Well I have been neglecting this for far to long so I’m going to have another attempt to make this in to a serious blog. based on some of the things that interests me, mainly PC’s and using them to play games.
After having stopped playing Wow I though I would share why I decided that this game wasn’t for me and how i think it could have been improved.
My main grip with this game is that it was a grind in every aspect of the word firstly you start out in content that has long since stopped being current in the way of the vanilla WoW content, and while this was a great set of content its now sparsely populated on most servers making ti hard to do group quests with most people just attempting to get past as fast as they can, hardly worth the effort to support at all, and to top this off if you have picked a PvP server (hence forth called a gank server) you also have to deal with people that have nothing better to do then bring there max level, highly geared toon’s through and 1 shot you while you attempt to reach your goal, in part this was improved with the random dungeon finder tool that blizzard has introduced that allows you to pull a group together across several servers making you able to atleast see this content if your a new player… all be it as the group your with attempts to set a world speed record as they run through it. As you move on to out lands, and north rend the pace picks up a little but its still a long, pointless grind to get to the level cap, and they intend to make this longer with the next expansion!
once i had finished this grind i was thinking to my self “Yay I made it time to get in and experience everything i have been told so much about” so i pull up the local trade chat to find it full or people spamming for people for raid groups, looked good for a few minutes… till i realized that no one was doing the basic level content once you reach the cap, and ignoring anyone who did not have current raid level gear… this was disappointing and in 2 months at the level cap I never even attempted one of the lv 80 raids and only did a few off bosses in another, and they were rushed. and i was forced to go back to grinding to get the gear to enter the current level of content.
Again after this next grind I thought “Now i can get in and do something”… Wrong! with out the experience of already having done the content no one would look at me for there groups, this community really does need some work, but thats not the worst part of the game. nor what I wanted to talk about in this blog. after 2 long grinds i got to the content and with some help from friends managed to meet the communities insane requirements to get into a group, only to find the current content (ICC at the time of writing) was impossible for the average player (even one who plays far more then they should like myself.) to be able to experience this content and best it with the balancing that Blizzard has given it.
I believe that this was a major mistake that blizzard has been making when creating content, as it currently stands there are 4 levels of difficulty in the current raids (10 man normal, 25 man normal, 10 man heroic, and 25 man heroic) and like any other game I would buy I would expect that at the lowest difficulty any body should be able to complete all the content to at least say they have done it, while harder difficulty’s are left to the more hardcore of gamers that want to prove something more.
the other problem i see with wow is its lack of other content for high level players, after reaching the cap there is no non-combat options for a player to pursue, even crafting will require the player to go in to raids to allow them to create the high level items, and these are much worse then the content that you have to do to create them. and PvP from my experience is something anyone can achieve, via battle grounds, and Wintergrasp so there is no high level content here and wow toon setups don’t allow for a metagame as each class/spec combo can only do one thing.
so in conclusion the best thing Blizzard could do if they want to keep WoW as the top of the bunch of MMO’s out there would be to add more endgame options for the players out there, and re-balance the difficulty of the raids to allow everyone to experience the content while still providing a challenge for the top tier of players at the high end of the difficulty scale.