If you take a look at the archive (a feature I’ve actually only discovered just now), you’ll notice quite an interesting distribution of posts here on gnegg.ch
2002 was where all started. November was still a bit slow, but in December I really got into blogging only to let it slip a bit during 2003.
2004, I began subscribing to tons of RSS feeds which provided me with a lot of inputs for my own articles. You’ll notice a significant increase of posts during the whole year.
Then, in 2005, my WoW-time began. My first WoW-related posting was from February 21st, 2005 and makes a reference to when I bought WoW, which would be – provided I’m calculating correctly – February 15th 2005.
Going back to the archive, you’ll immediately notice something happening to the post count: It’s steadily going down. From a good 9 entries in January (pre-WoW) down to one entry in October which is more or less when I got my first character to level 60. In November I was affected by my first fed-up-ness of WoW which lasted till January 2006 (post count coming up again – despite having christmas and all which was keeping me away from computers.
Then, in January, I was playing again, getting closer to 60 with my second character in February (just one posting).
March was WoW-less again due to my feeling of not having anything to do any more.
In mid-April, I began playing again and started my third character… (posts going down) – which I got 60 with at the end of May.
June was playing at 60 and before the end of the month, I began feeling fed-up with WoW. And burned out. I clearly felt to have wasted way too much of my life. And I felt like I was truly addicted to WoW. So I used the emergency break and stopped playing.
As you can see, I was back to 16 posts in July which also was due to my “Computers under my command”-series which was easy to do due to the topics being clear in advance.
August is interesting. Have a look at the month calendar and guess when I took my lv60 character out again!
More or less regular postings here until August 10th. Then nothing.
September is better again because I put my WoW to a deep-freeze again – especially after having seen what WoW does to my other hobbies. gnegg.ch is a very nice indicator in that regard.
So I’m coming to all the same conclusion as Adam Betts who also stopped playing WoW due to noticing his real life being severely affected by WoW.
World of Warcraft is highly addictive and I know of no person who could say not being affected by this. Once you start to play, you play. Even worse: Even if you think that you got it behind you and that you can control it, it just takes over again.
So for me it’s clear what I have to do: I will stop playing. For real this time. No taking out my character again. No-more-playing. I won’t delete my characters as they are the result of a lot of work, but I will cancel my subscription.
I’m really grateful for the archive function of gnegg.ch as it was a totally clear indicator of my addiction and it still is a perfect way to prevent me from going back as everyone will know I have due to the post count going down again.
gnegg 