The View From Down Here

I am not the world. Neither are you.

There is so much complaining going around, stating that the point of the game has been lost with its challenge.

It’s true that you can’t please all of the player base all of the time, and I think sometimes a lot of the more vocal (and hardcore) players forget that we are in the minority. Not everyone wants to be, or is able to, raid for however many hours it could take to down Kil’Jaeden in TBC. The vast majority of players are in smaller, friendlier guilds who don’t go out and conquer all available raid content in a month and then complain that there’s nothing for them to do.

There were Molten Core guilds and alliances all the way up to the release of the Burning Crusade, and there were Karazhan guilds all the way up to Lich King. Nowadays everyone’s in a Naxx guild, whether they’ve killed two bosses or all fifteen. Sure, some of us are working on or have killed Sartharion with three drakes, or Malygos, but the vast majority of raiding time is spent in Naxx. The other two encounters just don’t take very long to do at all once learned.

Wrath of the Lich King is still selling well, say Blizzard, and I have no cause to disbelieve them. There are many many more players who have progressed less well quickly than I have, and I have no doubt that there are many more who continue to level.

The biggest error was tuning Naxxramas on a too-easy scale; it does seem as if the difficulty that I remember being present in Karazhan is missing, and it’s a shame. On the other hand I also remember having to stack the raid in favour of hunters and priests in our early Kara runs, for the simple reason that we needed all the Crowd Control we could get against Moroes.

Almost nobody saw Sunwell, and it was disappointing that such a tiny number of people got to see the very end of the Burning Crusade.  Now it seems we’ve gone too far the other way. I think Ulduar will go some way to addressing this – it takes time to balance things in favour of the average player instead of the top 2%.

So, for all those people who are complaining that Blizzard haven’t done their job properly in delivering enough content, well, I agree with you. I am, however, in the minority, as are you. The vast majority of the playerbase are still happily working their way through the content.

I want some more content, I really do. I’m just not so arrogant as to assume that every single player of twelve million is in the same position that I am.