This post here will be about World of Warcraft… yes maybe a complain specially about how bad World of Warcraft became over time. I had an interesting discussion yesterday with my friends from real life.

Today we are five of our clique who still play World of Warcraft sometimes. Sometimes we are one more or less. But let me compare this to some years ago. We were more than twenty people of our real life clique who played together World of Warcraft. Additionally we had twenty and more people we met in World of Warcraft. We said they are friends too and still do think so. Lets count together… we were able to setup a guild with over forty and I believe we had more than fifty players in our guild. But it was not an anonymously guild because most did know each other from real life and the others became friends as well, with the difference that they did live just not in our hometown but instead of that in another town. However.. there was something which hold us all together and it was World of Warcraft and a nice guild constitution. Yes we had rules! No flaming! If there is a problem… only real and fair discussion! We had more rules.. and we kicked anyone who wanted to break our rules. But we didn’t need to do it often. Our guild was a bunch of people who did respect each other even if they had another opinion sometimes. But we had people with great attitude. Something else did hold us together. We had success but something which is more vital, we had fun together!

Yes when I talk about fun then I really mean fun! 😀

Have you ever been on a TeamSpeak server (voice chat) where forty people celebrate loud that they have just killed a difficult raidboss? If so.. you know what fun is. If not.. you missed something. But I can tell you this was often a real party. Peoples really couldn´t calm oneself. I think this did hold us together. We did go raiding in Molten Core with forty players, we did go raiding Blackwing Lair with forty players and we did invade Temple of Ahn’Qiraj with forty players. We had real party’s when we completed these runs. Peoples did laugh and scream on our voice server just because they were happy to complete something which was difficult enough. We had success together and there was strong company.

Ok back to our discussion yesterday. We did remember this time. And we all were the opinion it was an extraordinary experience. Something great, I mean super great or let me say so awesome that it is hard to find words for it!

So you maybe ask why we have been over forty players some time ago and today only four, five or six players? Some of you think it was maybe due to real life? You think people became mature and didn’t want to play games anymore? If you think that.. then you are wrong. I can tell you the truth as I still talk with some friends. Many of them are still my real life friends. Most of them became just disappointed with the game and many belive there were some pretty ugly and bad design decisions made by the developers called “Blizzard”, the maker of “World of Warcraft”. If you are able to setup a forty player guild, it is just sad if Blizzard removes these forty player raids. They did change it so that there was now twenty-five and ten player raids as a limit. Our guild did burst on that design decision pretty soon. We have been a team and didn´t really want to split our guild in two sections. That was not our target but we had to do. Soon we did lose a half of our players. I think it was just more difficult to manage two raids instead of one huge raid group as we had just one really good raid leader. Ok but now were still enough players to join twenty-five player raids. But it was so different.

Blizzard never stops to install patches on your computer and they never stop to make changes. If new content arrives, players like it. But if they change too much on the mechanic… I mean too much changing on the base frame… yea then at least the old players might be scared of these decisions. But some of us believe today that these decisions came because Blizzard wanted to bring in many new players. You can say World of Warcraft was a hardcore game, a niche and maybe something people called “Nerd Game”. So we think Blizzard´s targed was to get more into the casual market. They changed the game so much that it was easy now. Easy enough for the casual who anyway just wants to play 6 hours a week. We were now able to get any in-game item faster than before, much faster. But those who liked the game before, the hardcore players… they had trouble with this game design decision´s. At least it was the reason why our guild lost many players. It was a complete renovation also for every class. Maybe they did success by getting new and lots of new players. But as I said.. some old boys and old girls from the very first minutes of World of Warcraft became scared so that they stopped to play. The whole game became simplified and too easy and boring.

Me and four, five and maybe six player of our clique still play World of Warcraft time to time. But often we remember back to our great times and we said it will never be as it was. But we still have fun today. We are a little group who now mostly join player versus player battlegrounds if we activate World of Warcraft. Yes and sometimes we go raid with other people we don’t know. But World of Warcraft has changed. Or maybe we changed? At least it is not as it was and that’s why we are so honest to say sometimes that this soon will have an end also for us. We already play other games more often than before. It’s not only World of Warcraft anymore. We have already alternatives as the overall experience in WoW has changed too much for us. That’s what we talked about yesterday.

But hey!…

One thing we learned… a game isn´t just a game. That´s only what those flaming news in television telling you. No! A game is more! You bring in your friends and you meet new friends. Those who don’t understand, they never will understand. Apart from playing a game together we had great conversations on our TeamSpeak server over several years and not only related to World of Warcraft. No, in fact we did talk about all and sundry. Oh and we did visit people from our guild, which we didn’t know before in real life. We traveled by train and had a great weekend with people we never seen before. That means we did make new friends we still have today.

This is something we got from our experience. Maybe the game currently becomes unappealing for us. But our friendship wont!