anyone that played original trilogy EQ (eq, kunark, velious) knew the top 10 guilds on the server, who was the best at each class on the server, who the core members were of competing guilds, what their gear was, who their main tank was, how many clerics that guild had, how good their competition was at mobilizing (which actually mattered in eq) and everyone that raided knew exactly what mobs their competing guilds were doing and when the mobs they wanted respawned each week.

imagine having the top 3 guilds on the server each bringing 30 people to the same zone to fight a giant battle, with the last guild standing getting a shot at a dragon that drops the best gear in the game. one shot, thats it because by the time your first attempt is over, the other guilds have ported back from their bind spots, retrieved their gear and are AoE’ing your clerics and dispelling buffs off your main tank. that was so fun. to know that something like that environment used to exist, and then to look at wow and see 100 million people sitting in a queue for 20 minutes to go slam themselves against each other with no strategy, and no risk because theres a 5 second respawn makes me wonder why wow is popular and original eq style mmo no longer exists.

someone make a game where there is competition between guilds. wow feels like a single player game. think of how fun wow could be if instead of every guild getting all week to go to molten core and fail fail fail fail until they eventually get it right, and no one on the server cares because they get their own private molten core to suck on, if instead ragnaros spawned once a day and every guild on the server, horde and alliance were fighting over it, how sick would that be? at first the horde and alliance would join together to make sure their side got an attempt, but then there would be a struggle to see who got to take a shot first. since you cant fight your own side i imagine it would be whoever got there first, or some kind of bluebie random for it or something, but still. how rad would it be. one guild gets to take a shot at ragnarok while 2 other alliance guilds sit at the zone line and kill any horde that try to zone in. if the horde make it in they sprint through the zone and start rooting people in place of his aoe so the tanks all die then the casters get molested one by one. this goes on all night until one side establishes itself for long enough to complete the pve event. awesome. cant wait for someone to make this type of situation a reality in a game, oh wait verant did in 1999-2002, then sony ruined eq and it now is terrible.

I think this is one of the poor design decisions of WoW. Any real acheivement in the game requires leveling, or combat. There’s nothing else to really do that provides satisfaction. So in order to keep players feeling like they are progressing, the only option is to add more dings. To do that, leveling has to be fast.

I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong in casual friendly, players need to feel like they’re getting somewhere despite how many hours they spend in the game, but I do think there needs to be more than just questing and leveling.

@the truth – why don’t you look outside of WoW? There are a lot of Wowified games now, but there are some with different models of play. Hey. If you are after a challenge, why not give something like the original Everquest a go? You’ll find plenty there.

HATE IT!

Anyway more to the point lets talk about WoW. I do think blizzard have dumbed WoW down and made it more ‘casual’ friendly. But the way I see it is it kind of works, they have added 10 man raids for less accomplished players to see content, they have changed a good bit of actual talents and gear needed, the only thing I really moan about is leveling speed. In my opinion leveling should be slowed right down, I missed out on more than half of the old content, the old world is still populated but not with people running your dire mauls or scholomance – they are just questing to level up quicker it makes me sad

Anyway to sum up my thought I want to play a game for a couple of hours and actually achieve something in old vanilla Wow this wasnt always easy to do and in some instances felt like a second job. I do hope they add content for more ‘hardcore’ players but for me its ideal atm