-pills instead of learning to deal with stress in a constructive way. I'll also do something like that after a tiring day. It's not good, because it's grown into an urge that I get when it's time to relax, so I neglect other parts of life to which I'd ideally dedicate that free time.
  - dtech 8y ago
    Specifically, with World of Warcraft it's a game that takes all of your time. It's an endless treadmill with diminishing returns. It's full of (digital, ultimately meaningless) rewards which make you stand out above the rest of the players. Some of them are worthless in a few weeks/months (e.g. gear), some of it is timeless (e.g. mounts) but takes 100's of tries (every try 30-60 min) for that 1-5% chance to some mount. When I played the game, there were people who did nothing all Wednesday (when they could try again for the week) but running hours and hours of dungeons just so they could have a change to get the last 10-100 rare mounts they missed. The highest-tier end-game content requires large groups (20 players + reserves) to coordinate schedules and tackle dungeons together. This causes enormous social pressure to keep showing up because otherwise the group can't play the game and everyone is mad at you. It's perfectly possible to play it casually without participating in the above, but it's a game that has a lot of traps for people prone to addiction to fall into.
    - guildan 8y ago
muse900 8y ago
Can’t see that as a valid argument. Doing anything in life can cost you dearly. Personally wow curved me around 2004-2007 as a person. Helped me find my passion about development in general. I didn’t feel like I’ve lost something playing wow, actually I have fond memories of it. Only thing I would change if I could go back was just to spend a bit less time on it, but again I’d play it with passion.
- granos 8y ago
  I wouldn't say that playing WoW costs your dearly or is detrimental or toxic to people. I will say that all of the people I've known who played games to their own detriment or in a way that was toxic to their lives were playing WoW. It is attractive to people who want to escape from their problems and not solve them. Because of this, it has somehow come to be seen as a cause of that escapism. It definitely becomes part of a vicious circle -- I play too much WoW because I'm stressed -- I'm not more stressed because I play too much WoW -- but that's the fault of the player, not the game.
  - ordu 8y ago
    All you have seen is correlation. Maybe it is a correlation, because I bet you didn't tried to gather data properly. Assuming that this is a correlation, it might be, for example, that people who for a some reasons cannot cope with their problems tend to escape from them to WoW, and if there were no WoW, they'd do it some other way. I know it myself. I can run away from my problems by thousands of ways. Cut them all off, and I'll find two thousands more. I can play video games, read books, code some useless programs, engineer some useless devices, surf internet for interesting news, participate in flamewars, write this message, or at the last resort I can just sleep for 20 hrs per a day. If I cannot cope with my problems, then I cannot. My actual behaviour is just a simptom, not the cause of my inability. It is just anecdotal evidence, for other people it can be the other way around, and maybe for them WoW is the cause of their inability to cope with their problems. What I want to say: don't make conclusions about causation on correlational observations.
    - pdimitar 8y ago

playing World of Warcraft can cost you dearly

by whatcd 8y ago

playing World of Warcraft can cost you dearly

Nowadays (EDIT: anecdotally, sourced from myself, friends, and forums/Reddit), there's been a player exodus in WoW, as the latest expansion (Battle for Azeroth) has an unrewarding and mandantory grindy endgame, in addition to other player-unfriendly changes which the playerbase suspects is to pad out time-played metrics.

vlunkr 8y ago
Even if that's true, the game has had incredible longevity. That expansion came out 14 years(!) after the original release of the game. I'm sure the player base isn't what it used to be, but that has to be some kind of record.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  It's a big downgrade from the previous expansion (Legion), which had a playerbase close to WoW's peak.
  - basic1 8y ago
    That information came from a blog post which was later refuted by Blizzard.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  There are longer running MMO's, and the playerbase has faded a bit, but you're absolutely right - it's still a monolith, and to which all other MMO's are compared. Regardless of the BFA problems, it still wields a huge amount of power.
- JCharante 8y ago
  Eve Online is still kicking with its frequent updates (they shifted from an expansion every 6 months to a release every 6 weeks about 2 years ago)
- ergothus 8y ago
  > the game has had incredible longevity I'm not a WOW player (or really any MMO), but it's always impressed me how willing Blizzard is to throw out all the investment people have made in learning the game system details. Talent trees (or whatever they are called) are rewritten practically each expansion to follow very different rules. I suppose it has to do with knowing that NOT changing is a guaranteed loss over time, but still, it feels like an unusual attitude.
  - HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
    It's a trend-setting attitude. Relearning skill builds is easy and relatively fun because you already have the skill points/levels and all you do is just allocate them again( provided the new ones are balanced and fun). What blizzard is doing is basically reseting the entire progress of every player in the game every expansion. You might spend 2 years building up your end-game gear and then an expansion comes and the common drops from one level higher are more powerful than the highest drops from the previous one.
- bspammer 8y ago
  That's gotta be some sort of record. I can't think of any other game which is still releasing full expansions 14 years later.
- tzs 8y ago
  EverQuest is 5 years older than WoW, and still chugging along. They aren't doing two expansions a year anymore like they did from 2003-2007, but they have done one a year from 2008 onward (the 2018 expansion is coming out next month). There was some worry earlier this year that it would abruptly die because of US sanctions on Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg who owns the investment group Columbus Nova. The sanctions were freezing assets and blocking payment processing. There had been earlier reports that Daybreak Games, the company that acquired EverQuest years ago from Sony, had been bought by Columbus Nova. Daybreak later clarified that the person who bought them had been a partner at Columbus Nova, but he bought them personally, not for Columbus Nova, and he was not under sanction. That was 10 months ago, and they still have their assets and can still accept payments, so apparently they were indeed not part of Columbus Nova. (Although at the time they were bought, a lot of Daybreak people did mention that name, rather than the name of the partner who now they say is the owner, so it is all still confusing). Anyway, EverQuest today is worth a look if (1) you used to play and want some nostalgia, or (2) you never played but would like to see what one of the classic MMORPGs was about, or (3) if you would like an interesting game, good for grouping or solo play, that has a massive amount of content even if you are playing free. There were three big changes on the "live" servers (which are distinct from the "progression" servers, which I'll describe later) that made the game a lot more friendly for casual and solo play. First, a few years ago they added in-game NPC mercenaries that you could hire (one mercenary at a time per character). You can hire a tank, healer, melee damage dealer, or ranged damage dealer, and the AI for the mercenaries is pretty good. They "understand" group play. With mercenaries, a whole lot of formerly full group only content can be taken reasonably by a couple players each with a mercenary, and even a lot of it can be done with one player with a mercenary, at least up to level 60ish if you are playing free, and up to at least mid 90s if you are paying [1]. Second, they introduced a new line of armor and weapons, Defiant Armor and Defiant Weapons. These things drop from a lot of normal encounters, but the stats on this stuff is comparable to top raid gear from a few expansions earlier. With Defiant, you don't have to dedicate your life to equipping your character to be able to handle the top content from an older expansion. It's only the people who are chasing the leading edge that have to make EverQuest a second career, unlike the old days. Third, on the role playing server, Firiona Vie, there is a big experience bonus and very very items are marked NO DROP. So if you do need gear better than Defiant gear, you can trade for it or buy it from other players. Mana and healing rates are also higher than older players will remember. Fourth, there are some new great quests. You start out with a book called the Tomb of the Heroes Journey in your inventory. When you open it, it tells you several zones that would be good at your level. If you open when you are in one of those zones, it suggest several NPCs who have task, quests, and problems you might help with. Just following the Heroes Journey will give you plenty of fun stuff to do, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. With a mercenary and a free account on FV, you've got an excellent solo game for a long time. Even better for a group of friends. For those who played before, and are nostalgic for the old days, they have "progression" servers. There are several, but the overall theme is the same. A progression server starts with some old version of EQ, and then progresses through the expansions. Progression servers do not have mercenaries, or Defiant armor. Heck, they are even missing later UI features when they start, such as the wonderful multiple target tracking system that the live servers have. Progression servers have others rules, varying depending on server, to try to recreate the classic EQ experience that server's players want. For example, one of them is a "true box" server. That means you can only play one account per computer at a time. If you are one of those people who wants to play N characters at once on the same server, you have to have N physical computers if you are on a true box server. They also differ in when when expansions become available. Some do it on a fixed time schedule. Some do it when the endgame content of the previous expansion is defeated. Some do it by vote. They also differ in how far they go. For example, Agnarr unlocks expansions on a schedule, but will stop at Planes of Power plus the two smaller expansions that followed that. Many consider that the best era of EQ, and Agnarr will be frozen in that era. Progression servers are not available to free players. So for those who want a shot of nostalgia, or who never played and want to check out the classic game, the best thing to do is watch for the next progression server launch, and subscribe. A new progression server is always a high population server, with population density comparable to the old days. [1] The difference is mercenaries. There are apprentice mercenaries, with 5 skill levels (tier I to tier V) and journeymen mercenaries (tier I to V). Free players can only hire apprentices. Around mid 50s a tier V apprentice starts to struggle.
IMcD23 8y ago
Source? Even though Battle for Azeroth had a rocky start, WoW still has a massive player base.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  Fair: added an edit.
EpicEng 8y ago
Loud critics make up a tiny percentage of the player base. You have no idea what the numbers are and won't until blizz releases them.
- ArchTypical 8y ago
  Blizz stopped releasing numbers. Now they make PR statements that are intentionally misleading. Given the popularity of addons, some addon makers have a good amount of data that reaches beyond "no idea".
  - Drdrdrq 8y ago
    Curious - have they made any of the numbers public?
    - xenostar 8y ago
      As far as I’m aware not since wrath of the litch king expansion.
    - deong 8y ago
      They used to as part of their quarterly earnings reports, if I remember correctly. They stopped during the latter part of WoD when by all accounts the subscriber numbers were very low (by WoW standards).
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    Wow I didn't realize they stopped publishing sub numbers so long ago. I'm not convinced that add-ons give us great insight beyond a certain level of player who tends to use specific add-ons (e.g. DBM), but yeah it's better than nothing. Still, historically we know that bid drama does not correlate to mass drop in sub numbers. Hell, GC just posted something about that a week or two ago[1]. >Dropping a game because of a specific design change (despite what you might read on forums / Reddit) is actually pretty rare. I know it happens, but if you’re stack ranking the reasons why people quit, those specific responses end up being so far down the list that it is hard for a development team to take actionable feedback. WoW remains massively successful as far as I'm aware. [1]: https://askghostcrawler.tumblr.com/post/157080214673/unsubbing-is-often-seen-as-the-only-real-way-by https://askghostcrawler.tumblr.com/post/157080214673/unsubbi...
vbezhenar 8y ago
I'm not sure if this is a proper place to discuss WoW, but as a long standing player I can say that BfA is much better in terms of grinding than previous expansion Legion. You don't really need to grind anything, exactly because that grind is unrewarding and you was obliged to grind in Legion exactly because that grind was giving too much power. Again, according to my experience I'm not seeing big player exodus, most of those who started playing in my guild are continue to play, but that's only a personal anecdote, of course. Legion was much better in terms of perceived development cost: new gameplay systems, loads of new art and content, while BfA feels like cheap addon to build upon Legion investment, but that doesn't really makes it bad, it's just feels that they could do better.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  > You don't really need to grind anything, exactly because that grind is unrewarding and you was obliged to grind in Legion exactly because that grind was giving too much power. Interesting perspective. I've always wondered if rewarding grinds or unrewarding nongrinds are better for both player enjoyment and monetization. (I think the former does better; it's how addiction works)
  - vbezhenar 8y ago
    There are different players with different needs which are often contradictory. I don't like to spend many time in-game. Ideal WoW for me is 3 hours/3 days a week, when I log in, enter raid with my friends, spend some time inside trying to kill some bosses, log out. But there are many people who want to play 8-12 hours every day and they love when they can spend that time improving their character. So developers are trying to balance game for both types of players. Basically they are doing rewards which diminish in geometric progression. You can spend hour to get 1% power increased. Next hour will get you 0.5% power increase and so on, so you can spend hours and get that increase, but there's some limit and different players can draw it for themselves. Those who spend more time will be more powerful and those who don't want to spend too much time won't be too that much behind. But still some players think that they are obliged to spend those hours to farm those few % of power even if they hate the process, they just want the rewards. It's unhealthy behavior and only self-control might help there, I guess, otherwise player will burn out and unsubscribe from the game. Probably a hard balance from game developer perspective.

guildan 8y ago

I know you're probably saying this in terms of money, but I had to stop because it was an addiction to play Wow... This game is so addictive to me (I'm sure not just me)! I can't watch streams because it will give me the urge to play. I hope one day I'll be able to play it normally, but I'm not sure. So yeah definitely it can "cost" a lot to play.

dmos62 8y ago
Can you elaborate? I'm genuinely interested. I seem to have addictive tendencies, but there's a whole multi-dimensional spectrum, as far as I can tell. In my case, when I'm working overtime, I'll jump into a game every few hours for 30-60min just to let some of the stress off. It's quite effective, but I end up popping figurative gaming-pills instead of learning to deal with stress in a constructive way. I'll also do something like that after a tiring day. It's not good, because it's grown into an urge that I get when it's time to relax, so I neglect other parts of life to which I'd ideally dedicate that free time.
- dtech 8y ago
  Specifically, with World of Warcraft it's a game that takes all of your time. It's an endless treadmill with diminishing returns. It's full of (digital, ultimately meaningless) rewards which make you stand out above the rest of the players. Some of them are worthless in a few weeks/months (e.g. gear), some of it is timeless (e.g. mounts) but takes 100's of tries (every try 30-60 min) for that 1-5% chance to some mount. When I played the game, there were people who did nothing all Wednesday (when they could try again for the week) but running hours and hours of dungeons just so they could have a change to get the last 10-100 rare mounts they missed. The highest-tier end-game content requires large groups (20 players + reserves) to coordinate schedules and tackle dungeons together. This causes enormous social pressure to keep showing up because otherwise the group can't play the game and everyone is mad at you. It's perfectly possible to play it casually without participating in the above, but it's a game that has a lot of traps for people prone to addiction to fall into.
  - guildan 8y ago

muse900 8y ago

Can’t see that as a valid argument. Doing anything in life can cost you dearly. Personally wow curved me around 2004-2007 as a person. Helped me find my passion about development in general. I didn’t feel like I’ve lost something playing wow, actually I have fond memories of it. Only thing I would change if I could go back was just to spend a bit less time on it, but again I’d play it with passion.

granos 8y ago
I wouldn't say that playing WoW costs your dearly or is detrimental or toxic to people. I will say that all of the people I've known who played games to their own detriment or in a way that was toxic to their lives were playing WoW. It is attractive to people who want to escape from their problems and not solve them. Because of this, it has somehow come to be seen as a cause of that escapism. It definitely becomes part of a vicious circle -- I play too much WoW because I'm stressed -- I'm not more stressed because I play too much WoW -- but that's the fault of the player, not the game.
- ordu 8y ago
  All you have seen is correlation. Maybe it is a correlation, because I bet you didn't tried to gather data properly. Assuming that this is a correlation, it might be, for example, that people who for a some reasons cannot cope with their problems tend to escape from them to WoW, and if there were no WoW, they'd do it some other way. I know it myself. I can run away from my problems by thousands of ways. Cut them all off, and I'll find two thousands more. I can play video games, read books, code some useless programs, engineer some useless devices, surf internet for interesting news, participate in flamewars, write this message, or at the last resort I can just sleep for 20 hrs per a day. If I cannot cope with my problems, then I cannot. My actual behaviour is just a simptom, not the cause of my inability. It is just anecdotal evidence, for other people it can be the other way around, and maybe for them WoW is the cause of their inability to cope with their problems. What I want to say: don't make conclusions about causation on correlational observations.
  - pdimitar 8y ago