I am out of here

[Jarulf]

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. Of course, some like another type of game than me, who knows.

So what makes the game turn boring and not fun any more to play when I reached level 60, yet most people tend to claim the game doesn’t really start until you turn 60? Well, I would say that the areas were Blizzard has failed are the boring repetitive game play, lack of alternatives (yes, bare with me, I will explain) and a complete failure as far as item and item creation goes in the game, especially when you hit level 60!

I have enjoyed playing my characters (mainly my now level 60 hord Priest and before that my level 37ish alliance Druid but also a few level 1-25 chars of various types). It has been fun, even if frustrating at times, and there has always been options, real alternatives and fun areas to visit. Even the items themselves, although with problems even before you hit level 60, has been an enjoyable part. Of course, I take much of my ideas on how good and nice items can be used in games from the Diablo series (which also has flaws of course) and from private role-playing as well as a host of other computer games of the RPG type.

So what problems do I have now? What makes no alternative seem attractive? Lets take my Priest, who is the only level 60 character, what should I do with it? Apart from the fact that I just ditched a bunch of items, quests and such from events that apparently was of a “one time type” only and are now useless, what should I do?

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. I would attribute this to the fact that Blizzard seems to believe that post 60, you should spend time grinding instances, preferably the raid ones! The normal outdoor areas are badly done, lack all those final touches that exists in the earlier ones, there is no real plot or stories for them, typically they are wasted land (in a brown or grayish colour map) further disguised by having mist/fog so that you really don’t see much and wonder weather your monitor needs dusting. The exception is Winterspring which at least look beautiful. Still it fails pretty much like other end areas in that it is mostly void of any content except for random walking monsters. There is a town or hub to visit (usually with limited vendors, trainers, or other interesting people, Silithus being an exception) but that is pretty much it. Since there is no difference at this stage any longer regarding being horde or alliance (except not being able to interact), there is no longer any sense of “we” or “them”, you find you walk up to night elves in the field to get a quest without wondering what on earth is going on. Put simply, Blizzard stopped tending to the map areas that people reach when they turn, say 50, disguising it all by steering people versus instances which leads to the next problem.

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 never go around yourself alone and you should stop forgetting about having short casual fun outdoors, it is all instance play now. Quests are all elite if outdoors and very few of the quest lines are completable solo. Yes I know it is a multiplayer game, but up until level 50 or so, the game has lots of content that can be fun experiencing on your own when there is no scheduled guild content going on. This stops when you hit 60 (basically), the ONLY way to progress is by playing with full teams in instances with the possible exception being reputation grinding until you puke to be able to purchase that one extra recipe or item.

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. If you don’t do much instances, you can find some crafted items relatively useful although you will of course be far behind instance people in items. As for items found “in the outdoors”, well, after level 10, you hardly ever find anything much of use with the exception of not doing instances and not crafting, then they can be of some use for another 20 levels or so.

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).

All well, except that you don’t need 2 mooncloth, you need 5 or 10 or a gazillion of them, plus several other rare items like essence of some strange sort and so on. To get them, you need to kill another gazillion monsters since the drop rate is, of course, extreme low. Typically to make 1 (!!!) item of say some mooncloth or whatever type, I need more strange and rare ingredients than I have yet to come across in my entire career with the level 60 char, many also, it seems, mostly gotten from instances (see, you are not supposed to be out there in the wild). Trying to raise any crafting skill beyond 230 or so simply means horribly boring grinding for ingredients, doing useless crafts (since they require less ingredients) and even when you do so, you end up with being able to do items that has no particular use anyway, since you can instead spend a few nights repeating an instance until you get the far superior alternative instead.



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.

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! Seems fun and good although a bit tiresome, but sure, gathering up 3000 reputation to advance a level seems at least doable. Sure, you are level 60 so you probably get like 5 from each monster and every now and then can collect drops that if you collect a few hundred gives you a few hundred more points. Yeah, seems doable at least. *BAM*, the mighty “you shall not progress stick” of Blizzard hits you right in the face before you even start. Turns out to really get some rewards, you usually needs to level several tiers in reputation, although the first one was 3000 points, you soon start to look at 12000 and 21000 points (that is 4200 monsters at 5 rep a pop!!!!!) Gosh! So one expect there to be some super rewards. Not so, you typically can then buy some cloth glove that turns out to be far worse than the worthless glove you already crafted. Much better to enter an instance with the proper boss and get your uber set glove instead. You can also get some recipies at times. Of course, you need to grind up your skill enough first and then, well, the item you craft might be of some use, but nothing fantastic. Sorry to say so, reputation is a complete disaster in the game.

PvP
Yes, I am completely out of PvP so that area is closed, although I guess there is a bit to do there.

Items
So, about every other idea of what to do with your level 60 character out of the door, lets go the way one do in many other games, look for nice good items to improve your character. Sure, all the other alternatives about, are ultimately to get better items, but it turned out they were not so good at it, you simply won’t get fantastic items, ever that way, and it takes forever.

So were do one get nice items, because the game has fantastically good items for everyone to use. Actually, using programs to look at all items in the game, there are fantastically many looks of items out there. Hmm, yet, most people seems to run around with more or less the same item. What a shame. Well, lets go for them anyway and see. Turns out there is really one way to go and one way only. You collect your classes only set. Each item has a pre determined spot to find it (a specific monster usually in a specific instance). When you have your set, you start collecting the next better set, exchanging each item. One can apparently go on doing this several times until one reach the current uberset which is apparently rendered useless by the next instance Blizzard release were you should again go to each specific monster to get your new set items. For slots were you don’t have set items, you still don’t worry, there is this non set item that is THE item to get and you consequently go to the instance with the monster in question that drops it and do it until it drops.

Of course, there is no point (except for the sake of completing all quests, but see below) to do instances that lacks your set items or the uber wand or whatever, since the only reward is items that are inferior. All items drop at specific monsters only!! The exception is useless crap that drop randomly. The only time such random items are of any possible use is until you are level 20 perhaps. After that, they could just replace it all with “useless crap equipment” adding “random” at the front of some of them. Random items are basically never of any use, often more crappy than crafted items (or no one would use the crafted or whatever the reason, but since the designated set items are better anyway, no one goes for crafted items either).

Is this fun? There must be some randomness and excitement in it at least? No. The only randomness is how many times you need to kill a particular boss in an instance before you get lucky and get the specific set item you are currently looking for. But at least they have some random stats on the items, I mean like +10 to +12 int so that there is some excitement or even point in redoing a boss after you got lucky? Nope, none whatsoever!!! Only random items are the crappy one that gives you +2 int when you are looking for your next set item that gives +12 int (plus a bunch of other stuff), you would never waste yourself on that. There aren’t even special abilities only on random items. The set items are the best in all aspects, period, end of story and they drop from specific bosses in specific instances only. End of story again. Yes, item hunting just turned so fun, not!

Turns out all usable items are predetermined and redesigned and preset to drop at a specific place only. Randomness is only believed because most junk is randomly created so they CAN create random items, they just won’t do it for usable items. Even such a thing as weapon type is predetermined. So a specific item is always, say a sword, never a sword or a mace, or an axe and so on, not even such a thing is left to the luck.

But surely, there must be more than one staff or one helm or one whatever findable to be judge to be of the correct level for you at a given time? So that you can go either to boss A for shield 1 or to boss B for shield 2 and possibly hope for a “random” shield 3 from monster type C? Well, even if there is, the difference is bordering a difference in millimeters when we are discussing meters or tens of meters. The game creators are apparently fanatically and ruthlessly applying some algorithm to their non randomly created items so that there can’t be even the slightest deviation in “goodness” of an item comparable to the boss or monster, instance and state of character looking for it (that is, if you are currently equipped by tier 2 set looking for tier 3). Even a variation of, say +10 to +12 would apparently wreck havoc in the universe of Warcraft and is not tolerated, hence, there is really not much difference what item (of your designated equipment level to wear depending on what instance you can run) you actually DO equip, but since there is no randomness to start with and since you know exactly what monster drop what item, why go for monster A when you know that you never get the item with one extra int when you can get that for sure from monster 2 (if you kill it a few times, not for sure every kill).

So Blizzard has created a completely brainless, boring, non varying system of items, with no excitement or surprises were you basically progress from monster A to monster B as soon as you find the desired item from monster A (you typically don’t have a chance for monster B until then) and then after that to monster C (when Blizzard releases that instance) and so on with each new instance. Of course, everyone ends up wearing these very same set items. Random items or crafted items doesn’t fit in. Possibly with some exceptions now and then, at least at the beginning when you still look for your first set item (which is why crafting skills, even though horribly grinding in nature of leveling, has no real reward anyway). Killing random monsters, or even quest monsters outside instances is, from an item perspective as useful and rewarding as selling sand in Sahara!

Yet, Blizzard have at least some knowledge on how to create random items in random ways that are at least some fun through their Diablo games. But apparently they decided that instead they wanted the “here is your next ultimate item all should try for” (or you can’t progress in the dungeon) and it is found in one place only. After that, there is the next item and so on. Talk about boring before one even start.

Recently I found the apparent “algorithm” on creating items, which of course is just a disguise, since if it actually would have worked, we would have random stats on items, we don’t, it is all pre set (following extremely specific rules on what is possible or not) which makes it all boring. Why not let it lose and create random items? Would be so much more fun and interesting. So what if there is a small chance to find the same item with 2 extra int on it, would the whole world collapse? Of course not, but would be far more interesting and fun and you would not see everyone running around in the same set either.

Oh well, how can one mess up so horrible?


Quest problems
So, I have one more gripe that I will put forward that I can think of right now. That one of limited quests at once. For some reason Blizzard decided that their servers can’t handle you having more than 20 quests at once. End of story. Doesn’t matter how much hardware upgrades one do, that seems to be like a law of nature. “No, no” someone always chime in, it is not only that (even though Blizzard state that as one reason, which is silly but OK), “you are supposed to make decisions on what quests to work on”. Huh? Yeah, I tend to do that by going to the place were one can complete the quest typically traveling around the world 10 times once you hit level 30-40 or so, and then, because you can only have 20 quests at once, you need to travel around again 10 times to complete a few more quests, even if it is about the same travel.

I call Bull on that excuse, it is simply not valid and adds nothing, yet causes frustration and anger. What happens is that instead you end up dropping quests, many of which you will never remember you had and if you do, you have absolutely no clue were you got them, you usually tend to fill up your bank with items from them though, not knowing for sure if it was from that quest you DO remember to pick up when you sometime in the future get to that place were you think had a quest not done.

Obviously you also want to do instances and instance quests. Typically though, those are several for an instance, so you want some good chunk of free quest slots. Some are quest lines though and you have to remember those. On top of that, most later instances has quests that you get from all over the world, some in obscure places in the middle of monsters. You try to collect those at once and keep them. If you have 4 hours to play a night and manage to get people to play an instance an one agree on “Sunken Temple”, you don’t want to say “OK, now, just wait 3 hours while I find out what quests I have seen for this in the past, were I need to go to pick them up, and then actually go and pick them up, lets see, the first is from an NPC far out from the flashpoint among monsters in some troll area up in Hinterland, should take me 10 minutes only to fly up there, another 15 to travel to the NPC and back and then the next quest was on the other continent……” Well, the instance run is over before you even figure out what you are supposed to do. Keeping them all in your quest log (excluding the ones picked up “close” to the instance and keeping a note by the computer what quests you actually have seen for the instance) helps. Of course, that mean that you have some 10 or more slots taken by such “reserved for later when you play with others” quests. In addition, you have some unfinished quests from a few areas that you either also need others to help, or perhaps need to level a bit first but with you already have started, or perhaps needs to grind a gazillion monsters to complete and you decide to split it up in a few sittings. That leaves a few spots for actual quests you work on in an area, typically entering a new area at level 50-60 meant a bunch of new quests being available, some working well together, but you could only pick up a few, since you only had 5 slots free. Turns out the quest you skipped and pick up later, has a follow-up that required you to kill the exact same monster on the other side of the map that you just killed to complete a quest to get a free slot and so on. And don’t you DARE abort this area and go to another to play with a friend who just came online tonight, since then you must drop all quests here and go back there and find all the quests you dropped/skipped when you was last here since you wanted to have some variation. Sigh. Just hopelessly. Yet, I find the skills and its system a quite good part of the game (sure the ones requiring you to just kill 10 monsters or collect 20 items from a specific monster is a bit boring but there are many good quest lines, too bad you can’t experience many, at least not at the same time due to the quest limit and many times, you are a bit overlevelled anyway when you go back to do it because you could not do them at the same time).

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.

Well, in any case, I am out of it for now. I might be back to check out the expansion, who knows. Since the subscription fee was just paid the other day, I might be around another 20 days or so, probably playing some lower level character, but then I will definitely take a break. If I come back? Who knows.

[gothmog]

I agree on most of your points, although some of them (esp. the grinding, only instances, trade skills, reputation) should be fixed with the Expansion. I especially agree with the points about Items.
Everyone runs around in his uniform, everyone has the same stuff, you (if you are in a raiding group) know exactly what you will wear in three months, and you know exactly it will be better in nearly all aspects than what you wear now, and you know exactly which boss will drop it. The only question is how many runs do you need for it, and do you have enough dkp for it? How boring.
It is a bit better with the token system now, but it still is a boring system. I want the Diablo 2 rares back. They were oftentimes better than the Unique items (the Epics/Rares in WoW) in pure, raw power, but lacked the special abilities some Uniques provided (the set bonus from the set items in WoW).
I could go out on my own, kill some mobs and have always the chance that some item I've never seen, but has the perfect stats for me, might drop, even killing some Stygian Witches might have some reward. If I go out (or rather into raid instances) in WoW I know exactly what might drop and what is useful for me. In case I'm not in an instance I know nothing will drop that I will use. I might sell it for some gold though. No excitement or surprise in terms of items.
Then the frequency of rewards: How long do you need to raid/grind/PvP to get a new item? I calculated it for myself. For each item I received I raided around 100h to get my "reward". Something I will discard in another three months already.

[MongoJerry]

I understand your feelings completely. It may seem cliche to say this, but you might try coming back for the expansion, because it sure seems like Blizzard is fixing a lot of the structural problems in the game with it. As I said before, the problem with the game is that the pre-release development was focused on pre-level-capped areas -- and really only the first 40 levels got really polished. Everything after that was thrown together without much time for balancing or polishing. I'm looking forward to the expansion, because finally Blizzard will have / have had a chance to really polish the end game. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with it.

PvP
Yes, I am completely out of PvP so that area is closed, although I guess there is a bit to do there.

For me, PvP is a major piece of content in the game. How you play your character and the value you place on certain skills and items changes dramatically when you are PvP'ing. Skills that you think are "must have" in PvE become meaningless in PvP and skills you thought were "worthless" in PvE can become vital in PvP.

Of course, to really enjoy PvP, it helps to have a group of people on Vent or Teamspeak with you with whom to play. Yes, you can have fun queuing up solo for battlegrounds, but it can also get frustrating to play solo and know that you and likely the group of pick-ups you get thrown together with will get stomped by most organized groups that are using voice communications. So to really enjoy PvP, find some friends and see if you guys want to get together and PvP a bit. The comraderie and thrill of the battlegrounds can be quite intoxicating. When 1.12 comes out, probably this Tuesday, games will be up 24/7, so you should be able to go whenever you choose to. To me, not playing PvP is like missing a third of the game's content. Yes, you can choose not to do it, but you're missing out on a big part of the game.

Obviously you also want to do instances and instance quests. Typically though, those are several for an instance, so you want some good chunk of free quest slots. Some are quest lines though and you have to remember those. On top of that, most later instances has quests that you get from all over the world, some in obscure places in the middle of monsters. You try to collect those at once and keep them. If you have 4 hours to play a night and manage to get people to play an instance an one agree on “Sunken Temple”, you don’t want to say “OK, now, just wait 3 hours while I find out what quests I have seen for this in the past...

I've never liked the 20 quest limit, but also due to planning, I've never had this problem, either, mostly because I plan out that I will be going to a particular set of one or two instances soon and therefore know to store all the quests for those instances in my quest log. I can afford to keep five or six quests in my log for a particular instance and still keep 14 or 15 "world" quests. If I need to drop some quests to make room, I drop the world quests that are easy to pick up again -- ones in towns or whatnot -- or even the instance quests if again they are convenient to pick up again (say, from a town near the instance itself). I always keep the instance-related quests from far off places in my quest log, though.

[lemekim]

Ah yes, WoW could indeed use a healthy dose of randomness. More randomized items... More unique abilities on those items! More randomized mobs - and random abilities on those mobs. Perhaps even partly randomized dungeons!

But sadly, this game currently does not have enough content to support prolonged play by more casual players - and I see exactly where you are coming from, and agree with your points. Even though originally serving casual players was this game's very goal. Blizzard will fix various inconviniences that you mentioned in your post, perhaps even including the quest limit, and the game will be fun again for a while - but I am afraid that Blizzard will once again forget about its original goals, and leave the casual player behind. But it still might be worth it to pick up the expansion once it comes out for all the new content.

[Concillian]

I also understand your viewpoints completely Jarulf. The endgame is amazingly redundant for solo play at 60 and frustrating for group play when you can't play at a time when others you know play (pick-up groups).

For this kind of a person, level 60 becomes, without a doubt a choice of 4 different things:
1) grind grind grind
2) bang your head against the wall with PUGs
3) make another alt
4) call yourself done with the game

You definitely aren't the first to choose #4. FlashnPan and ShadoweSpirit left for some of the same reasons you outlined shortly after, or maybe even shortly before hitting 60.

[Monkey]

I especially agree with the points about Items.
Everyone runs around in his uniform, everyone has the same stuff, you (if you are in a raiding group) know exactly what you will wear in three months, and you know exactly it will be better in nearly all aspects than what you wear now, and you know exactly which boss will drop it. The only question is how many runs do you need for it, and do you have enough dkp for it? How boring.

I was just thinking this exact thing the other day and wondering why it hasn't been commented on--Magtheridon is one of the oldest servers from the first day of retail and the level 60 population has matured enough that when you look around in Ironforge you don't see an array of unique characters and you can forget about recognizing friends on sight. All you see are Tier 1 or 2 dressed characters wandering around.

The exception I've noticed (and only since they made innervate trainable at level 40) is that feral druids are popping up with complex assortments of gear because the best feral gear isn't any set, it's a collection of pieces from around the world. And druids are disincentivised to min/max like a rogue might be; they need a little of everything.

Still, Blizzard may or may not understand the problem. In the recent EU Press junket (as reported on worldofwar.net), Blizzard representatives said:

In Naxxramas you implemented the tier 3 set, can we expect a tier 4 in Burning Crusade, or tier 5 etc

Well, I don't know but there will certainly be epic gear sets going forward. Generally the gear sets are very well received and it's not a philosophy we plan to deviate from any time soon. You can see that with the Scourge invasion world event, there's some gear sets. Everyone loves gear sets so we don't plan to deviate from this,

[Kingpin]

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. Of course, some like another type of game than me, who knows.

Hey Jarulf, didn't know you was playing WoW until Laz linked your thread on irc:)

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 never go around yourself alone and you should stop forgetting about having short casual fun outdoors, it is all instance play now. Quests are all elite if outdoors and very few of the quest lines are completable solo. Yes I know it is a multiplayer game, but up until level 50 or so, the game has lots of content that can be fun experiencing on your own when there is no scheduled guild content going on. This stops when you hit 60 (basically), the ONLY way to progress is by playing with full teams in instances with the possible exception being reputation grinding until you puke to be able to purchase that one extra recipe or item.

Causual players do have their problem, with how the game is built up. If you aren't part of a big guild, you are missing very much of the social thing it offers, and will as causal player have alot harder time at lvl 60. Find a group who do the standard 5 man, 10 man instances at lvl 60 can be hard enough, depend if you are horde/alliance, and population on your server. Outside instances, pvp there aren't much on lvl 60 to do, besides grinding rep/gold.

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. I would attribute this to the fact that Blizzard seems to believe that post 60, you should spend time grinding instances, preferably the raid ones!

Silithus together with Plagulands is the best high level areas for both solo/instances. Both that have added content over the latest patches. The game is big, so we have all to understand that the end game haven't as much variations as 1 to 50 have as example. The end game is pretty much either pvp or instances.

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

Tradeskills are great in the game. But, the problem is the rare reciepes require in many cases visit instances. And for causal players some professions is hard to get anything useful from.

Alchemy is one of the professions that work very well as trade skill for even causal players, together with gathering skills skinning, herbalism, mining.

Items
So, about every other idea of what to do with your level 60 character out of the door, lets go the way one do in many other games, look for nice good items to improve your character. Sure, all the other alternatives about, are ultimately to get better items, but it turned out they were not so good at it, you simply won’t get fantastic items, ever that way, and it takes forever.

As you compare with diablo II. Sure, diablo II have a lot of more variations, but in todays D2 the item variation doesn't affect the true variations much. Most items in d2 is useless if you obtain the uber elite uniques. I belive the reason for the limited itemization in WoW, compare to D2 is to keep the balance. To much randomize and you will be out of control for give players still hard enough competition. Sure, this is a negative thing for the causal player. but remember the game is balanced for 6.5miljon players. This is something's they need to take into account for both pvp and pve and ofcourse they are far from perfect, what game is that? not even d2:)

The sets tier 0, 1, 2, 2.5, 3 is mostly instance set, besides the tier 3 set that is a levelup set for expansion. The rest of the items from the instances is to compose your own set of items. Many choose the later over use a complete set since it's in many case a better option.

The problem with know what boss drop what, is internet's fault. Without the sites that gives detailed drop what each boss drops. We would never know it before actual visit it, and it would take time before we learned who drop what setpart.

One of the biggest advantage with wow, same advantage as d2 have is that it never end. You can play it endless of hours and still have something's to do.

[Descended]

I just want to see one poster tell Jarulf that he's a newb for wishing Blizzard would focus on making WoW less relatively gimped for solo play 60+. Maybe someone could make a comment about how "that game wouldn't work" or "WoW needs to be a social-centric game". Come on, make my day.

Maybe I'll go play some D1 now... I think I have this nifty guide somewhere....

[Brother Laz]

As you compare with diablo II. Sure, diablo II have a lot of more variations, but in todays D2 the item variation doesn't affect the true variations much. Most items in d2 is useless if you obtain the uber elite uniques. I belive the reason for the limited itemization in WoW, compare to D2 is to keep the balance. To much randomize and you will be out of control for give players still hard enough competition.

I call it the Seven Lances Effect™. Try to keep things balanced by chopping off anything that might give a character any advantage somewhere over others at the same point in the game. This would even have worked, if:

<span style="color:#CCCCDD">1/ characters had to worry about more than 2 different stats;
<span style="color:#CCCCDD">2/ they didn't purposely overpower set items.

What good is it to get rid of interesting items in the name of balance, and then unbalance the items on purpose?

Sure, this is a negative thing for the causal player. but remember the game is balanced for 6.5miljon players. This is something's they need to take into account for both pvp and pve and ofcourse they are far from perfect, what game is that? not even d2:)

The difference is that not everything is rigidly preplanned for you. You just may find a Gull on your hardcore character in early Act 1, or you may never see one. In WoW, you basically progress from one item to another at predefined points, with no room for randomness or creative input. It's just 'here, take this item. It's better than what you're wearing because its ilvl is higher. So use it, newb'.

The problem with know what boss drop what, is internet's fault. Without the sites that gives detailed drop what each boss drops. We would never know it before actual visit it, and it would take time before we learned who drop what setpart.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. A game should never be a black box and try to hide important information. (By the way, anybody figured out the resistance formula yet?) Even if you didn't know which boss has a 25% chance of dropping the item you want and which hundreds of other monsters have 0%, the fact would remain that you still needed to Farm Boss X to Get Item Z.

In D2, once you are at the end game, your favourite levelling ground is high enough level to drop any item in the game. Or maybe you won't ever see one of your target items. Or maybe you will. The randomness is what keeps people wasting their money to lotteries and into slot machines. You never know, if you kill just one more pack of sirens, they might drop a Zod. It's addictive.

One of the biggest advantage with wow, same advantage as d2 have is that it never end. You can play it endless of hours and still have something's to do.

Oh, that much is true. You could always... wander around, pick up some quests way below your level, grind 50000000 rep, or drive a tonk around.

D2 created its own replayability by making a lot of content random. While WoW seems intent on putting people on a rail and just slowing them down enough to keep them from hitting their head against the content cap. The developers of Hellgate London may have weird ideas about laser guns and may suck at communicating their game concept to prospective players, but they did get one thing right: randomisation.

......

@ Descended: according to about four million players, Jarulf should just learn2play and stop being emo and not call the whaaaambulance because he's too retarded to get into a raiding guild. It is well known that casuals are whiners and want everything in the game without working for it. YA RLY.
Also sprach Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise.

Ps.: 9th!

;)

[lfd]

Ps.: 9th!

You forgot 'TLDR' :D

If only the development team could put as much time and effort into the solo possibilities endgame as they have in some of their raid encounters... I sincerely hope they have, for The Burning Crusade.

I lead a somewhat double life on WoW; I raid horde-side with my guildmates, and I duo alliance-side with a real-life friend. I have immense fun doing both, but when those duo'd characters hit 60, they just... stop. And we start new alts, and go again. Hopefully our current ones will hit 60 not too long before the expansion. And then we'll have to get the existing ones to 70 as well.

Eventually they'll all get to 70, but hopefully there will be more (read: something!) for them to do when they get there.

[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.

[Yuen]

Hey Jarulf,

I understand where you are coming from. I myself still enjoy the game post 60 - but that doesnt detract from the validity of your points.

What happened can be described as a 'Bait and Switch'.

You were exposed to a certain style of game pre-60. The pre-60 style lured or 'baited' you into loving the game. Then suddenly at 60 - with the levelling treadmill now ceased till the advent of the expansion - you are suddenly expected to 'switch' to a completely different aspect of the game.

The 'problem' I believe, stems from the very vision of the developers.

The problem is: The post 60 game that you hate - is always the game that the developers wanted to create. The pre-60 game that you loved - has always been seen by the developers as a levelling treadmill grind, that needed to be disguised from its grind status.

Let me explain further...

Legacy of Steel (LoS) was an Everquest Guild on The Nameless Server that had a very sizeable contingent of high-powered Blizzard Employees. LoS was also the uberguild of its Server. The Blizzard staff working there loved Everquest (EQ) - particularly its end game content, but at the same time noted certain flaws in its design - one of which was the very obvious and painful levelling grind. After putting up with a lot of crap in EQ for a long time (esp screwed up and buggy end game content, and horrible CS) - They must have finally had enough, and made the decision to make their own MMORPG World of Warcraft - keeping all the things they loved about Everquest, but attempting to change all the things they hated.

The problem for you, Jarulf, is that the Blizzard Employees were the ones who enjoyed the camaraderie formed by camping the Froglok in Lower Guk for the Flowing Black Silk Sash (killing the a certain mob for a certain rare drop item). They enjoyed large raiding zones. The Everquest End-Game didnt have much solo content to speak of - and they were fine with that. The post 60 game that you hate and find boring - is essentially the game that they love and always wanted to create.

The pre-60 game that they created - to them - is nothing but a very well disguised levelling treadmill. The treadmills primary function is to get you to the level cap - so you can start enjoying the post 60 game. (And also to teach you to play your character and get emotionally attached to your character along the way). The pre-60 game has always been considered to them a problem. Because in its most basic form - it is nothing but a grind. The problem for the developers has always been to find a way to disguise that grind. Ive read countless posts by the developers of WoW, when they were just EQ guildies throwing around ideas about what they disliked about EQ and MMORPGs, and what they would do to correct it. And what i have described above is their view on the pre-cap game.

The inadvertent problem they have created for people like you, is that they did such a gosh darn wonderful job on disguising the grind. The pre-40 game (in my eyes), has been polished to a degree that i haven't seen in any other MMORPG. This wonderful pre-level cap world they have created effectively did the 'Bait and Switch' on you. You weren't prepared for what was coming at the end of the tunnel.

The reason that I still enjoy the game post-60 is that I always was expecting this post-60 game. And I have always (until recently) viewed the levelling of 1-60 as the developers did. Nothing but a grind. A chore to fulfil till I capped. A well disguised chore, but a chore nonetheless.

I think I'm starting to ramble, and just repeat my points over and over. So I should probably stop there. (Also I'm at work, and should do some work).

Ill end by saying I sympathise with and understand your position Jarulf. One man's meat is another man's poison. Its unfortunate that from your point of view they baited you with some delicious smelling meat, then swapped it for some poison at the last minute. From my point of view, I had to wade through some heavily disguised poison, in order to get to the tasty meat at the end of the tunnel.

[Thecla]

Well, leaving aside a discussion of the apparently irresistible blandishments of the pre-60 WoW game for the unsophisticated gamer who can't recognize poison when he see it, I do wonder how WoW has succeeded in converting 6 million odd people to the pleasures of camping Frogluk's, or whatever it is they're actually doing. It is, honestly, a bit of a mystery to me.

[Thecla]

Oops. Double post.


Ob strat: If you're a hunter, dismiss your pet in dungeons, otherwise you will be thrown out. And if you're a priest, don't be a shadow priest, because then no-one will invite you into your group. Well, unless they're desperate for a priest, which they often will be, in which case they will. But don't expect them to whisper you if you're a hunter.

[Hedon]

Well, leaving aside a discussion of the apparently irresistible blandishments of the pre-60 WoW game for the unsophisticated gamer who can't recognize poison when he see it, I do wonder how WoW has succeeded in converting 6 million odd people to the pleasures of camping Frogluk's, or whatever it is they're actually doing. It is, honestly, a bit of a mystery to me.

Well, EQ was the most sucessfull MMORPG of the pre WoW era. So there must be a certain fascination with camping Frogluk ;)

The fascination is called "content progression". In EQ as well as WoW there is a hierarchy in high end content: one piece of content unlocks directly (specifc key) or indirectly (a certain level of itemization) access to another piece of content higher up the chain (UBRS, DM, Strat, Scholo -> MC, ZG, AQ20 -> BWL -> AQ40 -> Naxx) Each stage has higher requirements than the previous one. There is undeniably a special thrill when you reach the next level of content like killing an especially hard boss. That it was such a long way to get there makes the the victory so much more sweeter.

There wouldn't be anything special about Naxx if everyone who just dinged lvl 60 could walk in there and fight his way to Kel'thuzad. What makes it so fascinating is, that it's so very much of reach for most players yet; that you have to progress first from UBRS to AQ40 or at least BWL to have even have realistic chance with the encounters in Naxx. That's what makes progression content so appealing imo.

[Hedon]

double post :blush:

[Jarulf]

Just a small comment first. I am not advocating solo play or complaining you can't solo in the game. Far from it. Sure, I play solo from time to time, but I also team up with others, random strangers as well as guild people on Terenas (and before when playing alliance on Stormrage). When I claim that it is all instances and not much outdoor, that does not mean they should add more solo content. Far from it. Outdoor or non instnace does NOT equal solo play, although it seems many get that feeling, including Blizzard. There are great possible content to do outdoor that you do as groups (even non elite outdoor areas which seems to be Blizzard's solution to make it challenging).

The problem I have with instances is more of an organizational part (not the how to organizr 5 people, that is a piece of cake, we organize 40 people in our raid). Even if one do have prepared and set up friday for some instances, typicall one end up being 3 or 4 people that eventually decide on an instance, takes an hour or so to have people preprae, pick up the quests for that particular instance, trying to get that other friend to also play, wait for the other to eat his dinner. One start out the instance and the last person can join, get delayed and when he joins someone else drops. After 4 hours one is still only half way through it. Even if one do get all 5 up at once, picking up quests, going there and then playing thorugh (at proper level) do take some time, it isn't done in one hour. If one want to be anywere close to social, one talk, chat and so and that also takes time. Typically, even in the well organized parts, after 3 hours one have to decide, should I stay to the end despite that I should instead go to bed, they said it should take only 3 hours which is all I had? Or should I stay another two so the person who was desperate to finnish it can do that? I am not the person who likes to say, my 3 hours is up right before one hit the last room.

Typical outdoor content is much quicker, one move from one part to the other more randomly, if someone leaves, one switch to anothe rquest or part of the map for a while and so on. You can stop playing when you feel like it, no "must do the last 2 hours or we have to restart from scratch" and there is no "ooops we wiped because someone pressed the wrong button, all the last 4 hours was pointless". This is what I want more of, no problem that it should require some groups.

I just want to see one poster tell Jarulf that he's a newb for wishing Blizzard would focus on making WoW less relatively gimped for solo play 60+. Maybe someone could make a comment about how "that game wouldn't work" or "WoW needs to be a social-centric game". Come on, make my day.

See you missed my complain completely. It was mostly about how item and item creation works, how tradeskills are pretty much useless and how once you hit level 50 or above, there is only gameplay in instances and raids and no casual play that doesn't require planning and setting aside many hours on each playing occation. That has nothing to do with solo or group play. I had some other complains too (such as bad polishing and deserted maps at level 50+), but those were the major ones.

Silithus together with Plagulands is the best high level areas for both solo/instances.

That is not a proper way to divide the game. Non instance does not mean solo (and instances can actually be fun soloing also, despite that there is no loot or experience since you must be far above your level. I would love instances were you have non elite monsters though but that is another story. There is a LOT of content outisde instances that are great for groups and require groups. HOwever, much of it stops existing when you get close to level 60 I would say.

The problem with know what boss drop what, is internet's fault. Without the sites that gives detailed drop what each boss drops. We would never know it before actual visit it, and it would take time before we learned who drop what setpart.

The problem is not know were to get a particular item. The problem is that such a thing exist to start with. That is that items has one specific source only.

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.

My comment on silithus being good was that the town/hub was goodin that it had content, lots of different people, traders and such. That doesn't mean the area in itself is any good.

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.

Exactly, just go up to Ashzara (spelling?). It is mostly one big museum of interesting places, buildings, structures and so on, with no content at all. There is even a pointless wreck surviving crew in one place were you have NPC with no interaction and when you finally find a quest and hopes for all sort of fun activity to start, it turns out it is not finnished. Heck, I would not even call it initiated. It is not like they are working on it, it has existed for I don't know how many patches. Blizzard would have done better to remove it completely until finnished.

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;

My level values should be taken with a grain of salt, I just pulled them as approximate ones from memory. Could have been at 250, 260 or 210 that I started to feel it pointless and basically impossible to advance in any satisfactionary way.:)

Yup again --- I half-heartedly started working on argent dawn and cenarion reps, but the timbermaw furbolgs had already done me in.

Agree. The thing is that here you actually get a big incentive. There is at least two turn in items that start up quests that has such a drop rate that you get them both after killing like 5 monsters. Of course, you need to level up at least 2 or 3 levels in reputation for them to talk to you so that you can turn in the items. I hanged on to those items, and grinded my rep (I allready had gone thorugh the cave by simply dieing two times, so that in itself was no goal). I was hoping and suspecting that they would start up at least two new quest series related to the furbolgs, perhaps sending me to their friends in Ashzeara and be fun. Perhaps it would also make additional items purchaseble and so on. What a fiasco. You got a few exp for finnishing the quest and aminimum ammout of extra rep. That was it, no continuation at all. What a looser make up such two pointless quests with no continuation? Turns out for being able to buy anything special I need to grind another 6000 or 12000 more rep.

In addition, reading up a bit to see if there actually was ANY noce reward or quest serie opening up. It turns out that one should never ever turn in the reputation items one get as drops. See, at a certian reputation level, there is no more rep for killing monsters, only for turning those items in, so turning them in before is very inefficient. Yay, way to go Blizzard!!!

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.

WHich is were I called the bull. Actually, there is no need for an NPC to check anything at all. It is the players that need to check the NPC for available quest and quest status. That is allready done for ALL players and ALL NPC since otherwise the game can't put an exclamationmark on the NPC that has a new quest for you. This is done for ALL available quests, not just the ones you have on your character for that area. Considering the way the game allready trust the client in various ways, the actual question mark and indication can be all client side, the server just send quests for NPCs and the client sort out possible quest status (if there is a yellow or white ? needed). IF you actually talk, the server will of course decide if you get a response, as today, that is NO extra strain.

As I said, the possible server stratin would be in killing monsters which upon death has to check through all the players quests that might make special quest drops to occur. That is hardly intensive in work load. Neither is to up the kill count for that particular monster by checking all quests. We are not talking players running arround with hundrads or thousands quests here, it would be a need to go from 20 to, say 50 (or whatevver similar or higher value you like). Since quests can be tied to areas, or monsters, which are tied to areas, one can simply sort possible quests to check for when one enters an area. NO point ever looking through the quests which require you to talk to someone on another continent or quests that doesn't require to kill monsters or items from monsters, especially if they don't exist in the area. That right away "disable" most quests from even having to be checked for to start with and such sorting can occur when you move arround at whatever time needed, not at critical combat were you want to not have lag.

[Kingpin]

What good is it to get rid of interesting items in the name of balance, and then unbalance the items on purpose?
The difference is that not everything is rigidly preplanned for you. You just may find a Gull on your hardcore character in early Act 1, or you may never see one. In WoW, you basically progress from one item to another at predefined points, with no room for randomness or creative input. It's just 'here, take this item. It's better than what you're wearing because its ilvl is higher. So use it, newb'.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. A game should never be a black box and try to hide important information. (By the way, anybody figured out the resistance formula yet?) Even if you didn't know which boss has a 25% chance of dropping the item you want and which hundreds of other monsters have 0%, the fact would remain that you still needed to Farm Boss X to Get Item Z.

Eh? it's same in WoW with random world drop epics. Then I level my first char to 60, I never ever got an epic drop. Since the game was released I have maybe got 6-7 world drop epics total with all my chars. In D2 if you push the evilness magic find high enough. You would find the most pre elite uniques. Sure your hardcore character wont find it. But, on bnet you would for sure be able to trade your Gull, with same reason as you will be able to buy, trade your world epics in WoW.

In D2, once you are at the end game, your favourite levelling ground is high enough level to drop any item in the game. Or maybe you won't ever see one of your target items. Or maybe you will. The randomness is what keeps people wasting their money to lotteries and into slot machines. You never know, if you kill just one more pack of sirens, they might drop a Zod. It's addictive.
Oh, that much is true. You could always... wander around, pick up some quests way below your level, grind 50000000 rep, or drive a tonk around.

D2 created its own replayability by making a lot of content random. While WoW seems intent on putting people on a rail and just slowing them down enough to keep them from hitting their head against the content cap. The developers of Hellgate London may have weird ideas about laser guns and may suck at communicating their game concept to prospective players, but they did get one thing right:

D2 have semi-randomness. The it comes to world itself it's not much of randomness. Then it comes to items, it's where d2's strength is. But, not because of it's random affixes, but the huge amount of different unique items with in many cases fixed stats. But, the most affixes, items in d2 is useless in high end gaming.

If we look back to pre 1.10. How did the game look? special in 1.09x.

Player's did endless of Cow-grinding, or memphisto runs, that's it. In 1.11b I can't say, since I haven't play it on realm. Lost interest in realms long time ago because of all farmer-bots.

[Brother Laz]

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.

Actually, it appears that much of the original team left during development and they hired raid-addicted incompetents from EQ mega-guilds to replace them. This is apparently why it went down the crapper from about level 30-40 onwards.

The game was supposed to be like the early levels all the way until the end, but then the raiders took over and...

[Jarulf]

Reading the thread about the new arena, I just realies one major overall problem with the game which directly or indirectly is the root of many of my complains (with the exception of perhaps bad item creation). One of the things emntioned is that you will get "arean points" which you can buy reward for. Although not state, I suppose they are not connected to the honour points/reward of battleground and other PvP.

Right there I think is an indication of a problem. The game has set up a whole bunch (quite enormous if you think about it) ways to go and for each, there is rewards (honour, reputation, instance/raid sets, trade skills and so on). Each one has ultimately good and nice rewards. The problem? For each, it requires a lot of investment in time and you really need to grind them. This means, to get any reward of the late game, you have to spend a considerable time on a specific goal (of which there admitedly are many). If you don't want to limit yourself to a single goal and do a bit of everything? You are lost, no reward at all for you, they investments and rewards are not interchangable. A "casual" player, that likes to do a bit of everything will never reach any rewards anywere and feel it sucks. The fanatics playing all day arround will of course manage to progress and get rewards from several areas.

I think this is in much the reason why one see any rout taken after level 60 as pointless and just a long grind for nothing. Unless focusing completely, one never reach any goal, you just get a whole bunch of different goals partly achieved and there is no price for that unfortunately. You can't do a bit of crafting, a bit of battlegrounds and some instances every now and than and hope to get some reputation rewards. You get nothing anywere.....:(