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[ndkid]

My personal trollish spin: the question you should be asking yourself is, "why did I ever try WoW in the first place?"

;-)

[Gnoll Fortress]

No

[gogis]

My personal trollish spin: the question you should be asking yourself is, "why did I ever try WoW in the first place?"

;-)

It was unique novelty when it hit beta, absolute smashing hit (warriar with arcanite reaper111!!! ruuuuun!!11). I never really regret I played WoW for 2-3 years, it's certainly was a joy. Not like I gonna touch it with a ten feet pole nowadays.

[Azated]

I have some good memories of when I started WoW. It must have been post BC, maybe early WOTLK.

I never played religiously, but I made a few good friends that really increased the enjoyment for me. Adventuring with a person who knows as much (or as little) about the game as you, allowing you to explore and learn together, is probably the best thing about online games.

Unfortunately, it's hard to find people that want to quest together and understand the lore of a game instead of finding the most efficient way to farm mermaid bones.

[Fayrik]

Unfortunately, it's hard to find people that want to quest together and understand the lore of a game instead of finding the most efficient way to farm mermaid bones.

While I understand the comparison, I feel the need to point out that in many ways, farming mermaid bones is part of the lore of dwarf fortress...Perhaps not literally but still.

Though, I must say I'm surprised at how much consensus there is that World of Warcraft isn't what it used to be.

and their slash'n'burn method of game development (Yeah, we promised stuff, but coding it was hard and people didn't understand it soooooo it got axed)

Yeah, it feels sort of feels like they've lost all their proper programmers. They've implemented a lot of changes yes, but they're nearly entirely scripting and content changes.
It makes the updates and expansions feel a little shallow y'know?

[LordBucket]

it feels sort of feels like they've lost all their proper programmers.

Blizzard went on record in 2011 to say that they'd moved all their experienced developers off of WoW and onto Titan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Blizzard_Entertainment_project)

[Shadowlord]

LordBucket, Your link is broken.

[Mlamlah]

If you like W.O.W i would suggest http://allods.gpotato.com/

It's basically a copy of vanilla W.o.W with some neat additional features thrown in, and it's free to play.
Personally i don't like W.o.W, it's appeal while i did play was solely in it's potential for a very large role playing community. If i do get into mmo's again i'll probably go for guild wars or the new Elder Scrolls mmo in development, which actually looks pretty decent.

[LordBucket]

LordBucket, Your link is broken.

Strangely, that appears to be a quirk of the message board. I didn't manually link that. It's a copy and paste of the URL. If you look at the post, the trailing ) is shown, but the link doesn't contain it.

Let's try this

[Greenbane]

Though, I must say I'm surprised at how much consensus there is that World of Warcraft isn't what it used to be.

In my experience, the compound problem is that it is and it isn't.

It isn't the same because it's not new anymore. It's lost all the novelty that made me enjoy playing it years ago, not too long after Burning Crusade's launch. Back then I really hadn't played any MMOs beyond Ragnarok Online, the epitome of Korean MMO grindfest, and Ultima Online, which I couldn't get to like. So World of Warcraft was fresh, had great music and production values, the Blizzard standard, and it was truly fun and addictive even if you played alone.

And it is the same because mechanically it's largely the same game it was 7 years ago. In some regards, if you have minimal MMO experience, like I did back then, it might still be enjoyable. But I'm not the inexperienced teenager I used to be, and having grown up, and played a million more MMOs since I quit WoW, I've really grown tired of the same damn formula. I've experienced the cookie cutter, and many of the cookies it spawned, which were essentially the same but with some minor twists that ultimately don't make their game stand on its own, independent from the cutter. So in the end, (not so) deep down, I was always playing the same game, call it WoW, Rift, GW2, LOTRO, DDO, Tera, Conan, UWO, whatever.

Each one I play increases my fatigue for the whole genre, because the whole genre is largely made of clones. I've come to crave dynamism, which MMOs can seldom provide for more than a few hours (or less) total. That's understandable, given the creative difficulty to provide an engaging, dynamic experience is directly proportional to the length of said experience. And MMOs are artificially forced to be extremely long. It's a structural trait fundamentally tied to its profit method: longer playtime = more monthly fees per player. I guess that should change some with the popularization of the F2P scheme, but who knows. Anyway, many MMOs manage to create a world (and sometimes story) on the scale the game's size requires, but the gameplay, the most important cog in the machine, always falls short in my experience.

So I digressed a bit, but there you go. The trick nowadays is finding an online game that's actually different from the norm, which is hard given every other MMO boasts it's better and more innovative than the rest. But that's usually just colourful shinies.

EVE's the only example I can think of that's mechanically very different from the WoW formula, but it cannot escape the grind: it's a massive efficiency-oriented grindfest actually. And it's quite generic as well: the races and their ships and stuff are sufficiently unique, but they all live in a considerably bland universe where every star system feels the same aside from security level, type of asteroids and number of stations. Oh, and the boredom is maximized if you don't have any friends to play with.

[Morrigi]

My personal trollish spin: the question you should be asking yourself is, "why did I ever try WoW in the first place?"

;-)

[Burts]

NO,don't waste your money,buy some other game instead
blizzard completely destroyed the lore with so much expansions....
They should make warcraft 4 and just forget everything that happened in world of warcraft ,because WoW ruined the lore completely,vanilla was good,burning crusade was good-but it started killing off the lore in that one of the main antagonists died,but it was almost fine because it made some sense.Wrath took it further and killed  arthas,Pretty much the main guy of the entire series....Cataclysm killed of deathwing,theres pretty much no bad guys left,which is why they decided to do that mists of pandaria thing,but the problem is that it is the same...
In short : NO NO NO

[Sonlirain]

What exactly is so terrible about World of Warcraft?

Time to throw my rock.

Spoiler: Wall of Text (click to show/hide)

I have always played games for the lore. Always. I played Warcraft III, and it's expansion The Frozen Throne, and the lore in those games was great, if a bit bloated by the time the expansion came about.

Then you had WoW come along, and in shrinking the scale of the player, they utterly destroyed their lore. The scope of the lore increased to cover every single speck of dust on both continents, and I found the world a lot less interesting when a newly created orc warlock had to walk all the way to Orgrimmar to deliver the Great McGuffin to Thrall, or something similar.

Which brings me to my next point: the stories were less interesting. There was no personal motivation for your character's actions in quests. Everything you were doing was at the behest of some person you barely knew. I suppose this is an innate flaw of MMOs, though; there's no character development. You play the same damn person through eighty or so levels: a person easily replaced by a flat cardboard cutout.

Finally, there's the incredible(and i mean incredible) plot discrepancies introduced by the expansions. Which was it, Burning Crusade? Introduced the blood elves on the side of the HORDE. With the UNDEAD, and the ORCS, who their people had been fighting for *centuries*. Against their recently broken-up allies, the humans, dwarves, etc. The Draenei somehow find a *spaceship* and smash it into Azeroth, somehow losing their strange carapaces and becoming beautiful blue space aliens with glowing eyes that bear a striking resemblance to night elves. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDQPVFCR1m8   Check 0:00 to 0:40. The first guy that speaks is a Draenei.) Oh. Just looked it up. Apparently they had to make a massive retcon just to explain why the Draenei look different, saying that fel energies from Outland mutated them - despite them having originated from Outland in the first place! Wrath of the Lich King made it cool for /everyone/ to become a death knight! Whopee! Cataclysm added a race supposedly from a 'legendary kingdom'- one I've certainly never heard of before! Never seen a Worgen in any of the Warcraft games, as if their lore wasn't bloated enough. And then Mists of Pandaria. My god. They took the Pandaren, which were entirely a *joke*- no, really! The only Pandaren that ever showed up in either WCIII game were as a joke reward for beating the secret bonus level of the 'human' campaign of WCIII:TFT, and then they were hireable in multiplayer maps from the Tavern building. And they made these guys into a serious, full-fledged race. Not to mention adding an entire new continent for them.

TL;DR: WoW ruined the lore of my favorite RTS games, and did a really shitty job of telling no story whatsoever.
Yeah, no, never touching that game again.

Well 10 days late but here i am trying to argue.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1 - Your character is flat.

Sure it is. Every single MMO character out there is a dull blank page and it's the players job to fill it out... some games make that easier than others tho and wow is kinda bad in this department.
You're basically just a random adventurer walking from permanently troubled town to another permanently troubled town till you ding max lvl.

2 - Retcons

The blood elves had good enough reasons for it since they're pretty much convicts among the alliance after things that happened in W3:FT (not counting the remaining few high elves).

Draenai got retconned from ugly outland natives to pretty space gypsies worshiping floating jigsaw puzzles that mutate into fugly creepers when exposed to demonic energies.

Worgen - They first appear in WoW summoned by Arugal (a dalaran mage) somewhere between W3 and WoW (the games are 7 years apart) and the artefact that summons them is mentioned in several alliance quests... so yeah they didn't appear out of nowhere but are purely a WoW only race.
Gilneas on the other hand was present in W2. They were a human kingdom with black colors that decided to NOT join the alliance and wall themselves in instead.
Blizz did make a gate to their kingdom way back in the vanilla but didn't know what to do with them later deciding to turn them into furries (but that's after WoW started doing pot).

Pandaren - Yep you're right on this one BUT again that's after wow began smoking. Also there was one or two pandaren themed quests back in vanilla (Chens emply keg comes to mind) if it helps (most likely not).

[Darkmere]

How was Arthas the main antagonist in the entire series despite only being in WC3?

There was a comment somewhere far back along the line that nothing in WoW is canon, anyway, and if they do WC4 it will be its own thing. I have no idea where it was, so take that information at face value.

Though really, they covered all the "lore" there was left to cover in vanilla. Immediately adding Crystal Jesus and blood elf space pirates should have tipped off everyone then and there.

Lastly, if Blizzard cared about lore, they'd hire actual writers. Hey-oh! *cough* Sorry. It was never about the lore with any of their franchises. Diablo was D&D background fluff padding out atmospheric presentations. D2 was adventure towns with about the same. D3 was... eh if they gave a shit, they wouldn't have killed Cain.

Warhammer Starcraft was almost entirely devoid of characterization, and SC2 does a very good job of politely retreading the same material without changing ANYthing of interest.

Warcraft did get a bit more plot-heavy in 3 but I think that was a side-effect of the RPG mechanics mandating you have heroes than anything the authors really cared about. If that was the case, the "novels" wouldn't be random filler about redheaded wizard fan-wank.

[Nivim]

@OP:
Nope.
Reason: same as for the existence of this guide (which happens to imply why 12ers responded as above).

 I could write a very long rant culminating many other rants I've done against all games of this abusive kind, but it would probably just emphasize the people I've seen damaged and how little I care about social interaction, so you can probably just take that as a 'TL;DR' for the path unwritten. On the other hand, have a Cracked link including a few, better links; make sure to read the stuff at the 'Microsoft behavior expert' link especially, as it's an oft forgotten viewpoint.