Well it turned into a virtually World of Warcraft weekend for me. Why? Because I had other things absorbing my time and interest. Did I feel a little guilty for not playing? Oh yeah, for sure. There were “the shoulds” creeping in every now and then which is so silly but a sure sign of addiction I think. But as I said last time, why should I feel compelled to play if I have other things I want to do or even worse, simply don’t feel like playing? (gasp!)

Today I want to introduce the role of guilds in World of Warcraft addiction. I belong to an absolutely fabulous guild on my main server. (server Farstriders, faction Alliance, guild Ex Cinis Cineris, main Character Sayas though Dhume has been seeing more play time of late) Ex Cinis Cineris is a huge “social” guild of 500+ characters representing 200+ players. By social, this guild means exactly that: the guild is more about friendships and socializing than it is raiding, leveling, roleplaying, pvping, etc. That makes it the perfect guild for someone like me in that I can log in any time and have someone to chat with or at least “eavesdrop” on in guild chat. It doesn’t matter if my character is in all greens and they are all purples or whether I’m logged on as a level 13 and they are playing a level 80. On those occasions when I need help, someone is almost always available and willing to help, but by and large I’m left to do my own thing. Not ignored, but certainly not pressured.

That’s one way a guild can be really bad: You feel as though you are letting the others down if you aren’t logged on often enough or aren’t available for your raid role, etc. I know when my daughter was dating a major WoW geek, he’d have to explain or make excuses to his guild as to why he wasn’t available for thus and such. Bad enough that his new love interest was a bloodelf palidan! Sometimes in smaller guilds it even takes on the air of necessity. In my guild, if I weren’t online, there would probably be 3 or 4 other priests that could fill in for me. But I’ve been in many guilds where I might be the only priest of a certain level, spec, or skill set.

Even without that sort of pressure though, there is another. I simply feel like I’m being flakey with my friends. One weekend I’m on all the time. Next I might hardly be on at all. You’ll notice on the guild forums that some of our members feel compelled to post messages explaining or forewarning of absences. In my guild, its largely me making me feel guilty of flakiness. But I know there are guilds where you would get the boot after only a few weeks unexplained absence.

So I think of guilds as both a good thing and a bad thing when it comes to World of Warcraft addiction. Its wonderful to be noticed and welcomed every time you log on. But it can become a bad thing that fuels addictive tendencies if it reaches the point where you feel compelled to log on because of your guild.

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So since starting this blogging stuff, I really haven’t had much of a chance to play World of Warcraft. Should bother me, huh? Strangely though it doesn’t. The only way it does at all is if I get caught up in the “shoulds.” You know all those things that you should be doing at any point in time. But why in the world would you let something like World of Warcraft into the realm of shoulds? To me that smacks of addiction.

Last night I did play for a few hours. But you know how I spent the better half of that time? Doing my auction house routine. Now for me, the auction house is how I make my money. Others do dailies or farm but I do auctioneering. I do pretty well at it and of course there is always that next big purchase looming out there that has me feeling like I should be doing my auction routine. But the thing is it takes time. Why should I feel compelled to spend what time I do choose to play on tasks if I don’t feel like tasking?

One other note: I relearned an old lesson yesterday. When leveling multiple characters, there is often no need to go through the same areas over and over again. Right now, I’m (belatedly) leveling a death knight and following the typical path through Hellfire, just lightly touching Zangarmarsh (because I didn’t like it the first time around) before heading over to Terrokar where I was languishing doing a series of quests that were for largely too easy for me.

Well along came a friend and with his help I ran all the Burning Crusade northern areas picking up the flightpoints along the way. Most of the areas I’d never hardly seen with Sayas. Now I’m thinking Dhume, my death knight is going to spend what time he has left in the Outlands in Area 52 and Netherstorm. Then when heading over to Northrend, I’ll do the same thing and hit areas I didn’t get to with Sayas on his way to 80. I figure I should be able to see fresh content with at least three characters this way. Then you figure the difference between Alliance and Horde perspectives and there is plenty new stuff for me to see before the new expansion hits a couple years from now.

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