The Anniversary Realms truly show how far this game has fallen: -
- Massive overpopulation making levelling an incredibly painful experience and forcing players down the route of purchasing boosts, often with real money.
- Massive overpopulation meaning essential materials are ridiculously over-farmed making it impossible to get materials unless you buy them with gold, which people often end up doing with real money.
- Cartels ensuring that the boosting market is cornered and anyone who disagrees with them or tries to undercut them is mass reported and automatically banned.
- Blizzard taking a complete hands-off approach and relying on automated systems to monitor the servers as they are too cheap to pay for GMs.
- “LFM HR everything”
- People immediately abandoning groups when they don’t get the drops they want as they know there are absolutely no reprecussions.
- Having a single megaserver for either PvP or PvE and relying on layers, which are easily abused, to try to control overpopulation has been an utter failure.
- Having a release schedule that is far too fast and which caters to the few rather than the many. (Also not adjusting drop rates to account for this increased release schedule)
- Changing the PvP honor system to become a basic grind that has nothing to do with PvP. And although the previous system was still a grind it was FAR more difficult than what has now been implemented, you are going to have a server eventually almost full of Grand Marshalls and High Warlords. (Also the timing of releasing Rank 14 negates a lot of BWL gear, which was idiotic timing.)
- Bots EVERYWHERE! Due to some of the points above, players have turned to real money transactions and we now have World of Swipecraft, which in turn has resulted in more and more bots.
- Efficiency above all. Don’t dare PvP in PvP, don’t dare not use the optimal routes in dungeons or raids, don’t dare have fun unless it is within the lines of the most efficient method of playing the game.
This used to be such a great game, with a great community, but now it’s mostly a disappointing mess and predominantly its the players fault. Yes it’s an old game, yes it’s all been done before, but it still shows how far things have fallen, it’s not even a shadow of it’s former glory.
And yes this is just a rant post, but it’s something I think a lot are feeling judging from in game conversations i’ve had, so it’s worth saying.