They game has become so casual that the addiction claims are basically a joke. It's placebo that is feeding on people not wanting to take responsibility on themselfs.
There is no chemical reaction, and for 99,9% of the players it's not gambling addiction either.
What it is, is placebo. Like other games in America that get blamed for crimes and used for wilfires to to push the blame on horrible events and disasters away from bad parenting, loneliness and screwed up gun laws, and put them on the games(for example, the Columbine massacre was Dooms fault, as the shooters were major Doom fans. Great logic.).
A few cases in Korea and the States get reported in the news. Everyone gets scared, and suddenly everyone thinks that it's more addicting that it always has been. It's not more addicting than the Sims, Diablo or Civilization.
The game urges you to take breaks, you get double xp for not playing(resting in a game), they have made the entire game completeable to max level by playing solo, so you could play this MMO by yourself without depending on anyone else, when only you have time, making it one of the most flexible of its kind.
The game has continued to ease up on the difficulty, and the amount of time it gets to max level, and with the dungeon finder(you open a window and gets transported to a random dungeon with people from other servers) you get dungeons done fast, level fast, and even get rewards and items just for doing dungeons. You even get experience from Battlegrounds, so you could stand in a city at lvl 10 and just play pvp, until lvl 80, and basically play Battlegrounds like it was a first person shooter, making it almost more comparable to a fusion between Modern Warfare and Guild Wars.
My take on it, is that it's satisfying for people to convince themselfs that they have no will. its so easy just to cast everything away and blame it on something external, like the game has magic powers, when its just another one of those games, than have been around since the 80s, as MUDs.
