As many other people I was all jumpy when i first heard about Blizzards World of warcraft and my friends and I was looking forward to get this game and play it. I myself found the game a new as a new part of my gaming life and i started playing it all the time, playing nothing else but WoW. Life was only about getting up go to school and get over school as fast as humanly possible and than rush home and play WoW for the rest of the day, and I must admit it was quite funny to start with, levelling doing all the Quests, farming instances for better gear, killing horde and so on. But as time went by I reached level 60 and was ready to start venturing into the big instances like Molten core and so on. Out of the 3 irl friends of mine that had starting playing this game 2 was left and those 2 others was already doing the big instances so I couldn´t wait to go get some of the nice gear that you can get and finally enjoy the full potential of the game. But as time went by the game became more something I needed to do than something i wanted to do, you had to use almost every night on raiding and getting stressed because you where wiping all the time and the raid leader was yelling constantly, people getting really tired and pissed and all that. I started to realize that the game was taking over my life and i used more and more time on it, and to put a good example one of my irl mates that was still playing, he became totally addicted to the game and started to stay up til 2 and 3 in the morning when he had school and had to get up at 6am. His grades dropped quite fast, but I thought what the hell I have the willpower to not become as addicted as him, And I had the willpower, at that point I still enjoyed the game abit but as more time went by I didn't enjoy to go on raid most of the evenings just to keep up with the other hunters DKP so that i wouldn't be the last on the list. Than it happened. Summer came and a lot of the people in my guild went inactive and the good people started leaving because the guild was falling apart. I was at that time an officer in the guild and tried to stay as long as i saw the smallest hope of it getting up, but I lost hope and eventually I left the guild, and wandered around Ironforge for a few days thinking about what to do now. But the good thing was that I found out that i didn´t enjoy the game anymore as I used to do, so I went on the the wow website and cancelled the payments because, who wants to spent money on something they don´t enjoy? Now I´m back to being a normal gamer again. Playing all kinds of games and enjoying them. Because now I don´t have to plan when I can go into town and eat a pizza or grab a beer with some friends because I had raiding in WoW. And ain´t that what gaming is really about? Having fun when you want and play when you want and not play because you have to go raid Onyxia or molten core. That is how I see gaming as a part of life you enjoy and do when you want. World of warcraft is a cool game but play it on your own risk.

“We kinda refer to it as the plague”- FPS Doug