What drove you away from WoW?

[killidan]

Played since 2005, raided in TBC/WotLK/Cata T11.

I know exactly what drove me away from the game, could be summarized as casualization of the game by the ultimate misguided inept aka Ghostcrawler. He is lazy as fuck, failed to generate sufficient content and resorted to rehashing time and again. He destroyed the effort-reward basis of the game by making everything faceroll. He filled the game into an assortment of gimmicks, mounts, pets, achievements; now it is a collection game with an online store to take dumb players' money. Finally he abandoned Warcraft lore and infested the game with pandas, jumpy rabbits and some chinese crap that has no connection to Warcraft whatsoever and has no place in the world of WARCRAFT whatsoever. Every time I think WoW has hit the lowest, Ghostcrawler exceeds my wildest expectations in his destruction of the game and fun.

Broken down by expansions:
Rehashed content, Naxx2.0/heroics, ToC the worst raid ever, faceroll heroics: WotLK
Only 5 levels leveling content, no new continent, LFD, little to do: in Cata
Pandas, all the silliness and slaughter of lore with childish elements, LFD/LFR, all around faceroll game: MOP

[Duridi]

The raid model that was added with WotLK, where you progress from normal mode to heroic mode. It made me lose all sense of progression, which is what drove me in the past.

[rogoth]

mostly bullshit from guild, but also lacking teh funds to justify spending the money i was on a subscription and only logging in every wednesday to do LFR and dailies, then log in for raid nights, even doing heroic modes wasn't enough, so i cut it loose, after 8 years, after the last birthday event, i said to myself, i would try and make it a nice round 10, but not gonna happen i don't think, plus my realm is almost dead, and not being able to afford mass character transfers (even when they reduced the price it was still too much for me to do a full change), so yeah, game loosing its' edge, and too much crap going on in game did it for me.

[Archangel Tyrael]

Blizzard catering to baddies.
The amount of whinning from crybabies who think they are entitled to everything in the game without any effort/work.
Promisses broken.
Pet battles.

Off the top of my head, that'd be it. I'm certain there are many other things though.

[Zephre]

Wait a minute...do you have a source for this? This would go a VERY long way towards getting me to resub if it's true. Blizzard will get a nice fat chunk of my money with me transferring my toons as well.

I'm currently playing on The Sha'tar RP (EU) and there's no CRZ on RP servers atm.

I don't think Blizzard understood what to do yet with CRZ and RP/RP-PVP realms.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/03/12/the-crz-free-realms/ take a look here, I hate CRZ as well and this RP server is perfect for me.

I'd suggest making a trial account and checking out the RP realms.

[zeropeorth]

changing my preferred specs constantly. I don't want to play what I played for years.

other than that ... liking other games designs more. I don't like wow so much, not enough to pay a sub. no monthly sub? I'd check in when I felt like it, and probably be active in trying to help get my specs back to the fun I used to have ... but because their ideals are different, doubt it'll ever be what I want. So I left instead of nerd raging on their forums.

I like the game, or I have nostalgia for it enough to keep up with the story (and cringe at class/spec changes still). I just don't think I could ever be into it again.

I think they have made the game great for those who enjoy it now ... but everything is too controlled, metered, restricted, limited for me now. Everything has to be balanced beyond sanity; like homogenizing healers, nerfing lock and warrior mobility, it is just too much any longer for me to bother.


Those who still play, enjoy it. No hate here. Love what you love. Don't hate back though

[Deleted]

The disbanding of my guild, financial situation and studying.

[Xecks]

Just the fact it was so old. Had played for almost 6 years, almost 6 years of the same game can get old really fast.

really fast = 6 years. lol

[Jeleh]

No one to play with because of a dead realm hemorrhaging players. The messed up pvp system which results in fotm imbalance every season. Refusal to pay for a server transfer when I feel that my subscription should include maintenance of realm population.

[Arewn]

Blizzard's shameless milking of the player base is the primary thing that drove me away. Monogaming also isn't really my thing, so I was getting a bit bored of running the gear treadmill, and WoW's value is already pretty bad, so if you're only playing it occasionally it's really not worth it.

I still come to MMO-C because a) I'm interested in gaming news, WoW is a game and b)because the 'recent posts' box usually has more none WoW-related random stuff then WoW stuff.

[dinouille]

hum .... a lot

end of epicness
end of good pvp
99% gear . 1 % skill
bad community
change name/faction/ race / server ( that's the worse for me )
gay expension
boring class mechanic ( removing my vanish on spell was like killing my class ... )
etc etc

[Zdrasti]

Systematically tearing down the 4th wall in the name of convenience.

[Deleted]

the game has always been monotonous for me ... but after playing for 8 years i - on one day - decided that it's time to stop ...
the MoP dailys seemed to mandatory and it just took FOREVER to complete them ... that was too much.

[Deleted]

I hated how I would spend so much time getting the best possible gear, only for it to become worthless in the next patch/expansion.

[Godspeed]

Played the game since Vanilla, stopped playing when I got MSV HC Realm First (top 100 guild). I just could not stand gated daily grinds, farmville bullshit, dungeons with rabbits and monkeys, pokemon battles, LFR/LFD to some extent, and the thing that has ruined the feel of World of Warcraft completely: PANDAS! Only thing that had kept me even finishing MSV was my guildies and raiding challenge. I had hopes for the expansion because of Challenge Modes which I enjoyed immensely, but they haven't introduced new 5 man dungeons with new Challenge Modes. I was considering coming back to WoW just to finish those if they appeared.

Basically they are milking the game now as much as they can, trying to cash in from some fast trends like pokemon/farmville bullshit and etc. This game does not target people that are older than 20 anymore, it is a game for kids now.

[Blackspiral]

Started in Vanilla, then near the end of Wrath, real life aggro caught up with me. While I played on and off until just after MOP came out, between friends leaving the game and not having any time to grind out gear and rep for raiding or pvp finally killed it for me.
There are other factors, but that is the main reason. Heck, I'm happy if I have time to play a few rounds of tetris anymore....XD.

[taheen74]

Of course, I agree with that. I don't think that wow should have ever stayed in a static limbo. But for me personally, and the people that I played with the biggest change that drove us away was to the philosophy of the game. I could write a hundred arguments that people here throw around all day, but in the end if felt that we were no longer the target audience for WoW.

When the game first came out, Blizzard's philosophy was to make a game that was accessible for every type of player: from the newbie to the hardcore gamer: it was the player base that made things inaccessible during Vanilla and Bc made that things like LFD needed..

In order to continue keeping people interested in the game, Bliz has to be able to go by their original goal: to ensure that enough people see content to ensure that those people will stay.

LFR was Blizzard's solutions to lower pop realms/casuals* not being able to do current raid content. LFG and LFR were also the solution to get more people to actually see the content while it was current. Without those two, those lower population realms would have died off years ago (more so than they have now). Which meant Blizzard would have been losing money because those people would have just left for lack of anything to do.

If you really sit down and think about it, cross realm BG's were basically a predecessor for Blizzard to implement things like LFG and LFR.

Hardcores types were never the intended full audience for WoW though. I'm not saying being a hardcore is a bad thing, however, it was never intended to be just a hardcore game.

Are things perfect now? Hardly, but a lot of that is because of the player base in general.


(*When I refer to casuals I don't mean 'baduals'. I'm talking about people on shift work, with hectic sporadic schedules etc- people that generally just can't devote 3 hours a night in a structured raid environment.)

[grifty]

MoP is very beautiful. The art is amazing. However, I am not interested in the theme at all. I am not interested in the story. I started a new panda and leveled 1-90, soloing everything except for queued dungeons. The game does not feel the same as it did. I did not have fun. The only thing that drove me from 1 to 90 was wanted to experience the content, and after I did, I was disappointed and uninterested.

This is the first time I never made it into raiding during an expansion. I just could not care any less. I stopped playing shortly after reaching 90 and running a few 5 mans. One day I hope to delete my new panda warrior, return to my 85 priest, skip as much pandaria as I can, and continue playing in content that interests me.

[RicardoZ]

I'm currently playing on The Sha'tar RP (EU) and there's no CRZ on RP servers atm.

I don't think Blizzard understood what to do yet with CRZ and RP/RP-PVP realms.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/03/12/the-crz-free-realms/ take a look here, I hate CRZ as well and this RP server is perfect for me.

I'd suggest making a trial account and checking out the RP realms.

Well I've rolled on RP servers before but always kind of quit halfway through because I realized there wasn't any RP going on and I might as well just be playing on my normal server. But now that I find this out, it's a pretty big development.

[Gurluas]

The endless grind and the retcons that came with Cata, such as making Worgens into a borked druid form instead of extra dimensional werewolves.