world of warcraft addiction

New Must Read for Me

There’s a new book out called “World of Warcraft and Philosophy.” Now as a former philosophy major and an avid World of Warcraft player, how can I possibly resist?

World of Warcraft and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

Recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) in videogame history, World of Warcraft is everywhere — from episodes of South Park and The Simpsons, to online series like Watch the Guild, accolades and awards from game critics, and prime-time commercials with Mr. T. Inevitably, such a cultural phenomenon triggers deeper questions. When does an assumed identity become real? Does the Corrupted Blood epidemic warn us of future public health catastrophes? What are the dangers when real life is invaded by events in the game? What can our own world learn from Azeroth’s blend of primitivism and high-tech? In these lively essays, a specially commissioned guild of philosophers, including Yara Mitsuishi, Monica Evans, Tim Christopher, and Anna Janssen, tackles these and other complex questions arising from WoW.

The only thing is, I wish somehow it would be required reading. Unfortunately, I suspect it will by and large be the sort of read that will attract only those that have no pressing need for the book’s enlightenment. But, isn’t that always the way with philosophy?

Proactive Time Management Idea

: Image via CrunchBase

The following is kind of a follow up to my last blog post. It also is something I just now first posted on our guild forums. Unlike some though, I’m not at all adverse in “pugging” or running outside my own guild so long as its a well thought out, mature group. Perhaps you’re a small guild occasionally short a healer or something. Obviously, for this to be relevant at all, you’d have to play Alliance, Farstriders (US) server. But if you do, and need someone, feel free to contact me:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to make my in game time more productive. Seems like I spend way too much time trying to put runs together on the fly or simply waiting for one to come together. I doubt I’m the only one in this boat.

So here is what I’m thinking to try within this message thread and for myself, this message in particular which I’ll edit to keep current. I suggest we post our general availability and a brief goal statement for each toon we’re *actively* playing at the moment. Then also an *out of game* means of contact that has near constant accessibility. For many people this would mean a phone/text number. For some like myself, it could be an email/im address. For those with phone only but uncomfortable giving out there real number, google offers a phone number forwarding option called gvoice I think. So somebody contacting me could hit me up with something like:

Can Sayas heal an Onyxia run Thursday at 10am server?

To which I could either commit or decline. But with acceptance, I’d know how to schedule my time. So here is my current information which could be used as a template:

GENERAL AVAILABILITY: (server times)
Monday-Tuesday: 9:30pm – 11pm
Wednesday: 9:30pm – ???
Thursday-Saturday – Any time
Sunday: Before 11pm (finish time!)

TOON/GOAL/INTERESTS:
Sayas, lvl80, priest: Healing role, discipline primary spec, looking to learn a holy heal off spec, interested in badge (heroic) runs, particularly heroic daily for triumph badges, H ToC for gear drops, Onyxia for the experience, VoA, Ulduar, ToC10

Dhume, lvl75, death knight, blood tanking, unholy dps, looking to learn tanking, group dps, leveling

Whispera, lvl22, druid, feral tanking & dps, healing off spec, learning tanking, learning druid healing, of course leveling

CONTACT:
gmail/gchat: staretssayas@gmail.com

Roleplay (cradleoffilth.com)
Inumbr Creates Temporary Disposable Phone Numbers [Privacy] (lifehacker.com)
Release Week, and WoW Geekery (lilithsaintcrow.com)

Time, Time, Time

Yesterday I made the startling revelation that my main, Sayas, a level 80 discipline priest on Farstriders (US) was better qualified for raiding than I had thought. Today I begin to explore what that means.

First of course is the time commitment. Now we’re not talking quantity of time primarily. I spend plenty of that. I’d guess 10-20 hours a week typically. It seems like most raiders devote at least two nights a week to raiding and then many guilds seem to spend one night a week beyond that on “progression.” So, we’re talking three nights, three hours a night… so nine hours. Luckily, my guild really only expects two nights reducing that number to six hours.

But my deal is more about the expectation of nights of the week set aside for raiding. While I spend plenty of time in game, almost all of my time is on an ad hoc basis. I fit my time in between other commitments. Raiding turns that upside down to an extent and says you must to some extent fit those other commitments in around raiding. Still, I want to raid and anything you want doing takes a degree of prioritizing. So what if I committed just one night a week? Would that be good enough? I’m not sure because I know sometimes each raid is a progression in itself. In other words, night two is a continuation of night one. Obviously its an inconvenience at the very least to the others if I participate on night one and not on night two. Then again, what if the day of designated were to fall on day two of our raiding schedules? The chance that I’d be called upon to fill in for someone that started on day one would certainly be diminished from having started the raid in the first place.

I could look at pugging raids instead. I actually do a fair amount of that with 5 mans. But part of my motivation here is guild participation, not just raiding for raiding’s sake so that doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory solution. Also, I could look at raiding with a guild that consistently raids at a more convenient time for me. If I could raid mornings instead, that would far easier for me to commit to. But that would involve me changing guilds and perhaps servers as well. So that kind of would defeat the purpose as well. I don’t even know, is it possibly to transfer to servers in other areas of the world so that my morning might be their evening? Hmm…

So, there you have my thinking on the time issue. Next time, I’ll look at another concern.

The Secret World: Factions, PvP Details (rockpapershotgun.com)
Guild Wars 2 Hype Machine Rumbles To Life [Ncsoft] (kotaku.com)

Eye Opener

: Image by brianjmatis via Flickr

I just had an eye opening and thought provoking experience: I often look myself up at http://be.imba.hu to see what I should be working on gear wise and what content I should be running. Its a great site for doing that. But today I took it a step further and looked up all the priests in my guild. Here is what I discovered:

First, our guild “only” has 19 level 80 priests. That surprised me. I’ve always thought of Ex Cinis Cineris as priest heavy and would have guessed us to have maybe half again that number at very least. But what really shocked me is that I am roughly tied for 4th best in terms of gearing with two others. Looking at it another way, if this data is to be believed, I’m no worse than the 6th best geared priest in our guild. There is some room for error as some folks may have logged off in pvp gear or geared for an alt spec, but still.

What this means is that I’m harboring some delusions as to my status. I’d always proclaimed quite loudly that I was at best 2nd tier and quite possibly 3rd tier in terms of ECC priests. However, assuming 4 tiers of 5 each, I’m right at the cusp of 1st and 2nd tier.

Yet I’ve hardly ever run a 10 man (3 to be exact as of this writing.) and never have run a 25 man instance. At this point I could veer off to talk about problems in the WoW reward mechanics. Clearly I’m over geared for the content I’ve run. But I’ll leave that for others to do. (TotalBiscuit of the Blu Plz! podcast does a fine job running that topic into the ground.) Where I want to go with it is that I am once more catching myself caught up in the position of underachiever. (Wherever I go, there I am again it seems.)

Actually, this revelation of my gearing status within our guild impacts me at least 4 different ways at the same time: 1) I’m proud that my efforts of the last few weeks have resulted in such a gearing improvement. Clearly, upgrading doesn’t take as much as I’d assumed. 2) I’m shocked to discover I’m so deluded. I thought of myself as more prone to honest assessment. 3) I’m disappointed I’ve let myself off the hook so easily. My excuse for not attempting harder content was that I wasn’t properly geared to do so. 4) I’m sheepish that I’ve been letting my guild down even in the slightest. ECC is by no means a hardcore raiding guild. But we are large (500+ toons) and I suspect there are more than a few that would like challenge themselves. Why not? Isn’t that part of the fun? I still think we are probably priest heavy, but I’m also sure I’m one of our few discipline healers.

I’ve been thinking of myself as a charity case in need of help when instead I’m at a point where I really should be helping others. I don’t mean just those newly arriving at level 80 but maybe all but the the very top levels in my guild. Maybe even those top players could use my help if only to fill in spots on a 25 man roster from time to time.

I’ll continue this next time talking about what this revelation means to me in terms of gameplay. I know I still want to limit my gameplay time. But maybe its time to reevaluate how that time is being spent.

The Kind of Boost Need of WoW Alliance (momblognetwork.com)
Battle.net Accounts Becoming Mandatory For WoW (games.slashdot.org)

My Guild in the News

Around Azeroth: A cause to remember

Grizzleton writes that his guild, Ex Cinis Cineris of Farstriders, has changed its tabard to pink in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. “One of the guild’s officers is a breast cancer survivor still in treatment, and many other guild members and their loved ones have had experiences with this disease. In the public forum on the Ex Cinis Cineris website is a very helpful thread dealing with this issue. As the aforementioned officer put it when the guild rallied behind supporting this cause, “We may be gamers and geeks, but we have hearts!” For their first event, the guild formed a pink ribbon with their avatars on the Stormwind Harbor steps. ECC has also planned a Farstriders serverwide Pink event for Friday October 16th in Stormwind Harbor. Check the Blizzard Farstriders forum for details.”

My guild, Ex Cinis Cineris got written up at wow.com. How cool is that? What is happening is that we’re having a series of events to commemorate Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I’m very happy with my guild in general which in turn makes me proud to be a part of them. Something like this makes me even happier and prouder.

Meeces to Pieces

Hmm… I’m having bad mouse karma it seems. My trusty old Razer Copperhead started acting funky. I wasn’t pleased but thought I’d had it long enough that I probably didn’t have a recourse but to replace it. Since I’m short of money at the moment, I decided to go into my laptop bag instead and pull out the Logitech G5 that I’d been carrying with my laptop and put it in place of the Copperhead on my desktop. That worked for a few days until the G5 quit working altogether.

At this point I get a little indignant because I know I haven’t had the G5 that long. Sure enough, I look it up on Amazon and it turns out I’ve had it for less than 11 months. A call to Logitech confirms that I’m well within their warranty period of 3 years and that they’ll willingly send me a replacement to their newer G500. Great! Soon I’ll have a brand new Logitech gaming mouse.

But what to do in the mean time? The only recourse it to try to make do with the intermittent Razer Copperhead, so off I go to the Razer website hoping against hope that a driver update might help. Time will tell.

But what do I find on the Razer site but the new Razer Naga specifically designed for MMO game play. Need I say more than that I’m in gadget and button lust.

As I say, I’m broke right now so a new mouse purchase will have to wait for better days. But I think I see a Razer Naga in my future. Probably more near future than distant if I were to guess.

The Downtrodden Discipline Priest

I Keep Folks Alive

I had an interesting in game conversation with a guildmate the other evening while waiting for Wintergrasp to pop. It was a conversation I’ve had before but haven’t had for a very long time. The old, “So what spec are you anyway?” conversation.

Turns out this guildie was leveling a priest and wondering if there was an alternative to shadow as a dps spec while convinced that holy was the only spec she could consider as a raiding/healing spec.

I honestly don’t have an answer to her actual question. I don’t have a dps spec that I like nor do I have a gear set for pve dps. Using what I have at the moment, I pump out a paltry 1.2k dps which I know from watching my recount numbers is nothing.

But here’s where I lead the conversation: I bristle at the persistent perception that holy is the only viable raid healing spec. Not that I’m geared well enough to really know, but from what little experience I have, discipline is a perfectly viable raid “healing” spec. I put healing in quotations because much of the discipline priest’s healing utility actually comes in the form of damage mitigation. Bottom line though is, I keep people alive.

Discipline as an alternative to holy for inclusion in a raid? That I don’t know either. But I would think a discipline priest to be a nice addition to a holy priest in a two healer 10 man raid at the very least. I do know from first hand experience that I do just fine in healing 5 man heroics so that isn’t an issue of debate for me.

Further, discipline is a fun spec to solo with which holy never was for me. Holy put me in the perpetual position of looking for a partner if only to quest with even.

Now that I’m getting into pvp more, I’m seeing discipline as a perfectly viable and fun spec for that too. In fact, I may just give up on using my alternative spec for dps and see if I can fine tune a discipline based spec just for pvp purposes. That would make some sense since I’ve started to amass an armor set specifically for pvp.

Coming full circle, I’m frustrated that so many misconceptions about the discipline priest remain in World of Warcraft. I’m annoyed to find it still lingering in my own guild but am not surprised by that since we’re holy priests are very well represented in Ex Cinis Cineris.

I fully intend to keep soldiering on as a discipline priest. I like it. It makes the game fun for me and that’s what its all about.

Further, discipline is a fun spec to solo with which holy never was for me. Holy put me in the perpetual position of looking for a partner if only to quest with even.

I fully intend to keep soldiering on as a discipline priest. I like it. It makes the game fun for me and that’s what its all about.

Back in the Saddle Again

So I’ve started playing again! Have been for a few weeks actually and been having a lot of fun doing it.

There seem to be changes in my guild (Ex Cinis Cineris on Farstriders US.) I think I’ve made mention that I felt hopelessly behind my guildmates. Now, while I’m still behind, it seems like I came back much more able to participate. I’ve been running heroics enough that I’ve been able to skip right over Naxx and get into our baby ten man Ulduar raid team. (ECC fields three ten man teams at the moment.) I do want to go back and experience Naxx but don’t have a driving gear need to do so. Presently I’m one trinket short of being in all two hundred plus epic gear.

How am I doing with the addictive aspect of World of Warcraft? Not too bad I think. I have put in several long play days but I’ve also been able to set it aside when appropriate or limit my play time on occasions.

So yeah, I’m back and actually a viable baby raider. It feels good to be participating in the “endgame” if only on a limited basis.

Weekly World of Warcraft Addiction – 3/20/09

: Image via CrunchBase

Performance Anxiety | I Sheep Things…

I’ve had some really good questing buddies in the last few days. I usually play solo, I think you’re probably all familiar with my unfortunate guild situation at the moment, so the time I spend it groups is limited at best. It’s rare for me to want to quest with a random stranger, especially for quests that don’t involve an instance or elites or other group-requiring details. In my experience most of the people who group randomly are either sort of irritating, complete newbies who can’t find the party chat, or loot ninjas who don’t bother to /roll before grabbing. So I’ve typically steered clear of random groupings.

Progressive WoW: Leave of absence

I know it’s been a while since my last update, and that’s because I always update from work. That being said, I got laid off last week and as such I haven’t been at work to update. You’d think that means I would have more time to blog, but I guess I like to do other things online when I have full internet access.

What Happens When You Are “Done?” – Project Lore: World of Warcraft Videos and Guides

I’ve touched on this before, when talking about a lack of end game in the current content. But once again I personally have reached an interesting point in the life of my Paladin. When Wrath first came out, and I first got a look at all of the loot tables I spent a great deal of time planning my gear. I found every piece I wanted, determined what was the best in each slot, debated what set bonus were worth while, and finally came up with my “gear plan.” More or less I decided exactly
what I wanted my character to look like when I had everything I wanted.

Coming to terms with sex as an addiction

William Cope Moyers says: “Addiction is a disease of the mind, body, and spirit. Addiction is not caused by a person’s character, or willpower; it is caused by the way an addict’s brain is wired.” I would add that especially with sex addiction, it is caused by the way early life experiences shaped the brain.

What are the social consequences of video game addiction? | addictionblog.org

Does playing video games negatively effect the time adolescents should be spending in more developmentally appropriate activities like sports and hanging out with friends? I’ve got a personal bone to pick with gaming. Although I intellectually understand the appeal, I emotionally resent
the pull of games. Specifically, I wish that sports would once again replace video games. Not to mention that it’s now the chosen method for how my husband unwinds at the end of the day.

20 Questions with Nassira | The Hunting Lodge

I don’t know about you, but one of the fun things and maybe one of the more fun and misunderstood aspects of WoW is how social this game is. True, chat within the game itself can rapidly become mundane with LFG, WTB, WTS, and Chuck Norris jokes. But if you look beyond that, you can’t help but see the proliferation of WoW related blogs, sites, and other sources like Twitter.

FCC commissioner: Warcraft is a “leading cause” of college dropouts (boingboing.net)
Chuck Norris Is Your New Bicycle (blogs.wsj.com)
Boy Has Siezure After WoW Marathon, Daily Mail Has A Fit [World Of Warcraft] (kotaku.com)
Twitterfall: Watch Twitter in Action (appscout.com)
German Social Affairs Minister suggests making ‘addictive’ games available to adults only (joystiq.com)
Video games like World of Warcraft and Second Life could be used for education (telegraph.co.uk)
NFL player wants to change name to ‘Warcraft’ (destructoid.com)

Tools to Help Once You’re Over World of Warcraft Addiction

: Image via Wikipedia

When you get over World of Warcraft addiction, you don’t play nearly as often. Makes sense, right? But one of the side effects of not playing as often is that disorientation when you do sit down to play again. What the heck was I doing last time I played? Where was that quest giver? Or maybe where were those pesky Timbermaw anyway?

First thing to get over is beating yourself up for not remembering. At least it is for me. When I’m living, eating, breathing World of Warcraft ie, addicted, I know everything. (Or at least think I do.) Now I sometimes feel like I know nothing.

Back in the addicted phase, I almost considered it cheating to have to resort to sites like thottbot.com and wowhead.com. Now they are my first line of reference. I don’t have time to wander around aimlessly. Tell me where it is and what I need to do. Thottbot and wowhead do that. (To be fair, there are other sites that fulfill the same role. Those are just the two I use.)

Even better though, I’ve discovered a couple great addons. Questhelper and Carbonite Quest. Both do almost the same thing, so choose between them. Don’t run them at the same time.

What they do is keep track of your quests and try to show you the most efficient route to completing them. If you are in a group, (and all group members are using the addon) they also consolidate the list of quests and coordinate you through the groups quests as efficiently as possible.

Neither tool is perfect. But both are right enough of the time to make them immensely worth installing. (Note: Carbonite Quest becomes even better with the Cartographer addon installed as well. Questhelper stands alone.)

Lately I’ve been using Carbonite instead of Questhelper for one reason. Carbonite shows you a path of where you’ve recently been. As someone who is constantly getting lost in dungeons, I find this feature a great benefit.

Questhelper is a totally free addon. Carbonite comes in two flavors. One free and one paid for. I admit I did pay for Carbonite and find the added features worthwhile. But it is a useful tool even in its free version.

Evidently there are addons that take the concept one step further. They not only guide you through the quests you have, but help you decide which quests and quest paths are worth following. I can see the value in that but since I’m one of those that enjoys the trip as much as the destination, I’ve never explored them further.

Do you know of other time saving addons? Let me know. You can either write them up yourself for me to post at myworldofwarcraftaddiction.com (giving you credit of course) or alert me to them and I’ll write something up. I’ve already thought of a couple more addons that I’ll be writing up in the near future.

Worlds.com Targets World of Warcraft, Second Life For Patent Suit [Lawsuits] (kotaku.com)
Let’s quit our jobs and become World of Warcraft gold farmers (crunchgear.com)
FCC commissioner: Warcraft is a “leading cause” of college dropouts (boingboing.net)
Chinese government says no to Wrath of the Lich King (joystiq.com)

world of warcraft addiction

I can handle it, really I can

New Must Read for Me

Proactive Time Management Idea

Time, Time, Time

Eye Opener

My Guild in the News

Meeces to Pieces

The Downtrodden Discipline Priest

Back in the Saddle Again

Weekly World of Warcraft Addiction – 3/20/09

Tools to Help Once You’re Over World of Warcraft Addiction

Recent Posts

Blogroll

Archives

Tag Cloud

Our Sponsors

Armory for Sayas

Armory for Dhume

Recent Comments

I can handle it, really I can

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta

Recent Posts

Blogroll

Archives

Tag Cloud

Our Sponsors

Armory for Sayas

Armory for Dhume

Recent Comments