Why I No Longer Play World of Warcraft

When World of Warcraft first began, it was brilliant. In fact, it was brilliant for a long time and still today people say it's epic. However, I just can't get into it anymore, the game truly wowed me for a while but my WoW days are over and it's more like a disappointing sigh.

I first started playing during the vanilla days, I didn't make it to end game before Burning Crusade was released but I had a blast discovering along with my guildies. We were all so nooby and we had to do many things the hard way like:

• Make it to Wetlands, running for miles from Ironforge through tunnels without a mount because the first mount wasn't available until level 40.
• Even at level 40, most people didn't get a mount because they cost 100 gold and people didn't have that kind of money. Many people were even okay with waiting to get a mount because they'd spent 40 levels running anyway.
• If you just did quests, you'd run out and you were still too lowbie to go to the higher areas so you had to grind your way through mobs to get high enough.
• When you wanted to run a dungeon, you had to go there. I died many times trying to run to Scarlet Monastery.
• When you wanted a group, you had to ask on local or trade chat for people to go with and vanilla had 40 man raids.
• There were also no where near as many flight paths as there are now.
• There were no flying mounts.
  
  
  
  
  

There were many other things that made WoW more grindy, slower and harder back then so Blizzard listened to the community and made things easier... and easier... and easier... When I saw the flight path in Goldshire, this reminded me of how people take their car 3 houses down the road. Just walk people!

While I did appreciate the additions that made in-game life easier, I also noticed that for many plus's there are negatives. It was so much easier to get into a dungeon when you were just instanced there from wherever you were in the world when the queue “popped”. It meant you could continue questing while waiting for the queue and the queue's popped ever so quickly when we could all instance cross-realm. However, the community died. Trolls were already a problem, but within your realm, everyone knew who they were, I played in Dath'Remar and Snuggles was notorious as a troll. When we had to group up in a city then head to our allotted dungeon, we all chatted and got along, sometimes people would even leave their guild to join the people in their group because they'd become such BFF's chatting away, fighting alongside each other.

People were patient with each other, everyone worked as a team and I think a lot of this was due to the fact that if you were a pain in the ass in your group, you would most probably have to face those people again when you ran into them in a city plus you would know no one would want to group with you for future dungeon runs. You had a reputation to keep within your realm.

Now, no one gives a flying #$%@ about anyone else. You run dungeons hard and fast, if you don't keep up your vote-kicked, no one even says hello... there's me, trying to be all old school “Hello” … *crickets and a tumble weed...* It goes like this: Kill the mobs, down the bosses, pick up ya token, wham bam thank you ma'am, rinse, wash, repeat.

While they fixed it so you didn't have to grind mobs to level, you can now level doing quests, they made it so you have to grind end-game dungeons and daily quests. Oh hurrah.

During Wrath of the Lich King they took out team-work, made dungeons a joke where the group just ran in, everyone threw everything at all the mobs, no need for any CC or even a plan... and made us do them over and over again to collect tokens to get gear. So while running the same dungeon over and over again sounds fun they decided to bring back team-work and crowd control in Cataclysm.

So there we were with a whole community from WotLK; DPS running in trying to get in first hits and making sure they weren't on the tanks target because their whole role had become such a bore it became all about being on top of the DPS meter, tanks spamming AOE to easily keep threat and healers yawning through their role almost hoping something would go wrong for some excitement to: Cataclysm, where we went back to needing DPS peeps to use crowd control, needing DPS to wait for the tank to pull and gain threat and for DPS to stay on the tanks target. The tank's job was once again challenging and so was the healer's. It wasn't that it was hard there was just a simple need of team work. It wasn't about being carried by tanks and healers anymore, the DPS were actually needed again, they had a responsibility along with the rest of the group, it was up to them to not pull threat as much as it was up to tanks to hold threat and it was their job to control the mob.

It was a complete and utter mess with many many wipes because no one had any idea how to work together. It amazed me how many mages could fail at such a simple task of polymorphing. And of course when it all fell apart everyone blamed everyone else, off they went on their tangents where it was obvious they had no idea of the game's dynamics.

Although it was frustrating, I was happy for the time being that they'd brought back challenging dungeons, especially when I could run with guildies. It was quite fun. My guild and I were working our way up through dungeons, Heroics and starting to raid. We were a little slow but we were getting there, all working as a team, gearing up together etc.

When expansions are released, I'm always a little disappointed to say goodbye to the epics I'd worked towards for 2 years, it's so disheartening when green mob drops outdo your epic raid gear from the last expansion but it's a whole new journey once again. However, when they did it with a patch; Firelands, (okay, maybe not as big as an expansion) I rage-quit so hard I made hurricane Katrina look like a willy-willy. I was so despondent as I'd worked my butt off, grinding for months and it felt like all my gear was null and void. SighFye who just reached max level out geared me with a couple of Heroic Dungeon tokens. 

 

I quit the game for about a year or so but then those cute little Panda's had me curious again. I bought Mists of Pandaria but it just didn't have any appeal anymore. It just felt like the same thing again and with the sense of community gone it wasn't fun just bracing yourself for 12 year old trolls. I tried again with Warlords of Draenor but that attempt was even shorter than MoP. Trying to play again bored me to death.

There were a couple of things which I think added to the boredom. I'd gotten into Call of Duty and other FPS's which are really fast paced all the time, plus we had a clan to play with so I always had people to chat and play with. There's no grindy questing or professions. You just play, and when you've had enough you jump off. Easy.

I'd also played WoW and a few other MMORPG's (and in my opinion they pretty much all felt the same) for about 7-8 years on and off. Perhaps I'd exhausted the genre.

I still have a small part of me that misses the good old days of friendly community and discovery of new content, where we worked towards gear that dropped from bosses, instead of repeating the same dungeon for tokens; where we worked together, everyone had a significant role and we encouraged and helped each other.

That part of WoW is just a faint memory and what now stands is a troll-fest of egocentric teeny boppers who think they're pro because they can collect tokens and spam AOE's quicker than the next guy to be on top of the DPS meter. Let's all give them a slow clap as they bask in their own glory none the wiser that they're the reason for 99% of the wipes.



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Bellistik