"But I suppose if you really invest a lot of time and effort into one thing, it hurts even more when they become less good without you being to do anything about it."

Definitely. That's partially why I stopped playing WoW. The class I like has longstanding problems that have never been addressed seriously (i.e. a dev says 'oh problem X is feature, hur-hur-hur'), and it has had bad scaling in every expansion so far, and has had its major strengths completed changed in BC, and then essentially reversed in Wrath. It's not that I'm annoyed over the time I spent, but I like the feel and theme of the class/spec, and when the devs hamfistedly alter the strengths and weaknesses to be entirely different, I have to relearn all the painful little tricks and tweaks and timings all over again - in essence, I have to rediscover how to play my class - again. The thing that really burns me is that part-in-parcel with the class' problems is terrible scaling. Players I know I can massively out-play slowly begin to out-perform me as we progress through gear levels. This terrible scaling could easily be fixed by addressing the problems the community has documented... for years, which the developers seem to be uninterested in doing.

WoW isn't a single-player game that you pay once for. You pay a subscription, which essentially goes for the development and maintenance of the multiplayer aspect. In my view the development is nowhere near worth the cost - so I fired Blizzard. If and when they make changes that are necessary to the class I play, I'll be happy to rehire them. Until then, they are free to continue in their stubborn refusal that nothing is wrong without my dollars in their pocket.