Giving Up World Of Warcraft... Again

Wratty began playing World Of Warcraft after he broke out of university last year. It was a period of letting go and a time to do very little until he began his new job.

Those two or three months were great, he didn't spend the hefty amount of time on it as others do - when the account was put on hold, his character was a mere Level 23. Wratty simply spends too much time exploring the universe instead, and isn't obsessed with making his character the best there is. In reality he's probably not the right man for the game.

What inspired this gent to put his account on hold? Well it was many things, at the time Wratty saw his PC as the root to all evil. It became a social distraction, a means to gain weight, and completely dissolve any perception of time that he had. The major reason was to remove this addiction before the lovely XBox 360 came out before Christmas, and to enjoy the summer that Bournemouth brings.

So that was that. The account was dropped, the game was uninstalled and put to rest amongst the small pile of PC games he owns. A stack that simply contains some copies of Diablo, Diablo 2, Project IGI, Half-Life 2, No One Lives Forever and a few Star Wars titles.

"But wait a minute!" we hear you ask. Didn't you say you gave it up again?

Indeed we did, and who knows we shall probably be writing the exact same thing again next year.

Wratty picked up a 90-day card for the game earlier this year sometime around February. He'd played a few RPG's around this time and it game him some form of nostalgia. However he didn't use the card straight away, he had his (newly repaired) 360 and didn't need any other distractions. The 90-day card simply sat for a while, for a few months and found itself unused, much akin to his DVD's that he's never watched. They're there for the day that you need them.

That day was soon to come.

March 2006.
Something fantastic happened to Wratty, the single most amazing thing that has ever happened to him. Details will not be divulged as they're not necessary and Wratty wishes simply to be known to most of the world as half of the embodiment of GO:Yeah, his Superman to his real world Clark Kent. Needless to say life was different, better.

April 2006
Work whisked Wratty away on a mission to India for two weeks. Two weeks of pure hell. Again, you don't need to know the details, except that Wratty was for the first time in his life homesick. The final two weeks of April were wonderous, no complaints there.

May 2006
OK we're going to include a few days of April in this one because it's all a bit of blur from here. Obviously the 90-days of Warcraft had to start here because we've told you it just ran out. What May brought was a very different time for Wratty. The great thing that changed his life had been sadly and abruptly ripped out of his life which just left him dazed, confused and lost.

Warcraft is like another world, a place where thousands of faceless people can meet up and forget about real life. It's not like the regular internet, it's not like taking a stroll through Yahoo chat. There's something different about this world. The difference is being able to achieve something in this world. You can achieve status like you can on the internet, but you don't have to. You don't have to socialise with a single person, yet this helps. It helped me. Even the loneliest person in the world will forget that horrid feeling when playing Warcraft. You have a seemingly endless amount of people that share in your passions, and a surprising amount of people who are prepared to listen to and support someone who they've never met.

From the outside, from lets say a normal person's point of view the whole thing seems sad, and stereotypically geeky. That's fine with us, as Wratty is a self confessed geek. It doesn't worry us in anyway either because some of the finest people we've ever met are all crammed into the many realms that Warcraft hold. These people show each other that they're not different, that they're not alone and some wonderous friendships are forged here.

We've heard of love being found here, people finding their soulmates. It is a place rich in communication and it is all because Blizzard have found a way of making a common ground for these people while breaking the rules of normal communication. There are no uncomfortable introductions, no nervous chats. Each person has an equal opportunity to succeed in this world. There is no perception of appearance or race or anything else that has plagued mankind's vanity.

This became Wratty's fortress of solitude. His place to escape from the world and to discuss his thoughts with the great minds from around the world. These people showed Wratty once more how to play the game and how to get the best out of it. So even though he was there to escape the world, he was still getting something back. When leaving the computer to rejoin the real world, he didn't feel as bad as he did when logged on as he had achieved something. If he were to have gone to a quiet spot on the beach for a while to escape the world, his mindset would not change by the time it got cold and he had to go home again.

So here's what we got out of it. What do you get out of the game? We would love to hear if you think we're lunatics, or if you too feel the same.

What is the reason we now have left the game? Where did we get to?

We left the game for two reasons. The first is that our 90-day card ran out, this doesn't mean much because we could easily have renewed this. The main reason is that we didn't need the game anymore, it had done what it needed to for us and we wanted to come back to the real world and enjoy the weather.

Much to many people's annoyance we left just as we were about to hit Level 40 and get our special magic horse. Yes it's a crucial point of the game, this however symbolises one fact alone. That we were never there for the achievements and to reap the rewards of the world. We were there only to discover that we are not alone.