Dear Blizzard,
I am writing to inform you that you can delete my character; I don’t need it any more. I haven’t needed my character for some time now, and certainly since I started playing Wrath of the Lich King my character has been nothing but a dead weight that I’ve had to drag along behind me. You see, my character does nothing any more, I have gained all of two new spells in the ten levels I have achieved, and a couple more from talents that I was basically able to get at level seventy anyway by not delving too deeply into any other talent tree. To be honest, other than an incremented level number my character has hardly changed at all throughout this entire expansion and much of the last one, it’s just a mobile mannequin for my armour and weapons. Sure, my armour and weapons have changed as I’ve leveled, my armour and weapons changed almost daily until the end game! And of course then there is the end game itself, which is all about yet further incremental changes to my armour and weapons.
So you can delete my character, for it plays no role in this game; just animate my armour and weapons so that I can move them around from place to place, and give them my class abilities, and I’ll be good to go for the next five or so expansions.
Love and kisses,
Melmoth
P.S. If you’ve ever wondered why many people stop playing the end game or incessantly whine about the end game, and either roll alts or leave for other games, I’ve left a clue as subtle as Mythic’s marketing department in the above text.
We really should have moved beyond
[Common Class Spell XVXMXCCI] 20g
[Common Class Ability XVCMII] 20g
as character development by now.
And yet, it works. So they’ll continue to use it.
I suspect the proportion of clever, witty, older (well me anyway) ex-tabletop gamers who really have seen this over, and over, and over… is rather smaller than that of people who’d never touched a game before WoW and for whom, therefore, all this stuff is like, better! than! sliced! bread!
I’ve just really depressed myself.
Talking about tabletop gaming, I think they really could have taken a leaf out of DnD’s pages and created something special along the lines of prestige classes. I guess in the end WoW just isn’t about character, it’s all about the lewts.
I’m going to go upstairs and read my DnD 4e boxed set from start to finish whilst crying into a box of Maltesers.
I wouldn’t read 4e D&D to recover from the revelation that there is no character in WoW, it suffers from the same problem. 4e has overdefined the characters’ abilities and attacks to the point where nothing needs to be added by the player, there is no characterisation.
Where once feats and skills allowed players to improvise and develop, now it is all written for you.
Really? Good grief, is nothing sacred any more?!
Well I guess I’d better stick to real life, where I can at least develop my myself some more through my dead-end job… aaaand, uh, my inability to tear myself away from my computer for more than a minute to do something constructive…
Oh dear.
What is this thing you humans call “constructive”?
Oddly enough I’m rediscovering the fluff in WoW. The gear-centricity drove me away the first time (for I am negatively gear-centric and couldn’t give a rat’s arse about acquiring more armour), but coming back to it I’ve decided that only needs to affect me if I let it. Course it helps that I don’t raid nor feel the need to raid (why? for more gear I didn’t want in the first place, so I can raid for MORE gear… etc).
There’s a lot of fluff in WoW that’s quite enjoyable. Now if only they had player housing… I’d go back to LOTRO but there was something about it that didn’t hold me back in beta, and I’m not sure that something will be there now when it was absent before. (And oh god, MORE slow running, though the landscapes are stunning.)
I’d be so much more into the WoW fluff if so much of it didn’t rely on repetitive grinds and such.
And LotRO is lovely, but it’s not the perfect panacea to MMO ills, partly I think because it’s vastly enhanced when experienced as part of a group, more so than many other MMOs.
For now, however, it is a place to adventure and to invest in character, and that’s good enough for me.
It sounds like you came to the same conclusion I did when I hit 70 in BC. I didn’t want to min-max in Arenas, I didn’t want to raid, and there was nothing compelling anymore for me unless I got back into the gear grind. I quit shortly after that and never went back, even for WotLK.
At least in WAR, no matter what rank I am, I always feel like I’m making a difference in scenarios and keep sieges. And so I’ll be with WAR, especially since the lore and setting is so good.
Wrath was fun enough, and the achievements were enjoyable while the novelty lasted, but it soon became all grindy again, alas.
And yes, I can believe that WAR stays fresh due to the ever evolving nature of tactics and such in PvP; I’m very much hoping the Slayer is released soon, and that it’s enjoyable enough to be worth sticking through the rough edges that WAR still has. I’m still not sure whether I would stick it out at T4 for long though; again it comes down to lack of character advancement in any way shape or form.
I’ll be examining this phenomenon more closely in the coming months.