Lucky us, another depressing, the world is ending post from Mike Schramm. Surprise! Mike found nothing and complained about it!

WoW players have plenty to do. The VAST MAJORITY of players have plenty of raiding to do. Sure, some will say why bother when I am just going to replace them with Northrend greens. But that is only the case if your gear sucks. I had some epics from raiding at 60 that didn't get replaced until 70, and I never made it to Naxx, or even AQ40. I for one am in a guild that is looking forward to finishing SSC/TK. Sure, we could skip Kael and Vashj now that we are 5/6 and 3/4 and go right into Hyjal, but we want to kill them. We actually enjoy raiding and are enjoying killing bosses for the first time. We are having fun. Do you remember fun Mike?

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If you raid for gear you are missing the point. The gear is so you can do the next raid not the whole reason for the raid. I didn't get any 'pre expansion depression'. Right now many people are engrossed in 2.4 to get badge gear and see stuff they hadn't been able to before. Especially the 10 man groups who have been progressing in Kara. Personally I'm doing loads of dalies to get my epic mount. Then I will concentrate on getting a second 70 to help out with things when the expansion hits. Right now the player base is suffering with a lack of tanks and healers so I am levelling a hybrid. I've gone for a Dwarven Paladin so that the has lore to interact with on 2 fronts in Wrath; there's Arthas and the Death Knights and then there's the new Dwarven stories. I don't see what there is to be depressed about in WoW right now.

And besides Starcraft 2 is coming and that game is going to be occupying a fair it of my time while waiting for the expansion.

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Agreed, there is alot to do still, with most people haven't stepped foot into 25 mans (hopefully I will tomorrow, after a year of playing), the so called Isle of QQ quests are fun and I enjoy the progression I'm seeing there. The BGs are fun, Arena is fun, heroics are fun. Leveling another toon is doable. There is still alot to do. Sure if you have 4 70s and have cleared BT, by all means, pick up another game (gasp, you can do other things besides play WoW!). Otherwise, I'm having fun on my limited play budget.

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I can understand the "why raid with new lootz" issue a bit, but there are other reasons to raid besides loot, right?

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Yea but its true that raiding shut down a good deal as BC approached whether or not thats something that should happen it pretty undeniably did

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There really is plenty to do. I have friends that will spend ALL of thier time just to farm up money and mats for thier professions to get a kick start. I myself will be working on getting my various alts to 70 so I can get more out of the game at 80.

There are dailies, PvP, farming, and a plethora of other stuff to do. Hell, after the success of the first real x-pac, i'm sure people will stay JUST to see what is going to happen next. Blizz isn't about to go cry about it and nobody else should either.

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It'll take another 3-4 months for serious update malaise to take hold, so this post is a bit premature.

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Too soon.

That said, Mike's not entirely wrong. Here's how the new PVE content breaks down for the major groups of players:

-The rep grind is, in principle, good for another month or so for solo players, though frankly I'm already referring to the quests that have the chance to yield badges as "the chores" (as in, signed on, did the chores, went on to do whatever I actually wanted to do for the day). When that's done, players who cannot promise not to go AFK for the next two hours will have no more access to 5-man and higher content than they did before.
(It is really unfortunate that the new badge rewards needed to be BT quality in order to appeal to low end raiders. Solo players would have been in paradise if EVERY SSO quest coughed up SSO tokens used to buy ilvl 120ish blue items, but that would have made the content irrelevant to raiders. So instead we get a 10% chance for a badge from a small subset of the new dailies, and prices that are set to keep people who are farming Kara and the daily Heroic from getting BT gear too quickly. I'll be level 80 before I get 100+ badges from dailies, so it's pointless to even try for all but the lowest-hanging rewards.)

- MrT will become more puggable as players become familiar with the fights, but, again, there's no real bridge between "okay, tonight I can be on for however long this run takes" and "I can commit to being available according to a raiding schedule".

-Low end raiding guilds can attempt to outgear low end raid conten, but they're still going to hit a wall when the content requires more dedication than their guild can muster.

-High end raiding guilds can attempt Sunwell as it opens up (the gates are the stupidest thing I've ever heard of, especially since it's almost certain that Kil'Jaeden is going to be badly bugged when people finally get to him since he was mostly held back on the PTR's), but ironically face their biggest challenge in finding time to run Karazhan every week for badges.

My point being, there may technically be content that most players haven't done, but that doesn't mean they automagically CAN accomplish that content. And don't even get me started on PVP.

My point being, Mike is going to have a point in a month or so. Patch 2.4 is a good thing, but not six month's worth of good thing. If Blizzard thinks they're done until the expansion hits, and aren't going to deliver the expansion until the holidays, there is going to be some serious discontent in the community. Personally, I'm leveling an alt (after getting the chores done), and I don't have a problem canceling my subscription when I run out of stuff to do. But that's precisely the type of turmoil that Mike describes, and it might not be pretty.

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I actually just quit for a while, but not for the reasons mentioned. My problem is there wasn't anything to *do*.
- I had completed all non-daily questlines
- I'd done enough dailies to cringe at the thought of more
- I'm exalted with a half-dozen to a dozen factions, with no real need for more
- I don't PvP. I've tried it - just don't like it
- Raiding takes too much time at a sitting - I just don't have 4-6 hours at a chunk (our guild was in SSC/TK)

So I quit. I'll come back when WotLK is out and brings real new content, questlines, skills, etc.

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I'll never understand the people that cry about gear getting replaced when new content rolls around.

What's the point of getting the best gear in the game half a year before new content or 1 month before new content? The whole point is to have fun achieving new boss kills, so who cares how long you use the gear. I think some people will complain no matter what...good riddance to them all if they quit playing.

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I think you're getting a little ahead of yourself here Mike. The pre-expansion depression certainly hasn't set in on the servers I play on. Think about it:

We just got a heap of new content including Mr T, Sunwell Plateau, heaps of new dailies, new gear to collect from heroic badges, and new stuff to craft. Unlike pre-BC, it is now possible to easily gear both your main and your alts out in full epic sets by the time the expansion arrives and I think alot of people will be taking the opportunity to do so.

Also, I don't even think we'll see a depression, at least not to the scale of the pre-BC depression anyway. We've got dailies to make money for WotLK and the 2.3 leveling changes to allow people to quickly level alts to 70 in preparation for the expansion.

I've been noticing alot of these types of posts on wowinsider lately: fairly negative predications regarding the game that are completely unfounded.

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One difference: Arenas

Arena points will transfer to Season 4.


Everyone will just switch to PVPing for welfare epics.

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