Boring Background info...

So a few months back I quit WOW. I was addicted and I still am, however the fun just wasn't there for me anymore. I still like the game, and acknowledge that it is the best game on the market at the moment. However I felt that the game had lost interest for me personally.

Perhaps a little background is needed. I started my MMO history with Ultima Online, which I quit within a month. I thought it was an awesome game until I walked out of town, was immediately killed by three other players and everything I had made until that point was stolen. After this had happened three more times, the game quickly lost interest for me.

For awhile I became very interested in the Socom series of online FPS military pvp. It is alot like HALO but without the respawn, I love the pace, and the strategy of having to out think my opponents. Later I moved on to FFXI, WOW, Guild Wars, and then back to WOW. While I haven't played every MMORPG, I have racked up more hours then I really want to write down where my wife might one day read.

Anyway back to why i quit WOW. Within the most recent expansion several changes were made to the game that negatively impacted my game play experience. One was the change to class mechanics that allowed all classes to do credible damage. The second was the removal of the need to do crowd control.

Both of these changes are fiscally sound decisions for game-play and the subscriber base. They make sense because they allow people to level up easier and to complete dungeons faster and with less headaches. It is the age old adage of keep it simple stupid. Sadly as a warlock player these two changes killed my enjoyment of the game.

I love the warlock class, the whole concept is awesome to me, demons, dark evil spells, definitely very cool. Sadly I had invested so much time and loved my character so much I felt disappointed at the idea of playing another class. Not to mention as a mount collector with around 90 mounts and 50k + gold invested in my pursuit of rare mounts I really didn't want to restart all over again.

PVP, or why pvp wasn't fun anymore:

Anyway back to my point, Warlocks are a damage class. With Wrath's release now everyone else became a damage class too. I love pvp, and enjoyed it immensely prior to wrath when I didn't have to worry about a resto druid killing me. With wraths release damage seemed to have been tweaked up to allow people to due 2-3k in damage a second. This was done to allow players to take on the high level bosses with health in the millions. While necessary in raids, it had an odd effect in pvp.

While the average person was putting out 2-3k in damage some classes focused on crit have the ability to hit small bursts of 6k dps (this was at the beginning of wrath). As a warlock with 18 to 20k in life this meant I often never left stun (3 secs). Here comes Mr. Rogue, who I can no longer see due to changes in my fel puppy, hmm I am stunned, oh I am dead. I am not even going to get into Paladins and Death Knights who could crit, stun, crowd control, wore plate, and healed them selves. The speed of pvp was drastically sped up, but my spells still required me to wait for them to kick in or to stand there and cast.

So PVP felt like leaving the towns of Ultima Online and having three guys run out of the bushes to gank me. I quickly lost interest. Mind you this was probably my favorite part of the game.

Raiding:

The other end game direction is raiding. While not my favorite, I can only do the same thing so many times before it gets boring. To me pvp it infinitely different because people will never react the same way twice. It is not that I disliked raiding, but rather my odd work schedule and the fact that I live in a different time zone make raiding very difficult. Combine the fact that all classes can dps, and that I couldn't show up on a regular basis and you can guess I wasn't highly sought out to fill in a spot. This meant for me raiding wasn't really enjoyable.

Prior to wrath I really enjoyed instances due to the complexity of crowd control. As a warlock having to cc two targets (seduce and banish) while doing damage to a third was a blast. It was what separated a good warlock from a bad one. The ability to multi-task and control the flow of battle. After wrath I cast Rain of Fire over and over again till the group was down to one npc then I switched to immolate and incinerate etc. There was no strategy, no planning, just run in grab a group, and aoe them down. It was simple. Simple and downright boring.

For awhile I focused on playing the Auction House, but after I had accumulated everything I could buy, saved 55k with 50K in inventory and with 5k coming in each week I sat there and realized there was nothing left to spend all the money I was making on. Mind you I think the economy is set up really well in WOW, the reason we have so little gold spam is because gold has little value besides buying nick knacks. 99% of the armor at endgame must be gotten through individual effort and can't be directly bought with gold. While you could buy a run through, or even support a guild like Gevlon, neither of these option seemed overly interesting to me.

Honestly my guild was probably one of the main reasons I stuck around after wrath. I also dual boxed two characters up to 60, then individually leveled them after that. I was also messing around with a 49 mage twink which I got to 5k in health with buffs that I used to run flags in warsong gulch.

Anyway this Blog is not about me crying about why WOW sucks or why I quit, I think WOW is a great game. Honestly I am still addicted, I simply don't really see anything I the game that I want to do (I may return for Cataclysm). Rather I started this blog to fill my cravings for WOW related things by discussing ideas on how the game could be improved.

I plan to go in depth with discussion about a variety of things from WOW I think could be improved, as well as other MMO RPG's and what they have done right and wrong. All of this in the search for A Better MMO.