Inb4 the WoW haters show up shouting victory for X mmo as dethroning the giant.
I think the problem might be that there are veteran players who just got burnt out with the game. Hell I know at the end of Wrath I was so burnt out I let my subscription lapse and haven't really felt like going back. It's another expansion which means another year or two of grinding to the top of content only to have the board reset again with the next one. After going through vanilla, BC, and Wrath I just didn't feel like doing it anymore.
Despite the big revamps in Cataclysm it's still the same game, and the players who've been around for a long time are probably getting bored with the same old grind of content patterns.
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Xanthious said:
I don't know, I'm a six year veteran of WoW and for some reason Cataclysm just isn't "doing it" for me. I don't know what it is exactly but there just feels like something is missing. I know a lot of guild members are saying the same thing. We can't put our finger on it but something that was there in the previous three chapters just isn't there any longer.
I think what's missing is that their big bad guy isn't one with lots of rep outside of novels. Though I'm not sure how well that stands up, Illdian got lots of his back story from the War of the Ancients novels. (at least the parts that made him into more of a tragic figure than he already was)
Another thing could be that Arthas was a pretty big and epic target for us to kill. I mean we have to face it, Deathwing just doesn't measure up in the depth/badass department of Arthas, he's just kind of a "bleh", flat villain.