Blog Azeroth

Today we had one of our Main Tanks call it a day and wish us well. She wants to get back her RL focus and has decided that wow takes up too much of her waking hours.

It did get me thinking, that achieving RL/WoW balance is very important and most likely a good thing for players to do. I would like to write a piece on this and your thoughts would be appreciated - perhaps it could be a shared topic?

Katiya

I think RL will always find a way to make you keep the balance. I went from around 35-40 hours of WoW a week to around 20 when i got out of college and starting working full time. My guild leader works on a ski rsort, so his play time goes down during the winter.

As long as you manage to keep your priorities straight there's no need to quit or other extreme measures.

One of the greatest posts I've ever read about...well...anything, really, had to do with a guy quitting WoW and his reasoning behind it. The comments that followed were pretty much what one would expect when faced with the anonymity of the internet.

Check it out here.

I do find that now that I play I use any free time for Wow and not things I use to do like learn a new programming language or learn and use new web packages.. but WoW has made me learn some, setting up DKP sites for my guild and MySQL related to those packages.

Sure, WoW can inspire folks to learn more. But I think what Katiya is driving at is finding that right balance between playing the game and not shucking off your real-life responsibilities because of what should be a hobby. For those that can't seem to find that balance, quitting the game is certainly an alternative and one that shouldn't be viewed as "extreme."

OHHHH.. My wife make sure I don't "shucking off your real-life responsibilities" but I do get away with more sitting at the PC than I probably should

I became very aware of the balance back in the preTBC Honor Decay system while ranking up my Druid. After 3 months of farming up to Rank 10 with a few friends and pugs, then another 1-2 months of farming with a premade, I hit Rank 12.. and realized that to go any further I would have to:

1) Not go to class.
2) Not show up to work.
3) Not see any of my friends/family.

No good! I called it quits and started ranking up my Rogue casually (5 months of straight up Druid PVP made a Rogue really, really refreshing to play).

But yeah, if WoW ever messes with points 1-3 it definately should go on the backburner.

I think this would make a great shared topic actually. Mainly because my answer is too long to put here:P

I actually have a very similer story to Braids. I got up to rank 8 after a few weeks where i did nothing but battlegrounds all day. In the following week i took 2 days during the week off of BGs and i lost all of my honer from the previous week. I think alot of people got burned out from the old honer system (I'm just glad i got out when i did).
Balencing real life and WoW is crucial. Just like a horse or car, you can't ride all day or keep driving once the oil is gone or past mileage and not excpect a break down at some point. The horse will fall down dead and the engine will overheat/break down. And for these examples there is no "getting back on the horse".

I posted something very personal on this topic:

http://www.justjoshin.net/wow/?p=42

What do you guys think?

Left you a post about it, Josh. Hope it helps.