The MMORPG question

I'm a long time MMORPG player, I've been involved in gaming somehow since I was about 10 and got my first Nintendo for Christmas. When I was 18 I started getting into MMORPG (Massive multiplayer online Role playing game) my first one being Star Wars Galaxies, sure I tried a few before that but they never quite grabbed me.
SWG was a rather unique MMORPG since due to game balance issues a single player in good equipment could take on Bossmobs in the game. I enjoyed it very much because I could log on, get a set of buffs and get going, if I died or messed up it was my fault completely.
Since I could do most things solo, I was free to log on whenever I had time, my guild was a mainly pvp guild, and while we did have guild events it wasn't every day. Most of the time the guild functioned through guildchat and whispers and not by playing together constantly. Sure we did pvp and did base defenses but that was a few hours here and there.
After Sony Online Entertainment managed to ruin Star Wars Galaxies I moved on to World of Warcraft. The behemoth with 10+ million players, the raid mecca of the modern mmo world. At first I really enjoyed the leveling up to level 60, doing 5 mans with friends and so on. Then we moved on to 40 man raiding which was a rather time consuming task. There were hours of farming for buff items such as flasks and pots, resistance gear, and then the raids themselves which could take anywhere from 2.5 hours to 4 hours.

A sexual sadist has certain steps he or she goes through in order to condition their partner to do their bidding so to speak.
At first the sadist rewards their partner for "good" behavior and punishes them for bad behavior by sulking or similar things.
Once the person is connected to the sadist, the sadist removes "lifelines" to the outside world. This means getting him/her to give up their friends, phone calls to family or other social activities.

Once this has been done the person is usually broken and completely under the power of the dominant sadist.

In the case of WoW like all MMO games it rewards you for playing, but the game also purely rewards you for spending obscene amounts of time in the game. Take an event such as "The flame warden" which requires you to travel across the world, find NPC's and do tasks linked to them. If you do all of them you get a title reward, as you do for all major world events. In addition you get achivement poitns and you get a 310% flight speed drake if you do every world event.
The game rewards you by giving you gear, titles, achivement points, gold, and so on. It also punishes you for "bad" behavior IE not doing the events or raids correctly by costing you time and effort. IE if you wipe in a Raid you end up spending 5 - 10 minutes running back, rebuffing and so on.
In addition these raids are done by 10 or 25 people, if one or two of them make mistakes, you wipe and have to start over.
What ended up forcing me to stop was that I spent about 4 hours Sunday - Friday raiding, and most of the time I did play correctly and still my guild was unable to do the boss in question because a few people usually the same ones fuck up.

People say WoW is just a hobby, or that they swap TV for WoW and if they do that its fine. However a lot of the players I met in the game didn't have much of anything in their lives except the game. Some may not have had much to start with, but the game "divides" you from real life if you let it.
I mean my guild raids from 19.45 to 23.45 Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night. Then there are optional 10 man raids on Friday and Saturday, however some people will give you shit if you don't show up. In the end I felt guilty because I didn't show up 5 nights a week to raid. Showed up before raids to do the daily 5 man dungeon quest.

The game itself and the way its designed ends up stripping you of "real life" in favor of a more fun virtual one. You can hardly blame people for wanting to escape but when the escape slowly becomes your life its dangerous. I've lost several friends to World of Warcraft, they just want to play every single day, never want to go out or do something in real life because to them wow is the best thing in their life.
But when you quit an MMORPG you don't just lose the game itself, but you lose most of the friends you had in the game. People you've talked to every day for months or even years stop talking to you on msn, or make no effort to answer texts and phonecalls.
So not only have you lost most of your real life friends because of the addiction, you now face losing the only social network you have left the people in game.

That's why breaking a wow addiction is so hard, because even if you hate the game you stay for the people you like who still play it. So in the end the game takes over and you lose your real life friends, and when you quit you lose the online ones.
So you end up having to deal with the addiction and the urge to log back in, if not to play just to talk to someone.