World of Warcraft addiction is a real thing. Here’s a video of a kid who goes absolutely insane when his parents turn off his account, and unfortunately this isn’t an unusual reaction.
Blizzard just wants their money, and they would rather provide tools to parents to make them happy rather than lose your business. They get paid the same if your kid only plays one hour a month or 500 hours a month.
Blizzard has implemented a great granular Parental Controls tools for all of their online games such as World of Warcraft and Diablo 3, and you can enforce restrictions even when you aren’t at home.
Once you sign up and enforce Parental Controls on an account, you can use the Battle.net site to allow different access times depending on the time of day, and the access levels are inheritable. You can limit daily access to 2 hours per day AND only allow access between certain hours. You can also limit how many hours they can play per week. This applies to the account, and not the individual games, so if your teenager plays WoW, Starcraft and Diablo 3 then the hours add up no matter which game they’re playing.
Unfortunately you have to go in and change this when your kids are out of school or have an extended holiday. If you have a latchkey kid then you can change access time, or even completely deny access without having to be home.
