Happy anniversary, WoW Europe

Two years ago today World of Warcraft Europe launched. Although I had already played the US beta and was playing on a US regular server, I switched to the European servers to play with people in the same timezone. I also wrote my very first WoW journal entry two years ago. February 2005 my blog was celebrating its 10,000th visitor, today I'm at 458,000, and writing about World of Warcraft is an obvious source of traffic.

Since then I played a lot of World of Warcraft. But how much exactly? One of the features of WoW (and many other MMOs) is that it logs that information for every character, and with a /played command you can find out how many hours you played each of them. So I logged onto all of 11 characters: The three I got to level 60+, the alts where I tried different classes into level 30 to 40, even the bank alts that are doing most of my auctioning stuff, and I noted how long I had played each of them. Then I added all up and got a result of 122 days of /played time, just short of 3,000 hours, in two years of World of Warcraft. My warrior, which was my first character to level 60, has 48 days played, while my current main, the undead priest has 36.

That is about 30 hours per week, which sounds about right for me. There are people that have more than 122 days played on a single character, and others who played a lot less than me. With the average American watching 28 hours of TV per week, and me very little, I don't think that 30 hours per week is unhealthy or a sign of addiction. It just is another form of entertainment that I prefer over TV. 30 hours per week is the disposable time I have between job and family, without neglecting either. How I choose to spend that time is my choice.

So, how much World of Warcraft did you play in the last two years? How many days /played on your main character?
- posted by Tobold @ 5:47 AM Permanent Link