Yah, I read this yesterday at WoWhead in which this was emailed to me with the URL to read further, which comes as no surprise. I actually thought a notice like this was going to hit the web sooner than later, but news like this Blizzard was probably trying to drag their feet on releasing to avoid shareholders to jump ship.
I have been with World of Warcraft since the beginning. I tried out the Beta for the game before it was released since my younger brother was able to get in on the beta, so we took turns on this single acct with the beta access. When Classic WoW hit, it was jaw dropping in how good it was, although there were lots of world crashes which got to be annoying until they smoothed it over. Blizzard released the game at the time that was about as addicting as a drug to anyone who played prior MMORPG games. Many people jumped ship from Everquest (aka EverCrack because of that games addictive nature ) to World of Warcraft. At the time that WoW launched, I was heavily into Diablo II, but as soon as I bought my copy and got playing Diablo II fell off the list of games to play daily. I got hooked into 4 to 8 hours a night of gaming and on my days off sometimes as much as 12 to 15 hours of gaming for the first month or so, then balanced out to 3 to 5 hours a night as well as 30 minutes of gameplay while on my lunch breaks at work, since my boss who was 48 years old at the time also played the game on his lunch breaks. We had a company guild started and lots of us would have a WoW Pizza Party on Fridays after work and run dungeons etc. Back in the days of Classic WoW aka Vanilla, there were so many people on, made so many friends, and the economy of the game was not as insane as it is today. I remember selling stacks of Copper Bars for 75 silver per stack of 20 and Linen Cloth stacks selling for 25 silver a stack. If you had 150 gold you felt rich.
Then as a result of having so many alts, my main toon was only level 46 when Burning Crusade Expansion came out, so I missed out on battling the original world boss dragons
, but now there was the push to stick with playing my highest level toon vs the 40 other toons and get my Human Rogue from 46 to 58 so I can walk through the Dark Portal as a level 58 and get to the new game content in Outlands. My problem was once again playing too many alts, but having fun. The addition of Dranei and Blood Elf brought whole new quest chains and playability, as well as introduction to so many more good friendly gamers to chat with and become IRL friends online with. The only draw back was that I ended up hitting level 70 with my main character rogue 3 days before Lich King Release on 11/10/2008. During this time there were so many people playing.
Lich King is released on 11/13/2008, and I anticipated this as being a BIG SELL to the millions of gamers, and I thought I might be able to make a good profit buying into Blizzard Activision Stocks prior to the sale of this expansion. Caught word the day after release that they had sold 2.8 Million copies of Lich King in the first 24 hours of release and thought I was going to make a good stock profit. Fact of the matter was that the shareholders didnt see squat from the success of Lich King. Shares stayed level, even with the great success of this expansion
Sold my shares and reinvested elsewhere since I dont like to keep my money in any investment that stays level. Everyone I knew took this as the most awesome expansion yet except for my youngest brother who is 13 years younger than me. He claimed that Lich King was the tipping point of when the game that use to be challenging and fun was then made too easy to get epics etc. And so he quit WoW. And he was trying to get me to leave and go to Age of Conan, but I couldn't and wouldn't break away from WoW. Many many good memories of great runs with so many good people, many of which were total strangers.
The only trouble I had with Lich King was that with the waypoint portals added, Dalaran became the new central hang out hub for both Alliance and Horde, and it would be so populated that my frame rates were down in the dirt and I then realized that I needed better than a Pentium 4 2.8Ghz with 256MB GeForce 7600GT video card. So I bought my current computer build in April 2009 to not have to deal with lag of my Pentium 4 in high populated areas.
Then everything was going awesome until Cataclysm was released on 12/7/2010. Prior to Cataclysm's release, Blizzard had hosted a Q&A session with the Blizzard Developers through a promotion that Bestbuy had going on. There was only 1000 seats to get in on this chat room and it was to start at 8pm that night. It took me a good 10 minutes trying to get in by repeated URL tries. Finally I got in probably due to someone on wifi losing their signal and screaming out choice words as a result of.
The cool thing is that I was heard and I was answered by the WoW Developers. My question was, WHY destroy so much that people have been accustomed to, when you can just make a Southrend instead? The lead developer of Cataclysm answered my question with that the game prior to Cataclysm was lacking and unfinished. And that this was a facelift to the old content, but also with this face lift must come change, and we rolled this change in as Deathwings World Wide Destruction, instead of just a new area and facelift with no good storyline to go with the drastic changes to come. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to stop their plans in motion for this destruction to the old world, but I had to have this question answered and I was fortunate to have it answered by them.
Many of my friends including myself did not like the drastic changes to not just the world, but also to the characters talent trees were no longer as diversified as before. You had to allocate so many talent points to one of 3 key character talent tree attributes before any remaining points could be chosen for the others. My Level 56 Super Priest which was a good mix of the 3 and use to be able to solo level 58 Elites would now die if I tried to kill those same elites that I was able to own in 3.3.5 Lich King. My pally, my hunter, and so many other toons were trashed as a result of the drastic changes. Most of them needing all new gear, especially my Hunter that had lots of Intellect to Volly Spam, and now Volley was gone as well as many other AOE's in the game, and I was extremely upset. As a result of being upset with this. I RAGE DELETED ALL MY TOONS and left the game in January 2011. By the time September 2011 rolled around, I tried other games out there and was missing wow greatly, but more than the game itself I was missing hanging out with my friends who stuck with WoW through this mess. Many friends did the same as me quitting wow and when RIFT was released in March 2011 many of us where there instead of WoW, but RIFT I had issues with. Some things were really cool, while so many restrictions in the world that WoW did not have annoyed me. I quit RIFT after just 2 months. Also tried LOTR online and couldnt stick with that either. By September 2011 there was lots of talk about all of us who left WoW giving it a try for a month and see what happens. So many of us came back. But not for long. In November 2011 one of our friends who was 58 years old IRL had passed away and they were in addition to a great friend, a key figure in our guild. Without her humor and her in the game, many of us felt that not just our good friend passed away, but also that the game itself feels like its dying and not evolving in the right direction. I decided not to quit completely and attempted to merge one of my main characters that I had Blizzard restore from the Rage Quit to my wifes account, and Blizzard stated that they no longer offer characters to move between 2 accounts because they could not tell if the character was being sold on ebay or privately. I told them to look at the billing information of both accounts and you would find out that I own both of them, so please allow for this character move from the one account to the other. They said that there are no exceptions to this rule. If I wanted to play this 85, I was going to have to pay my monthly subscription to the game and I couldnt consolidate all important characters to 1 account even if I was paying a 1 time fee of $25 per character. (They were likely doing this to avoid people consolidating accounts so that those with multiple accounts such as myself, would be stuck with paying 2 or 3x the monthly subscription rate.)
I ended up then making a Death Knight on my wifes account so that I could game with friends and not pay 2x the subscription fee per month. BUT this became a problem as for I enjoyed the godlike abilities of my Frost Death Knight with Unholy Presence, and I was out DPS-ing many of the tanks according to recount, and my wife wanted to play the game and I was hogging it. So I had to reactivate my account and then have blizzard recover all my toons I rage deleted and then get new clothes for them and weapons etc and set up everything for about 20 characters on 3 realms.
At the last 2 patches for Cataclysm, I was finally over my anger of all the changes and I had adapted to the drastic change. Then my wife was able to get in on the MoP beta with her acct while I tried and never got the offer. So I tried out MoP under her beta and had fun with it playing with the instant 90 on the test realm. But I didnt invest any serious time into this character because nothing gained in this test realm would be kept, and didnt want to feel as though time was wasted when its over and nothing was gained from it to be applied to the real game.
The world populations were not as much as they use to be. Azshara where I had an active guild dried up in a matter on months as for people were paying to move to higher populated realms. Low and Medium populated realms were starting to become ghost towns and you could literally hear the crickets in the background.
Diablo 3 stole so many of my friends off of WoW to that game making the game even worse for populations of players. The only good thing was Realid friends being able to chat between battle.net of both games with 2 people playing 2 different games.
MoP launched and my wife and I bought MoP expansion for each other. And I switched from automatic monthly payment to game cards so that I could play off and on, since work was getting crazy and I didnt have as much time to game anymore. I liked most of the changes MoP brought, but still many many friends were missing from the game. I then went in search for a new guild, but the problem was that I found out that the drastic Guild changes which now ranked guilds between Level 1 and 25, had a bunch of people grouped together in level 25 guilds mainly for the perks and not necessarily to have any loyalty to their other members. I found myself in guilds that were no where near the structure of what guilds use to be, and this was upsetting. I then thought to myself that there must be others who feel the same way, they want the original guild feeling back with people who are all friends hanging out and having fun. Tried to get a guild going called Pandaren Pride, thinking that the name might be catchy to get a bunch of people with new Pandaren toons to join in. Problems I faced was that there were many people who wanted the old guild feeling back of a group of around 100 people or less who knew each other and played well together, but the problem was that the gamers who were high level raiders were all grouped with the level 25 guilds and these people in the level 6 guild felt left out of the end game content runs and large raids and we were not able to get people to show up to 1 or 2 nights a week to game. We would get 14 signatures for a 10 man event and only 3 people would be on etc. Basically the lack of everyone in the guild able to commit to gaming lead to its failure. Everyone ran off to level 25 guilds for the perks and runs with strangers and many ninja's among them with no respect for others and only out for themselves. In addition to this I had always helped out lower level players in the game and there was a great shortage of people wanting to help out the lower levels. More and more people were out for themselves and who cares about others needs for help.
Then at some point due to the population on the realms declining greatly and people moving in swarms to the higher populate realms, blizzard added a merged realms. I created a new Deathknight on Sargeras prior to the merged realms. This is a PVP REALM, where occasional ganking is to be expected. When it happens and your body is camped and there is just 1 person waiting for you to get back you go back to graveyard and take the rez sickness and hearth as fast as you can. Well ever since blizzard merged realms, we now had a disproportionate number of Horde to that of Alliance, and the problem was that the majority of the problem was Illidan Realm Horde traveling in large groups and intentionally killing lower level alliance in low level zones and while a few of the group are killing all alliance in that zone, a few others are waiting at the graveyard for people to take the rez sickness and get ganked again.
NOW... THIS I WAS REALLY STEAMED ABOUT!!!!
I opened up a ticket to blizzard support telling them that the merging of the realms for PVP Realms has become a serious problem for lower levels. Anyone trying to quest in PVE content on these realms are not just seeing the occasional gank as was in the past. Now there are troves of horde groups intentionally killing lower levels, and it is seriously pointless that they are doing this because there is no honor points gained from killing others who are 60 levels lower than yourself. I said that this is ruining the PVE game play in the PVP Realms and that they should make characters with greater than a 7 level gap untargetable targets so that people can quest chain and level up without getting frustrated. Also there should be a 10 second period while within the boundary of the graveyard so that you could hearth out if you wanted to upon accepting rez sickness vs getting 1 shotted the second you come back to life with rez sickness within graveyard. My response from blizzard was that if you dont like the changes you can move your characters to a PVE realm and avoid this, but that would be $25 per character move!
So as a result of this, I know of 8 people who quit the game because of all the changes and blizzards disregard for the gamer. Everyone who has quit is (upset) for the lack of the actual words they stated that I cant share here that Blizzard does not listen to the player base. They make changes and we all have to live with them. Why cant they host realms dedicated locked to the other content so they could go back to Lich King, BC, or Vanilla. And my one friend stated that Blizzard is just a money hungry machine that does stuff to make people react and spend money, of which some of the things they do are almost designed to force people to have to spend money via character moves if you dont like the imbalance of Horde to Alliance on a particular realm that is now merged etc, as well as PVP Vendors moved to MoP, so those who are still playing the locked to cataclysm content are forced to have to buy MoP if they want to access this vendor to turn in their honor points for gear etc.
Since September 2012, i have been buying the game cards off and on for 60 days of play at a time. I have also created a FREE account called a World of Warcraft Starter Account which allows for unlimited period of free play, but it comes with many restrictions. This allows me to play the game for free when paying $15 a month is not realistic with limited time to play. This also allows me to chat with the remaining 4 people who are good old friends of the over 100 that once were and of which over 96 of them left never to return.
I also continue to stay in contact with 12 of them through facebook ect as for we have become long term IRL friends. Of the 12 many are playing Guild Wars 2, no one is playing RIFT anymore, and a few including myself are playing AION which is free to play through NCSoft.
In addition to this, I am friended with EmberIsolte on Facebook and one of her friends who also was a gamer since Vanilla decided to leave the game, but they hosted a going away party, and so everyone who attended including myself playing a level 4 toon in northshire starting area as ChuckNoaris (since the correct spelling was reserved by blizzard and not available), joined in on a going away party which was a bunch of quick runs and then at the end of the event she gave away all her companions to all these strangers who attended. She had everyone stand around her character and then she spun around and which ever character she was facing after spinning around got the next companion traded to them, she also did this for epic gear that was not BoP etc that she had. She gave everything away and then in the end flew away on her flying mount and thanked everyone for attending. Later I found out that this event was recorded and placed onto youtube LOL.
With so many other games out there competing these days, Blizzard needs to understand that they are no longer king of the hill, and they really need to shape up and make changes that the gamers want vs changes that they feel is a good idea in a developers board meeting!
The biggest complaints these days is that Blizzard has copied other games. Examples being Farmville and now having Farms and planting junk in the game, and PokeMon used for battlepets. Back before MoP came out many people were upset that Blizzard was copying / getting in on the Kung Fu Panda movies success by making MoP as an expansion. And the graphics are lacking and outdated and cartoonish from that of other competing games that are MMORPGs and more realistic.
Whether Blizzard is copying others ideas or not, they are no longer king of the hill and personally I can only see the game getting worse from here on. All I can say is that I have many great memories and they cant be relived in the game. I myself as well as many others are feeling that need to move on from WoW. And I am doing that slowly, but I feel its going to happen eventually. After Rage Quitting, I never thought I'd be back, but my friends were the lure to come back. With almost all of them moved on, there is no need to really go back at this point!
