Next World Of Warcraft Raid Dungeon

GrandGranini writes "The New York Times has an interview with World Of Warcraft Lead Game Designer Jeff Kaplan (Tigole), in which he talks about the next raid dungeon after Ahn'Quiraj, the necropolis Naxxramas." From the article: "Naxxramas is going to be the most difficult thing in the game until the expansion pack comes out. It will be the pinnacle, and it's absolutely massive. You'll see this big necropolis floating above Eastern Plaguelands. It's a 40-man raid zone, and it's bigger than the Undercity [one of the main cities in the game]. Things could change, but we're up to something like 18 bosses in there, and they are really cool, too. But it's going to be hard. Really hard. We're hoping to release it in the spring." If you told me two years ago that I'd be reading about an upcoming instance in the sport section of the NYT, I'd have called you a damn dirty liar. May you live in interesting times, indeed.

all the time in the world

[joe 155]

I have never played WoW - and this is something i'm very thankful for. I have a habbit of letting things take over my life a bit, especially games. It kind of makes you feel a bit like your wasting your life when they put hour counters in the games... I'm glad i've managed to keep my time.

Elite Quests and Dungeons

[Phaid]

This sort of thing is why I pretty much quit and make a new alt whenever I hit about 40. I just cannot stand the gigantic instance dungeons.

And really, to me they pretty much destroy the enjoyment of the game. Elite quests and instance dungeons seem like a cop out on the part of the designers -- they just make the same monsters three times as hard to kill, for no reason that makes sense in the context of the game world. It's so amazingly frustrating when you work your way through a nice story arc, with lots of challenging but not impossible quests, and then at the end of it you end up facing a dungeon which is completely impossible for the usual group of 3 that I play in. So you're stuck either never finishing anything, or having to LFG and hope you don't wind up with a bunch of retards.

But then I guess I'm cluelessly stuck on that whole "RPG" aspect of it, which is clearly not where the money is.

A little less MM MMORPG?

[BrickM]

Playing around in the world of Warcraft is absolutely amazing, due to the depth of story and rich world they've created. But I could never imagine buying and playing the game regularly unless they design a path or two you can take through the game to make it to the "end" without having to join up with a huge guild that schedules raids and grinds for gear.

Basically, I love multiplayer agmes and WoW is very good, but I can't stand playing a game on a schedule or organizing this massive efforts. Make some "end game" content that doesn't require a huge guild to complete, please. Some of us like company in the worlds we play in, but hate obligation.

Re:NO MORE HUGE RAIDS!

[BrickM]

Molten Core is "casual" now because it only takes 2 hours with 39 of your friends?

Sounds pretty hardcore to me.

Expansion pack will fix a lot of high end problems

[Mullinator]

Since the Expansion pack will be raising the level cap to 70 a lot of the current raid zones will suddenly become instances that players will be capable of doing with far less people. I think that is why Blizzard keeps on releasing these high end raid dungeons since they know once the level cap is raised that people won't need to be so hardcore to do them.

Re:NO MORE HUGE RAIDS!

[ImaNihilist]

It is.

WoW really is a very short game. You can reach end game extremely quickly, and for the most part, the game has no dynamic end-game content.

You get to Level 60 and then you have to join a massive guild to make it worth your while. The only thing left to do now is get "uber" gear. To do this, you have to do instances like Molten Core over, and over, and over again. You can't just do it once, because there are a lot of people in the guild and a lot of people in the instance on the particular raid.

Once you reach Level 60 you join a massive guild and then have to play for at least 1-2 hours at a time, 3 days a week, on a fricken schedule just to advance your gear. It's not even a game anymore, it's work. Every night, 7pm log on and get ready to raid. For ever raid you participate in you get "points" within your own guild, and if you do it enough you get a chance to spend those points on the gear that drops in the instance. This is how most guilds work.

Basically, when you get to this level, it's not a game anymore. It's a job. You get paid per hour in points, and then you may spend those points to advance your characters stats. Don't show up to a bunch of raids? You might get fired. Don't do your job well? You might get fired.

Once you reach Level 60 in WoW it is ONLY for the hardcore.

public service message

[DeadPrez]

So are the all the "regular" enemies still going to be the same model except slightly different sizes and colors? ^^

I've lost a ton of friends to WoW, and in fact i played beta and about 3 monthes of release. Dungeons are the biggest scams and time sinks. But you can't compete either in PvP or other dungeons without farming item after item endlessly (literally hundreds of hours spent doing the same dungeon over and over)

For the love of god, recognize this shitty, endless cycle. Your life has no purpose and that's why you play (are addicted to) WoW, but guess what? Your life has even less purpose while you play! Also, real life friends are better than loser virtual friends who only act like the like you so they can get purples.

how wow works

[DeadboltX]

In WoW the dungeons are "instanced" which means that when you group up with people and go into the dungeon only your party is in there, it creates a new dungeon for each party that goes into it. Regular dungeons are 5-man, meaning if you are of appropriate level it will take a group of 5 people to go through with a decent ammount of time. These 5-man dungeons are usually capped at a max of 5 people also, so you can't roll through with 20 people and get it done in 2 minutes. 40-man dungeons are the "end game" content. They are possible to do with less than 40 but it is ill-advised if you value your time. They differ slightly from regular instance dungeons in that you are "locked" into the instance once you kill a boss. From then on until the instance resets (once a week) you will join the same instance every time you go in. This allows groups of people to complete a dungeon over the course of a week which is often necisary. The first 40-man raid dungeons were Molten Core and Onyxia's Lair. Molten Core (9 bosses + 1 super end boss) is doable with far less than 40 now if your group has been doing it and has awesome gear. Onyxia is a 1 boss dungeon which is also doable with less than 40. (Average completion time is 8 hours for MC, 1 hour for Onyxia) They then released Blackwing's Lair which is a lot harder than either of the other 2, most servers have only managed to progress to the first few bosses by the time they released AQ (I forgot how to spell it..) There really is no average completion time for BWL because only a few guilds complete it. AQ was just released about a month ago, even harder than BWL, I'm not sure how many if any bosses people have killed. But to sum it up, you need an organized guild of either 40 extremely i-will-lose-my-job-over-a-game dedicated people or a guild of 80 pretty dedicated people to assure that you will be able to do one of these dungeons on a schedualed night. High end raiding guilds will usually have planned raids 3-5 nights a week going to the various dungeons which makes the end game content seem more like a second job than a video game. The harder they make these dungeons the longer it takes guilds to progress through them, the more raid time is REQUIED the less fun the game becomes.

World Of Raidcraft.

[Visceral Monkey]

Have fun, it's all about raids and it's why a lot of people are simply quitting the game. They seem to have forgotten the large number of people who made the game so popular..

One of the problems with WoW

[Siberwulf]

Being a game designer, and writing my own MMO, I've been doing a lot of thinking about WoW (avid player for 6 months).

It doesn't find the happy medium. It is like a pyramid, with the middle missing. There is no spot for mediocracy. You have leetsauce gear, or you are a noob.

Every game has its roots. DAoC was a PvP game. EQ was a PvE game. WoW can't make up its mind, so its kinda half-assing it on both attempts.

I think its great for the extra publicity, as it helps us indies get a better grasp on what Joe Public wants and how he reacts to various scenarios.

Re:A little less MM MMORPG?

[andykuan]

I'm in agreement. I love playing the game but I don't have the time or patience for the administrivia involved in doing a raid. Implicit in these massive 20- to 40-person raids is that one's administrative effort in the "real" world is the price you have to pay to get those rare items. Plus the expectation that I must have a large contiguous block of time to kill in order to complete said raid.

Let's say doing a raid takes 3 hours of planning and 7 hours to complete. That's 10 hours of time expended. Couldn't Blizzard provide some kind of end game content that leads to rare items similar to what you'd get from a raid that would take me 10 hours to complete without requiring me to organize a bunch of wankers while ignoring my wife for a whole day? Heck, make it 20 hours of my time -- as long as it's possible to do some end game content solo.

Re:NO MORE HUGE RAIDS!

[Sentry21]

This is one of the main reasons I stopped playing WoW. I'm a very solitary player, and while I don't mind joining up with two or three people for company, having to schedule end-game content just seems impractical to me. I want to see a massive sprawling, complex dungeon designed for three people, with traps and puzzles and such meant for three people to solve.

Make it challenging, make it complex, make it interesting, but don't make it all colossally huge. I started playing WoW because it was 'the MMORPG for the rest of us', for the people who don't have eight hours a day to devote to dungeons and instances and plotting. I would like to see more 'lone wolf' content for people who can't join a guild and/or commit to certain times to be online and play.

Maybe that's just me though.

Too much "stupid" loot already ruins the game.

[Shivetya]

Seriously. Rare should mean only a few can exist in the entire world. In MMORPG parlance rare means you just have to farm the same damn mob over and over for it to drop. Nothing is Rare/Epic in WOW. It just takes longer to get. Hell most 60s are equipped in rares/epics.

Worse, its an ever escalating arms race. They keep out doing the last quest and now you have scads of level 60s running around with items that normal level 60 content can't threaten and worse, in PvP anyone not equipped on the same level is just shit out of luck.

Monty Hall.

When a MMORPG finally understand what rare means then perhaps we can get away from this incessant farming the create. Then Blizzard gets up on their high horse claim gold farmers are bad yet they continue to create the very environment which fosters them!

(sorry for the ramble)

What casual v. hardcore is really about...

[pcx]

The "war" between hardcore and casual isn't a war at all. It's just casual players have reached a point in the game where they are unable to advance their characters further. They don't want epic handouts, they just want a way to continue to make progress with their character and thanks to time/skill or other factors are unable to participate in the 40 man raid guilds that allow that to happen.

It's not surprising given that it's been over a year since a new "casual" dungeon has been added to the game (dire maul).

High end raids causing plug on new characters?

[Grip3n]

The issue that I see with this is the fact that starting a new character nearly becomes impossible, and nearly all the end-game content for reaching 60 is limited to 40 people during a guild's raid schedule. I, at one point, had two level 60's and enjoyed the game, but I realized it actually was taking over my life.

Initially I would only space time in for WoW, but eventually I found myself moving around my own timetable *for* WoW. Once you're in the hardcore guids, there is no end to the raiding (at night...during the day there is absolutely nothing to do at level 60 beyond PvP, and the PvP items suck compared to anything from BWL). The game became an obsession, perfectly viable business opportunities and opportunities to make a significant inroad into my career were forsakeen for...well...taking down Golemagg for the 55th time.

Now, this new raid instance merely continues the chain. Once again, there's nothing outside of raiding to do once you're 60. PvP items are becoming increasingly inferior to the epics won out of BWL or even AQ40.

Now the issue with new characters is suddenly, lets say you make a new one. You get him to 60, great. Decked out in blue items if you're good and spent your time leveling the last levels in Dire Maul. With this new Nex thing, you're incredibly behind. There are the epics from Molten Core you would want to get, which then you'll need to get the items from Blackwing Lair, then hit up AQ40 for all the latest Legendary or god knows what, then you'd be on your way to Nex. This process would take nearly 2 years to complete, and there's no way in hell you're going to AQ40 or this new zone without being decked out in Epics. There's even very little use for you in BWL if you're in Blues...especially against Vael when everyone just needs to be putting out huge numbers.

Thus, it becomes alts are...well...more of a burden than an enjoyable part of the game. You're stuck on one character and you damn well better enjoy it. You're hooped if not.

If i was at Blizzard, I would be looking for more ways to extend the story at level 60 beyond "Get a group of 40 people and kick ass". ZG was slowly making it that way...but perhaps even take it further. Most people who are casual could perhaps get 5 people together. Make a dungeon where you go and kill something that will yeild an epic item with a 200% drop rate (in other words, two epics...not 3 or 4 like from the 40 man raid bosses). Make the dungeon take around 2 hours to complete for the group of 5, and give it a reset timer akin to ZG's, or perhaps even the weekly timer. The casual players will love it because they can only ever go so often, and the hardcores probably won't want to invest all that time...unless they're more interested in just killing time.

It would be a slow process, but a good one. Perhaps the dungeon (at a level of difficulty equivilant to MC) yeild items straight from MC itself. Of course, with only 5 people the game would need to ensure an item isn't going to be destroyed, thus is sensitive to the classes in the group. At this rate, the group of 5 people should have 8 epics (the number of armor slots) by the end of 5 months. Comparatively, if you have 40 people go into MC, MC yeilds around 30 epics a month, 8 slots each, you're looking at 3 months of getting entirely equipped.

Thoughts?

Re:Elite Quests and Dungeons

[DarkBlackFox]

My experience has been almost the opposite. I leveled up to 60 at a relatively brisk pace, absorbing the game as I went along in the solo quests. I have 2 brothers who have been playing for quite a while now (and were the main reason I picked up the game, after thinking it was a waste of time for so long). I found the solo quests got boring an monotonous after a while. There's only so many times you can do the "Go speak with X" or "Go gather 10 of item X" or "Go kill 25 of X" before it starts to get repetative, just involving more damage, or more kills, or lower drop rates for items.

With the instances/raids though, there's a dynamic that has to be present to be successful. I'll agree if publicly Looking For Group, you may end up with a group that makes the experience miserable, but at the same time you have a good chance of meeting new friends to quest with later. With both my brothers already established players on our server, I was accepted into their guild, and the end-game instances are a blast with them.

The thing that makes the raids and dungeons interesting is it's not the same old kill/gather quests, but rather a dynamic group effort requiring different skills and talents to be successful. Take Molten Core- There's a number of boss fights there, each with different strategies to take them down, from Lucifron to Ragneros. Beyond that, head into Blackwing Lair, and face even more difficult fights. As far as elite quests being a cop-out, I'd say it's the opposite. More thought and planning goes into creating an elite/boss fight than typical trash mobs. With the higher end bosses, you need a clever combination of talent, from healing, to banishing, to sheeping/sapping, to all out DPS'ing. All in all, it's refreshing to see a group come together to use each classes unique skills as one solid unit, to take down otherwise impossible enemies.

For people who don't want to join guilds or cooperate with 39 other people, there's still Blackrock Spire, Scholomance, Stratholme, Dire Maul, and a few others that can be done 5 or 10 man. Group together with some people, and if you have fun with them, add them to your friends list, and ask if they'd like to quest together in the future. Amass a few friends, and you have the beginnings of a guild of your own.

I can't sway anyone's opinion on end-game Warcraft, and it's not my intention to try. Everyone has a personal preference, and my personal experience has been thus far positive. As with any game, YMMV.

WoW has diverged from its what caused its success

[Paolomania]

from http://web.archive.org/web/20021202071205/www.worl dofwarcraft.com/wow/faq/ [archive.org] :
How will World of Warcraft differ from other MMORPGs?
World of Warcraft will differ from other MMORPGs in many ways. One of our main goals is to ensure that players can enjoy World of Warcraft without having to invest huge amounts of playtime. Players will be able to complete quests and experience the world at their own pace-whether it be a few hours here and there, or week-long adventuring marathons. Additionally, our quest system will provide an enormous variety of captivating quests with story elements, dynamic events, and flexible reward systems. World of Warcraft will also feature a faster style of play, with less downtime and an emphasis on combat and tactics against multiple opponents. We also plan to incorporate several unique features, which we'll disclose throughout the course of development.

Once a character reaches 60, the only playstyles are to raid or grind. At 60 you can play at your own pace, so long as that pace matches that of at least 20 other people. Story elements and dynamic events are cool, but at 60 there are fewer and fewer quests that take longer to complete and are accessible to fewer people. Fighting a huge raid boss doesn't involve much tactics against multiple opponents. And to boot, the raid itemization progression (aka mudflation) has totally thrown off PvP balance between those who raid and those who do not.

Re:It's all about your epic gear

[DasAlbatross]

I can't see that? All I said was that getting the weapons is fun for some people. You were claiming that wasn't the way to have fun. I know many people who have never seen the inside of Molten Core and have ridiculous amounts of time on their main character and love WoW. Different strokes for different folks is fine with me.

Re:It's all about your epic gear

[Dr. Descartes]

I think an easy solution to the situation is to create more tier 0 sets. One for each spec tree for each class. Add a few 5-10 man dungeons within which certain bosses drop said items (maybe make a few drop off of Strat, Scholo, etc). The casual player can get a decent blue item in a few hours of gameplay.

That should solve the problem for a number of months. The casual players get more content and the hardcore gamer keeps what's important to them, the differentiation between casual and hardcore players based upon the color of their item names.

Re:Why is WoW Any Different?

[funk49]

At that point I stopped playing EQ and didn't mess with any of their competitors. But everything I'm hearing about WoW is that it seems almost identical to Everquest. It has all the same problems that plagued EQ. So what makes it a big deal? Is is just new and different eye candy but the same design? Same group sizes; same raid setup; instanced zones; epic weapons; everything?

That's because the asshats at Blizzard hired away the guys from SOE who worked on EQ2, which in turn brought their idiotic philosophy of "40-man raids or nothing" to WOW. The original developers of WOW are long gone, and so is Blizz's original vision for the game. All it is now is a much more cartoony version of EQ with instanced dungeons and lame-ass PVP.

problem is

[Transient0]

it doesn't take any more blizzard man-hours to create an item for 10,000 people than for three people.

it's just not worth it to do the art/balance-testing for something that only two or three people are going to see.

Re:WoW's dirty secret...

[code-e255]

It really depends on when you join your guild / raid group. To me it sounds like you just tagged along on a Molten Core raid with a bunch of people who already knew what to do. If you're one of the older groups who started raiding the end-game instances when they got released and when strategies on how to beat the bosses weren't widely spread, you wouldn't say the game's easy. Normally it takes weeks of learning to beat the end-game PvP encounters. Weeks of just getting your ass handed to you and having to pay lots of gold for equipment repair costs.

Things do get easier when strategies and tactics spread, true, but it's still hard for a completely new raid group to start being victorious.

Molten Core is the easiest place to get epics, but I wouldn't say it's easier than Stratholme. Stratholme only requires 5 people. MC requires 40. The more people you have, the more likely somebody will make a mistake and things won't go as planned. Okay, people can make minor mistakes in MC - there not everyone *has* to play extremely efficiently. However, in order to beat Razorgore or Nefarion in the Blackwing Lair, everyone does. Beating Razorgore takes most guilds many weeks of training. I'd guess that less than 1% of the player population has beaten Nefarion. And the newest raid zone in WoW, Ahn'Qiraj is even harder than Blackwing Lair...

Re:NO MORE HUGE RAIDS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the problem: games like this have to do one one of two things. They can either do nothing but cater to the casual user, or they can cater to the hardcore spend 5 hours a day 5 days a week raiding type. You can't do both. If you cater to the casual gamer, the hardcore players are going to continue to be bored. But if you cater to the hardcore (like Blizzard has chosen to do) you shun the casual gamer. The only thing one has to think about then is: which is going to play longer? (and keep paying subscription fees?) I'm sorry to say, it is the hardcore gamer. You can try to pretend that they could make content that is challenging for the hardcore gamer while still remaining accessible to the casual, but thats not true. Anything a casual gamer could do in a month, a hardcore gamer will do in a week (or less).

I'm not defending Blizzard's stance on this. It is the very same reason that I cancelled my account. But I understand it. If you want a game for casual gamers, it has to appeal to casual gamers and no one else. That sounds great, but it doesn't make Blizzard as much money. And thats what really matters to them.

Re:NO MORE HUGE RAIDS!

[Wildclaw]

One more bad thing about raids is that they force players to specialize and makes the game more boring and actually easier than an equally hard 5-man instance. Hardcore players that doesn't want non-uber-guild players to have access to good items usually claim that raids should have better items because it is more difficult. The truth is that the most difficult thing about raids is organization. And in my opinion, organization shouldn't affect rewards, atleast not much.

When it comes down to gameplay raids is basically a healer/tank/damage dealer/crowd control game. Each person specializes on one thing and basically has to use only those skills for the whole raid. Also, due to there being 40 people, the death of any one person has less impact on the overall performance of the raid.

In a 5-man instance each player will have to use most of their skills because there aren't enough people to specialize. A single death will reduce the group size by 20 percent and things like mindless healer rotation is impossible.

Of course it is possible to make raids challenging in other ways, but it is also possible to make 5-man instances more challenging and without forcing people to join uber-guild to have fun.

Re:True Casuals

[cyber-vandal]

Just four hours a day? That basically means doing nothing else with your free time if you have a job.

Re:NO MORE HUGE RAIDS!

[geminidomino]

If you include alt-replayability (new content, not just same content with a different class) and two factions, you're looking at potentially 500 hours of unique content - all new quests and such.

You MUST be joking. "All new quests?" By the time you've gone through Deadmines/Wailing Caverns, you've played through all the quests the game has to offer.

* FedEx - Bring Item X to npc Y
* Orkin - Kill n monsters
* Search Party - Find the missing NPC. Bring him (or more often, something he was carrying before his horrible death) back.
* Hunter/Gather - Grind Monster X for n item Ys.
* Assassin - Kill boss monster X. Return with $BODY_PART
* Class - Use class abilities in meaningless ways to acheive some end (unless you're a rogue.)

That's all there is to it, and you play through all of them, except perhaps the last one, repeatedly on the FIRST run through. You're response is "If the end of the game isn't fun, just do it again?!"

Re:Too much "stupid" loot already ruins the game.

[dscowboy]

Let me explain what you mean. You're complaining about a system where 'rewards' (loot, xp, money, etc) materialize out of thin air. When you killed that merloc and looted its corpse, the money you got from it didn't come from anywhere, the merloc didn't 'earn' it. The merloc didn't spend 10 years eating saltwater fish to grow the [Thick Merloc Scale] you tore off it. It never gathered the raw materials for a [Cracked Short Bow]. In five minutes another identical merloc is going to appear with some more crap on it, all out of thin air. You think that's stupid. Of course it's stupid. The alternative is to have a system where players and non-player characters have to compete for persistent, LIMITED materials/resources/loot/energy. A system where not everyone can be winners, and hard work doesn't always pay off.

But we get plenty of that in real life, which is why we play games. Games where EVERYONE can be a winner, and the least amount of effort (clicking buttons, sitting in chairs, barely thinking) can ALWAYS produce 'rewards'.

You can't have it both ways, either a realistic system where rewards are limited and people lose as often as they win, or a fantasy system where rewards appear out of thin air.

Re:expansions....

[code-e255]

Blizzard have released quite a lot since release. See for yourself: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/imple mented/index.html [worldofwarcraft.com] (Mauradon, Gurubashi Arena, Dire Maul, Azuregos, Lord Kazzak, the PvP honour system, the elemental invasions, PvP Battlegrounds (unlike you, I and many others find them very fun), Blackwing Lair, Darkmoon Faire, Fishing contest, Zul-Gurub 20-man raid zone, Silithus and Searing Gorge revamps, the 4 Dragons, linked auction houses, Ahn'Quiraj (20-man and 40-man raid zones, and s***loads of bugfixes, character class fixes and revamps, and holiday festivals).

Sorry for sounding like a fanboy, but no hobby modders would be able to create content of the same quality Blizzard's content is. Creating an instance isn't simply a couple-of-days 3D Studio Max job (more like couple of weeks to get an internal release done). The thing needs to fit into the game world and into the storyline, and it needs to fulfil the needs of the players. Interesting new encounters take quite a lot of time to design, test and balance, and adding items which are useful yet not game-breaking isn't a simple task either. Then there are all the quests, sound effects and voice acting, artwork - going to concept art to the final textured model doesn't just take a day or two. Loads of people work on instances - writers, game and level designers, modelers, texturers, sound people, and lots of testers.

I don't play Battlefield, but I play a lot of Counter-Strike (been playing since beta 1) and I have come across a lot of community-made stuff (the whole game was a community-made game before 1.6), and even there 3rd party maps tended to suck. First person shooter maps are a lot simpler to create (and even they take weeks of work, lots of testing, and lots of post-release tweaking) than proper WoW instances with all the content. With newer, more sophisticated engines which allow for more polys and higher-res textures, it's getting harder and harder for modders to create high-quality content. Creating maps for CS1.6 which were as good as the official maps was hard - doing so for Counter-Strike: Source is way harder.

And even if Blizzard would let players create content, how would it be integrated into the game world? You can't just let players create new items (they'd all create uber-legendary weapons which drop off rabbits).

The only feasible thing is maybe for Blizzard to hold some sort of a "create a design for a new weapon or other visible item" contest. Creating concept art and models for itemsis something a few people in the community could do. As for whole instances, I doubt any non-professional would be able to create something of the same standards of Blizzard's content.

Idiots

[Dirtside]

I seriously cannot believe some of the idiotic posts I'm seeing in this thread. Why do people think you're supposed to be able to play an MMO constantly, forever and ever, and always be able to have new content available to play? Are you people fucking retarded? It takes ten to a hundred times as much time and effort to create interesting content as it does to experience it. Hey, did it ever occur to you that maybe once you hit level 60, if you don't like raiding or grinding for loot, and you've finished all the available quests, you could stop playing WoW? GASP! NO! YOU MUST RAID THE SAME DUNGEON A BILLION TIMES!!! RAWR!!!!!!!111dragon

I mean, it's not like WoW has 3,000 or so quests, most of which you probably didn't do on your way from 1-60 with a given character. It's not like there are eight other classes you could play, or seven other races, some of whom have large swathes of entirely different quests. No, no, I'm going to bitch because I got to level 60 AND THERE'S NOT INFINITE MORE CONTENT TO PLAY! OMGWTFBBQORLY!!

Jesus. If you don't like raiding, and you don't want to start a new character (try the other faction! They have an almost entirely separate set of quests to do!), and you're bored with the game, STOP PLAYING. You played for a few months, Blizzard got some of your cash, it's quite a fair trade. Quit bitching like you're entitled to something which is impossible to create. Christ on a crutch.

(Lest anyone impugn my qualifications to rant on this topic, I have a level 60 warlock, 60 priest, 44 warrior, 35 hunter, 30 mage, 25 rogue, 24 paladin, and 10 druid. That's on ONE server. I played a lot until a few months ago (don't have the time now). Oh noes!)