Don't get me wrong, I used to love World of Warcraft, even during Black Temple and the start of Sunwell. When Ulduar hit, I rerolled to my druid, played it through, witnessed all of the changes that just made this game even worse. I always thought that blizzard knew what they were doing (Ah, anyone remember when BC hit and SP's got 10 nerfs in a row or something?!) but man, they just lost it big time.

Point of the thread? Discuss when WOW turned shit. I unintentionally quit before ToC hit and stuff like that, but I've heard from most of my WoW buddies (who still play) that it's complete balls. Even noticed some of the most hardcore people from my old guild quit as well.

Now, when Blizzard a couple of months ago announced Cataclysm, I was like "fuck it." A game's gotta be a BIT competetive for everyone, ie not nerfing any instances, since the harder instances belong to the hardcore raiders, the lower instances (which are fun) belong to the casual players. If the game is not competetive, it's spending time grinding for nothing KNOWING you are grinding for nothing. When the entire game went über welfare, so far that you could buy tier for badges, 'twas just too much bs. (which was joked about during BT etc)

GAH, bitch mood off, NERD RAGEEEE. Ten points to whoever reads this whiny message. :]

Wow has always been bad

haha, yeah, makes sense.

Sad but true. In my oppinion wow has never been good. There are lots unbalances, lots of boring stuff, lack of content etc. It's saving grace is that it's the best thing out there even with all the flaws it has. It seemed better "back in the day" simply because it was new(ish) for players and they didn't know it could be better. They just played what there was and were happy. I'm quite sure newcomers to wow think it's a great game and are having lots of fun playing it. It'll pass when they understand the game isn't really too special or good

Hi.

I want to bitch and moan too For me, the only moments I did really enjoy WoW were the levelling part when I did it for the first time (have 7 lvl 80 char atm, so this gets me bored as well now ^^ even tried Dual-boxing to "get some new fun in the game" and I must admit it was fun... 3 months ^^) and everytime I have been able to play with a full raid of people of equal/similar gear and skill than me.

The latter is basically what gets me frustrated and sad at the moment, as it is sooo rare that you don't have to carry a couple of people through a raid. Honestly, I prefer raiding with 22 raiders fully involved and 3 empty slots than with 25 out of which 3 don't care and have to be carried through by the 22 other people...

Really I have no clue how this could be implemented (it probably could not cause "skill" is something hard to evaluate) but I'd like to have skill-based server population, a little bit like there are several levels in Sports. Only the 20 best teams can compete for "first division championship" (whatever it's called in your country : Premier League, Div ProA, ...), then the 20 next compete for championship in "second division" etc...
I'd love to see players offered the possibility of moving to a higher level server, and gently offered as well the possibility of moving to a lower skill server when there is a too big difference in skill with other players from the same server.

This would ensure that you have a greater chance to really being at a challenging point in WoW rather than either lacking far behind your guildmates and still pretending you are a HL-player just because you killed Jaraxxus in Hard Mode (OK, you were behind the tanks in damage despite being a DPS-class, but still you were in the raid when he died...) or having to constantly compensate for guildmates pretending they are End-Game players but have to L2P...

As well, this would give GUILDS a better chance of finding the players they need when they look for some new members.

Not sure if I did explain my point properly... but yeah... would just be great if everybody with same skill would be together

Obviously from above, the answer to OP is same as HoHo : Always ^^

Introduction of ZG.

Anyway, I just don't get the argument that the game is too easy unless you are wearing a 272 cloak. It is still competitive, very very few guilds have downed 25H Anub, even fewer without wipes along the way. The "omg this game is easy, our guild doesn't do heroics" crowd annoys me to no end.

"But there's hundreds of guilds that have downed Anub 25H"... sure, out of hundreds of thousands of guilds. Less than 1%. How is that "too easy"?

And yeah, 2 pieces out of 5 of middle grade gear can be bought. Middle grade. Most industries call the tier of middle grade "Mainstream". We have three tiers of gear: Value, Mainstream, and Extreme. The majority has access to Mainstream, only a few have access to Extreme (ilvl 258 and 272). Those who put more time and effort than the majority get better rewards. Those who can not afford the time and effort at the level of the majority get "value" rewards. The majority is in the middle. Bell curve, mass-marketing, pushing middle product... etc. If you are looking for raw skill rewards, arena awaits, because killing internet dragons has NEVER EVER been "hard", only challenging for a short time before entering farm status.

Blizzard very much have the design philosophy that WoW content should be accessible to everyone. Thus 5 and 10 man is pretty easy, moving up to heroic 10 man being a little harder. 25 man is similar to heroic 10 man but needs more people, and 25 man heroic is still challenging.

And furthermore casual players are able to avoid falling too far behind the hardcore raiders. So when the hardcore players get access to new content with better loot, casual players also get access to new content and better loot - in essence they can keep up with the gear advances but with much less effort.

If you are right at the very top then I can see why you might think this is pretty shitty. You put in lots of work to get better gear, and casual players get only slightly worse gear but with much much less effort. And if you want to maintain your slender gear advantage over the casuals then you need to keep working very hard.

It is obvious of course why Blizzard do this - there are many many more casual players than hardcore players and everyone pays the same subscription fee.

Personally I still like WoW, although there are some things I dislike about it. If a better game comes along then I will switch to that instead. But that just hasn't happened yet.

Wow, all very awesome replies. I agree with griemak and all of you. Most of the people I've talked with has said that ToC is a sad excuse for an instance though, I haven't played it.

This is my major beef with WoW. Let's rewind the time to when BC hit. Karazhan was pretty hard, so were heroics. (Shattered Halls especially) Without taking the hard-hardcore players into account (Nihilum etc.) most good and okey guilds were dealing with karazhan, and Gruul being the harder boss and Magtheridon the hard-hard-impossible to reach-boss.(eventually not)

This was a perfect "staircase" way for all guilds to try and climb. With a few minor nerfs to karazhan, gruul and magtheridon, it was pretty ideal. And quite exciting. If this makes any sense at all.

And when we're on the subject of letting all of our moaning out there, the expansions has been way too fast. In fact, I would've enjoyed keeping all levels at 60, and just adding instances and new places without it being a completely new expansion. This would make sense, since the old instances would be used by people who are less experience and or undergeared.

Instead, these instances are totally forgotten, which is a shame. And for example, when people advance too much, basically shut down the first instances (ZG etc) and blame it that these places has collapsed or something. Ah, well, that's what I think I guess. :]

What makes me sad is that this game is balanced for braindead people...I don't consider myself a uber pro skilled wow player, but still it's damn annoying to play with noobs that in 4 years haven't still learned to move their ass out of the fire.

I play in probably the worst server ever created by blizzard so this problem gets very accentuated.

Let's make an example: oculus heroic.Everytime there's oculus heroic the server stops getting emblems because people are too dumb to get the 3 spells of the dragons.Once I wiped with a party full of t8/t9 players for 4 hours just to get them understand how the f**k the dragons work.

Malygos is totally ignored,most of the server didn't even see him once,naxxramas 10 you can't ever go to the death knight quarter, you can't finish the plague quarter in naxx 25.Ulduar normal you can't go past keepers, if you ever get to them.Ignis is mostly skipped because "he's damn hard".

then we got toc...that's ridiculous even my server can clear that in a pug run in 10 man, and even in 25 man sometimes(but my guild can't down anub'arak 25 normal...) You see that there's a flaw here.The game has gotten too damn easy...I mean some bosses could kill themselves and give free loot since they're so damn easy....and still people wipe at them for countless wipes.

Hard modes I can't judge, my guild will never do them...

If you wonder while i'm still playing/playing in my guild/playing in my server, it's just because I like playing with my friends...you know I tried changing realm, but it was different, there was no real friendship there.That makes wow shit for me, wanna see end game? Go in a "uber" guild, eat a full load of shit, because most of people are only there for progress/loot so you won't have friends, or stay with your friends, and suck at the game because 15 of them can't move their asses out of the damn fire, or because you get a guild whose one of the max dps is a shadowpriest....

I hope my rant wasn't off topic

So, back in the day, the reward was the content itself.

I started raiding, when ZG came out and only saw BWL pre-BC. In BC I was mostly one tier behind. KJ only in 3.0.

So, now everybody gets to see the content, but as mentioned by others, the really good gear and reward (310% mount) is only for the hardcore players.

I like the simplifications, because I don't have to invest as much time in the game as I did before.

The voluntary easy-mode of the game is easy. The voluntary hard mode is too hard. This is a fault? All you have to do is right click and hard mode can challenge you tonight!

No it's not. Most hardmdoes are significantly easier than bosses in Sunwell.

Yeah, but how many people actually cleared sunwell pre-nerf? I'm going to guess it was a miniscule proportion of the total playerbase. Blizzard have decided that they now want to make content accessible for a much larger part of the playerbase, so don't ever expect to see Sunwell difficulty again.

That said, some of the hard modes are still pretty difficult. Yogg + 0 was as harder than most of the encounters in Sunwell (ToC gear made it a lot easier) and Yogg +1, Mimiron Hard, Freya Hard and Anub Hard are certainly no cakewalk.

The real issue IMO, is the lack of differentiation of goods vs. bads... In BC you saw a dude running around in current content tier... chances were good that he wasn't a bad... and the reason you knew this was because it was a rare occurrence.

Currently I stand IMO in the top 5 Shadow priests on my server between the two/three guilds capable of clearing all content minus Anub hard 25 and the third guild only clears it because they have the will to wipe to it until they kill it (every week they barely kill twins with any attempts left.) and the fail part is.... other than the title next to my name, the mount I fly on, and the guild tag under my name.... I look no different than any other priest on the server to the casual observer.

Liking to be at the top of my game I inspect my self against any priest I see wandering IF or Dalaran and laugh.... People in the gear im wearing with shit gems...

My point is that most of the people complaining arent just being assholes who believe that the reward is being able to see bosses die.... because thats just stupid... they just miss having their kills mean something... When everyone can wear my gear, then where is the competition and challenge...

My proposed fix... change hard mode loot drops from the rings, trinkets, bracers and other gear items people really cant see and replace them with unique weapons, shoulders, helms, or items they make your character glow, or be on fire, or leave a trail of frost. the idea being... when I walk through a crowd... people should know... that guy must be good to be wearing that. I want to be as good as that guy.

Thats the missing ingredient.

/apologize for fail wall of text

I actually fully expect to see IC hardmodes being at least as hard as Sunwell with the harder ones much harder than that.