Intervention. (Score 3, Funny)

The solution for this is simple. I had a friend of mine who was addicted to EQ (I was too) -- As I realized what an incredible timesink this was, I planned on quit playing. I knew my friend never would, however. What I did may be considered "evil" by some. Here is the story: Me and a friend both had level 60 characters on EQ. We always played together - officers in the same guild, we raided and quested together (and played alts together). I knew that when I quit, he never would. I had a girlfriend, and more interest in going to do stuff in the real world. My friend had no interest in anything at all except EQ. Here is what I did. 1. I installed a physical keylogging device on his keyboard at his house. 2. I got his EQ password. 3. I deleted all his characters. He called me up the next day and said all his characters were deleted. I feigned suprise: "No kidding? Wow. Well, I was thinking about quitting anyway." He responded with: "Don't quit man -- I'll get my characters back!" So I said ok. He spent about 3 days with the Verant tech support getting his characters reinstated. He changed his passwords and virus scanned his box (I think he even formatted it). He got his characters back, called me up, and we started playing again. (A side note: those three days he was more social than in the last 6 months) I felt bad, but I did it again. I had his new password (it was like 32 chars long, heh). I deleted all of his characters again. He called me up and said it happened again. I felt bad. I knew he was hurt. I knew it would help him, in the long run. What followed was a month of the same thing happening. Verant got pissed off because they thought he was messing with them. He got pissed off because he know he didn't delete his characters. In this time where he could not play, I decided to quit completely. He said it was his fault, that his account was messed up, but I said it was probably for the best anyway. Over this month we spent a lot of time out, went on a weekend hiking trip, ate dinner out, etc. He finally gave up his quest to play EQ again. I told him it was fate or something. To this day, he doesn't know it's me. We've drifted apart since then (We were stationed in the same place in the military) -- I'm sure he's playing WOW or whatever else now, but I am happy that I helped him at least a little bit. Maybe I'll call him someday and tell him the truth... ;)