Giving up Warcraft

I've just taken a momentus step and cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft.

I haven't cancelled my account, so I can still play it until my present subscription expires (not til the end of december. damn them and their 'save £3 when you buy in 3 months chunks' deal!). I'm going to try just not playing it, but so far it's been a ravenous monster which has sucked up most of my free time for the last year, stopping me doing anything remotely creative or productive outside work, and I'm not sure if I trust myself. If it doesn't work out and I can't restrain myself I'll have to take some drastic measures like ceremonally destroying all my gear then deleting my characters.

The problem with warcraft is that it's a game that you can never win. There will always be something there for you to do, some way to advance your character and some people who have better gear because they put more time in than you. If you have 30 minutes before you're going to bed or going out you can go grind some money or go farm some herbs or something else. It's almost like having a job. This means goodbye to doing anything productive when you're at home. No reading or writing, no drawing or painting, and for me the most damning thing is that I stopped making flash games in my spare time. It has also stunted any impetus I might have had to sort out my poor situation visa vi women, since it kept me from getting bored and thinking about it. (not that I'm expecting making flash games to do wonders in this regard...).

The other thing that make it so addictive is the guilds. When you have a group of 40 people all doing the same thing as you it feels like it's normal, like there's nothing wrong with spending 4 hours every other night playing a computer game. There are several people who I genuinely liked and who I'm going to miss, and that makes it slightly more difficult to leave but then I did some calculations:

In the past 2 year I have logged nearly 60 days played time over several different characters (my main character has 47 days played). Think about that - there are 730 days in 2 year. You'll probably only be awake for 2/3 of that, which is 486.66 recurring, or which I spent 60 days playing World of Warcraft. That's nearly an eigth of my waking time spent playing a computer game. I could be fluent in a foreign language by now.

Anyway, it's over. I'ts been fun but this feels like the first day of the rest of my life.