Why can't we admit it's over?

Having read a couple of magazines about PC games, I know that the "game of the month" is a new shooter named Prey. Some people don't like it, but other reviewers give it very high marks. Prey can be played through in 8 to 12 hours. And there are quite a number of games that only take about 10 hours to finish. Role-playing games usually last a bit longer, but even a Final Fantasy lasts only about 60 hours, and the longest single-player RPG I've read about time to completion was Baldur's Gate with 200 hours, if you do all sub-quests. And yet here we are and discuss that World of Warcraft has a design flaw, because unless you raid there is nothing left to do for you after about 500 hours. Why can't we admit that we reached an invisible game over screen?

I don't think there is a "design flaw" in World of Warcraft. It just ends, like any other game. While you play, you consume content in the form of quests, zones, spells and abilities, etc., and at some point you have seen it all. If it were Baldur's Gate, we would either put the CD back in the box and stop playing, or roll a new character and start over. But in World of Warcraft we insist on playing our level 60s for hundreds of hours more, excerting tremendous effort to reach the last tiny bits of content we haven't seen yet, all the time complaining that there isn't much content left. Isn't it us who have a "design flaw"?

Of course Blizzard is partly to blame, because they foster that kind of behavior. Instead of giving us closure with a screen saying "Game over, congratulations, you won" at level 60, they give us that hard to reach content which requires 40 people to coordinate for hundreds of hours to achieve. That divides us into a group of people who are willing and able to coordinate with 39 others for hundreds of hours, and those who notice that this isn't the same World of Warcraft any more, and won't or can't chase after that last bit of content.

But whatever style of gameplay we prefer or are willing to cope with, we all want more content. We want the next episode of World of Warcraft, because we are tired of watching the first episode over and over. We just don't have the willpower to stop watching that first episode while waiting for the second one. Damn addiction!