WoW and RL in adulthood

[Deleted]

Many of us started playing WoW when we were in our teens. Back then we had virtually no responsibilities and more free time than we knew how to spend. We grew up with this game, it was a big part of our transition to adulthood and maybe helped define our behavior as adults.

Fast forward to today: we have jobs, responsibilities, social obligations, bills to pay. Some of us have families, a girlfriend, a wife, kids.

To get away from all the complaining on this general board I want to talk about something else: how did your WoW gaming habits change when you got older? Do you still try to hold on to how you played as a kid/young adult? Do you still raid Mythic? How do you manage?

[Leih]

I don't have the time I did before, though I could still make Mythic raiding work if I wanted to. I don't want to though, I have plenty more things I can do with my time and I just don't have the energy to invest into it all.

I still love the game though, and for Legion I'm running my guild as a casual 4 hours per week heroic guild. Still have fun and getting to slowly work through the content with other mature and time-constrained people, so it's all good. Much better than pugging!

[Keile]

I pulled back on how much I play by a lot. I basically only play an hour or two on the days I play except on raid day (since that's a 4 hour commitment, we do normal and Heroic but not mythic). Even then I don't even play every day, maybe 3 days a week if that? Though now that I have a "normal" job (I recently left the hell that is retail and got a normal Mon-Fri 8-5 office job) I've actually been playing a bit more than I used to since I have more REGULAR free time.

Back in the day I could easily have spent 10+ hours every day playing. Was also a Hardmode/Heroic raider back in WotLK, to put into perspective my cutback. Basically I went from full on hardcore raider to more casual/laid back but still taking it seriously raider. It's done wonders for me.

Also helps that I have a supportive GF who knows that I set aside certain hours every Sunday for the raid, and even checks up on me to see how it's going (or will watch).

[Naiattavain]

Many of us started playing WoW when we were in our teens. Back then we had virtually no responsibilities and more free time than we knew how to spend. We grew up with this game, it was a big part of our transition to adulthood and maybe helped define our behavior as adults.

Fast forward to today: we have jobs, responsibilities, social obligations, bills to pay. Some of us have families, a girlfriend, a wife, kids.

To get away from all the complaining on this general board I want to talk about something else: how did your WoW gaming habits change when you got older? Do you still try to hold on to how you played as a kid/young adult? Do you still raid Mythic? How do you manage?

you know what blizzard obviously doesn't think about their customers being responsible. it shows when they literally just nerf everything on emotional whim. with no explanation behind the so called change. people get tired of this nerfing and eventually stop playing the game. warlords of draenor was a really fun version of the game. and legion came in nerfing alot of stuff making the game an elitist game. its getting time to quit. chris metzen had his fun with us now its time for us to find other things to do because lets face it chris metzen was really that cool of a guy.

[Deleted]

Back in college I used to raid 5 days a week and still played a lot more.
After I got a job I tried raiding 3 days a week and it felt tiresome at some points.
Now with a job and having moved in with my girlfriend there's not more organized game for me except a RBG and a mythic + every now and then. I play casually around 2 hours a day (sometimes more, sometimes not at all)
When a kid will come in future I suspect it will be much less.
It was fun but well ... life happens

[Keile]

you know what blizzard obviously doesn't think about their customers being responsible. it shows when they literally just nerf everything on emotional whim. with no explanation behind the so called change. people get tired of this nerfing and eventually stop playing the game. warlords of draenor was a really fun version of the game. and legion came in nerfing alot of stuff making the game an elitist game. its getting time to quit. chris metzen had his fun with us now its time for us to find other things to do because lets face it chris metzen was really that cool of a guy.

Actually they do give explanations, people just ignore them/don't trust them.
While they are not always 100% accurate, they typically are pretty on point as to why they make the changes they do. Thing that people don't understand is Blizz looks at raw numbers they get from the millions of players playing and less on the few who go to the forums and complain about something when they make their decisions. So that can lead to some detachment from their player base, but overall I feel that they've done a lot of the right moves recently.

Though I cannot wait for Artifacts to go away...I'd much rather the necklace in BfA than a perma weapon. I miss getting weapon drops T_T

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Back in college I used to raid 5 days a week and still played a lot more.
After I got a job I tried raiding 3 days a week and it felt tiresome at some points.
Now with a job and having moved in with my girlfriend there's not more organized game for me except a RBG and a mythic + every now and then. I play casually around 2 hours a day (sometimes more, sometimes not at all)
When a kid will come in future I suspect it will be much less.
It was fun but well ... life happens

Yeah, raiding gets to a point when it feels like a job. When I got to that point I had to pull back. Playing a game should not make you feel the same as waking up to go to work. It just...shouldn't.

Ever since I stepped away from the hardcore scene and went to 1 day a week raiding...I've felt a lot better.

[A Chozo]

Adulthood meant only thing for me: no Mythic raiding.

It's not that there is no time - time exists, even with work and responsibilities, but there are SO - MANY - GAMES to play. Instead of 20h of WoW, now it's.. maybe 6 tops per week, but combined with a lttile Guilty Gear there, or Splatoon here.

[Blacktales]

The one and most significant thing that has changed, is the amount of time i'm able to put in the game. The last time I did organized raiding was in Classic and it took lots of time, managing a dkp, managing the people and channels. So what was timing consuming were basically activities that required lots of people. Therefore I devoted my time to activities, that requires less management of big groups. So I devoted my time to,Arena 2v2, Raid PUGs (sometimes quite painful, but also fun), Rated Battlegrounds, and now in Legion Mythic+ Dungeons. The Game did change to cater those needs. I guess thats why i'm still playing

[Queen of Hamsters]

I started playing when I was... um... 22? Yeah, must've been 22. I have more time to spend now and also more money than I did back when I first started playing the game.

[Hashtronaut]

Oh I definitely don’t play as much, and play in a much different way than when I was a teenager.

I still remember all my friends and I getting wotlk the first night it came out. I stayed up with another friend for 32-36 straight hours to get to 80. Was so fun...now I certainly can’t do things like this.

I usually play an average of an hour or 2 every other night. Binging to me is 4hrs+ which I barely get to do. Sometimes I wish I could play more but then again I enjoy my job and my life outside the game although it’s nice to reminisce.

[Deleted]

The underlying theme here is rationalization.
The thing changed the most is; less sitting around,chatting,... and more planned activities. (Basically about 2 hours of WQ in afternoon + raid 3 nights a week).

[ddengster]

Stopped raiding and playing, now just following up on the lore via youtube videos. Will come back once I have more time, but probably not going to be raiding. And I'll be glad to have video games if I ever reach retirement age. I'm grateful for the form of cheap entertainment that you can enjoy now as compared to when before video games existed. If only my old parents enjoyed video games... they'd be playing them now instead of going on expensive trips.

[Aoyi]

I stopped playing WoW for a while. I just didn't have the time/energy to raid, so I dropped off my raid team first and played casually, then eventually ended my sub. I'm on disability now, so I'm playing again having fun. I'm on a heroic raid team now with a little mythic raiding here and there, so not as hard core raiding like I did in the past, but I have fun with it. When I was working though, it was hard to keep up with the game.

[Deleted]

When I started in vanilla I had indeed no responsibillity. I miss these times , but also not really.

Now I have a job, a girlfriend, a great house and get so many different things in return. However, my relationship with wow is an love/hate relationship. If I am not in a guild doing scheduled content, it is not a game for me. hence I am still raiding (late-night, cause of the previous named responsibillities). If that raiding would ever stop, I would not play this game at all.

I got many friendships in return as well. Just came back from a week skiing with an old WoW friend

/love Grumpys

[Currently Retired]

I started playing when I was... um... 22? Yeah, must've been 22. I have more time to spend now and also more money than I did back when I first started playing the game.

I really like and agree with your location;

Back to the topic, how big is the difference between back then and today in terms of available time?

[kamuimac]

Many of us started playing WoW when we were in our teens. Back then we had virtually no responsibilities and more free time than we knew how to spend. We grew up with this game, it was a big part of our transition to adulthood and maybe helped define our behavior as adults.

Fast forward to today: we have jobs, responsibilities, social obligations, bills to pay. Some of us have families, a girlfriend, a wife, kids.

To get away from all the complaining on this general board I want to talk about something else: how did your WoW gaming habits change when you got older? Do you still try to hold on to how you played as a kid/young adult? Do you still raid Mythic? How do you manage?

went from playing many hours a day each day (soon after university when i was basickly coming back from work and playing all evening/night) to playing maybe 5-6 hours per week on weeks when i have plenty of free time.

at the end of day wow is only a game - it was fun while it lasted but its not that fun anymore - have plenty of more fun RL activities right now

the only thing is i wish i realised much much sooner how pointless chasing gear threadmill was and how much of a timewaste raiding was

[h4rr0d]

If I wanted to, I could still nolife it pretty hard (and sometimes still do) even with a partner (btw, once you live together, the relationship immediately stops taking as much time as it does when you are just dating) and some friends to keep in touch with. Remember, most of your friends have aged along with you, so they have obligations of their own.

I always had an on and off relationship with wow, raiding hardcore, burning out, quitting for couple of months and then returning (usually it worked out so that I was progressing about every other raid instance), but when I subbed for 2 months around this xmass, most of the days I wouldn't log in at all. The game just doesn't feel like a game anymore. If you don't have a stable group of friends to run M+ with (which is hard to do, when you take 3-4 month long hiatuses and I don't exactly fancy M+ anyway), there isn't much to do. PuGs are extremely hit or miss and pretty toxic (the average player is really terrible at the game), so that isn't exactly pleasant experience and other than that the content gets stale extremely quickly.

[Lahkesis]

I started playing when I was 22/23 in 2004. Back then I played a lot and throughout the years I've gone through periods of time when I've played waaaay too much (20-30+ hours a week) and complete breaks where I didn't play at all. I started really strong in Legion with the intention of raiding mythic but it actually became way too much of a chore and I have since gone casual/member status in my guild. I do heroic with them on occassion.

I've since learned that the desire to play 20+ hours a week is gone. I'd much rather experience the story and content at my own pace and then clear heroic. There are too many other games I want to experience and too many books I want to read in order to sink that much time into one thing. As I got older, I realized that I needed to engage in more varied kinds of entertainment and take better care of myself because how bad I felt physically and mentally translated into a jaded view of my experiences in WoW. I was genuinely angry at my guild mates and nothing I did in WoW felt like fun. It just felt like another thing that was holding me back. So I took a break and now just only play when I feel like it, which is sometimes 10 hours a week and sometimes 3.

Edit: I'm also married, but that didn't change how much time I had available to play WoW. My husband and I share a love of games. We do spend a lot more time co-opting games than we did when I spent more time playing WoW. (He quit right after hitting 110 on his paladin at the start of Legion. I wish I hadn't been so 'committed' to mythic raiding. We could have experienced that together and I won't make that mistake in BfA)

[Deleted]

I don't play on a fixed weekly schedule anymore, and only belong to a small social guild of people which I know in RL. It's already bad to find schedules for other things. When I play, I want to do things that I am in the mood to do, not things which I ought to do. This is why I hate that things like Mage Tower are not available all the time, because I cannot participate in them on every occasion where I have more time to spend in the game.

I also don't run much challenging content, except Mage Tower, because of the organisational hassle. I rather play alts. And I want to have some "return on investment" of my time spent in the game. I hate idling around. If some activity takes too much time to reach a goal, and is in itself not entertaining, then I will not go after that goal. I love Mage Tower, because practicing fights has some value in itself. I don't like looking for raid PUGs because I don't know how much time I will spend with idling around, and how much time I will actually be raiding (and if I will get any loot out of the ordeal). In an LFR queue, you can at least spend time with some other activities and then will get a port into a raid. LFD tool costs too much time and micromanagement for setting up bigger groups without auto invite, or looking for a group to get into.

[killwithpwr]

I started playing when i was in the army... So got much more free time now to play than i had back then.... I also have much more personal money to spend, so my rig is significantly better.

However, being in a committed relationship i still dont have a lot of time to play. So... I still am in a weird spot.

Would love to play much more.

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I started playing when i was in the army... So got much more free time now to play than i had back then.... I also have much more personal money to spend, so my rig is significantly better.

However, being in a committed relationship i still dont have a lot of time to play. So... I still am in a weird spot.

Would love to play much more.