Fall of the King

Fall of the King

A World of Warcraft article

What is World of Warcraft? Well, WoW is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game that’s been around for several years and two expansions.  It tells the story of two factions set in a fictional fantasy world of now several worlds, with Azeroth being the main world. From Azeroth, brave warriors may also venture to Outland and to another time even via the way of a dungeon. As a player you get to chose between being either an Alliance or a Horde character, each having their own distinct areas and cities and their own races to play with.
From the very beginning, it was clear that World of Warcraft was so much more than just an MMORPG. It was history in the making. Ever since this game was released, other MMO’s have been mimicking themselves to this game in the hopes of getting some of their crowd. Which, by the way, is over 11 million players.
World of Warcraft swiftly became the King of RPG’s. And like all royalty, some day it has to fall. Either by choice, necessity or their own damned fault, it has to happen.

My own history with this game starts at a local toys and games store. Out of all the boxes in there, one was still labeled at the old price, which was a special price. Seeing as it was lower, I decided to just go with it and buy it! From that moment on, I was a WoWaholic. The game was both hard as challenging, never really being too easy in both gameplay as overall style. To make life easier within the game, I remember I had to work my ass off to get somewhere. Nothing was handed out and you had to make sure to bust your ass to get something as simple as a mount. But, time moved on and so did the game. I myself found the transitions that the game made to be tolerable, as I had in game friends and fellow clanmates who I could bitch with about these changes.  As time went on, it did become very noticeable that it was becoming easier and easier. The level for your first mount decreased and much, much more. Everything became much more streamlined and also a whole lot easier to do as long as you had the right gear or you had the right people. Instead of being hard and challenging, the game became easy, hard and grindtastic. Now, WoW has always had a lot of grinding, but it was way more apparently in the end when Achievements were introduced. To me, these achievements were introduced to cover up the fact that they made the game easier.

Is it so wrong that the game is accessible to the public? In a word … yes. In long though, the answer isn’t quite that simple. Sure, if these changes were limited to the started zones of each race, then I would have been cool with it. Then transition the player back in to the old WoW slow and easy so that it would once again be hard and challenging. Right now, I can easily blaze through all the quest lines, dungeons and more all by myself. Giving the right strategy of course. And that’s not how it’s supposed to be damn it. Sure, there are dungeons where you need more folks. But unlike in the old days, you need only a good tank or a good healer with you to go through. Later dungeons and raids might need a full party, but not once have I had to go through intense planning or something to go through it. We just rolled with it most of the time, coming up with a strategy as we went along. If enemies proved to much, we simply walked back as a ghost or got rezzed to fight another day.
I remember hearing my intern job boss talk about how he and his clan used to plan everything out from start to finish with dungeons that could last hours easily because of the final boss alone. Only to be completely and utterly crushed by me and a team of misfits.

There lies the biggest problem of them all. Things get nerfed way too much. What is Nerfing, you ask? It is to reduce the desirability or effectiveness of a particular game element. Otherwise known as the opposite of buffing. And by god, every single update the game had nerfed the hell out of one or multiple things. Never did something get harder. It always got easier. When something did get harder, either by overnerfing the rest or by a glitch in the game, it would soon get fixed.
To top it all off, there is no more Twinking. Twinks are characters meant for battlegrounds, instances where the Alliance battles the horde in a massive battle quite like Deathmatch or Capture the Flag. In these instances, there was no leveling. Thus, a character could obtain the best of the best items for a level 19 character and stay level nineteen to dominate the battlegrounds for that character level. But, that is no longer the case as battlegrounds now come with a nice and nifty level up system.

However, ever since the announcement of World of Warcraft’s newest expansion: Cataclysm, things really took a turn for the worse. It became quite clear that all the developers were interested in was money. That is why they made the game more accessible and that it why they are making Cataclysm. What should have been a new game, is made in to an expansion to the game which by all means and purposes, is going to destroy the world of Azeroth. What already was a confusing and convoluted story is now destroyed even more by a complete overhaul of Azeroth and the addition of even more races.
Last I heard is that they are shortening the talent trees. What are Talent Trees? Well, every time you level up, you get a talent point. This talent point is then spent on the talent tree. There are several branches you can chose from, depending on the kind of character you want to be. Let’s just there’s Attack, Neutral and Defense. It used to take 51 points to get the best abilities in one of these branches. Now it’s just 31. Meaning that you can spend more points on Neutral and Defense as well, making your character even more powerful. Now, I hope that is not the case but it’s too late anyways. The King has Fallen and I hope that Star Wars: The Old Republic will be able to claim the throne.