I am out of here

[Thecla]

Well, first of all, I assume most people don’t agree with me, or the game would not be as popular as it is, but even then, I assume at least some of my criticism is valid even for those that play it.

Well, just to chime in with my strong agreement for pretty much everthing you say. I played a hunter early on up to about lvl 48 (incidently hating the way in which WoW implemented that class around pet and trap micromanagement, made them a nightmare to play in instances, and gave them a ranged deadzone just in case they didn't have too many deficiencies already); quit; came back after a long break and leveled up an old shadow priest to 60 (who was actually a lot more fun to play than the hunter); looked around at what to do next, and quit for good.

Actually, one small thing I did enjoy before quitting, was going through a fair part of Zul'Farrak with that priest (no bosses, of course, no xp, and no worthwhile items ---but it still shows they could have done things differently).

Just a few of incidental comments on your excellent essay.:P

Areas to visit
Sure, there are no real new ones, I have “done” even the level 60 ones. Yet, those last several map areas of the game were I have spent my time since, say, level 50-55 has probably been the most boring, badly done and lacking in atmosphere, creativity and finish of all in the game.

Silithious, in particular, was just awful. Cobbled together with no rhyme or reason, very little that was interesting to do or see, and set up -- as far as I could tell -- basically to provide a handy staging post for raids and instances.

Casual play/Exploring/Outdoor fun
At this stage in your character’s life, you are supposed to be in a guild, teaming up for instances (shifting into raids). You should

They could have made the outdoors so much more interesting and fun in so many ways, but they never bothered, or perhaps simply wanted to funnel everyone into raids.

Trade skills
Trade skills are fun, I have tried most of them, but have come to the conclusion that most are only ever usable to either fuel lower level characters with temporary items for quick leveling. Apart from perhaps potion making and making bags, I have yet to find the crafting skills of much for myself or any other character of similar level to me. This is connected with bad item creation in the game, see below, my main gripe which strangely comes at the end. I can tailor tons of items out of which I wonder if 80% of them has EVER been crafted and used much by anyone in the game. A few of the worthless items have as the only good thing that they can be used to level your skill, they are themselves of no use.

Yup --- exactly as you say. In tailoring, for example, apart from bags, you made stuff simply for the sake of raising your skill level, so you could make more cheap higher level items that would raise your essentially useless skill lvl more.

The biggest problem is though, that once you hit around 230 or so in the skills, you are not supposed to progress much any more. Of course, the exception being if you care to grind hopelessly for the ingredients (and the recipies themselves). Trying to get tailoring to 300 and actually use some of the high level recipies means you need rare materials (for example felcloth and mooncloth (which you get at a slow rate from the felcloth which requires hours upon hours of grind of a few specific monsters, not even sure you get reputation at the same time).

I would say you could get quite a bit beyond 230 without too much trouble, but it definitely got slower and slower the higher you went; and what lvl 60 character wants to spend all that time farming those satyrs in Ashenvale for fellcloth (and absolutely nothing else), assuming they can even find a spot that isn't crawling with other similar characters, just for the pleasure of saying you have 300 tailoring?

Skills
Other skills, spells and such are completely tied to your leveling, when you can just buy them. Once you hit 60, there is no more for you with the exception to save money for a slightly faster mount or grind instances for versions of some spells that affect all players in your group. That is it, this is not an alternative for a level 60 character, to improve on, since there are no existing improvements.

And I have to say here, even below 60, it was not always the most exciting moment when you finally got to purchase the lvl 6 versions of "banish sprurgles", "inflame", and "create devastation" to replace your lvl 5 versions of exactly the same skills. It's another issue with the non-instance/raid game, that combat as a whole gets pretty monotonous. Well, no doubt it isn't designed to be otherwise.

Reputation
So, unless you have hours upon hours each time/evening to set up instances and raid groups, are bored with wondering if your eyes are turning bad from all the dim views of outdoor areas voided of content and don’t like to grind those void areas for random monsters to increase your crafting skills resulting in basically no reward, what can you do? Gather reputation!... Sorry to say so, reputation is a complete disaster in the game.

Yup again --- I half-heartedly started working on argent dawn and cenarion reps, but the timbermaw furbolgs had already done me in. And I recognize they are but a tiny drop in the WoW reputaion bucket.

Quest problems
So what was the technical problem that makes it impossible to test for more than 20 quests at a time when you kill a monster? (disregarding that not all quests require to keep track of kills or item drops and if you have several, the type of item/monster will probably not even exist close to the map you are in and can be removed when you enter the area). That would be the ONLY valid technical reason I can see, but who knows.

Somewhere, I remember someone from Bliz explaining that it would be too computationally intensive for the game to make all the npc's check the quest logs of all the nearby players if they allowed unlimited (or large numbers) of quests. This explanation made no sense to me then, and it makes no sense to me now.

This is pure speculation, but I guess Bliz modeled WoW on EQ, and back before they knew for sure that WoW would be a runaway-locomotive hit, I think they were worried, in particular, about establishing their 'hardcore credentials", and courted the "elite" EQ guilds and designers, figuring the masses would follow, which may explain why they ended up making the game the way they did.

In my view, the game's 'hook' is not ultimately interesting game play (well, I can't say about raids, never having participated in them --- I'm sure it's not straightforward, you need to learn what's what to raid successfully; and obviously there are many people who do find raids interesting, me not being among them) but the lure of better and better stuff at the end of the tunnel. Given the enthusiasm and dedication of at least some of the player base, they just have to make that tunnel extraordinarily long and difficult to crawl through, so they have time to add on another one at the end, after the "top" guilds emerge from it victorious with bloody kness and roughened hands. The EQ model, in other words, with a relatively entertaining 1-60 pregame added on in front.