World of Warcraft isn’t addictive because it’s mind-numbing or stupid, although – don’t get me wrong – it has the potential to be both of those things. When I played about a year and a half ago, I was in a pretty sour emotional place and eschewed plenty of awesome real-life activities – beer! boys! THE SPRINGTIME! – to prowl Azeroth. My name was Evina and I was an undead Warlock. I bought a headset to chat with my guildmates over a Teamspeak server. I literally giggled when they found out I was a girl. Could you please make me a shame cocktail? This is really rough. I picked up the game again this summer, and now that I’m not playing to get back at a bad boyfriend (please don’t ask me about this logic), I realize that while Warcraft is expansive and immersive and completely engrossing, that’s not really why it’s addictive for most people over the age of 18. Despite the game’s young demographic, there really are a lot of us grown folks wading through the Chuck Norris jokes on the game’s General Chat.

While there are certainly poopsock addled WoW vets out there, they’re in the distinct minority. The game is mainly comprised of teenagers – hence the influx of players on servers in the mid-afternoon – and 20-or-30-somethings who still love videogames. Warcraft serves the latter purpose pretty nicely, in spite of the unwashed Cheez Doodle stigma; this time around, I’m discovering that the game is actually deserving of an incredible amount of active thought (even while you’re waiting for your Progress bars to finish), and most 20+ gamers tend to look for both interactivity and customizability in their gaming. The game’s truly addictive properties come from its incredible versatility; there really are dozens of ways to play it.

A quick stopover for the blissfully (or willfully) ignorant: World of Warcraft features ten races, nine classes, and two factions. The factions and races should be awfully familiar to previous players of the Warcraft series: you’ve got your “good guys” (the humans, dwarves, night elves, gnomes, and Draenei of the Alliance), and you’ve got your “bad guys” (the orcs, trolls, Tauren, undead, and Blood Elves of the Horde). What separates World of Warcraft from previous Blizzard efforts is that this time, every unit on the field is a Hero, with the distinct ability to reach greatness. Like most MMOs, progress is the point. Where the peons and footsoldiers in Warcraft 3 are expendable, in World of Warcraft that’s how you start out, a nobody killing stray wolves and boars for low-level Captains and Sergeants. The way you approach these tasks differs drastically depending on which class you choose to play as, so with nine separate classes, there’s nine ways to play the game.

The versatility of the game doesn’t really stop at that nine, though. Starting at level 10, each class begins to earn “talent points,” which allow a player to attain a new level of customizability by developing their “talents,” class-specific abilities or aspects. Ostensibly, the talent tree was introduced to allow everyone to approach the class of their choice in a different way, focusing on different moves and abilities and encouraging different approaches to gameplay. Each class features three talent “trees,” each with a different focus. Aggressive players of warlocks, for example, may choose to “spec,” or specialize, along the Destruction talent tree, which allows the caster to cause what’s known as “burst damage” – high levels of quick damage that in this case, quite literally set the opponent on fire. It’s fun, it’s fast, and it’s fucking terrifying to be on the receiving end. Destruction’s tricky, though; deal too much damage too quickly, or on too many disparate targets, and you’re out of mana with few abilities that allow you to escape. These weaknesses mean that the class actually tends to attract careful, meticulous players, who spec Affliction, allowing them incredible mana efficiency, powerful Damage over Time (DoT) spells, and strength against multiple targets without causing too much “threat” (the built-in AI that makes the computer monsters target a player).

So nine classes, each of which can be split three ways – that’s 27 ways to play the game, without considering the fact that you don’t have to stick to any one talent tree – while my Warrior is traveling mainly down the Arms tree, which allows for burst damage and high armor ranking, the skills she’s taken from the Protection and Fury trees (pretty self-explanatory, I think) keep her well-rounded and unique. But her effectiveness depends heavily on what gear she has – at level 30, I got my hands on an outrageously good axe, and plowed through the next five levels by doing way more damage than was reasonable at my level. Gear also gives attribute bonuses: the five main attributes are strength, agility, stamina, intellect, and spirit, and each one does something different for each class. Stamina raises your overall health pool, and is therefore indispensable for warriors, who are meant to take damage for other players; intellect increases your mana pool (15 mana points per intellect point) and increases your chance to crit with spell damage. Each class, then, needs different attribute bonuses, and each talent tree, as you might imagine, requires a slightly different focus. A Druid specced for Feral Combat – the art of fighting like a giant bear or cat ((IMAGES)) – looks for Stamina, Agility, and Strength gear, where one specced for Balance or Restoration – magic- and healing-based Druidry, respectively – wants far more Intellect than a Feral Druid would ever need.

So luck – or skill – on choosing the right pieces of armor for your character can drastically change how effective your character is at what it does. To this end, plenty of people play the game primarily to rock its economy, gathering rare items, materials, and armor sets to sell for massive amounts of gold on the game’s intra-player Auction House. (I’m not going to talk about gold farming here; it’s an interesting piece of game politics, but to be honest, I don’t think it disrupts the game economy as much as you might think; a bar of gold at the Auction House still sells for about a gold, and really that’s a pretty solid yardstick.) Others spend their time mainly engaged in PvP, which stands for Player versus Player, as opposed to PvE, Player vs Environment. Depending on the kind of server you play on, you have to consider the constant threat of players from the other faction, but there are also more organized battleground PvP settings, with a Capture the Flag game as well as other styles of team play.

But no matter what way you’ve chosen to approach the game, the Internet can and will bless you with dozens of people who’ve thought it out to its full possibility. Yesterday, while researching effective ways to do any decent damage with a healing druid (hint: spec feral combat and stop spamming Moonfire), I was introduced to the phrase “theorycraft.” Originating from the early days of Starcraft, “theorycraft” refers to hypothetical approaches to gameplay, where you imagine all the numbers to work out without random or unexpected influences from the environment, be it real or imagined. It’s really a fabulous term, and in a roundabout sort of way it explains pretty thoroughly why I like Warcraft. Yesterday, I ran into a group of Alliance on my level 37 Warrior, and while I got pretty far on foot, the level 42 rogue caught up with me. My theorycraft held up: I remembered to use Overpower, a skill designed for enemies, like rogues, with high dodge rates, and a few lucky critical strikes granted by my Improved Overpower skill, which increases Overpower’s crit rate by 50%, had him down pretty quickly. It held up – but if he’d thought to disarm me or brought a friend, it wouldn’t have, and that’s why it was exciting.

No matter how long I play theorycraft, crunching the numbers or considering the numerical impact of the talents I’ve selected, the game is always changing even past the nine classes and 27 talent trees, past the hard data about my awesome axe and my firm grasp on how best to complete the tasks on my quest log. A rare monster might lope by and take aim at me while I’m already near death, or a low-level Alliance player might bring his or her high-level friends out to hunt me down. I might run into somebody at level 49 in the Battlegrounds who I dueled at level 19, and I might be a lot better than him this time. And I can, and do, plan for these things extensively – but, really, it’s in the luck of the moment that they play out. I’ve never played a game like that before.