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I’m not falling for that one again. I don’t care if Wrath of the Lich King gets a >95% metascore.
I did play WoW for a while. It was deceptively amusing and fulfilling. Until the reality of the game started to sink in. In other words that the end-game was far worse than the actual rally to reach the level cap. Up until then I had ignored most of the instances in the game. You could get away with it because even the fanciest sword, gun or piece of armor was quickly deprecated. But at level 70 that tactic did grind to a halt as instances and epic items started to pile up and the game increasingly started to revolve around them. For those that cant or wont group, spend tons of time in the arenas, battlegrounds, or instances there is no real reward from the game. In fact the anticlimax of that realization was considerable.
I also remember the feeling of trying out the Arena Tournament Test Realm. The feeling of trying gear, gems and whatnot that I could never in a million years get inside the real game. That too was anticlimactic.
In one word, World of Warcraft is the most ingenious grind ever created. You grind for gold, for levels, for reputation and for items. Everything about the game is deceitfully engineered to suck people in and make them pay for another month. And then Blizzard has the audacity to clamp down on gold sellers and bots. Gee, I wonder why anyone would resort to making life a little easier for themselves?
My advise to Blizzard is once again to not just make the game more single-player friendly but actually reengineer the server configurations to make single-player the default game-mode. How about sandbox Single-player PvP and PvE realms that don’t have any instances, where there is no such thing as soulbound world drops and where all items are in fact world drops. Or purchasable at a small cost, without any bloody reputation grind, or at the reputation you normally have after clearing a zone. And you could transfer your character there for free of course. And why not increase the experience reward by another 30% while you’re at it. And make health pots free, purchasable at a small cost or remove them altogether. And stop creating money sinks like repairs, customization, flying mounts or that new mammoth.
