Finally, Fuck The World of Warcraft.

So, As a long time WoW player, I feel it is my right to bitch about the steady decline of the World of Warcraft.

This gets pretty damn technical in places, so if you aren't a gamer, you might want to skip this one.
Back when I started playing, sometime around 2006-ish, The game was pretty bad, constant glitching, insane lag, getting an instance group took forever, it was basically a game of waiting for the stars to align so you could do the stuff you wanted to do.

I loved running instances, getting into a group with four other people and kicking the shit out of monsters? Hell yes.
But back then the mechanics were kinda retarded.
First the quests:
Example: Scholomance
In the early, early days, Strat and Scholo were actually 10-man raids, but by the time I got to that level they had been nerfed down to 5-man instances, but they still had the quests from back when they were raids.
You had to start a quest chain in the Bulwark, then fight a bunch of undead in Western plaguelands, then go the Tanaris (on the other side of the world), then back to the bulwark, then more killing in WPL (this time with a full 5-man group), then eastern plaguelands, then you got your key to the front door. About 300 gold (which was alot back then) and a month of your time later, you could finally enter the instance, of course if you had a Rogue in your party (who had spent that same month pick-pocketing trash mobs for lock-boxes) you could just go in, no quest chain required.
So you would run the instance, and eventually your reputation with the appropriate faction would become friendly, so now you could do the first set of quests. which involved running the instance two more times (back before we had the ability to reset the instance, we just had to wait 24 hours. We would often schedule the runs at 10pm and again after the reset (which was either midnight or 3am depending on how the server was feeling that week.)
That would go on for awhile, and every time we would gain another level of reputation, more quests would open up.

Shit was ridiculous. I'm baffled at myself for wasting that much time, especially since in later expansions they got rid of attunements, keys, prerequisite quests, etc.
So all of that shit was for nothing.

But despite all of that, it was still the best MMO at the time, so we all played it.

Then The Burning crusade came out, and Shit got real, Blizzard decided to step up their game in raid content difficulty  to the point where UI modifications were not just useful, but mandatory. You simply could not beat the boss without the UI mods. Clearly somebody managed to figure it out to make the mods, but all of the mods were developed in the public test realms by the top tier raiding guilds.

To make matters more complicated, they added two new races that had access to the faction-only classes (paladin & Shaman) of the opposite faction. So now both side were equal, before this change, all of the world's top raid teams were alliance only, because Alliance had Paladins, and paladins were entirely too useful back then.

For those of us who weren't hardcore raiders (i.e. like 80% of the players) we got to explore new content in the world, new races, and new classes, but the game didn't really change that much.
Except for Karazhan.
Karazhan was a new 10-man raid (like Stratholme and Scholomance used to be) that was accessible for everyone, you had some basic gear requirements, but they were entirely reachable for non-hardcore players. And the Raid was like a loot pinata. 10 people went in, and more often than not, 10 people got gear.
I spent the entirety of burning crusade in Karazhan, I still remember it fondly.

Then Wrath of the Lich King came out.
I had the perk of being on the closed-Alpha test And the Beta test for that game.
It was glorious.

Blizzard introduced the new "Hero class" Death Knights, with their own bad-ass storyline and the amazing perk of starting off at level 55 instead of 1. Once that hit the shelves, EVERYONE had a deathknight, the game was filled with them, because it was entirely too convenient.
Why would you start off a character at lvl 1 when you could start at level 55? It was a no-brainer.

They also add the "Looking for group" system. Instead of standing in town all day constantly bugging everyone to run a instance with you, you could simply press a button, and the game would find a group for you. Meanwhile you were free to continue questing or doing whatever you wanted, but the point was, you didn't need to beg people in Trade Chat anymore.
Back before LFG there was alot of servers where unless you belonged to a large guild, there was no possibility of finding a group, all the guilds ran instances specifically with people in their guild, no-one else.
Now, it didn't matter if you were in a guild. The computer didn't care, it got rid of alot of the elitism.

The elitists of course refused to be stopped, the the Gearscore UI modification was invented. It was a program that scanned your character and did the math on the total value of the stats on your gear, and compared it to what instances and raids you would find easy or hard just based on gear.
This of course ignored player skill, quality of computer, and quality of internet connection, but they didn't seem to care, the Score was everything to these people.

But us casual players didn't care, because we had LFG, which meant that anyone could find an instance group and get better gear.
And then they made a drastic change to raiding in this expansion aswell. All raids would have a 10-man and a 25-man version.
They decided that the old 40-man raids were just too much of a pain in the ass, so they reduced it down to 25, and they gave the 10-man version to us casual players. They also added "Heroic mode" for the hardcore raiders.

So finally they had raiding where almost everyone was involved to some degree, everyone was getting to do all of the content.
Finally after like 4-5 years, all of their development was getting used by almost all of their players. For the first few years all of the raid content was only enjoyed by like 2%-20% of the players.

They had their timing figured out finally too. They would release the patch, then slowly decrease it's difficulty (or let the gear creep decrease it's difficulty automatically) until everyone had beaten it atleast on 10-man normal mode. Then they would release the next patch. It was awesome.
By far my happiest memories from the game.

Then tragedy struck, Activision bought Blizzard Entertainment, and the game turned to shit.

Activision decided that the game wasn't user friendly enough, so they dumbed it down... alot.
Some of the changes were good, they made things that used to be impossible significantly easier. But most of the changes were insulting.
Like the classes were decided to be too volatile. too much room for exploitation.
So they changed the talent system so that users couldn't exploit or even personalize their characters.
Back in WotLK I loved playing my Death Knight. I had figured out a totally bizarre setup of talents, that was  by no means the most efficient, but too me it was the most fun. They got rid of all hybrid specializations in the first new expansions "Cataclysm" and then destroyed even partial hybrids in the second expansion "Mists of Pandaria".

This really pissed me off. I liked the way the game functioned before, I loved how complicated the math was and when I was Tanking, me and my fellow tanks would spend hours awake late at night theory-crafting better ways to do our jobs.
It was fun.

So on top of making the game mechanically boring, they also ran out of good plot.
Wrath of the Lich King was the end of the story. The characters had been building towards this since Warcraft 2 when we first discovered about the Lich King and then Heightened in Warcraft 3 when our beloved hero Arthas fell into darkness and came back as the evil Lich King.
We needed to put our fallen hero to rest, we had been working towards this for over a decade over three different games and additional expansions.

At the end of WotLK we finally defeated Arthas, our quest was over, we were looking forward to what new story Blizzard might have in store for us.

And this is what we got:
"Yeah, you remember all of those Dragon Aspects? The quest givers in WotLK?"
"...Yeah?"
"Well, there is actually another one, and he decided to destroy the world because a goblin kicked a football into a volcano."
"........WAT?!?!"

Yeah, no joke there. that's the actual plot.
Oh, and the "Maelstrom" which is supposed to be this massive hole in the planet caused by when the elves and the guardian of Tirisfal kicked the shit out of a god? Yeah, that's actually just the entrance to that evil dragon's prison, and that football weakened things enough for him to escape.

Yeah, we were not impressed.
Some of us quit, but most of us decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. Cause we already had 5+ years invested in this story.

So turns out this evil dragon has a cult, that existed previously in the story, but previously had no connection with the dragon at all.
So yeah, random. Most of the expansion was based on fighting the cult, then eventually we fight the evil dragon himself.
But between WotLK and the Fall of Deathwing, most of the casual raiders had quit raiding.
So they introduced "Looking for Raid" which is just like "Looking for group" but with five times as many assholes.
Before you would run an instance and if one player was a dick, you'd kick him out.
If most of the players were dicks, you'd leave the group.
But in LFR EVERY group has atleast 5 assholes in it making your life miserable.
Without fail.

So that was stupid, really made alot of us dislike raiding even more, but whatever, we got our gear.

Then Mists of Pandaria came out.
The Plot:
Gilligan's Island.
(No joke.)
The Horde and the Alliance are off fighting eachother and whatnot, and they randomly crash into this massive continent, that they some how never noticed before (because it was covered by "Mist").
And then we randomly get involved in the bullshit drama of the native Pandas (you heard me right, fucking pandas), but really, no-one even gives a shit.
The entire premise is that both the Horde and the Alliance want to claim this already fully occupied continent for their own faction. And the Pandas seem happy to let them fight over it, aslong as they solve all of their hidden problems in the meantime.

I could literally give two shits about the drama of the Pandas.

I will give credit where credit is due, Monk is a pretty awesome new class. But it should have been a Fucking Hero Class!! I already had EIGHT max level characters at the beginning of this new expansion, I really don't want to level another one from 1-90. Fuck that. That is entirely too much time to waste.
Fuck, Blizzard, here is a free idea to save yourself a shitload of problems. Every time a player reaches maximum level, they get to add 10 levels to another character. So if you have two max characters, you can create a new character that is lvl 21 rather than 1. I'd happily take that deal.
I'm just fucking sick of level grinding the same boring shit over and over again.

But really, at this point, they need a much bigger fix.
They need plot that doesn't suck.
Because really? Pandas? And their shitty Panda drama?
There is literally an entire instance devoted to monkeys stealing beer.
I shit you not.

I'm fucking over it, I spent years invested in this game, and they are literally boring me to tears.
And it shows. They keep losing subscriptions hand-over-fist. Players are leaving because the game sucks now. It's sad, but it's true.
And until they can get good writers again, the players are going to stay gone.