In the last year or so, several players that played with me in my guilds on Chromaggus, Lightbringer and Silvermoon stopped playing, including no less than four guild masters. Some of them for personal reasons, but many left because others left, because they got bored, got sick with other players attitudes, or the game mechanics.
This week I tried to understand what is going on with the player base, and with my sickness towards WoW. The topics with most views on wow forums are, undoubtly, negative, as you can see in http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/. The most popular are
-"Is the game dying"
-"Wow player login decline since January"
-"The attitude spawning from this game makes me sick".
It has become an utterly boring game, with a spicy biasing on "gear outperforms skill by thousands of miles."
The quick guide to WoW is:
You level a character
You can kill several mobs simultaneously (e.g in LOTRO, more than 1 is a challenge), You go through the same hub quests, in Cataclysm, worse, in linear mode.
You reach your cap level,
You farm equipment in 5-dungeons. PUGs work, but you can get ninja'd.
You farm reputations for more equipment or enchants.
You farm medals for more equipment or enchant.
and then..
You can't even enter a single-raid, unless you get a "gear level", unless you can do "imba dps", and an "achievement" for it, which you don't have, unless you are in a guild, unless the guild raids, unless you can raid with the guild at nearly all times (or you get demoted).
In WoW, there is no such thing as "we need a player for a raid. If you are nice, and know what do do, come along". In LOTRO it's *ALL* there is.
It was like this during TBC, it was like this during WOTLK, and it is like this during Cataclysm. Nothing changed.
If you go for PVP, it's the same. If you reach cap level and enter a battleground, you are smashed for having 0 resilience. You have to slowly go up the ladder, or go into arenas, meaning, you need stable partners to be successful. You cannot have fun trying to kill a player, because the player will always kill you, irrespective of your skill. Blizzard introduced rated battlegrounds, which I hoped would allow skill to show up. Wrong, it's simply a thing for elitist guilds show off their style, and titles, like Commander, a title I got in Vanilla by single-player PVP in battlegrounds for hours (10-hour Alterac Valleys), are now obtainable by those players. More casual PVP players, can't kill them, because again, gear outperforms skill. And all these players do is farm farm farm. Farm honor points, conquest points, valor points, heroism points, stupidity points.
So what prevents you from having fun ? From the forum answers, and my oppinion, addons, damage meters, achievement checking, anything that promotes elitism.
Elitism is good, WoW say. We need it to support our player base. LOTRO does not have elitism, people invite casuals to raids, and even radiance, an elistist stat from LOTRO, was removed this week. Blizzard will say, sure, but we have 10M players, you have 250K or so. True.
What does elitism promote ? Rudeness, lack of cooperation, of social attitude, of comprehension. You see that in battlegrounds, in dungeons, in chat, in trade, nearly everywhere except may be on raids, where cooperation is mandatory.
And this is what is causing me to stop playing. I don't have a playing guild, I'm too bored to go into a guild and having to again demonstrate I'm a valuable player, while I see the guild falling apart because 1 single healer or tank leaves in rage, in anger, because he's too pro, and we're all noobs, and there we go again.
No. I'll be back playing, when and if people I played with come back, and if I can have fun again, which I doubt. Atm, WoW is boring, elitist, full of people with the wrong attitude.
One account is cancelled, the other one will last a few more weeks.
PS: At the same time, I saw surprisingly, a few days ago, during my work time, Blizzard entertainment founders ringing the closing bell at Nasdaq. Why so ? Blizzard has become a successful money drainer. But that's about it.
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