I feel faint...

A time will come, Steve, where we realize that the world around you is not what it seems to be and that the World of Warcraft is the place to be.

As someone said, you will all be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Heh, I would play WoW, with one small problem: I'm unemployed. Call me stupid, but I can't justify spending money on a "game" on a monthly basis if I'm not going to be earning money to replace my entertainment spending. Besides, it lets me focus on my homework.

As for the rest of ya, don't lose your soul to the beast!

Going back to entertainment/cost, what is everyone's /played? Mine is 3 days and 2 hours. Started playing last Saturday, so yeah I'm getting my money's worth.

Planned event for about a week now. Wanted to do some nice big PvP battles. Let me get these screenshots up ...

Do you really have any doubts about that?

I don't feel like uploading everything, so just click the naked Orc for a decent shot outside the tower.

http://members.gamedev.net/23yrold3yrold/WOWpics/KOTHnakedporcthumb.png

A friend just told me that he wanted to pick the flowers on his way to the ATC

And I spent 3hours fishing, with a meager outcome of 3gold

It wouldn't surprise me if there's a whole industry of Chinese WoW farmers. I can just see it, hordes of young children taken from their homes and forced into poverty stricken factories where they are put to the most mind numbing work imaginable: playing WoW 24/7. Come to think of it they'd probably also only have the bare minimum of computers. No sound, 10" CRT and uncomfortable chairs. poor kids

hey.. that's not a bad idea... set up a bunch of WoW farms in China! I'll strike it rich!!!!

It's called a "service". People selling stuff like this on ebay save you the time to find that item yourself. While gold is a pretty simple item to be traded (since you can acquire it in a couple of ways) finding a very specific item will require a lot of time - if you ever find it.

It's like paying somebody to do something for you. Like asking somebody to observe your children. You can do it yourself but maybe you'd like to spend your time doing something else?

Um yeah.
But that's like saying you go to an ATC and click the "Gimme 50bucks" button. While it works like this, it's not really that easy.

You have to invest time to get the items. Say you want to create a special magic item. That item might require Wool, lether, Magic Dust and a couple of other ingredients. While you might get the base materials for wool, you cannot make it into usable wool unless you're tailor. If you're not a leatherer, you won't get any leather. Unless you you're skilled leatherer you won't get heavy leather.
Unless you're an entchanter you can't disentchant items into magical components (which destroys the original item BTW, so it's a pretty costly process) and even then you'll first need to find that magic item.

In other words: Even if you invest a lot of your time harvesting for items, you might not even be able to get the base materials.
And if you have the materials you'll have to find somebody to create the final product - and he'll normally charge you for that, so you'll have to invest time making money.
And while the items might not be real, the time invested is real. And as we all know, time is money.

EDIT: it's kinda like buying software. All you need to create software is other software, skill and time. And yet some people actually buy software.

't Is called role-playing.