World of Warcraft free trial version is now unlimited length (until lv 20)

Trial accounts lasting forever now is really a very minor change that doesn't seem like it should bother anybody, unless you're one of the folks who hates "newbies" to such a degree that anyone who isn't level 85 with a full set of heroic raid gear (or Arena gear) needs to die horribly to sate your ego.

The restrictions are necessary so the game doesn't get thousands of trial accounts all being created to stand in Stormwind or Orgrimmar and /yell "Go 2 my site 2 buy goldz" all day long. We get enough of that as it is from paid accounts getting hacked.

And yes, the progression of people screaming about stuff went something like this:

• Classic WoW: This is the Golden Age. Everyone yearns for the days when it took 30 human vegetables and 10 people with the slightly higher IQ of a rabbit to down eight bosses in Molten Core, never mind that they couldn't get past Majordomo Executus or Ragnaros. Apparently Naxxramas being so hard that less than 1% of the player base ever stepped inside, much less downed a boss, was the pinnacle of hardcore raiding. Balance Druids did not exist.
• Burning Crusade: Heroic mode dungeons and a steep barrier to raid entry meant that only TEH HARDCOREZ players ever got past the Karazhan 10-man raid. Class balance was so completely out of whack (albeit better than in classic) that you would get laughed at if you rolled a Druid, Shaman, Paladin, or Priest to DPS, unless you were on a Kara alt run. When ilvl 141 gear became available for Emblems of Justice in 2.4, it was the death of the game — how DARE Blizzard hand out raid-level gear to mouth-breathers?
• Wrath of the Lich King: The sudden reduction of difficulty meant that all those hardcore raiders suddenly had to deal with the aforementioned mouth-breathing human vegetables parading around Dalaran in shiny Naxx epics. All they could do to feel properly leet was to show off their Immortal and Undying titles *
  ^{Earned by clearing the dungeon without dying to any bosses.}
  . Ulduar was the greatest raid anyone ever made, with a perfect balance of fun and difficulty via optional hard modes. If you didn't kill Lich King in Heroic mode you sucked as a person and need to throw yourself off a bridge.
• Cataclysm: Oh noes it's too hard again all of a sudden! Now we get to feel awesome again that we can kill Heroic bosses while everyone else is struggling with normal Nefarian and Al'Akir. Rather than class balance sucking like it always did before, now we're all mad because it's too homogenous and I can't feel morally superior to the Mage who prefers Fire to Arcane despite the 0.00003% DPS difference.

That's about it, really. There's a reason I stay off of the official forums.

My recommendation: Just play the game if you enjoy it. Don't worry about all these comparisons to the past.

edited 30th Jun '11 10:05:51 AM by Fighteer

To that last point I say that there are some people who hate Cataclysm because it isn't hard ENOUGH.

Well, you have to elaborate there. Quest difficulty is a different thing from 5man difficulty, which is again a different thing from raid difficulty. Last I checked, I didn't see anyone crying for Cata raids to be harder, but I did see people complaining about the lack of challenge in solo quest content.

There was never challenging quest content. There was only solo and waiting 3 hours begging the general chat for a party. Only exceptions I know of were the Priest and the Hunter class quests.

edited 30th Jun '11 11:28:38 AM by stevebat

Personally, I've had a lot of fun trying to solo group quests with various alts. I don't really miss them in Cataclysm though.

Well, there was always challenging quest content if you were going in undergeared or under-experienced (in terms of the human player, not the character). Perhaps not interestingly challenging, though; the npcs are never smart.

That said, I don't quest for challenge; I quest between random battlegrounds or random dungeons, to kill time, and because learning about the world is interesting. And because there are shiny achievements to keep me pressing the button like one of Skinner's pigeons.

I've only played since WOTLK, but with a player base as big as it is, there's always going to be whining — from a small but vocal proportion. Most players seem to be happy enough most of the time. And I'd wager that most people who quit the game don't quit because of the things being whined about loudly, but for other reasons. The whiners are mostly those who don't quit but keep complaining.

Well, in Vanilla there were quests that made you run on foot across huge stretches of empty terrain, sometimes through multiple zones, to get to an objective. Lowering the level requirement of mounts was the one of the best things Blizzard did, yet people still bitched about it because "REMEMBER WHEN MMOS WERE SUPPOSED TO BE HARD?" (actual quote).

Apparently, "hard" means to add so much Fake Difficulty that the barrier to entry is high enough so that only the "true" gamers can get anything.

/rant

That said, I can understand the annoyance at working one's butt off to get something and then have them make it so much easier for newer players. Maturity is required to realize that even if one did work hard for it, it was still stupid fake difficulty that didn't enhance the game.

Besides, it's not like there's not plenty of stuff still in the game that's grindy, if you want to — like certain faction reps, some of which give neat toys to show off (like exclusive mounts).

edited 30th Jun '11 11:44:35 AM by Morven

Running across those miles of empty terrain to get to my quest objectives... leveling a new toon still feels painful even though I know that they modified the quests to be more tightly grouped and I have a mount some twenty levels earlier than I used to. Nostalgia Filter? Not me!

I will say though that the world feels a lot smaller now than it did back then.

"Hi quest-starved level 40-ish player! Welcome to Tanaris, on Southern Kalimdor. Please go to Hinterlands, Northern Eastern Kingdoms, the literal opposite end of the game from here!"

Half hour of flights and boat rides, IF you've got the flightpoints already, later-

"Hi quest-starved level 40ish player! Here's 2% XP for meeting me here. Head back to Tanaris now!"

Half hour later-

"Welcome back! I do have a local quest for you. Thanks for doing it, that only took about 15 minutes, head back to Hinterlands now!"

I like the quests in Un'goro crater that took you to Winterspring and back... twice. With a stop in Feralas on the way. Never mind that you had to grind rep in Felwood to even get into Winterspring unless you were a Druid. And the rewards you got were crappy anyway. Oh, Linken... I love and hate you at the same time.

Now the biggest problem is leveling so fast that the quests in the zone you're in are all gray by the time you're done.

You could always just corpse-hop through the tunnel if you really wanted to get to Winterspring. You might not even die; it wasn't that dangerous.

You could stealth or FD through if you were a Druid, Rogue, or Hunter, or get a friendly Warlock to summon you. But if you were actually leveling for gear — in short, not OP enough to just ignore the furbolgs — you were condemned to a death or two. The point is that it required a really large amount of pointless travel time just to make the quest chain seem longer than it was. And then you had to find a group to kill Blazerunner which was hard enough in and of itself given the sparse population of that zone.

edited 30th Jun '11 12:12:40 PM by Fighteer

In the vein of Tropes Are Not Bad, even fake difficulty can have its good points, though. There were times when I enjoyed being sent way around the world to wander across new quest hubs and just soak in the atmosphere while killing mobs along the way for useful loot. You got to see lots of different places and had a fair chance of interacting with other players along the way. Since that time, World Of Warcraft has streamlined travel time to become a series of instant teleports to instances. Yes, you get to the content faster, but it stops feeling like a world.

That said, there were genuine problems in the early game with quest density. It DOES suck when you get to an area and find that there's barely anything to do. I just wish they hadn't taken the easy way out as the solution.

I also seem to remember some reasonably challenging solo content, albeit distinctly as a minority of the quests available. Some of those warlock class quests weren't easy-peasy.

The class quests were occasionally challenging, for those who got them. The inequity was an issue. But Blizzard doesn't like the cost/benefit of designing quests for 1/9 (or 1/10 now) of its player base.

edited 30th Jun '11 12:18:20 PM by Fighteer

I'm beginning to wonder if Blizz isn't laying the pop culture on a bit too heavily. The Rambo references were nice and all but isn't Bioshock a little too recent?

Bioshock was what, 4 years ago? In ADD, neophilic gamer conceptions of time, that's like prehistory, right?

Me, I don't care — if I get the reference, I'll get a grin, if I don't, it probably won't hurt anything.

I enjoyed the reference to CJ Cherryh's having used the world name Azeroth before World Of Warcraft, for instance.