WoW Love or Hate?

[Tenacity]

I've been playing blizzard games since the original warcraft: Orcs and Humans back in '94. Been playing world of warcraft since it launched around four years ago...

the game has lost a lot of what it once was, as all MMORPG's do over time. When I first started playing, and for the first year or so, it was an awesome game... it got your blood flowing, seeing the amazing world blizz had created and being a part of it, and moreso when you went up against the unimaginably huge bosses.

Then the class revamps came. People on the official forums cried that such and such was overpowered, or underpowered, or needed this or that. Blizzard's first mistake was giving in to these whiners. Through the class revamps each patch the game became exceedingly imbalanced - sure, some classes had been overpowered beforehand, but now every patch made a new 'flavor of the month' class and the game started spiraling downwards from there.

Then the honor system and battlegrounds showed up. BAD IDEA BLIZZ!
World pvp was fun, it was unpredictable and you never knew when someone might jump out of the shadows and attack you. It kept you on edge and added some adrenaline to the game. When they put in battlegrounds, pvp became like any other 'instance' in the game... boring. Adding a 'goal' to pvp removed it's allure for a lot of players, myself included.
Then the honor system... like the last line above, added 'goals'. It turned pvp into a grind and an epeen-flaunting contest rather than just another fun aspect of the game.

Unfortunately the first expansion (burning crusade) didnt do much to solve any of this. All you got were more grinds... pvp grinds, reputation grinds, instance grinds, grinding for money, grinding for items, grinding for more experience to level up 10 more times. They've turned the entire thing into one big grind-fest and NOBODY likes doing that.

I still play now and then though. My first character ever created... 4 years ago... was a night elf druid, and that character is still my main to this day. I've also got a 70 paladin, 65 rogue, 62 priest, and a bunch of others in the mid levels.

I'm eager about the next expansion though, it seems like blizzard is starting to learn what really made the game special to begin with and are tryign to go back to it. I dont expect the honor system or battlegrounds to be removed, or all the grinding for that matter, but I think they're trying to give the game back the immersion it once had.

Well, that, and I'm psyched about making a deathknight =) I played starwars galaxies before WoW, and I really missed my dark jedi from that game... the DK will let me go back to being evil once more =P

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