I've got two very good friends who started playing WoW about three years ago, pre-BC (Burning Crusade expansion for those who don't know). Over the past couple of years, I'd watch them play at their respective homes, sometimes for hours. But I never played myself.
Then the time came when I knew more about how to run Karazhan (one of the first major 10-man raids) than some of the people who actually played, and at that point I decided to either stop paying attention or get an account of my own. My wife and I often work different schedules (I work shift work), and quite often I'm at home during the day or late at night with nothing to do, so I did, about four months ago. I know a lot of people who started playing this way, watching friends play first, then playing on their own after growing interest.
I've now got a level 70 Affliction Warlock on Blackrock and I'm starting to run Karazhan for tiered gear and then maybe run Gruuls. I doubt I'll get the chance to run SSC or Hyjal or Black Temple much before the WOTLK expansion comes out, at which point all the major raiding will be done in Northrend I'd imagine. It's nice that they've dropped most of the BC instance attunements and reduced boss HP though, it will definitely make my immediate goals more attainable.
WoW is a hobby really, both like and unlike many others. It's not like a traditional RPG like Final Fantasy in a lot of ways. You can let it control your life and you can arrange your schedule around it, or you don't. It's like anything. I don't think there's a difference between playing WoW 2-3 hours a night and going out to the garage and working on a hotrod or playing on a team sport several days a week. But I don't let it run me. If I don't have time to raid, I tell people, I won't waste their time and screw them by leaving in the middle of a run having to look for someone else to replace me.
I do think there are a lot of people who spend too many hours playing WoW, often to the detriment of their real lives, and I also think that some people who play WoW put more importance on what happens in-game than in RL. WoW accomplishments are nice, but ultimately unimportant. You won't care about your epic journey through Mag's Lair when you're 75 or the T5 shield you picked up last Sunday, I can guarantee you that much.
But it's fun, easily the best MMORPG on the market. It has it's flaws, but it's so in-depth and ever changing, so vast, always something more to do.
i play WoW... i probably play a few hours a week. i don't raid or pvp... i mostly run through the content with my wife.
like others, WoW eats into my TV time... hey instead of watching some random sci-fi movie, i can play WoW.
I hardly watch "live" TV anymore, other than the news. Any TV shows I watch I record and watch at my leisure, and even then there are only a handful of shows I watch on a regular basis. So many choices out there, but so much of it is either crap or just another cop show or CSI rip-off. I watch movies when something new is out that I like, which happens about every month or so. But yeah, a year or two ago if had free time it was "what's on the tube", now it's "I should farm netherweave for an hour to work on my tailoring skill". But I don't think that's exclusive to WoW, younger people in general watch a lot less TV and spend a lot more time online doing various things than they have before. And WoW is a kind of social network too, you meet people, talk to them, spend hours playing with them. Some of them are certainly more "real friends" than those who people have never met or spoken to before that have been added to a Facebook list to get a friends list count over 600 or some damn thing; I'd argue that is an even bigger waste of time.
