One of the most striking features about WoW from a non-gamer’s perspective is the amount of repetition involved. I have no statistics at hand on how many enemies the average player must vanquish to reach the maximum level or items they must collect or craft, but the number of processes they complete to earn that level are seemingly incredible.

Killing enemies is one of your chief tasks, and to accomplish this you have a variety of abilities and attacks you can use. Via trial and error, players will determine the most successful combination of abilities and attacks to defeat most enemies. The number of enemies a player kills to gain subsequent levels rises exponentially (though there are other ways to earn experience, this rule holds true) with each level attained. Combine that with the progressing difficulty of enemies: immunities to certain attacks and abilities, behavioral variation, and unexpected environmental factors. Further consider that the abilities earned by a character vary in their potency and effect as more levels are gained and the player’s ability to learn on the game’s difficulty curve. In total you have a tremendous amount of repetitive trial and error.

When players enter raid content, the trial and error becomes even more intense. Enemies encountered here are much more difficult to defeat and often have very specialized abilities and gimmicks. Raids also often involve discrete static environments outside the regular world that can be time consuming to get to. If every member of a raid dies within a raid instance the general process is: players run from the graveyard to the entrance of the instance, wait for all players to assemble there in case more enemies have spawned between the entrance and their corpses, travel within the instance to where they were defeated, resurrect or teleport anyone who is not present, reapply all beneficial spells that do not persist through death, discuss what went wrong and modify the strategy of attack and coordination of up to 40 people, then reattempt what killed the group to begin with. There are many inflammatory factors which will add to the delay and time, such as players leaving their computers, returning to town to repair their armor, returning to their banks to retrieve a forgotten item, and being attacked by rival faction players while en route to any of those tasks. Some of the pre-expansion end game raid content required players to have an incredible ammount of focus and the mistake of single missed or accidental button push could cause the entire raid's death. For example, a player attacking a mob of enemies before the guild was ready or the primary healer missing a heal on the main tank. Both are easy mistakes to make, either can waste 20-30 minutes of everyone's time.

Aside from killing enemies you have to repeat many tasks to thrive successfully in game, such as making money, repairing armor, traveling to and from destinations, just to name a few. At lower levels these tasks are simpler and there are fewer things to interfere with a player’s completion of them. It is not uncommon for players to have alternate characters on their account which they do not strive to level quickly. My understanding of this practice from other players mirrors my own experience. The early game is more fun because it is less challenging, but offers the enjoyment of completing the same tasks that can become tedious later in the game.

Prior to the release of Burning Crusade, a large amount of the average player's time (once they reached the maximum level) was spent grinding out reputation with various factions. The benefit was access to new raid instances, quests, better gear and rare crafting recipes. The amount of reputation your character has with a specific faction is measured via tiers. Each tier requires a certain number of reputation points to attain, and once at a given tier your access to the incentives increases. At the beginning of this process, a player will accrue points quickly by performing given tasks, and as they progress through the reputation spectrum these easy tasks award less points. Eventually easy tasks are replaced with ones that are increasingly more difficult and worth fewer points, until ultimately you're earning very few points for very complex and time intensive tasks. Obviously, since incentives are linked to which tiers you have attained, and the space and duration between tiers increases, it takes a serious mental commitment to complete this aspect of the game.

So what’s my point with identifying all this repetition? I would posit that to achieve a high level within the game, a player has to either be able to ignore the constant repetition, be distracted from it, or be soothed by it but must be able to commit time to it. If you examine the playing habits of very advanced and committed players, it'’s hard not to use the words"obsessed" or "compulsive". As an aside, I would like to implicitly state that I am not offering the conclusion that OCD is correlated with a commitment to an MMORPG, however it is difficult not to consider this worthy of further exploration.

<--Quitting

Depth--> of Detail