3 Steps To Lead Your Lover From WoW [video games]

Yahoo recently published a list of “Seven Ways To Win Back Your Gaming Spouse.” I’ve seen lists like these before for the same purported purpose. With suggestions like “fake a power outage,” I can only conclude that someone thinks the very act of writing this list of suggestions is such a hoot that they really don’t need to bother thinking about the content too much. As with this list, many of these end with “If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em.”

Nothing wrong with that, but it got me thinking: if I wanted to unplug someone from WoW, what would it really take? Knowing that my own efforts to unplug myself have met with mixed success arguably gives me both insight into this problem and also no real room to talk. Nonetheless:

The one thing that Yahoo and others get right is that WoW encourages such persistent play because it keeps people going for hours with incremental rewards. For example, one high-level quest (“Smooth As Butter“) tells you to kill buzzards to collect 12 Plump Buzzard Wings. If you collect 12, you will be rewarded with some amount of money and an item. First, you have to find buzzards and kill them for their meat, but only about 15% of the buzzards you kill will drop Plump Buzzard Wings. So, you have to kill far more than 12 buzzards.

Because the game distributes its reward (or its surrogate) using probability, WoW uses a reward schedule that mirrors a “variable-interval” schedule, the schedule shown in rats and people to result in the highest level of persistence of any operant conditioning reward schedule. The underlying reason is that the rat or gamer who is rewarded some percentage of the time doesn’t know precisely how long it will take to get to the next reward (food pellet or buzzard wing) so it keeps responding (pressing the lever or killing buzzards) in anticipation of the next reward, which could come at any time. With other reward schedules, such as a fixed ratio, the reward signals that it will be a while before the next one, so rats/gamers would know to take a rest before gearing up for the next push.

Understanding how this reward structure works is critical to understanding how to break someone away from WoW. If you pick a moment when they’re on buzzard 11 of 12, good luck. Best to wait if you can catch them when they are “turning in” a quest — ideally just afterwards, then you may have a reasonable shot of getting them before they get caught up in the next cycle of reward collection. Starting a new quest is probably when the reward system is at its lowest ebb.

Method #1 might help you to pry your gamer away from WoW for a meal, sexual encounter, or other activity, but if you want to start chipping away at the strangle-hold that the game holds entirely, you may be able to do so and also look like you’re trying to be supportive of their gaming. I have to admit, I’m a bit proud of this one.

As discussed in #1, the entire premise of this game is that small rewards keep you involved. The quest I mentioned above is a level 60 quest that takes up to an hour and still only gives you 2 gold. In order to short-circuit the hold that the incremental reward system has over your gamer, you can give them a large gift of WoW gold. It’s available for purchase with real American dollars, and the last I checked the going rate — which varies by server — can be purchased for as little at $5 for 1000 WoW gold.

If you’re going to try this approach, make sure you give them a TON of WoW gold because the idea is to make them so WoW-wealthy that picking up pennies (i.e. doing quests like the one I just discussed) becomes a pointless exercise. Because you can buy virtually any item in the game with gold, a truly wealthy WoW gamer will enjoy spending at first but may quickly run out of pleasure in a virtual world where there is little left that feels profitable/rewarding. In psych terms, you’re feeding the subject animal so much that the little pellets are almost sickening to look at given how bloated the poor creature is with cream.

I won’t lie: tactic #2 is a bit of a gamble. You can expect a brief spike in gaming if the tactic works, followed by the expectation of a crash in interest. If that crash in interest doesn’t happen, then chances are that your gamer really enjoys the possession of virtual wealth rather than it’s acquisition. They like marching around in their finery and showing off their cool as shit to other gamers who don’t have as much as they do. I have to say, if this is your gamer, you might consider breaking up with them. But don’t do that until after you’ve tried this suggestion, because I think you’ll enjoy it regardless of the outcome.

If the gaming pleasure comes not from acquiring but from having, you need to divest their character of all of its wealth. You need to log into their WoW account (open the game). You will be prompted for a password. If you don’t know it, install a free shareware keystroke recorder program on the computer and specify that it record all keystrokes typed in the World of Warcraft program. Once you have access, log in as each character and give all items and gold away. How do you do that? If you know how to play, you don’t need me to tell you. And if you don’t, I probably can’t do so succinctly, so visit a website that instructs you on basic game-play (e.g. howstuffworks beginner guide). Some critical suggestions to make this work:

• Visit the “Bank” in a major faction city and take every item out.
• Move all items in all backpacks to the mainplay menu — the game will prompt you “Are you sure you want to Destroy [item]?” — Click “Yes”
• Give a passing player all your gold using the “Trade” feature (left click another character, hold right click their picture at the top of the screen, select “trade” and then write in the number of the amount in your backpack). If they ask you “why would you give me this?!” you can respond “I’m quitting the game.” Most players, trapped zombie-like in the WoW reward churn will totally understand and accept this answer.

If that seems like too much work, you can simply post their username and password on any WoW forum and someone will do your dirty-work for you, though perhaps less thoroughly. WoW accounts are often hacked, so there is an outside chance that their account may be restored by Blizzard upon petition. This suggestion, in combination with #2, should be a solid one-two punch to take the pleasure out of WoW. The idea of going BACK and collecting pennies to recoup one’s losses after not only spending forever piling up all that wealth in the first place but then also losing your newfound riches on top of that…well, that should be a crushingly huge disincentive for anyone who enjoyed strutting around in virtual frippery.

Because the idea of someone doing this to me brings tears to my eyes, I cannot honestly — in good conscience — recommend that anyone actually take these steps. If this post is “about” anything, it’s about how far you would have to go to shake me or someone like me off of WoW. No, please, please, please don’t even think about it.