Hardly any MMORPG has been played as extensively as World of Warcraft. The playtime is longer than human history – much longer.
That MMORPGs are time sinks and that World of Warcraft is no exception is old news. But how much time does the game actually consume? How many tens of thousands of hours have players spent in Azeroth? A question that one wouldn’t expect an answer to – but Blizzard has now answered it.
What happened? The account “Überfacts” regularly posts various facts on Twitter that can easily be stored as “useless knowledge.” Good for having a conversation topic at parties, but not important enough to remember an hour later. The channel explained:
People have played a total of over 6 million years of World of Warcraft.
The official account of World of Warcraft apparently couldn’t let that slip and stated:
It’s now much closer to 9 million.
Converted to a smaller unit, that would be a duration of 78,840,000,000 hours. One doesn’t even want to imagine it.
This is how the community reacts: Although such numbers are certainly reached by other games as well, it is interesting to visualize just how much time that is. In the World of Warcraft subreddit, players have done some calculations and simply looked at what “9.000.000 years” would mean in relation to all of humanity.
This led the user AktionMusic to conclude that an average person on Earth would have had to play around 10 hours of World of Warcraft.
Others point out that it surely cannot be that after 9,000,000 years of playtime one is still “the one” who hasn’t obtained Invincible from the Lich King.
The number naturally raises some other instinctive questions. Many would like to know how many years of that time were accrued by bots or how many years players spent just riding in Ironforge, Shattrath, Dalaran, or Oribos in circles. But those are likely questions for which there will be no answer anytime soon.
One should probably never make the mistake and think about what one could have achieved if one had dedicated those 9 million hours to productive things…
How many days or years have you contributed to the millions? Just type “/played” on your main character and let us know.
