Real talk; how do you folks balance a 40+ hour work week, with WoW/gaming?

[clevin]

It's not hard depending on what you want to do. I mean, think about it... Say you work a day job, 8-5 or so. if you're home by 6pmish, you're done with dinner by 7, 7:30.Even if you want hit the sack around 11 to get up at 6:30... that's 3-4 hours of free time each night. You can easily play a bit here and there. I used to come home and while dinner was heating up (this is winter, so I often had stew or roast chicken etc), I'd do some emissary stuff. After dinner, play an hour or so if I want.

The harder part is maintaining a strict schedule. Sometimes you might get home and just not WANT to sit in the game for 3 hours but you're signed up for a raid. That's why I no longer raid but just LFR it to see the story and get a few upgrades.


It also really depends on what else you do during the week. If you want to go out, chill with the BF/GF, etc that takes evenings. So, yeah, you might not play as much or as ambitiously but you can certainly play.

[NoRest4Wicked]

I get up at 6, go to work, hit the gym on the way home, 3-4 hours with the wife and kids (until their bed time), raid starts at 830 2 days a week. The other 5 days are split between doing stuff with my wife or playing. Not too hard to do.

[Dread Pirate Phayde]

I was better at balancing it when I was working 55 to 60 hours a week, now I'm working 40 to 50, and I have a hell of a time finding time or desire to play, but I'm also getting home a few hours later than I used to.

[ldev]

Oh wow. So, a job is letting you down? Just imagine how little time you will have with kids.

[begemoc]

My schedule is fairly messed up as well, but I have plenty of time to casually enjoy the game:
5.30 AM - wake up, have coffee and breakfast while playing wow and griding out daily tasks (WQs)
6:30 AM - leave for work
6 - 7 PM - get back online, play for 1-2 hours (Mythic+ / PVP / PUGs)
I don't have time raid with a proper guild, so PUGs is the only way I get to experience the end game
On weekends, I will try to balance my activities, wife and WOW as much as possible, but I normally get at least 4-5 hours of gameplay a day.
When I was single I would play from about 5-6 PM to 11-11.30 PM daily, however, now with the wife in the picture dinners take longer and I there needs to be quality time spent together doing other things than playing WOW....
I guess you can always find time if you really want to, but you may need to adapt your gameplay accord to it.

[CogsNCocks]

Retail WoW really doesn't require you to put a lot of hours in unless you're doing worlds first or something, I don't really see the issue?

There is no issue. These people saying it's not possible are either just rubbish at the game or need to find themselves a decent guild that works around their schedule. Pugging high-level instances is the worst if you value your time.

[begemoc]

There is no issue. These people saying it's not possible are either just rubbish at the game or need to find themselves a decent guild that works around their schedule. Pugging high-level instances is the worst if you value your time.

I pugged Antorus on the day it was released and it was fine. Walk in with the mindset of we will wipe and it's okay and you'll be fine. If you join PUGs from the start while everyone is still learning you'll get gear advantage and weeks later you'll be able to skip "trash" pugs and go straight for experienced groups where everyone is geared. Obviously if you try to pug Mythic then good luck to you, but Normal/Heroic isn't that hard.

[LoopyLoop]

Only working is no big issue but balancing work, gaming and familylife can be quite hard. I just accept that I will never play as much as I did when I was younger. Now I can usually do 2-3hours a day and thats fine.

[Glowbear]

I work a 37-hour week, but spend around 3 hours a day commuting on top of that. The other complication is that my partner of almost 10 years is a recovering WoW addict and has gone cold turkey since 7.0, so I avoid playing in the evenings so we can spend time together without my exposing him to too much WoW.

I play for 1-3 hours on weekend mornings and also for an hour or two on weekday evenings once or twice a week, depending on if I can work from home during the day.

This doesn't leave me with much time to do anything, and pretty much rules out raiding altogether. It's not ideal, but I would rather be a casual dabbler than not play at all.

[Faroth]

Arguably more than 40 hours.

I'm single, so that's more free time, but I juggle an MMO/gaming, 40 hour job, along with taking time to read or watch movies/tv on streaming services, spend time with friends, and some weekends are spent driving around game hunting or listing things on eBay (eBay selling is more time consuming than some realize).

MMO-wise, it's probably worth noting that I've become gradually more casual. In FFXIV, we spend 3 hours on one night a week as a group doing previous expansion raid content to farm for mount drops. In WoW I just return for expansion launches and patch stories. I've shifted to treating MMOs as just another RPG and focus on the story less than the grind as it allows more time to spend getting through single player games as well.

There are stretches of time that I barely get any gaming in at all, though.

- - - Updated - - -

Only working is no big issue but balancing work, gaming and familylife can be quite hard. I just accept that I will never play as much as I did when I was younger. Now I can usually do 2-3hours a day and thats fine.

That's what retirement is for.

My dad retired last year and he's been fairly bored, looking for new things to do. He got a part time job this year to address that boredom. I don't think gamers will be bored in their retirement years.

[NutellaCrepe]

its simple - they dont.

all those stories how people succesfully combine high end wow with good social life and work ? fake like fuck - maybe 0,0001 % is real.

rest are just combining jobs like flipping burgers with wow .

welcome to adoult life - where you do lfr not because its amazing but because you are simply to tired from work to focus enough for anything else.

I wasn't going to respond to this thread, but it really seems like you are projecting here. I balance work ~40-60 hour week as a litigation attorney. I only go out 1-2 times during the weekends. I still work out 3-4 times a week (helps that the gym is in my building). I make time for my wife in the evenings and still get 1-3 hours on WoW almost daily.

It's all about time management. I am certainly not the only one doing it.

[Glowbear]

Can I ask, is it still possible to do the BFA Pre-Patch event? Ive been away for a while doing work stuff as well.

I don't think so, sorry You can (and indeed have to) do the Lordaeron scenario but the Teldrassil stuff is gone.

[Vaelorian]

I just... don't see how people can manage. Maybe that's where I "fell out of love" with WoW (or at least, stopped playing regularly). Work is exhausting enough, and playing WoW just also feels like more work. Like... even if you just accept that you're not going to try and Raid, it feels like everything else is gated with daily or weekly lockouts. Even farming for transmog-gear, something I used to LOVE doing, I've been doing that for years now, and I have basically everything that I *really* want. I'm still missing some mounts and some transmog gear, but I feel like I already have all of "the good stuff", giving very little for me to actually do by myself.

I dunno. Curious how you folks handle the balancing act.

I don't play anymore. But when I did I had a 40 hour work week. I just came home and played (ordered food) and went to bed.. rinse repeat for years on end.
But for a few years now I have a relationship and this makes me prioritize things differently.
Still I could manage to raid 2 nights a week + play on saturday afternoon(and sometimes evening). Which was nice.... but it does show you what you can accomplish with that amount of time vs how I played before.
There is absolutely no prestige. No high end world rank. No server firsts. No big ass server reputation. Not finishing your tier set (not that it matters now). Not having the best of the best gear. Not playing with the best people - though they could potentially be the best people... but for that to happen they also need to have time to "train" to be the best. And if you do not have time (as I stated) your skills won't be as great as you otherwise have.
10.000 hours of play makes you an expert. But that only goes if nothing changes. If your class has had an overhaul yeah you still can play pretty decent... but it is not exactly the same. It takes time to grow into your toon again. And with the days that I could play I would never ever make it to 10.000 hours.

The thing is: Sure you can play like I did. But you also need to accept that you can perhaps not play the same way as you would like.

[Mr chub]

Depends what you want to do in wow I put aside roughly 12 hours a week and never had a issue.

[Daws001]

It's probably why I stopped raiding seriously years back. It felt like another job with scheduled times and such and I was already working full-time and going to college. Now I just play casually. No pressure.

[wysimdnwyg]

The first couple of years of WoW (aka Vanilla), I played semi-casually until I got invited to an MC raid while standing in IF hawking enchants. (It was good to be a dwarf Priest.) Once I joined a raiding guild, I played heavily (avg 6+ hrs/day) for over a year. Once BC came out, I leveled to 70 and quit. It didn't help that my guild disintegrated over the raid size shuffling (40 -> 10 -> 25), or that all of my RL friends also quit playing, but mostly I was just burned out.

Since then, I have periodically taken breaks (the longest was almost a year during BC), but I always come back. Legion is the first expansion I played all the way through (since Vanilla), and that's largely because I make plenty of gold to cover my sub. The secret for me is to spread my time around. I level different chars (finished Legion with 9 at max level), spend some time doing pet battles, run old raids for pets/mounts/xmog, etc. Variety is the key to avoiding burnout.

But the biggest thing is, if you ARE burned out, take a break. Even if that break is only a few days or weeks, take a break. Accept that you don't HAVE to log on every day. It's a game. If it's not fun, why do you play? Take a break, and when you come back, maybe it will be fun again. If not, maybe that break becomes permanent. There's nothing wrong with that.

[Almaric]

Ah balls, I was hoping it would last until I was back. Seemed like a lot of story content.

Lol no it wasn't

[Sansnom]

I dunno. Curious how you folks handle the balancing act.

I still play but not the same way or the same amount. I have stopped raiding and also dungeons simply because I do not remain in front of the computer for long period without disruption.

People do not like it when I have to be away for a short period. Even for maybe a minute. I can understand that since I should not make others to change their gameplay to fit mine.

So I miss the whole dungeons, raiding and group play. Initially it requires adjusting but I found it was not that bad. I do miss the raiding but playing in my own terms when I want is more relaxing. Not having to keep up with the requirements of raiding, being available at certain time for raiding etc. The flexi mode has helped my guild to progress because now people does not need to attend 100% and does not need to feel bad if they fail to attend and potentially ruined the raid night for others.

[Tj106]

I work 40 hours a week in sales, do photography and editing usually another 10 hours a week, have a wife and active social life and still do mythic raiding. I don’t really do transmog or mount runs much, but I have always been able to get mats for more than enough raid supplies and I always did my mythic 10/15 for the chest. It’s all about maximizing time, I know when I log in Tuesday I would get my mythic in to get a maxed chest, make sure I had enough mats for the week for pots and flasks, and then raid. I usually didn’t play Wednesday, thursdays I would only log in for raid then I would usually not play too much Friday-Monday just do some wq here and there or do something with an alt. Realistically I’m only spending 7-8 hours a week on wow

[Deleted]

Well, first, stop working 40+ hours. Fulltime is 40, or less, depending on country. Second, I don't know, I played some evenings and most weekends when I worked 40 hours. I did quests, leveled alts, did dungeons, professions, pet battles, LFR, kind of everything except 'real' raiding. Now I work 32 hours and still do the same.