Gotta do everything!

When I started playing online role playing games, it was literally impossible to spend all your time playing games. You had to log onto the "GEnie" service to play, and they charged 6 bucks an hour just to connect. And, it can get worse, that 6 dollar charge was from the hours between 6pm and 6am because apparently, GE used their computers for other stuff during the day. During the day, the charge shot up to 18 dollars an hour. And that was for the 1200 baud connection. If you wanted one of the fancy new 2400 baud connections, that was an extra 2 dollar an hour charge.

So yeah, you learned to budget your time REAL FAST.

Back in the day, not only was it uphill and in the snow both ways, but we had to push a school bus, too.

Today, it's totally different. 15 bucks a month! You have a high speed internet connection! As a result, games have evolved into the biggest time sucks they can be. You're at max level? No problem! You can do dailies, build Garrisons, collect pets and mounts, endlessly fight Sov wars, perpetually camp .4 security system gates... etc, etc, etc. Or even the ever popular grind in game currency.

It's east to get addicted to this and feel you MUST do everything you can do. But you can't, it's impossible. And the sooner people realize that the happier they will be.

At it's core, the problem is our human brains. Can't really do anything about that, though. You also can't really blame the companies who understand human psychology and build "Skinnerian mechanics" into the games to try to retain your subscription for as long as possible. Well, you can blame them, but it will get you nowhere as they're doing it all perfectly legal-like. It's like getting angry at McDonalds for engineering addictive food. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.

So, you need to learn to be disciplined and budget you game time lest you succumb to the siren call of “Gotta do everything!” to the detriment of every other aspect of your life.

Me, I started the latest WoW expansion with 4 level 90 characters, I now have 1 at level 100, and one at level 91. I would like to level the 91 higher, as it's a Gnome Warlock and is completely different from my Draenei Shaman “main”, but I will not. I have my hands full with ONE Garrison.

I just choose to not spend that kind of time on it. And I refuse to be made to feel guilty about that. Of course, you could argue "Well look at you! Aren't you wasting time blogging about it instead?" Not only would you be right, but you don't know the half of it... I'm also writing an indy MMORPG at the same time. So yeah, I spend just as much time on MMORPGS as the guy doing dailies with 5 Garrisons. Judge that as you will.