So...

World of Warcraft. An MMO that for quite a while I enjoyed played quite a bit. And then the expansion came out. "The Burning Crusade" sounded good, the screenshots made it look cool, and the unveiling of the opening movie made it seem like this was gonna be the best thing ever. Released on January 16, 2007, tons of stores had special midnight sales for those who had preordered it and those who didn't mind standing out in the cold for hours just for a chance at getting a copy.

Now flash forward 4 months, and people are realizing that there's nothing new, not in terms of how endgame is played. at level 70 you have 3 choices - 1. Stand around all day looking for a group for an instance and hope that when you finally get one it doesn't suck and doesn't fall apart before you finish the instance. 2. Spend hours upon hours every day gathering materials for consumables and gear for raiding, and then spend hours upon hours doing said raiding, after which you could leave with nothing but a huge repair bill. 3. You can spend hours PvPing for better gear, weapons, etc, but depending on the class you play, you might just get disgusted and go afk until the battleground match ends. Alternately, there's arenas, in which organized (or supposedly so) teams fight against each other in 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 matches. But again, some classes are favoured over others.

"The Burning Crusade" promised new content to everyone, with tons of things to do at level 70 regardless of what you did, but alas it seemed it was all a lie (or will be added in increments over the course of several patches). Meanwhile, the PvPers are getting classes nerfed because "OMG they have one overpowered spell or talent that I'm too stupid to think of how to beat nerf it Blizz or I'll quit it's not fair waaah wahhh". And the raiders are getting all these challenging (read: most likely buggy) raid instances with these important lore characters that they kill just because Blizzard needed to stick someone in there to drop shiney epics. And I don't care if it's Blizzard's lore, they screwed it up. Honestly, they could've done better with these characters, but no. They just want more money. And what do the people who don't want to/can't raid and who don't particularly care for Blizz's PvP get? They get to stand around looking for a group, or farm for the insane amount of materials needed to make whatever it is they want, or try and solo their way through the reputation bars for multiple factions, many of which are needed for profession patterns, better gear, better weapons, and the keys to harder versions of already existing instances, so they can stand around all day trying to find a group for those. Yeah, fun.

Now I don't know who reads what I type, or if anyone does at all. I could care less either way, really, I just like to rant and get it out of my system. But I do no want any Blizzard fanboys spewing their stupid drivel about how WoW is "the greatest game ever because it has 8 million subscribers blah blah blah...". I see enough of that crap on the WoW forums. I'm not saying Blizzard doesn't make good games, because they do, and if I have the time and money I may pick up Warcraft 3 and Starcraft. But World of Warcraft, still the "greatest game"? No, sorry, don't think so. It's gone from a game that had developers who cared about their players, their customers, and their game, to a game that has developers that only care about numbers and money. I mean, come on, the trading card game was one thing, but WoW credit cards? That's just... stupid.

Numbers mean nothing, you know. For all we know, they could be counting each and every active account when they make those "8 million+" announcements, and not the actual number of players. There was one guy on ther server I played on who had 4 mages and 1 priest, all on separate accounts. Almost any time you saw his priest, the 4 mages were grouped behind her (he had a setup where he controlled them all almost completely from one keyboard). He quit when the expansion was released (after being in the bets testing), because it just wasn't fun for him anymore. And why pay for something that's not fun?

Anyway, it was fun(most of the time) while it lasted (which was about a year and 4 months for me).

Now Flyff and Rappelz are installed in WoW's place, and while there are some options I miss from WoW (namely the ability to use addons to change the interface around), they're both free games, their graphics are quite good, and their gameplay is fun and doesn't require you to be on every bloody day to make progress.

I guess now that I have a bit more free time, I should get out my tablet and start practicing with it again.