You have a lot of unresolved anger. Do you love your mother? Did your father hit you?

I think the big thing your missing: ARE YOU HAVING FUN?

I'm having a great farking time, I can see the awesome end game sights, I don't feel pressured to raid 4 nights a week to be competing in the end game, It's easy enough to do professions (though a few are under powered right now), and I'm loving the stories in the game.

Please show me an Armory link of your Twilight Vanquisher main.

"- Blizzard has underdelivered on a heavily-hyped expansion in virtually every way."

Really? Every way? No, they really haven't. Almost all builds of all classes are far better than they've ever been, prot warriors in particular being nothing short of a masterpiece. Questing is much more varied and interesting than ever before, the game looks and sounds amazingly better. The reputation from tabards system means never having to grind dungeons you hate. Every profession now has a viable way to make money.

"- Blizzard has made the "end-game" into nothing more than a walkthrough of a 3D environment."

Look, any goober could be easily carried through everything in TBC except for the latter half of Sunwell. This is the equivalent of T4 content. It's not meant to be hard. This game is not made for the minority of hardcore Sunwell raiders, but there are encounters for them even this early in the game. If you want cop out and say Sarth 3D is a "pointless" achievement, then you're just a giant hypocrite. What were warglaives, other than a visible "I cleared endgame" marker? Same with Twilight Vanquisher/of the Nightfall.

I'd wager to say "The Immortal" is a better testament to the value of you as a player and that of your guild than any amount of TBC epics were.

QQ

You seem to not understand that this expansion isn't even half over yet...or maybe you do and are just an idiot.

1.) The underdelivered (Isn't a word btw) on a heavily-hyped expansion?
Taking from the WotLK Trailer:

Death Knights? Yes, they've delivered on them. People seem pretty happy with Death Knights. There are balancing issues, but what game DOESN'T have those when introducing a new class?

New continent? Yes, they delivered on that. And incredibly at that, the landscape of Northrend is ridiculously amazing looking.

New Profession: Inscription? Yup, delivered on that. Inscription is here and its...well...a profession.

New hairstyles? Yup, they're in the game

New Dances? Not yet, but they're working on it. Not that I really care about them that much...

New Quests? Yes, yes, and more yes. The quests in Northrend are the best in WoW so far.

New Dungeons? Definintely. Beautiful looking and fun to play. (I'll hit on the raids in a minute)

New Monsters/items? Yes

Level cap raised to 80? Yes

Seems like, according to their trailer, they've already delivered every promise except 1. The dances.

Lets talk about end-game raiding for a moment.

Its incredibly obvious that raiding right now is easy. Blizzard THEMSELVES have admitted this. The reasoning also makes perfect sense. Burning Crusade pushed the raiding limit to such an extreme that only an incredibly low percentage of the player base got to even see Sunwell. They purposely tuned down Naxx, not only because they wanted more people to see it (Since, like Sunwell, such a few percentage of players got to see it), and because it's an entry-level raid. Was Karazhan ridiculously difficult? Maybe before the necessary-nerfs, but no, it was not.

Then you have to take into account that Naxx was tested for an incredibly long time. Players were given complete free-range to the instance during the beta-phase. The tuning of the instance is not the only reason why it's so easy. Its because players had been clearing it on the PTR for weeks before the game even launched.

Raiding is a walk-through? Perhaps after you've got Malygos and Sarth 3D on farm (And have the gear from them), but I guarantee you didn't walk through Sarth 3D when learning (Probably not even Malygos).

Now for your second point: Blizzard took action against a company that had a produce that explicitly went around the rules to give some players an unfair advantage. It's their game, they make the rules as to how it is played. Having a mod that farms FOR you/ect is not fair to everyone else. I don't even see how you can use this for your argument against them.

I think you need to calm down and wait for the entire expansion to be finished before you start slinging your mud. Ulduar isn't out yet and then there's patches 3.2 and 3.3 to look forward to.

The POINT of those "pointless achievements" is to push people into doing odd and/or different things while the new content is coming out.

Frankly, if I was Blizzard, I wouldn't care WHAT someone like YOU thinks, you're clearly still playing the game. And they're getting their 13 bucks/month out of you just the same.

And finally, if you have such a problem with the game, there's that time old saying of "If you don't like it, stop doing it."

"The expansion is an unmitigated failure for the 20-25% of players who were actively dedicated to the raiding aspects of the game."

So? That still leaves 75-80% of players having a better time than you.

John was spot-on with the first three paragraphs, at least.

cheers john, it needed to be said!

Don't forget... they pretty much have killed BG's. Used to love playing those... hell can't even get rep in AV on my server >:/

"The expansion is an unmitigated failure for the 20-25% of players who were actively dedicated to the raiding aspects of the game."

You mean the 8%, right?

I must say I agree with John to an extent. I was never a hardcore raider, we could only do 10 man with my guild, so we cleared Kara and ZA in TBC, we were sooo extatic when we cleared ZA pre-nerf, just the week before even. I remember the flame wreath issues on Aran, I remember the sheer joy and excitement of our first Kara runs. All.... gone. Naxx is not nearly as exciting. Everything is a one shot, even for a bunch of noobs like us. I LOVE that everything is accessible to 10 players now, that was a very good move on Blizz' part. But that should have been the line with dumbing down content. They should have not made it piss easy like they have now. The sense of accomplishment has just vaporised.

They aced the quests, phasing is godly, lore behind it is very enjoyable. Achievements are fun for those who are interested in them. I couldn't care less, but that doesn't mean they annoy me. But to just say raids are still hard because they have achievements to them now... it is not valid. Because it is still the same old content.

So when people say only hardcore raiders are disappointed by the raid content, that is not true, casuals also like a challenge every now and then. Get rid of attunements, okay, but just... don't make it a walk in the park. Achievements are a nice bonus, but they shouldn't be the only thing that gives the fulfilment to raiders in my opinion.

I love the expansion, but this bothers me, the raiding content. I will always have enough to do because I try out every aspect of the game, and because I spend a lot of time with roleplay, but I do not think the 'casual' excuse should justify making everything easy and diminishing the joy for those that like a challenge.

"I can't take it any more. If I have to swallow another one of these openly fawning articles from Mike Schramm I'll add this website to my company's restricted site list myself."

Promises, promises.