Over The Years [Part Two]

So yeah, by Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard gave players the choice of going for 10-man or 25-man versions of every raid introduced in that expansion. In a nutshell, it worked, as the 25-man raid versions gave higher item level loot than the 10-man, but it also caused some problems. For instance, epic level gear began at item level 200, but by the time the expansion was at its end, the highest item level was pushing 277-284. That was a BIG jump at the time, but it did not have to be that way.

Another issue was the introduction of hard modes, harder versions of raid bosses that could be triggered by a raid for even better loot, a couple item levels higher than the usual. For 10-man raids, hard mode loot was equal in power to the stuff you'd find in a normal 25-man raid. Ulduar, for example, gave iL213 loot in 10 man, while hard mode bosses would give iL226. That was also the same level of gear you would receive in the normal 25-man version. Hard modes in 25-man would yield iL239 gear. Quite the jump. The next raid tier would go from 232 > 245 > 258.

It also didn't help that there were lots more players were running around in such gear too. It was pretty hard to distinguish the good players from the bad ones. Sadly enough, this was the new face of World of Warcraft.

As time went on, the player base would being to alienate itself from each other- The better players would still continue to interact with one another, totally avoiding things such as the new "Looking-For-Group" system for their daily badge rewards. The rest of the players relied on these random group runs to earn badges to buy their gear and hope to get in a pick-up raid for even extra rewards. The game quickly became boring. Not many guilds were able to do hard modes, since they'd become too cozy with the simplicity of normal raids, especially on the server where I played. This led to a few burnouts.

Nobody had to work anymore to get a few purples. All you had to do was run the easy heroics countless times to get the badges required. All you needed was a bit of time really. But oh well.

When Cataclysm rolled around Blizzard attempted to scale the difficulty back to where it once was at the start of the Burning Crusade but the damage was already done, people weren't too happy leaving their comfort zone and the ones who had greatly enjoyed their time in Wrath of the Lich King all started to break off from the game, as well as some veteran players who grew tired of everything else.

But oh well, life goes on.