I personally love WoW to death. Maybe literally, too, as it's eating up so much of my time that I could spend doing other, more productive things, like eating, sleeping, exercising, writing MyGamer.com articles... :duck:
But to add to this discussion, I do have one major pet peeve with WoW I have at the moment. I realize it's early in the game's lifespan, but personally I think Blizzard should address it in the next major patch.
That beef? Currently the way the game is set up, the only way to get the real high-end awards, those that make the game worthwhile and can give you that warm fuzzy feeling of special accomplishment, that you've done something worthwhile in the large Persistent World that other players can acknowledge, and not feel like some cookie-cutter quest griner that would reduce your enjoyment of the game, is to engage in PvP combat. It's the only way, currently - once you hit level 60 and do every quest in the game, unless you're willing to engage in PvP, you're done. Finished. You might as well uninstall the game. I can't find a way to justify paying a monthly fee for a game that has a finite, foreseeable ending. As is, the only way to make this game last the length of several months and possibly years, to keep it fresh and exciting, is to engage in PvP.
The problem with this? Well, it leaves behind those of us who don't like PvP. I'm one of them. Call me a carebear all you want, but I just hate it. No matter how hard I try and how hard I practice, I just can't get any good at it. It just frustrates me to death whenever I engage in it. I honestly try to circle-strafe with the mouse to the best of my ability, because there are a huge number of buttons to juggle in an MMORPG, it makes circle-strafing in WoW infinitely harder for me than an FPS with a much simpler control set-up, like Half-Life 2. Even when I have a plan set up for dealing with an opponent, when the time comes, all the pressure just makes me choke. All the spells, stances, shapeshifts and such become so infinitely daunting to keep track of that it's impossible for me to memorize them all, so I play "find the key" for the first spell of my salvo, and by the time I find it, the Warrior does ten thousand critical strikes on me for 9999999999 HP or thereabouts each and I get fuxx0red. Not to mention that apparently in Contested Territories I seem to be a magnet for high-level jerks who derive some kind of perverse pleasure of making my questing experience in these areas an exercise in boredom-torture, as they make my game slow to a crawl by having me corpse-run ten gadzillion times, time I could spend better actually having fun doing my quests. And since many quests take place in Contested Territory, I am effectively cut off from entire portions of the game. (Although I'm not a fan of PvP, I still have a couple of characters on PvP servers because I have friends IRL who refuse to play anywhere else.)
Blizzard is apparently committed to making the game enjoyable for PvPers and carebears alike, as in many FAQs, press releases, guides, etc., they repeatedly state their commitment to make non-PvPers as happy with the game as PvPers. But what's their apparent solution? Make more PvP options, in the form of the Battlegrounds, with the intent of giving a way for non-PvPers to have a more enjoyable experience PvPing (by removing boring things such as corpse runs) and get them to PvP, inadvertently opening up ways to cheat one's way to the PvP top in the process. So, to make the game enjoyable for those who don't like PvP, you create more PvP? No offense, Blizzard, but I don't think I need to tell anyone else how foolish that philosophy is.
I'd say more, but I don't want this post to become a Dickens-length novel. (The editors at MyGamer.com prefer Hemingway anyway.)
