But if I don’t care about something its dead to me I guess, and I did/do genuinely feel cheesed off about the way that game changed (more so that friends keep trying to get me into it again!).

As a bit of a completionist I like the idea of leaving an MMO at the end of an expansion when the next one doesn’t appeal, sort of happened with Guildwars I guess there I don’t harbour any bad feelings for NCSoft as a company in the way they handled that game and it leaves me tempted to try out their newer offerings.

Well imagine if SOE had taken EQ1, dumbed it down in ways unimaginable so that it suits now a totally different audience, changed PVP from a fun casual activity to something you have to grind away at to be able to compete because now you need special pvp only gear so Blizzard could chase their E$port dollars.

Then they made tanking so easy you could do it with one button because the threat was ridiculously high, released a yawn worthy expansion where you could even solo the 5 man quests while you were levelling up. Make all 12 dungeons in the game snooze fests from start to finish that we could complete on heroic bypassing the normal modes (this contributed a lot to burnout).

Then for the final rip re-released a raid from earlier in EQ1, same graphics, same mobs, just a higher level as the only major raid to run for the first 6 months of that expansion, Uldar was good, but it came too late in the day to save my enthusiasm here.

The final nail in the coffin would be then to reset the gear levels 1/2 way through that expansion thus making the best route to gear up to endlessly spam the same easy dungeons, even the thought of doing this convinced me it was time to call it day.

Now would you have fond memories?

Sure I was a little burnt out in WoW, sure I had some good times in it (ironically I met up in real life with some of the guild members for a day out just a few days before), but I always wanted to walk away from it when I’ve had my fill.

And its for the social reasons therefore that I dislike Blizzard, WoW isn’t a computer game, its an MMO which means its got a social component, normal games change, a console sequel can be bad, but so what.

But with an MMO there are networks of friends, playing fast and loose with the whole game just because they stop making what I realised was a watered down copy of EQ1, but instead now want to cater to the level of facebook games playing crowd is a great way to get hated as a company.

NGE anyone? Its happened before, for this reason I think Blizzard have been slow with their changes, but they’ve still broken up a good thing, that’s my reason to hate them.

What’s yours?

If I see someone whining about something stupid “go back to WoW” will put them down far more effectively than anything intelligent I say.

I do generally resist the temptation to say it though but I can certainly see why people coming into DDO and whining about it not being solo-friendly get this. It’s obviously a group-centric game and is one of the last bastions of group-centric gameplay that isn’t a pvp blob game.