Many World of Warcraft players complain that they find that their life suffers when they play the game. This is largely because they have failed to make a proper balance between their lives and the game - which can be harder than you might think. People who join raiding guilds basically have to devote a very large block of their free time to the game, blocking out other opportunities in their life. This creates a lot of churn and burn out for guilds, and limits their membership generally to people with a fair amount of leisure time.

Some guilds take time off after making significant progression, but most continue on a hard slog of regular play, generally amounting to about 20 hours a week of raiding alone. Most progression guilds have a stringent requirement of about 90% or higher raid attendance to maintain a slot, and with good reason - the guild needs to protect their investment in gearing up each of their characters, ensuring that their time hasn't been wasted in gearing someone up that will just end up leaving after a short period of time.

It is entirely possible to play the game on a casual basis of only a few hours a week, but it's also easy to fall into an absurdly time consuming habit. Of course, many people spend as much time watching television every week as hardcore WoW players do raiding, but it isn't quite the same commitment that raiding is. Any raider will have had to cancel many impromptu social engagements in order to ensure that they make a raid time, making it harder for them to maintain spontaneous lives as even their free time becomes regimented and highly scheduled.