The Death of WoW

I started playing this game back in fall of 2005. I'm still intermittently playing it after 2.5 years, but it's more of a "there's nothing better to do". School is out, a lot of friends are home for the summer, you know... that sort of thing. I got back into WoW this time to play with some of my good friends over the summer. I enjoy it but WoW is dying and I think I know what it is.

The casual vs. obsessive debate rages throughout WoW. "Elite" players hate it when Blizzard gives the casual some epic for doing essentially nothing, while the casuals can't really enjoy the game without gear. Those are two opposite sides of the spectrum and 90% of the players fall somewhere in the middle. However, with the release of The Burning Crusade something in WoW changed. Blizzard started giving away epics.

It started with PvP. Well, first let's look at the history of PvP in WoW. Grand Marshal/High Warlord gear was some of the best in the game. It took months to get though. PvP was based off a ladder system of sorts and when you reached rank 12 or 13, where you placed the next week was in direct correlation to how much honor you got vs. how much honor everyone else received. The gear was amazing and rightfully so. It took nearly 6 months of 24/7 PvP to achieve it on some servers.

With the expansion Blizzard decided to allow you to save up Honor points. Now it doesn't matter when you do it as long as you get the honor. Someone could take a year playing a few hours a week and get better gear than those who spent the 6 months of solid PvP. Now, I don't have a problem with this. The problem is that back in the old days, someone could PvP and get gear enough to be effective in a 40 man raid dpsing, or someone could do PvE (player vs. environment) and get gear good enough to be effective in PvP.

With the addition of a single new stat, Blizzard has effectively destroyed the fun of pvp or pve. They claimed to not want to pidgeon hole you into doing one thing, but they have done precisely that. In a PvE gear, I can't kill anyone in PvP because my crits don't land as hard as they should, and because I don't crit as often. In PvP gear, I am in the lower half of the raid DPSing because the gear is more about mitigating PvP damage rather than outputing as much damage as possible.

All this to say that WoW has become to most of its clientele a "nothing better" game. As soon as a decent MMO comes out, and I'm not talking about Vanguard or Age of Conan. When a good MMO comes out, expect WoW to die mainly cause it pidgeon holes you into one thing, just like all the MMO's before it.

~J