Before I start to write about things I’m doing in WoW now let me say a few words about game itself and its evolution.

As you know, I’ve been playing WoW from early closed beta test. I saw the development of the game before it became available for the players. I’m still watching the way game is changing by developers and I should admit I’m not always happy with changes.

Let me explain. “Vanilla” (original) WoW was a hard game. “Hard” means that even when you’ve reached the final level of your char (60 at that time) you had always to look around – an NPC could easily kill you if you were not ready to fight. Leveling itself was long but wonderful – new areas, continents and content made this game outstanding, mostly because of what Blizzard stands for itself – amazing graphics. But it was also hard since environment was on par with players. Instances were absolutely challenging. I still remember those 5 hours spent on getting my paladin epic mount in Strat and I didn’t get it from that endless attempts. Before the nerf fights in 5-man instances were really hard and always had many wipes.

There were raiding instances in the game with so called “end game” content. To see them you had to be “hard core” player who were ready to spend hours and hours in front of their PCs to deal with the content. I remember the day when our US guild went into MC for the first time. Somehow the instance ID was messed up and we went into someone’s else instance, where a few first bosses were already killed. During that 1st run our guild was not able to kill even a single pack of trash mobs (though most of those 40 raiders were geared up to the entry MC level). We conquered MC in 2 months but we were raiding 4 times a week at least 4 hours a day. We became only 5th guild on a server who was able to do it (while server was full which means there were like 10k players on it). Then we did BWL, then AQ40 and, indeed, raiders got a feeling of being “uber” players and started to consider themselves as “elite”. It was true for some extend because average player wasn’t able to beat even a single boss in 40-man instance while in PuG – it required the level of coordination that cannot be achieved without voice communication and training plus vanilla instances had very exacting requirements to the gear. So endgame raiding guilds consisted mostly of “elitist” hard-core raiders.

So less than 5% of players were able to see that end-game content. It went to extreme when Naxxramas has been announced in the end of vanilla game cycle. It was too hard even for elitists – only a few guilds in the world were able to conquer it. (As a side comment – imagine how much time developers spent on designing/fine tuning this instance. That work shouldn’t be wasted – that is why Naxx appeared in WotLK.)

TBC was a big failure for Blizzard. Everything became enormously hard, from simple 5-mans (all of them in heroic mode required high reputation related keys) to 25-man raiding since getting attuned was absolutely insane. Even though Blizzard understood that managing 40 persons was too hard and replaced it with 25-man the encounters in TBC were inadequately hard. On top of that – new continent lost vanilla flavor and wonderful graphics.

The reason for failure is rather simple - I’m sure Blizzard didn’t plan WoW to last long and the decision to release TBS has been based on business success rather than logical development of WoW lore. But seems like the direction to make TBC even harder than vanilla WoW wasn’t based on what players wanted. I do know that many (even hardcore) players left the game because of that. Raiding is essential but not the main activity in WoW and definitely the most money come not from raiders but casual players.

WotLK to me is the evidence that Blizzard learned its mistakes and listened to its customers (players). Environment is different from vanilla landscapes but looks great again, questlines are rich and exiting, but…

But WoW became very easy to play. To me game went into another extreme, it is too easy for me now. I do understand that all these changes were done to satisfy average players (who bring more money), but I feel a bit cheated. To give you a few examples of the changes compared to vanilla WoW: no more profession specialization, no more rare drops of formula/recipe/design/plans, no more hard-core attunement, no more keys (with a very few exceptions), no more endless hours to grind gold for repair (a few dailies makes you rich in like a month), even arena points could be received without playing arena. NPCs are a joke, even elite ones. Reputation is a joke now too, I recall how I was repping-up with Thorium Brotherhood in vanilla WoW – at exalted there was BS plan for epic mace which was real good at that time. At certain point the only way to raise it was to collect Dark Iron Ore from MC or BRD. I wasn’t able to mine it from inside of MC, but I knew all nodes in BRD and did daily runs in there. On top of that you had to visit a bar in BRD to turn ore for rep, so as soon as I got full 5 bags of ore I had to find a group to clear trash to the bar… It took me about 5 months but I did it…

The list is endless but in the end I should say – this is a different game now which is oriented to casual player. On top of that seems like nice and mature players have left the game long time ago. Why I'm still playing is another story ;)

Speaking of challenges - raiding on heroic mode is indeed a challenge but I could raid only in a company of friends (virtual frendship is enough). OSG spent like a year trying to find appropriate people but we failed even to find 8 other people who are not loot-oriented players and who share same view on the game and its goals. I should admit that today's player's population is mostly kids (not only by age but rather by their behavior and game goals). That makes most PuGs being a kind of loot-whore assembly with rude speeches and disrespect to other players. I'm afraid these people (who are trying to proove that their e-peen is the longest) do have serious troubles in real life. I simply can't play with those.

Nevertheless I still like this game a lot and keep playing. With today's players base raiding isn't my choice but, as you might see, I'm seekeing for a challenge. Meaning I'm looking for solo challenges for my tanking DK.

I'll be talking about some of those in my next battle reports, stay tuned!