Babylon's Burning

When I first started playing World of Warcraft seven and a half years ago, my life was very different. I was thrust into parenthood not once but twice, I had two children both aged under 2 years old, and still I decided to play one of the most absorbing computer games known to man.

Back in those days I would work, look after the children and play WoW until bedtime. It had a lovely work/life balance to it. Whilst the children were sleeping upstairs, both parents were killing internet dragons in the room next door. My game time was maybe as high as 5 or 6 hours a day, but it didn't really matter I was able to spend time with my family at various stages of the day without neglecting the children or my wife, we even got to spend quality time with our close friends, via Ventrilo, Mumble or Skype.

Moving onto 2012, I now play alone, and I am only officially allowed to sit down and concentrate on WoW when the children are safely tucked up in bed. These days that time is squeezed by my children wanting to stay up longer and longer, it is not really a surprise that they no longer need 11 or 12 hours sleep each night. The longer they stay up, the less time I play, with the exception of a few minutes that I am able to grasp whilst they are having a bath or doing things in their bedroom. This means that at most I have 4 hours play 5 times a week, with 2 days off to watch TV with my nearest and dearest.

The result of this is that I have two different type of sessions, one for quick easy tasks that can be dropped immediately and longer more in depth passages of play. The short easy tasks, involve Auction House activities, crafting, profession research and dailies. The longer sessions are for levelling, scenarios, LFD, LFR and PvP.

Dailies are by far the largest part of these relaxed shorter sessions, in particular I am tending 10 farms but only actively on the 3 level 90's. The longer sessions are devoted entirely to levelling and as much as I want to try other things I am always drawn back by the desire to have a full compliment of max level characters.

This is the rut that I now find myself in, and I am unable to go off and explore new avenues of play. We all find routine in our everyday lives and WoW is no different. This is the biggest reason that we need to have a summer holiday, just to break up the routine and be spontaneous and do something different for one or two weeks a year.

This style of play was first established during the Cataclysm expansion, and with the harder style heroics and the loss of my wife and friends to the game, I took solace in the levelling game, and later started doing PvP.

I am in a rut and want to get out but I seem unable to change my playstyle. This week I promise that I will sample some of the other fruits on offer. I will miss an entire day of dailies and concentrate on another aspect. As yet I am undecided what to do , but I will wait for the weekly reset before I take the plunge, small steps on the road to recovery.

I was wondering if the levelling process is too long, too short or just right? My rough calculations are as follows:

• 8 Hours per level.
• 5 levels.
• 40 hours from 85 to 90.

Obviously you can argue the toss, but I think these are reasonable timings. The only problem for me is that I am only able to devote 20 Hours each week to the game and that would take 2 weeks for each character to get to max level. I still have 7 characters at level 85, so that is 14 weeks, depending on me concentrating solely on this one task.

Now does that seem too long or should this process need shortening? I am not looking forward to repeating the same content until some time in March 2013. I think I might be in a coma by then.