Pause Button

You know, I just had a light bulb moment that illustrates one of the dislikable things in WoW that makes me question my long-term involvement with the game.

There's no Pause Button.

In the past, when playing video games, there was always a pause button.

Playing NHL 94 and cooking brownies and the timer goes off. Pause the game and take it out of the oven.

Playing Tetris and you hear mom coming down the stairs to your room. Pause the game, turn off the TV and hop over to your desk and pretend you're doing homework.

Playing Age of Kings and the baby wakes up from a nap. Pause the game and leave it for later.

But WoW has no pause button.

So what happens when something comes up in RL?

Lets say you're defending Ice Blood Tower and your gf says she's going to head out to pick up some food.

What do you do?

Well, if the Capping timer shows that there's still 2 minutes till the cap, and track humanoids shows there's no horde nearby, you avert your attention, give your loved one a proper goodbye and maybe, i dunno, listen to any questions she has and give her attentful answers. And then return to your game, drooling over the juicy steak and cheese sub, with sausage crumbled on top, and special sauce beautiful woman that's going to be arriving shortly.

But if there's 30 seconds till the cap, and you see 3 horde entering the tower on your minimap. Well that's a whole nuther ball of wax. In this case, its like nothing else exists and the sole focus is keeping those buggers off the flag for just a few moments more. This has a tendency to leave the loved ones feeling not-so-loved.

And I won't even go near a boss fight in a raid. Especially a progression fight. The house could be on fire, and we'll all be sitting there, spamming our 1:1 shot rotation macro, oblivious to those around us.

If this were a normal game, one that's fit for long-term human consumption, there would be a pause button.

Granted, given the fact that there's 80 people in the battleground, 60 of whom are actually sitting at their keyboard and trying to play, or 10 to 25 people in the raid, implementing any sort of pause functionality would be ludicrous.

But that doesn't change the fact that a video game without a pause button has an inherent incompatibility with real life.