Yeah, I said it. The most popular MMORPG out there is a stinking pile of fetid horse-droppings. It sucks so hard that I sold my vacuum-cleaner and used WoW to clean my floor instead. I am of course referring to that much-loved 'net game known in full as World of Warcraft.

Now, I'm sure you've all heard the horror-stories - like the one about the kid who played the third expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King non-stop for several days without pause until he passed out. Frankly, I can't see what the attraction is. And before you say anything - YES, I have played it. Many times. Very rarely did the game make me feel as though I'd accomplished something: the only thing it really gave me was a sense of being part of something extremely huge and detailed, at the cost of becoming even more bored and frustrated due to how frikkin' repetitive the game is - not to mention how much waiting you have to do if you want to do anything with other people. The perpetrators of this monstrosity, Blizzard, laud the multiplayer aspect of the game to the skies, as do all the people who use it, but, call me unreasonable if you like, if it takes an entire night to organise and carry out a decent-sized raid, I think there might be something wrong. Remember that this is a game, not Second Life. At least the people there, by accepting to sell their souls to SL, are acknowledging that their First Life is perhaps somewhat substandard.

And let's say that you decide to go it on your own in WoW, like I often did, and thus avoid all the tedious waiting (not to mention the arguing - is it just me or is almost the entirety of WoW populated by asshats?). This will entail one of two things: questing or grinding. Questing is pretty self-explanatory, but for those not in the know, 'grinding' is the repetitive killing of monsters to earn experience and thereby gain levels - an extraordinarily tedious process, you may be rest assured. Questing is almost as bad, but not quite. I don't need to explain the plot of any one quest as an example, because they all follow this exact formula:

1. Receive quest from quest-giver (those people with the ridiculous yellow exclamation-marks floating above their heads, in other words).
2. Go kill monster(s), using the same bloody moves over and over again to kill them.
3. (Optional step.) Die because your computer keeps freezing at vital moments. (Or you just suck.)
4. Retrieve item(s) from monster(s) dead carcass(es).
5. Go back to quest-giver ('You've traded it in for a question-mark, I see!') to receive reward.
6. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It's the mind-numbing inevitability of it all that gets me down. At first I admired WoW for the sheer depth and scale of its mythos and the stories about its various races, but the gameplay mechanics are sooo bloody repetitive that it palls for me within the hour I start playing.

I thought the whole point of being addicted to something was that it allowed you to escape from reality. However, it turns out that WoW is depressingly like real life: the same bloody thing over and over and over and over and over and (ad nauseam).