My thoughts exactly.

 

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"What a let down"

Yeah, your experience mirrors my own. I hyped it up to my brother and my friends and I wasted my money on it. I canceled a week after it released and logged on once to clear my mail before my account went down two weeks later. I did that only because I had hope they would go "wtf, we better fix this back cause people aren't happy!" But of course that didn't happen due to their legendary hubris.

The hardcore raiders are happy and just adapted but most of the people that I know in real life that used to play aren't bothering anymore. Game isn't very fun as it currently runs.

 

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In one word, describe the reason you've cancelled 4 accounts and your guild has left to go another game, maybe permanently this time:


See: thread title.


With specific examples of just exactly what I did not like as a result of this expansion, that is the word the poor crying peon got.

 

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Still playing, still enjoying it.

And I think people complaining about the supposed difficulty of the heroic dungeons have long term memory problems, and don't remember how those dungeons were in TBC and even in WotLK when they started, wearing crappy quest gear, wiping in HoL, Occulus or UP. They got too used to the "easy mode" artificially created during WotLK by the careless distribution of epic gear which progressively turned 5 man dungeon a mindless faceroll.

I think that blaming Cataclysm, Blizzard or Ghostcrawler is only a placebo reason. Could the real reason simply be that after 6+ years of WoW, some people simply have enough of it? No game is eternal, I stopped Asheron's Call after 6 years because I've been there, done that, and the game was getting old, and also finally a good enough game, WoW, was released to replace it. If Rift had been any good (for me), with more content, a bigger landmass, several cities, more race specific lore, more starter areas, more replayability, I could possibly be playing Rift instead of WoW now. If SW:TOR is good enough, I may also stop playing WoW then when the time comes. I wouldn't mind something new, but for now, WoW still remains the best choice on the market with it's huge landmass, cities, rich racial and class lore, and quality challenging content. I understand though that people who happen to enjoy Rift, for whom Rift is "good enough", have stopped playing WoW after 6+ years of "the same".

 

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Still playing, giving it a meh though. I loved vanilla, I loved BC, I loved WotLK. I don't hate Cataclysm, though I did at first for the idiotic difficulty that was Ret. But nothing in this expansion made me go "Awesome! Cool! That Rocks! I totally want to keep playing this game!" Expansions, up until Cataclysm, meant an immediate increase in power for your character. It meant learning new spells, getting more talent points and having something new added to the game that would let you customize your character even more. Cataclysm has felt like it's been the opposite. Most of my characters are doing the same DPS at 85 as they were at 80. Granted, they're not raid pre-geared yet but compared to the last expansions? My characters were significantly more powerful in quest gear at 70 and 80 than they were at 60 or 70. That pattern didn't hold true for Cataclysm. I want my characters to advance! I paid for the expansion so I could get more powerful not so that I could go backwards or not change at all.

I leveled a character through the 1-60 content and while the quests were entertaining and it was definitely streamlined....it lacked unique storytelling. That's something I enjoyed from wow at the very start. A good story with every quest that felt like it belonged there in that place in the world. But in Cataclysm it really felt like every other questline was based on some pop culture reference or other. I don't mind that kind of thing now and then but it was everywhere you turned! It really, really made me miss the uniqueness of the old quests even if they were scattered and complicated. I did like the uses of vehicles and other things to give some flavor here and there and a little twist on the same ol', same ol'.

 

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I've played WoW off and on (mostly off) since late BC.


WoW is pretty easily the best, most well done, most polished MMORPG, I've ever played, and I've spent more hours playing WoW than any other game.


Loved vanilla, liked BC, really liked WotLK.


CATA? Hmm. The new leveling areas have lost some of the charm, but they are fun and streamlined, which is both good and bad. Overall good. I really really really dislike their (mis)use of phasing. Being literally a few game feet away from someone and not being able to see them, as they are out of phase, completely immersion and fun breaking. Unreal.


Arenas are still king, rated bg's, pfft, they either are not competent or continually lie to us about end game PvP. Hmm, which is it. Perhaps a touch of both, but they've definitely lied about arenas repeatedly.


Healing change I really super dislike.


I'm disappointed in CATA.


I do think Korrigan has a good point about the short memories. But at the same time, my own guess is that many players get tired after four years in the game, the bait and switch and you are a noob again who must wipe and 'earn your stripes'. I also feel Blizzard has helped set the expectation on ease of instances.


Now, if you make dungeons easy to just turned max levels, they are going to be pretty darn trivial once players get some gear and experience. So maybe it's a necessary evil, I don't know.

 

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Korr, come on now, you're lying to yourself, look around you. The expansion was bad. Most of us here WANTED to like the expansion. Most of us here WERE enjoying the game right before the expansion.

I've been playing MMOs long enough, and have been through plenty of them now. Hell, I've been bored and quit plenty of them by now. I know the difference between, wow, I'm bored of this game because I've played it too long and it's old. And, wow, I hate playing this game now. Most MMOs don't even hit the 2nd category for me, they just get older and the 1st category gets stronger. WoW used to be in the former category off and on, but with Cataclysm it has vaulted wholly into the latter. Also, you're the one with memory problems, as I've highlighted before by digging up past threads on similar time periods to this. Neither Raids nor Dungeons have been cried about so loudly for quite some time, looking back to threads at the release of WoTLK and just prior.

And I'll say something else here, since you bring up Rift - I wasn't even going to give that game a try. I hadn't looked at much information on it. Cataclysm had me hook, line and sinker and I was happy to enjoy it for quite some time - until I played it for longer than a week. Then, trying Rift didn't sound so bad. Cataclysm drove me there.

 

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I like the difficulty of the instances but it's only difficult the first few times - once you master them it's just a painful grind.


I llike the difficulty of the raids too, personally, but it killed casual raiding and a lot of my guildies can't really handle it, which has hurt our guild, or what's left of it now since many have bailed for grass is greener and doing no better elsewhere.


I have mixed feelings about all the revamps. I didn't think anything was wrong with the game so gutting stats and the talent trees, while making speccing moron proof, took any thinking or variety out of speccing.


New low level content is ok - they redid it well but it's now so utterly generic, funneled, and streamlined that it's almost too formulaic.


Worst part for me though, is that they make so much of the game brain dead easy (leveling to 85, for ex) and grindy (grinding heroics, grinding JP, grinding VP). The faction and "emblem" grinds are an exact repeat of northrend with no twists and they're already talking about revamping/bumping emblems to extend/repeat the existing hell grinds. The total lack of twist, change, or innovation here and the carrying on of the northrend grind, slap you in the face, redo the exact same gring, thing just isn't fun.


I log on to raid but even that's misery lately since our progression is stymied - a lot of my WoW friends aren't elite raiders and just can't execute or deal with the pressure of what I consider to be easy content.

 

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I do think Blizz also gave a sense of entitlement with wotlk and I also think there is a limit to players having fun being noob wipees again. That's just my impressions.

 

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Korrigan is Ghostcrawler. The way he tells people what they really think, it is obvious.

 

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