For those of you who don’t know, Breaking the Addiction is a series of posts I’ve been writing to bring to light and discuss the serious addiction I had to playing World of Warcraft. On this edition I wanted to talk about my worst “addict moments” I ever had with the game. These are the moments that I’m probably the most ashamed of. They were all clear signs that I had a serious addiction to the game, but I didn’t see that until much later. So let’s get to it shall we …



Addict Moment #1 – Playing the game 16 hours straight the first day it came out
The day World of Warcraft was released was not the first day I played the game, but it was the first sign that I would have an addiction. I actually started playing the game 3 weeks earlier when Blizzard opened up the Beta for anyone to play. I was immediately hooked and couldn’t wait for the retail version to come out. After playing the beta I knew there would be a mad rush to level up as fast as possible and I didn’t want to be left behind, so I was determined to level my character as high as possible in the shortest period of time.

The game was released on a Tuesday and they day before I had just come down with a really bad case of the Strep Throat. Now I was not faking this to get time off work to play the game. I was seriously sick, and my doctor quarantined me to my house for the next 3 days because of how contagious I was. I felt like complete shit and was extremely contagious, but that didn’t stop me from going to Best Buy when they opened at 10AM the day the game came out to buy it. It also didn’t stop me from playing the game for 16 hours straight without stopping to eat. I only took breaks to get a drink and go to the bathroom. When my friends logged on that night to begin playing the game for the first time, my Night Elf Hunter was already level 12 and I was out of the starting zone. I didn’t end up going to bed until 4AM in the morning that night. It was my first day playing and I was already addicted.



Addict Moment #2 – Playing the game while working on a school project
Besides having a 40 hour a week career I also go to graduate school part time to get my masters in electrical engineering. I’m specializing in analog microchip design and every semester I take one class, which always has a huge project near the end of the semester. I took this one RF design class in which my final project was to design a cell phone receiver chip. It required a lot of work, I was spending 40 hours a week in the computer lab at school working on computer simulations for the project.

At the same time my in-game guild was tackling the final boss of the 40-man raid dungeon Molten Core (Ragnaros). We had been working on it for weeks and I wanted to be there when we finally took him down. There was a good chance we would this one night that I was supposed to be working on my project, so I took my laptop to school. I sat there in the computer lab and while working on my project I was also playing World of Warcraft, trying to defeat Ragnaros. We did end up defeating him that night and when we did I jumped up from my chair and screamed cheers of joy out loud. It freaked everyone in the computer lab out. Now my project was due in a week and I was really far behind. I should have been working on my project hard core but instead I was playing the game. Beating some stupid boss was more important then doing good in school.



Addict Moment #3 – Playing the game during work hours
This isn’t really one specific moment as much as it is a series of moments that lasted for months. Luckily for me my job provides me with an extremely nice laptop that is actually good enough to play games on. In the event I ever got bored at work I decided to install World of Warcraft on it to play on those slow days when I didn’t have much to do. Well when The Burning Crusade expansion pack came out I was once again seriously hooked. There was so much to do and I wanted to do it all. Playing the game at home was no longer enough for me.

I started playing at work. It started out as just a couple of hours a day, but eventually it grew until I was spending more then 50% of my work day playing the game. I would come in to work in the morning and log on immediately. My coworkers were starting to get very annoyed with me. They were busting their butts for the company and here I was sitting at work playing a damn computer game. Eventually I had to much work and I had to stop playing at work or risk getting behind and getting fired. That was the end of that.

Addict Moment #4 – Blowing off my Best Friend to get “Epic Lootz”
After playing World of Warcraft for about a year I actually quit for a while. A couple of months later I was talking to my friend Chris who told me he was moving back from Boston to live here in Raleigh, NC again. He also told me he had recently started playing World of Warcraft. After a couple of weeks of talking about the game I decided to come back to the game to play with him. We both started new level 1 characters so we could play together. He was a Warrior and I was a Priest. It was the perfect class combination. We were having a blast playing together.

At the same time I also started playing my old level 60 Night Elf Hunter again. I joined a raiding guild and was right back in the thick of the action again. After a while I began spending more time raiding with my new guild than I was playing with my friend Chris. He was the reason I got back into the game, but I had the chance to get some awesome Epic Gear from the high level raid dungeons in the game if I raided and I didn’t want to miss out. He didn’t have a character with a high enough level to raid, so he couldn’t come along. The result was that I spent more time raiding then questing with him. I told myself I was doing it “for the guild” to help everyone out. Deep down though I was greedy and I wanted the epic gear. Chris told me he didn’t mind, but if I was him I would have. I should have never blown off my best friend to play with a bunch of people I didn’t even know in real life.

Final Thoughts
So there you have it, four of my worst “addict moments” I ever had playing World of Warcraft. I’m sure they all probably don’t seem that bad to you, but when I look back I consider them to be pretty pathetic moments in my gaming life. Hopefully I’ll never be that addicted to a game again.