I'm Talking to You...

Over the past couple days I've actually researched a topic(shocking I know) and I think that with today's announcement it is a perfect time to write this post.

What Blizzard is Doing Wrong

Over the last week I've spoken to a lot of my friends about why there seems to be a loss of interest from the players of World of Warcraft. From the hardcore the casual, the famous to the... not-so-much? Meh whatever. One thing that everyone seems to agree on what is wrong with WotLK was how much and often they've made class changes. We're not talking small class changes but we're talking the complete removal and addition of spells.

In Burning Crusade sure we always had class changes but they never changed our talents like they have or the effect that the base stats have. Now we all knew Death Knights were going to have major work done on them, they are a new class after all. But the drastic change to mana regen and the removal of talents and spells from classes. Instead of balancing what they have they seem to have the philosophy of "well we'll just take that out or give them something in place of it." This is just leading to frustrated players who don't want to relearn how to play their toon every time a patch comes out.

Another concern players are having is some of the reasoning for the changing of our classes. While in BC a vast amount of people did pvp (especially arena for free loot), with the change to the loot you get, most people only do wintergrasp; and lets face it, when is there ever a 1v1 in wintergrasp?(yeah, the answer is never) So why are they drastically changing our classes because of pvp? I can understand changing a spell so it works differently in pvp compared to pve (polymorph for example). But why are they changing how much damage a spell does in both pvp and pve when it's balanced in pve but is "too bursty" for pvp?

Now I understand that the summer "raider drought" is underway but my server has basically lost 3/4ths of the raiding guilds that are there, and it wasn't because they got stuck in Ulduar, people have just lost interest. I know it's only a couple months (if that) until 3.2 but will players be coming back for it? I think so, there really isn't a new MMO that will be out and if they haven't swapped to to another MMO then they are not likely to.

We'll just have to see what happens, but I think we'll see a return of players with Midsummer Fire Festival. Hopefully they've changed the boss (aka made him lvl 80) and they've added some new stuff for Northrend. I'll definitely be making machinima for a long time to come. While I love my job, I don't have the creative rights like I do with machinima and I view it as practice for when I'm running the show (but since I'm only 22 that probably won't be for a while). Plus I enjoy doing it, and when it gets down to it if you aren't enjoying it then what's the point? (I'm talking to you Joaquin Phoenix)

~Jack