What has changed now, I think, is your average player now has a better idea of their own capabilities and limitations. Plop them back in Vanilla or BC and they wouldn’t be happy, since they’d know they wouldn’t be able to handle it. Blizzard’s previous success with hard content was based on the ignorance of these non-elite customers. Here at the start of Cataclysm they sized up their prospects, decided there wasn’t much to look forward to, and many just bailed out right there.

Blizzard has said (and then went against it) that you should have to interact and group together to progress in the game. In Cataclysm you don’t have to do that. Just click, queue, and run. It’s kind of social but not really.

http://www.eldergame.com/2011/05/you-cant-bolster-your-newbie-hose-with-self-indulgence/

I look at the gear and my first thought is, “you want me to log in and learn fights for…that?” I’ll pass…

I’d much rather run around in the old instances, maybe try a little bit of roleplaying, focus on archaeology fun, fish with friends in Uldum, etc. Unfortunately even that isn’t all that exciting anymore because I’ve been doing it for far too long.

I think WoW is just “old” to some people. We’ve done it for a long time, and even tiny things are distracting us now as we browse around for a new hobby.

My experience in BC was dramatically different from Cata. I’m leaving wrath out of the analysis since it is universally seen as too easy.

In BC my guild (which was delighted with having a 10 man raid available) began the weekend after release leveling and running the 5-mans as a coherent group with all the advantages of voice chat and a structured team. I definitely remember working through the factions and progressing step by step through the story line into the kara attunement. There was a real sense of progression. From the initial release up to and including the quests inside kara I felt that it was a carefully laid out path. The sequence that you needed to go through required a team to get ready.

I remember clearly the completion by my 5-man team of the revered status with Cenarion (especially because I got my Mace!) and we immediately decided with arrogant confidence to do the heroic version of Steamvaults… and promptly had our asses handed to us in the first 3 pulls. We geared together and helped the others. We entered kara together before the nerfs. It was a major deal when downed Shade and a few of us completed our urn for the dragon.

All of that is missing in Cata. You can easily solo the entire leveling process and get yourself into solid gear. You can then (and I did) solo queue into normals and heroics to 346 gear and craft into some 359. At no point do you need anyone from your guild if you have one — right up until the point you want to get into BWT or BOT and get hammered. The progression is harder in the sense that creating that core group is not organic to the entire experience the way it was for me in BC. Cata is a fast and furious ride up to what feels like a wall in a way that BC never was. Cata is easy to solo and harder to group. The larger the group you are trying to form up the harder to get it organized because so few people really need any real guild organization until the very moment they decide to raid and are very frustrated when they realize that all the instantaneous LFD grouping no longer applies. The entire game can be made to fit your individual schedule except for one part of it — raiding.

Also what feels different to me is the lack of any quests to tie into the raid zones. You had a reason to go into Kara (and Vanilla and WotLK) beside killing bosses … a major portion of your work in 5-mans was attunement and the quests were all tied into together. I still have no clue what the hell any of the bosses have to do with the great story-lines told in the leveling zones other than big bad bosses in a raid zone have to die because … well … err … they deserve it! Everything in Cata feels great in terms of story and quests right up until raiding when it seems like there is a big disconnect. To me the raids feel entirely tacked on to the end of a solo game instead of the solo game deliberately leading into them. I am betting everyone reading here completed all the quests in WotLK raiding.

These are the points I was shooting for:

1) Everything that happens in WoW (and really in life as well) is cyclical. It is an easy thing, even for the most perceptive, to lose perspective on this and view the past expansions and tiers and eras with rose tinted glasses.

2) Most people in WoW (and again in “real life” as well) have a relatively small collection of individuals that they actually interact with and must then use as a base to try and generalize the state of the larger world from. Of the dozens of relationships I have formed with people through WoW over the years, most of those people are no longer really playing any more. Only a small minority of us seem to stick around for more than ~3-4 years, and I would suspect that the decision to stick around has more to do with the relationships and feeling of investment at this point than anything else for most.

3) Blizzard is clearly in the process of changing their overall strategy for WoW. They have explicitly stated that they want to move away from the Evercrack model that encourages people to play 24/7 to “keep up” and migrate toward a more “casual” model that allows people to feel like they are getting their money’s worth with a few nights a week of gameplay. I think that this is a good thing personally for reasons stated above. I think that for those that feel like they have a growing gap in their game experience, Blizzard is well on their way to offering some new alternatives to fill those longings with things like Diablo III and the as-yet-to-be-named “next generation MMO” due out in another year or so.

Blizzard knows exactly what they are doing I think. WoW may be transitioning to a new age, and I am sure that some will forever claim that it’s peak was perpetually in the past, but I don’t think it will ever close its doors until Blizzard feels like they have provided a suitable replacement for *most* of us.