What made you quit retail?

[Defiler]

extreme mount collection

that was probably the peak of retardation and one of the most senseless activities in wow (if not in gaming overall) of all time

[nosuser123]

I wanted to write a long post but instead I'll just say - Winstons, I fully agree with everything you said.

[ProMeTheus112]

I wanted to write a long post but instead I'll just say - Winstons, I fully agree with everything you said.

[kenyo]

Winstons said it. I wanted to essentially say the same.

- When something is easy to achieve, it doesn't feel awesome to have it.

I loved to gather in front of WSG with my mates, to play it. I loved to have to conjure water for EVERY single caster during raids... i loved to manage reagents to buff people. I loved to being bound to my character as it is.


Back in the day my Warlock used to have a straight up UGLY ass face. i hated it ...but everyone knew who i was ... and knew me by that mo* f* ing face. No going to the barber to get a face job ( really blizz ... )

I remember how hard i farmed for my Arcanite Reaper....it literally took me weeks....but that is the whole point , after i got it i was so freaking proud. Yesterday i started a new character on retail but i lost interest after level 4 because it was so freaking boring.

I now started on this server, and have never been that happy ( regarding wow ) since 06

[Winstons]

I remember how hard i farmed for my Arcanite Reaper....it literally took me weeks....but that is the whole point , after i got it i was so freaking proud.

This is a great example of gameplay forming around social interactions and real achievements, and I can totally relate as I did the same. I was the second ever person on my whole server to be able to create an arcanite reaper. It took me hours and hours to level blacksmithing to 300, and then a whole long list of interactions, leads, dead-ends, favours and bribes to be able to get hold of the plans. You could walk through Ironforge and people would go 'ooooo!' at the weapon. I kept it to myself for a month or so, and then eventually started selling it to other people, and even the horde (PVE server) for a huge markup price to earn my epic mount, I became known as an arms-dealer, some of my own PVP friends got *slightly* mad at me at making the horde warriors they faced more deadly. Even 6 months later, I would still see people with the "Made by Winstons" arcanite reapers. It was a really cool piece of the game for me.

This is just my specific example, but it's part of a larger problem you alluded to - when everything is epic, nothing is. When a player had a purple item, or you saw a warrior decked out in MC gear, you thought 'Shit! This guy is packing!'. That one random rogue who had been lucky enough to get the epic dagger in UBRS, and lorded it over the peons beneath him.

Interesting/glad to see so many people felt the same way about the direction the game went.

[Brion]

I had pretty much disliked retail since TBC. They did some good things by making PVP a viable game option on its own, but were way too slow and inadequate at really pushing it. I kept quitting and coming back because all my friends (both IRL and online) were playing the whole time, so whenever I quit I was just sitting alone. I finally quit retail right after Cata release. I dinged 85, went to Org, and then never logged in again.

The 2 big things that killed it for me:
1. No community. Everything revolved around queues with people I'll never see or play with again. There was no personality, character, grudge matches, anything among instances and BGs.

2. Everything was so formulaic. I really like the randomized loot distribution as it gives an element of surprise. Yeah some of it is irritating (shaman/paladin drops for the wrong alignment, especially) but every run was a surprise. My vanilla priest had 6/9 T3 and Atiesh, but I ran UBRS almost everyday for something (Devout Chest I think? Could have been something else) just to complete the set and never saw it drop once. Still had a ton of fun helping out people who really needed gear from there. Knowing that when my character hits max level that I will have to run exactly X number of instances until I have all the gear I want is pretty dull. Embrace chaos.

[airicdragoon]

Much like has already been said, when you experienced the game right from day one you really can't replicate the experience with the new content. My friends and I still talk about our early days in wow. Even with a vanilla server that is Blizz like you can't mirror the experience because everyone knows class mechanics to at least some degree. My first pvp experience was joining a raid at level 19 to raid a location I cant even remember. When we got to strange thorn.. the whole low level raid froze at the ?? level tauren that walks through the area. By the time we got to bootybay half the raid was dead or lost and then as we wait for the boat.. it shows up with a HUGE horde raid that runs us over in 2 seconds.

We all have countless numbers of these great moments we could talk about endlessly. I felt each expansion pushed me farther and farther from what made this game so amazing for me. After 1 month of Cata I was so uninterested in the game I quit and haven't looked back. Knowing the people on the server, having rivals, having people know who I was when we ran around stirring up PVP trouble. Having to earn each piece of gear. I farmed the mats for weeks to get the Arcanite Reaper mining 1 arcane crystal per day if I was lucky. The horde had plans for the lionheart helm before us so I had to use 2 accounts to sell myself mats using the tanaris auction house just to get it.

My friends and I don't have 1/4 of the time available these days to play wow which the retail version caters to, and is also the reason we don't have any interest in it. I am mostly waiting for Corecraft to come out, but this server does look fun for the interim.

[NostalgicEnigma]

I can't really say that there was one specific reason as to why I quit retail WoW, but thinking about it, it was primarily due to:

1)Lack of time: I began to have less time to play as I got more responsibilities and my classes got harder.
2)Other interests: More interests besides WoW.
3)A feeling of not really getting anywhere/inability to progress: I felt like I was being stonewalled in areas where I was capable, but not enough that I could make the break, and even in the places I WAS able, it felt like nothing was interesting enough to be worth the effort.

[RhoadsOfRock]

I still currently play, but ONLY because of one family relative. If it weren't for her, I'd have been done with WoW back when MoP launched!
Basically, ANYTHING cross-realm pretty much killed what I loved about the game. However, I started playing WoW completely during the last patch of TBC, so I kind of knew or got used to random BG's since it was a cross-realm thing from the get-go for me.

Anyway, as the game evolved, to me it just kept going further and further downhill. I hated losing attunements, the need for keys, since hunter was my main class, I LOATHED the removal of the pet loyalty system and such, the removal of ammunition and what-not.
Despite maining a hunter for such a long time, I also did and loved the Zelda-reference quest line in Un'Goro Crater on my warrior and rogue, and loathe it's removal.

*sigh* I could go on about all the removals and changes I hated, especially Naxxramas from being in Eastern Plaguelands for level 60 to Dragonblight for level 80. Also the recycling of Onyxia's Lair, ZG and ZA and so on.

At least with the 10th anniversary event they got it right with MC - being ONLY temporary and NOT a permanent change to level 100 with ONLY 3 actual items for loot. I did wish that they'd made the Southshore VS. Tarren Mill BG a permanent one though.

[Belegurth]

Well, I am still subscribing to retail now and again, but there are 2 things that stand out to me.

1. Introducing X-realm BGs. This really killed the server community across factions, however I can see that 4/5 hours in AV queue wasn't very fun.

2. Flying mounts. This was the snail in the coffee for awesome world PvP almost anywere. In TBC I found the only place to be remotely like Tyrs/Silithus/WPL or what have you was Elemental Plateu in the start when everyone had to farm.

Everything after this with dungeon finder, LFR, class homogenization etc is just a mountain of crap.