Guest Post! Balance between RL and WOW
So today I bring you something new for Keine Ordnung – and something that I hope will happen periodically over the life of this blog. A guest post! This time, from a very good friend (who signs himself Opaladin in comments) who doesn’t have a blog of his own. He’s the one responsible for the name of this place though, and apparently was compelled by my ramblings to tell his own story about Warcraft and balance. It’s a pretty interesting read! And so, here’s Zelig/Opalatheta/etc, on the subject of Warcraft and Real Life.
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I found myself starting to play WoW in the fall of 2005. 
I moved back to Germany in late 2004 after 9 months of looking for employment – I ended up as a contractor working for the Air Force. Prior to leaving for Germany I knew that it (Germany) wasn’t where I wanted to go with my life (I had been stationed there while I was on Active Duty) – I was going on 30 and felt the need to put down some roots. I love Germany; I just knew it wasn’t where I wanted to go – it wouldn’t be permanent. And so, after hearing all the guys that I worked with talk about WoW, I bought a copy. Around the same time, I started cycling / mountain bike racing, but knew that I wouldn’t get much riding in during the winter – I needed something to keep me entertained.
Forgive me if I dig into ancient history here, but I started playing this game the summer before my senior year in college. And, for awhile, I did really well with balance. It was summer, I had my jobs but not much else. So I played Angoleth a fair amount, RP’d a fair amount, and generally had a good time. This was before I had a guild, any alts, or classwork to do. That following fall I think was the hardest classwork I had the entire time I was in college, and WoW… didn’t help. I did a pretty fair job of managing things, partially because I was very excited about what I was learning and partially because Angoleth was level 30ish and I didn’t have the all consuming end game to fight through. I managed well enough that I basically took the spring semester out of the game, because of my research thesis and planning my wedding to Dauganimir (his paladin’s name, and an easy way to refer to him). And that’s when things got bad. That summer, I went jobless, thanks to the sucky economy and my not having a permanent place to live, and so I did a lot more gaming than usual. Started raiding Molten Core and BWL. Rolled 4 or 5 alts (a few of whom are still with me) and leveled the priest to 60. And when that last semester started, things got rough.
