[granos]

I wouldn't say that playing WoW costs your dearly or is detrimental or toxic to people. I will say that all of the people I've known who played games to their own detriment or in a way that was toxic to their lives were playing WoW. It is attractive to people who want to escape from their problems and not solve them. Because of this, it has somehow come to be seen as a cause of that escapism. It definitely becomes part of a vicious circle -- I play too much WoW because I'm stressed -- I'm not more stressed because I play too much WoW -- but that's the fault of the player, not the game.

[ordu]

All you have seen is correlation. Maybe it is a correlation, because I bet you didn't tried to gather data properly. Assuming that this is a correlation, it might be, for example, that people who for a some reasons cannot cope with their problems tend to escape from them to WoW, and if there were no WoW, they'd do it some other way.

I know it myself. I can run away from my problems by thousands of ways. Cut them all off, and I'll find two thousands more. I can play video games, read books, code some useless programs, engineer some useless devices, surf internet for interesting news, participate in flamewars, write this message, or at the last resort I can just sleep for 20 hrs per a day. If I cannot cope with my problems, then I cannot. My actual behaviour is just a simptom, not the cause of my inability.

It is just anecdotal evidence, for other people it can be the other way around, and maybe for them WoW is the cause of their inability to cope with their problems. What I want to say: don't make conclusions about causation on correlational observations.

[pdimitar]

Partially true but in my experience if you are cut off of WoW you will not find another way to procrastinate immediately. That's why there were studies that kids and teenagers being cut off from smartphones/tablets have found themselves more mentally healthy. You can search for those, they are out there.

So while I agree in principle -- that the inability to address one's problems is not fixed overnight -- it's also true that removing the distractions you crave the most can and will push you to healthier habits even in the short term.