I dig your point mven, and i actually do think you represent a part of the gaming community. That part is, like i said before, the old and wise and oldschool and hardcore bit. I admit there are a lot of things that annoy me in WoW. Take last Wednesday... my guild made a small 15-20 man raid and we went griefing some alliance towns. Our raid was supposed to end with killing a faction leader - we chose darnassus as our final objective. We raided southshore, refugee point, darkshire, menethil harbor and finally darnassus. And in every city, there were guards. New guards. Lots of guards. Lvl 65 guards. 5-min or less respawn time. I remember just before patch 2.0 when i cleared southshore all by myself. WTF blizzard, what's up with the carebearism !? .... Gone are those days. Yes, i'm pissed. I'm pissed about BGs killing world pvp. I'm pissed about the grinding in those BGs. I'm pissed blizzard sees BGs as PvP.
Still, i have choices. I can go gank around people or go to a pvp objective and fight there. I won a little 1vs2 in hellfire, against 2 warriors... i was so happy in my pants. I was satisfied. That's how it is in WoW, it's about the e-peen. No matter the epix or greens, if you can pwn that noob, you're the man. I remember once, i had a flame war on my realm's forum with a member of the alliance premade (back in the days where were no x-ream bgs). This guy was good, he was a rogue like me, but he was a twink, so i said he compensates for skill with those enchants... and so on and so forth. After several pages of flaming eachother we decided to have a duel, 2 out of 3. We met, my buddies behind me, him and his buddies behind him. He was outgearing me and he had a pvp spec - i still had my hybrid grind/utility Combat spec. I won 2 out of 3. I had my 15 mins of glory and i felt good. He later logged in on another account and congratulated me. We gained respect for eachother and we moved on. I'm sure there are moments like these that every wow player had. It's what makes this game good. Sure, instances are repetitive, sure there are a lot of retards that play this game, but admit it, you had your day in the sun. This game has some highlights. A "the first" history - first time you ninjaed something, first time when you wiped your raid, first time when you downed a raid boss, first time you soloed an instance boss, first time when you were outnumbered in pvp, but you still won, first time a lucky crit saved your life, first time you critted over x, etc etc.
There are still a lot of "first times" in WoW to do for me. Maybe you did it all and you got sick of it, maybe you're right and after 1 year i'll join you and say WoW is not a good game. But for now, i'm still having fun. My e-peen still grows an inch from time to time.
Look... what if there would be a genre called CMMORPG (casual mmo...) and another called HMMORPG (hardcore blah blah). And it would be like apples and oranges, no way to compare them, as one cannot compare the FPS genre with RTS. And say EQ and UO and god knows what else fit into HMMO category, but WoW (and from what i've seen LOTR Online) would fall into CMMO category. Would you like WoW more ? I dig that WoW changes the perspective of game producers, that future games will be easier. But also, WoW brought a lot of MMO customers. And not all of them are "casual" or "softcore'. Some of the new rpg-ers might be hardcore too. And sooner or later there will be a product to address them. The pool of mmorpg-ers has just increased, that can't be bad.
Another thing. Let's talk about the "hardcorism" of WoW. Don't base your opinions on death sentence only. WoW IS hardcore, if YOU are hardcore. If you wanna play 2 hours a day, WoW is okay. If you wanna play 6 hours a day WoW is okay again. The difference here is - or maybe it used to be - that a casual would lack skill, gear, relations and know-how. I've ran maraudon countless times to get my NR gear, i strongly believe i'm an expert regarding that instance. I know the bosses' behavior, i know the rare spawns and where they spawn, i know every drop and the drop rate, i know the patrols, their pattern, i know herbs and mining nodes. A casual player (i'm not saying i'm hardcore, but surely above casual) will never know those things, will never know the formulae for glancing blows or miss rate. I do, and that's what gives me an edge. I can down certain stuff that he couldn't. I can pwn some players that he couldn't. And of course, there's always a bigger fish. I can have my arse handed to me by other players. Everyone can have epix ? I dont' think so. I think you know as well as i do how hard is to control a raid, keep everyone in check and have everyone do his job right. And with TBC, the encounters are much more difficult. No more tank and spank. After you go into a heroic instance and eat an 8k cleave, you'll know what i'm talking about.
Maybe for you this is nothing, easy as pie; for me is still a challenge. See, before WoW i wasted some 6 months of my life playing a small korean game called MU. Let me tell you this, is VERY basic. It's a d2 clone without A LOT of stuff. WoW for me was like "OOooooooohhh.... shiny !!". I know you played other games and you think they were better. Think about something else for a moment, think about the peak of your experience, your emotion in a computer game. Mine was years ago when i played Sanitarium. Very, very few games after that were a match to the "feeling" sanitarium gave me. Look at the movies they make nowadays. And the music. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Remakes. Movies based on a book or story. Remakes of remakes. The making of the making of that remake of a remake. There are very few original ideas now. It's true in games too. They look better, they're flashier, but gawd, no game can compete with Sanitarium, still. That was the best game ever, imo. The real problem is not WoW. The real problem is programmers let themselves be influenced by WoW because they lack new ideas. And it's not their fault, it's the plague of our time. Blizzard always came up with new ideas, or greatly enhanced old ideas - dune was old and cool, but warcraft was the fucking golden goose. And others copied blizz over and over, but there were still some good games. So I say, don't worry. WoW can't do harm. Even if you don't see any hardcore oldschool mmo's now, i'm sure there will be some in the near future.
And a last thing, without irony or sarcasm, what do you consider a good game ? If WoW is bad, give me an example of what you think is a good game, and you like it.
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