Irvine (CA) – World of Warcraft players now have some extra tools to help them put down their virtual crack pipes.  Yesterday, an update to WoW added time displays and alarms that warn players when they have exceeded their allotted playing time.  Unfortunately, or fortunately for truly addicted players, the alarms have no real consequences because they are a simple ‘DING’ sound and some optional text.

Players now have a constant display of the server time in the upper right corner of their screen (just below the minimap).  Traditionally, players had to hover their cursors over the day/night icon to get the correct time.  Right-clicking on the day/night icon will bring up alarm options which allows players to set an alarm time and text to be displayed like “PUT DOWN THE CRACK PIPE NOW”.

A countdown timer can also be set by typing in /stopwatch or /sw followed by the time.  For example, to be alerted in an hour and thirty minutes you would type /sw 1:30:0.

The author of this article has a 70 Night Elf warrior, the fearsome Ganden on Medivh, and has played World of Warcraft way too much.  Perhaps the next step would be an alarm with some teeth – perhaps a forcible reboot and an account lock until the next day?  Or better yet, a constant display of your total time played (you can get this by typing in /played) in bold letters in the middle of the screen.

The 27 megabyte patch 2.4.3 was automatically pushed to all players on Tuesday.

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