The following are first-hand accounts of the devastation WoW has on it’s devoted players… all quotes are completely unedited and pulled from a number of online forum threads, discussing their experiences with WoW players. Posters and names are not included for anonymity.

I knew this guy in college that used to be really social. Had a hot girlfriend, lots of friends, was physically fit and looked decent.

He got WoW and within 6 months his girlfriend was gone. Started fucking his best friend who is also no longer his friend. Guy ended up gaining 30lbs and turned pale as a ghost. I went in his room and he had like 15 bottles of urine stacked up along his desk because he ‘couldnt leave the raid’

He had 20+ pizza boxes stacked up along the wall of his room. His room smelled like death. His sheets were stained brown from when he did sleep. he lost his job and flunked out of school. He lives at home with his parents now I think, I havent seen him in a year or so.

Im glad I never bought that game, cause I feel like I wouldve turned into something like the people in these stories. I never want to touch this game.

my MMO horror story:

…played for over 4 days straight, 103 hours.. was camping for a Ghoulsbane in Guk.. I only stopped after 103 hours because I fell out of my chair and passed out from exhustion .. spent the next 6 days in hospital .. still didn’t get the bloody sword.. a guildy gave me one off of one of their twinks..

my friends brother was married, had two children and a home and all that stuff.

he got hooked into wow and quit his job and stopped supporting his family.. his wife eventually left him and took the kids/house, he moved back in with his mother. the guy had met some girl in wow that lived 1000 miles away and actually disappeared to go meet her/live with her. fast forward a few months, my friend brings over his brothers computer asking if theres anything i can do to help find him. all they knew was he left to go meet a girl he met online.

well, i dug through the computer and found wow screenshots and chat logs of the girl and her name, and eventually found an address and we tracked him down.. but afaik it’s done no good, he’s still living with the girl he met in-game and has completely abandoned everything here. his ex-wife and children live with her mother i think.

I’m 22 now, and the guy I’ve been best friends with since we were 14 started playing WoW about a year ago.

He never leaves his house, I could never get him to go outside and do anything, and now he doesn’t work or go to school. He lives with his mom, and just recently, he stopped returning my phone calls because he couldn’t put down his mic during a “raid”

Now we’re not really friends anymore, and I can’t even remember the last time we spoke.

Fuck WoW.

Friend of mine went from a B student to a D-E student in the last year because of WoW… I tried to warn him, tried to get him to quit but “my guild needs me”

My best friend was into WOW.. bad.. Like your story bad. It got to the point where he would shower by sitting in the chair and pour bottled water on himself.

Well, Me and my buddy went over one night because we were going to just have a few beers and his parents weren’t home. Turns out my buddy invited a few more people and when I arrived there were 10 people with us.

Anyway the WOW guy thought they were from the computer game and came to invade his house. WTF! This is when he really fucking lost it.. I mean mental hospital “lost it” So I sat there and was like I got in one little fight and my mom god scared, said your moving with your auntie and uncle in belair.

I had a room mate in a guild that he said required him to play like 48 hours a week. He spent everyday in his room on WoW and hardly ever went to class. The only time we saw him is when he ran in the kitchen to get a hot pocket.

i have a buddy i work with who is a heavy WoW player. his wife is also a heavy WoW player.

i don’t really understand the details, but he almost went through a divorce with her because of this. apparently he noticed she’d been on a different “server” than usual. something seemed amiss. there were like five nights in a row she was up all night playing. she didn’t want to play the game with him at all. turns out she was talking to some other guy and doing “quests” or something with him.

it really sounds ridiculous, but i can’t even describe the rage with which he realyed all this to me.

Another horror story Ive heard was about this one guy that was into WoW, and one day he ganked this shit out of this one low level guy. His girlfriend was a psychologist or something and was working on counseling a 12 y/o kid that one day went crazy and pulled a knife on his family. She was talking to the kid and found out he played WoW, she said her boyfriend played and told the kid his name and server he played on, and the kid went apeshit after hearing it.

Turns out her boyfriend was the one that ganked the kid, causing him to attack his family with a knife. There is audio somewhere of the guy telling the whole story

I buddy of mine in my Army unit dropped out of school (which was being paid for by the Army) and got out of the Army so that he could play WoW and work part time at a Walmart photo center.

I lived with this weird ass dude in college. He bought WOW…

…and stopped coming out of his room. He was literally home every time I was home and I only saw him 3 times in 6 months. He bought a refrigerator, did all of his dishes in his sink, and never let his two cats out of his room. He’d wait until I was gone and then put post its on my door to tell me things (bills, etc).

One day he showed me some character of his that was a girl and he’d solicit the other players to give him gold and pretend to be a girl.

Psycho.

good friend’s fiance dumped him over the game.

best friend of mine, grew up together… both dreamed about going to UT… and being there at the same time to have a ridiculous time in college…

dream comes true. we both get in. the dude gets ridiculously addicted to WoW. he completely stops going to class. academic probation -> flunked out. walking into his room was so nasty. he’d have 5 cups full of spit where he’d dip when raiding and not do anything about it. he wouldn’t answer anyones calls. he’d stay up all night and play… one time he fell asleep in his chair with his fingers still on the keyboard… and then we heard him bragging about it later on his microphone.

we actually stole his computer at one point to force him to not play for a few days and he threatened to call the cops on us

A guy I know through one of my best mates started playing wow roughly when it came out. He dropped out of school in year 10 (we are currently just about to finish year 12 and complete our HSC), he went to T.A.F.E for 6 months (aussie version of community college) then dropped out of that. Its taken him another year to get a f**king job, at pizza hut…and know all he does is punch cones and play wow.

He’s been doing this shit for 2 and a half years and is just turning into a degenerate, I feel sorry for all the kids who turn out like that.

A guy at the office used a vacation day last Friday just so he could be in on a raid.

kid failed out of college and and when he moved back home his parents knew it was because of WoW and would not let him play in their house. so he moved in with his guild leader (in france).

i failed out of med school and then went on to start a successful career as a night time rent-a-cop security guy because of WoW

And in the press:

http://www.techspot.com/news/19487-chinese-13yearolds-death-linked-to-world-of-warcraft.html

In China, the parents of a 13-year-old Tianjin boy are suing the makers of “World of Warcraft” because they claim that the game was responsible for the death of their son! Seemingly, the boy jumped to his death after re-enacting a scene from the game, according to Chinese news agency Xinhua. Anti-Internet addiction advocate Zhang Chunliang is backing the parent’s suit against Blizzard Entertainment. Chunliang has apparently spoken to 63 parents whose children have allegedly suffered from online gaming addiction, and has a class-action suit in the works.

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=59697

A Korean husband and wife are facing criminal charges after their baby daughter died when they left her alone in order to play World of Warcraft.

According to news site Chosun, police say the parents left their four month-old child alone in a bedroom while they went to play the MMORPG at a local Internet cafe.

When they returned five hours later, the baby was lying on her stomach and had died of suffocation.

“We were thinking of playing for just an hour or two and returning home like usual, but the game took longer that day,” the couple is reported as saying.

This is all from a video game… quite scary actually.

I stumbled across this site recently which has a large list of any and all high-priced items on Amazon, but in this post I’m only highlighting the ones I found particularly interesting.

How would you like to own your own, personal space suit for only a million dollars? Of course, if you got that, you’d also need your own $10 million space ship. With those you can bring back a $1 million space rock paperweight… a great addition to any office!

Read the reviews on the space rock, they’re pretty good.

People say BMWs have expensive parts (I drive an M3), but at least I don’t drive a Civic! They have to pay almost $900,000 for an aftermarket exhaust.

And I know Amazon sells a lot of random things like some auto parts (above)… but a full auto parts store?

If your a chemistry geek, Amazon has a great deal on a magazine subscription… only $6,000 per issue!

And of course, for the lady…. Amazon sells a certified, 7.12 carot, half-million dollar diamond.

Digg That is an improved, more secure version of Digg This. It fixes a number of security holes and bugs, while adding additional functionality and stability.

If you’d like to first read a little background information on Digg That, please check out this post: Digg This Blog Security Vulnerabilities Found.

First of all, download the plugin source code here and place it in your wp-content/plugins/ directory. Then go to your control panel and activate it. Be sure if you’re running the unpatched “Digg This”, you deactivate that plugin completely. This version is an upgraded replacement.

Then modify your template files to add this line:
<?php digg_that(); ?>
on the index.php page right before the <?php endwhile; ?> line, and on the single.php page right before the <p class=”meta”> line.

Here are some additional options you can use with that hook

digg_that($begin, $end, $show_post2digg, $support);

The digg_that() function has four optional parameters:

$begin – Any HTML content to place before the Digg button, such as a div opening tag.
$end – Any HTML content to place after the Digg button, such as the </div> tag that $begin started.
$show_post2digg – A boolean option for showing a 32x32px Submit to Digg icon and link when a post isn’t dugg already. Notice it on my blog.
$support – A boolean option for showing a link back to Digg That’s homepage under your Digg button. It doesn’t show on undugg posts, but only the few ones that have a Digg article about them.

So for example, if you wanted to wrap your button in a CSS-enhanced DIV to only show on posts that are already dugg, but not show the little gray man if it’s not dugg (for example, if you have your own social bookmarking icons already on your site), it’d look like this:

<?php digg_that(“<div class=’diggblock’>”,”</div>”,false); ?>

And if you missed the link earlier to download the plugin source code, it’s here.

10. Multi-color, rapid flashing banners congratulating me for being the millionth visitor. If I were really that lucky, I should start playing the lottery.

9. Popups piggy-backing on a link… I click the link to go somewhere, and while the page changes, an ad pops up in front of me. Site Point is an example sites that do of this. Actually, I think pop-ups in general describe number 9 best.

8. Chain emails. Email is not new anymore. Everyone uses it, and the novelty is wearing off. When will people learn that Bill Gates isn’t watching who they forward it to, and will not donate $1 to some armless, legless, kid with cancer living alone on the streets of Uganda by the name of Janji.

7. Trying to unsubscribe from an email advertising list you didn’t want to be on in the first place, and then have to send or confirm 30 additional emails during the removal process… later to find out you’re still getting the same spam, only now it’s coming from a different From address.

6. Having to sign up or register for every other website on the internet. When will they create one master login for everything? Google’s going in the right direction.

5. RIAA and MPAA. I’m tired of every other news article being about who they’re sueing, or how much money they’re losing now. Either get new techniques, or give up already. P2P will never die.

4. As a web developer myself, I can’t stand websites that break standards. If I view some site in Firefox on Ubuntu, it better look identical to IE on Windows (unless of course it’s IE that breaks the standards, ugh).

3. Broken links. Don’t you just hate it when you FINALLY find that perfect resource, and the links broken? Then on top of that, there’s no old cache of it? It’s just plain gone. Makes your heart sink, doesn’t it?

2. Slow loading websites. Like I mean sites that feel as if they were hosted on someone’s old 486, connected via their residential 56k dial-up. If you run a website, spend a few dollars and buy decent hosting.

1. Community-based websites that completely sell out. For example, MySpace has more advertisements crammed into every page than I would have previously thought possible.

read more | digg story

Instantly a clip from the Family Guy will appear and start playing.

It was probably made by some developer who thought no one would ever see it but him and his friends… yeah he just got fired, haha.

digg story

Also, here is a link with more information about MIRTs and how to build your own for $20 (which I don’t condone of course).

read more | digg story

read more | digg story