"What's your played time?"

picture unrelated

Played time is a common comparison that World of Warcraft players often like to make. Some view it as a positive thing, a way to show how much time and dedication they've put into the game, while others seem to be embarrassed of their played time.

Threads pop up now and again, where invariably someone will say they are embarrassed of their 125 days and someone will respond to that person letting them know they have 300 days, someone nonchalantly says they've been playing for 800 days, so on and so forth. Some people seem to pretend to be embarrassed while others brag about played time that seems rather low.

Personally? As of this post I have 664 reported days, 133 days on my original main and 361 days on my current main.

I have countless deleted alts, though the difference can't be that high

Courtesy of Altoholic

I don't often bring up my played time. I don't respond to played time threads. If you ask me, I'll tell you, and when it's relevant I'll talk about it, but all my played time means to me is that World of Warcraft is a seriously awesome game.

I play video games all the time - I've been playing them since I was old enough to understand the concept of them. I don't need over 600 days of played time in a single game to brag about some kind of imaginary prowess. The time I've spent not playing WoW has been primarily time spent playing other video games, I just don't have an actual record of that time.

My played time to me is just a single portion of an overarching theme. I've played video games my entire life, but never has a video game been so great that I've spent nearly two full years of actual real time on it.

I am totes afk right now

Granted, a large portion of that time is easily time spent afk, time on flight paths, time waiting for raids to start, time walking in circles around main cities on our mounts and time spent using WoW as an expensive instant messenger. We all know that, but even if we were to grossly overestimate and attribute an entire half of the total to time spent not actually playing, we're still left with 332 entire days worth of actively playing. 

If played time counters existed for Starcraft and Warcraft 3, I'm sure I'd have months worth of time in them. Various Pokemon games have claimed plenty of days of my life, along with games like Harvest Moon, and Animal Crossing. A few games I've played where I have an actual played time counter for them pale in comparison to my WoW play time.

16.2 days, 5.4 days, 5.25 days, though Civ5 has unrecorded playtime

A video game at the absolute pinnacle of gameplay and entertainment will provide a few days of gameplay, while your typical above average games may provide 40-50 hours. Skyrim providing 16 days worth of playability is astounding for its price.

A large volume of video games released these days have much less than that, 10-20 hours maybe, with artificially created "replayability" implemented through multiplayer and online modes.You'll still pay 40-60 dollars for a game that you might play for a few days, and everyone seems to be totally okay with that.

World of Warcraft is relatively cheap. You pay $15 a month for a subscription, but if you play even just 10 hours that month, you've already had a much better deal than purchasing another video game. It's typical for someone who plays video games as a main hobby to buy at least a game a month - granted, I pay for my subscription and typically also buy other games, but there have been countless times where I've opted not to spend 40 dollars on a game since I could just play World of Warcraft.

it really helps me avoid not having any money ever

It takes a pretty distorted perception on video games for someone with 300 days of played time to proclaim that WoW is a bad game. Someone who has played for six years or someone who has played for even just one year claiming that a game that provided that much entertainment is bad has a warped view on the cost and playability of the majority of video games. Just because you got bored of a game after playing it for hundreds of days doesn't mean it's bad.

Even compared to other MMOs, a lot of people tend to play a new MMO for a few months if that. If your played time is even 50 days, that's 1200 hours - that is over twenty times the amount of hours your average high quality game will net you.