I have to wonder what the people who down on WoW as being "evil" and "time/money-wasting" spend their time and money on. Especially the ones here at the Escapist, who seem to be avid game players themselves. Hint: You play games, you are wasting time and money on them. There's no solid return money/time-wise in video games unless you're one of the few who review games for a living, and if you actually make good money on that, you're mired so deep in games u need to review you hardly get to play them thoroughly enough.
People get hooked on all sorts of useless tripe. There are "Gleeks", Twilight fans, Miley Ray Cyrus fans, D&D enthusiasts, Stargate fans, Trekkies, Star Wars Geeks, etc. And its all a waste of time. But is that a bad thing? No.If you don't like WoW or Blizzard, great for you. I hope your time-wasting activities are joyful because I get a great amount of joy and fun from mine.
Thus... to get OT:
Blizzard by far has made the most successful MMO. Addicting? Perhaps, but there has to be something of value to the people who play it avidly. There has to be a return on the investment for people to continue playing it. Sure, people have died because of self-neglect in gaming. Perhaps you need to blame people for their priorities being fucked up.
But overall if Blizz is making a completely new IP MMO, great for them, I hope its successful and awesome. If I play it, that will be a miracle because I have very little time as it is to play anything at the moment. Maybe a few hours of WoW or MW2 (BlOps sucks) or something else from my library that hasn't been finished yet.
But I realize too in the end, people take any reason they can find or contrive to knock success and demonize it, perhaps out of jealousy or close-minded trollishness... who knows?
