Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Random Ramblings

Some assorted news today, since it seems to be all little messages that I would like to say something about.

No patch yet
I logged in this morning and the message that was up announced a 15 minute rolling restart. Looks like the patch isn't going to drop this week yet, but I had my bets on next week already anyway.

I do have to admit that I'm looking forward to the new kitten skins. My druid won herself some upgrades in Naxx10 yesterday (yay KT staff!) and she'll be such a pretty white kitten ^_^

No instances available
I also just read on WoW.com that Blizzard is working on the 'additional instances not available' problem. Yay!

There is nothing more annoying then bouncing of the instance portal for half an hour just wasting your time away. And while Icecrown has been very good to us, on our EU server we have been running into this message a lot.

Trading Card Mounts no longer BOP
And woot, as MMO Chamption was suspecting already, the trading card mounts indeed seem to go BOE!

I have always refused to buy trading card packs, especially since the only thing I want from them is the in game loot, and it felt too much like buying my rewards. And silly as I am I rather spend hours on end to actually earn them ;)

But now I might be able to spend my hard earned in game gold on a spectral tiger mount after all, woot!

Addiction therapists signing up to World of Warcraft
I still believe that if you feel you have a WoW addiction there is an underlying problem. If your life is balanced between normal work or school, family, friends, and gaming I cannot see this being an addiction.

Not until you decide that the game comes first in the above list you should start thinking about if you have your priorities set straight. And when it comes to that, you might also want to think about why your priorities are messed up. And I find it hard to imagine that most then come to the conclusion that it is the fault of the game...

I can sooner see this a problem of not being interested/happy enough with your work/school, or social life, and fulfilling this need for happiness with something else instead. If you had turned to play sports people would call it a healthy workout, because it's gaming people call it an addiciton. Odd how that works.
From the article: "...youngsters who are spending so much time playing these games that they have lost touch with the real world."
If these youngsters exist, and if we're so worried about them. Shouldn't we think about what we're offering them in this real world of ours instead? And how youngsters are being raised?

Permit me to grab back to my mobile phone rant. We give young people (at the age of 5 or 6 often already) a mobile phone and teach them that commiting to appointments, and actually planning your life is not too important, because they can update it at any time.

Is it odd then that life just becomes a world of no commitment?

Is it odd that these people are eventually turning to a world where the rules are way less complicated than in the real world? Where they can count on the same encounter always being the same encounter?

I might be completely stabbing in the dark here, but might it be that the game simply offers more structure than real life, and that youngsters are really just trying to find a world with rules and borders?

Either way, this post has become a lot longer than I had planned, and I can go on ranting a bit about my visions on the world, but hey...in the end what counts is what we do with it.

If we call it an addiction it's an addiction.
After all if we would call a table a chair, it would live under that name.

3 comments:

  1. WoW and addiction...it really can be. if you don't realise how much time you pass away, and that EVERY day, than it starts to get...not dangerous, but maybe oneself has to keep an eye on it *DONT_KNOW*

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  2. Yea I guess you can get addicted to anything really. Tamarind made a good point, my grandma use to crochet for fricking hours, and no on gave her flak about it.

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  3. omg, hadn't even looked at it like that! your lovely critical view on one of these people...

    I hope you get a tell too!

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