This week on “South Park,” the boys are addicted to “World of Warcraft.” The episode, animated in the game’s gorgeous engine and artwork, also quantifies the game’s problems, particularly at the endgame. I can only assume that Matt Stone and Trey Parker played the game over the summer.

In the show, the boys’ characters keep getting killed by a guy (in reality, a fat nerd with glasses and a neckbeard) who runs around dancing naked and is such a high level, he can kill anyone he wants. After becoming frustrated, the buys dedicate their lives to the game to become strong enough to kill him. How do they do this? They kill boars. Lots and lots of boars. There’s a boar-killing montage. It’s amusing. In the process, they become pimple-faced, pale and fat.

This exact scenario is impossible in “WOW,” but it quantifies the very real and very lame problems of “WOW’s” endgame. There is always someone better than you, and the reason they’re better than you is because they have no life outside of Azeroth.

To compete in the end of the game, you have to essentially make appointments to meet up with 39 other people and do the same few dungeons repeatedly. These raids can and do take six hours. The truly competitive endgame guilds do this five or more nights a week. This might be okay if it was actually fun, but any fun is quickly replaced with tedium.

The boss fights in these levels are well-put-together encounters, but you have to fight through room after room of enemies that require 40 people to kill for no other reason than they have a ton of health. When you finally do get to and kill the boss, you have him on “farm status,” which means that you and your guild do the series of fights once a week to get whatever crazy-awesome items they drop.

The episode also skewers the players of the game wonderfully. Cartman’s dwarf avatar walks up and announces to everyone, “I just took the biggest crap.” This happens in every online game ever. No one cares how high you are or that you just farted.

The episode also uses an excessive amount of “WOW” terminology, but it’s all real slang used in the game’s culture. To someone who hasn’t played the game, it’s a bunch of funny fantasy gobbledygook, but when Cartman berates Kyle about his character’s spec, it mirrors the same conversation that occurs between “WOW” players daily.

At the end, when the boys are using headsets to coordinate their fight against the naked guy, they speak in perfect monotone voices. They lack excitement and just sound BORED. This is the perfect imitation of actual people using Teamspeak. It’s uncanny. During the final battle, they sound completely uninterested, with Cartman monotonally giving orders to the others. Their enemy eats chips. What earlier was a relatively exciting fight with their avatars running around fighting becomes four fat guys in a basement surrounded by garbage speaking unexcitedly.

The best thing is, at the beginning, the boys are playing moderately and enjoying the game. Once they decide to get “serious” about playing, they begin to have no life, and the game loses its fun. If you play “WOW,” which is a good game, don’t let it dictate the rest of your life. Pretty much, once you hit level 60, you should quit. There’s nothing past that worth bothering with, unless you like showing up at 6 o’clock every evening to do the same thing as the last week for the next six hours, and hey, maybe you’ll get one piece of equipment out of it.