Breakfast Topic: How do relationships in game affect relationships in real life?
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Most of the time, relationships in and out of World of Warcraft are completely separate. There are people I know in the game and people I know out of it. With the number of available realms, even the people I know in real life who play WoW are on different realms. This contributes to keeping in-game and out-of-game politics separate. But what happens when these two parts of your life come together?
At the end of Wrath, most people I knew played on different realms than me. I always wanted to play more with my friends, and we decided to do something about it. For Cataclysm, a large group of us transferred to a single realm so we could play together. We formed a guild, and suddenly my roommate was also my guild leader. In fact, that meant four major raid and guild members lived under the same roof. If any drama were to unfold in guild, surely it would spill over into my house. What if someone I liked in real life was terrible in WoW?
Unfortunately, that guild started to fall apart on me. As I thought about leaving the guild, I wondered what it would do to my relationships out of the game. Would there be hard feelings? From my experience, guild drama definitely did spill over in real life, although no friendships were hurt. In the end, I did feel it best to leave the guild, and everybody understood. I was lucky.
Do you play with people you know outside of the game? Has drama in WoW ever become drama in real life? What do you do to separate the two?
