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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Draksila" data-source="post: 5381974" data-attributes="member: 31376">Personally, I played WoW from the first Children's Week in 2005 to around May this year.  I played it for two reasons: my regular gaming group had broken up and I was looking for roleplay, and I loved the lore established in Warcraft II and III.  After roughly five years of play, here's why I quit. 1 - Blizzard has continuously bent its own lore over the table and done bad things to it while people watched.  Seriously, you can tell when a new dev team is working the game by watching how much of the old lore they forget and replace with new stuff that clashes with established world setting history. 2 - Roleplay ceased to exist with the release of the first expansion.  Back in the Vanilla WoW days, I could actually sit for hours on a pier in character with my guildmates and friends and have social parties or even develop personal story arcs.  As raiding has become easier and more rewarding to those tempted by loot, however, even the guilds that advertise themselves as 'roleplay guilds' quit giving more than lipservice to their RP.  It got so bad with WotLK that, on any RP server I played on, we couldn't even get more than a half dozen people to commit to getting together for one hour-long weekly guild meeting in character.  And roleplay in a dungeon?  I was ecstatic just to get everyone to comment once or twice in character. 3 - Endgame is boring.  Granted, this is my own take on it and others might like loot gathering more than me.  But what it comes down to is you grind X dungeons to get gear so you can grind Y raid to get gear so you can grind Z raid to get gear... and ultimately it's all about epeen.  When you get that last, ultimate set of gear it's really for nothing.  You've beaten everything out there, so your only choice is to grind out the stuff you've already done just to show that you're Billy Bad-butt.  And this is coming from someone who was in a good raiding guild, had some outstanding gear, and knew his rotations well enough to be a valuable damage dealer. 4 - Expansions make all your hard work mean nothing.  Seriously.  The epic gear you had in Vanilla?  The low-end trash in Outland was better than your raid-earned epic magic items.  That high end gear from killing Illidan or Kael'thas in Outland?  Made laughably petty by the stuff you got from farmers and fishermen in Northrend.  I gaurantee it'll be that way again with Cataclysm. 5 - The world setting is not consistent.  It's hard for me to care about killing Edwin VanCleef, Illidan Stormrage, or even the mighty Arthas when an hour later someone else is fighting him and next week I can just go back again and it's like I've never fought him.  Don't get me wrong, from a video game frame of mind that's the norm and I like video games, but when I roleplay I want my efforts to mean something in context with the setting.  If Arthas is dead then by gods he should be dead, not just momentarily lootable before respawning. 6 - No computer game using modern computing technology can do everything you can do with a few loose rules and your imagination.  There are always artificial limits to your exploration, to your actions, to your choices when speaking to NPCs.  As fun as WoW can be on its best days, it limits your imagination to what is possible within its lines of code. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that everyone go out and cancel their WoW subscriptions.  It's a fun game in its own right if you can work within its structure comfortably, and there's room for both MMOs and TT.  It just got to where I personally could no longer ignore the elephants in the room and had to just let it go. As a note, it's no better in other MMOs.  I went from WoW to City of Heroes, DDO, and Guild Wars, and I had tried a few others before WoW.  The most RP I found besides Vanilla WoW was City of Heroes, and it was very cliquish.  In both WoW and CoH, even when you could find RP, it was always relegated to something you do with your usual suspects and not something that you do publicly to include interested passersby.  There were exceptions to this, yes, but the vast majority of roleplayers didn't want to deal with anyone outside their own little circle.  The best, most open roleplaying communities I found were in the original Neverwinter Nights.  They also had the advantage of being DMed servers, so there was world consistency when the DMs ran their adventures and the artificial borders established by the program were a bit more flexible for the fact that the people maintaining the individual servers could alter things as they saw fit.  Still, push come to shove, it still came down to being a grind-fest if there were no DM events planned and being artificially constrained by its programming.</blockquote>

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