Times they are a-changin'

As Mists of Panderia rumbles ever so closer, the latest patch of WoW is let loose. Some changes have been made, no doubt to keep in line with the latest expansion, and to be honest? I do not like some of them. Granted such a response is atypical of a system that is in command of thousands upon thousands of users but some of the changes made are jarring and, in most cases, come across as unnecessary.

The biggest two changes for me are the Talent Trees and the glyphs. With the talent trees have disappeared – in its place is a far simpler system of selecting one particular skill every so often and other skills being implemented into the character class. Funny thing is, I actually sat down and plotted out a plan for my characters to take with their respective talent trees. Funnily enough such effort now feels redundant.

And the glyph system! I really enjoyed the glyphs but now the Prime glyphs have been dropped and all of the glyphs have had dramatic changes to their effects. Again this is cause for redundancy: I’ve spent a lot of time and money on obtaining certain glyphs for certain characters. I even had one of my characters, Naesandra, to make glyphs for an entire guild. It took a lot of hard effort on both accounts but now it seems it was all for nothing.

I’m not sure why these changes have come about. The glyphs and the talents trees were working just fine the way they were and Blizzard come across as trying to fix something that wasn’t broken in the first place. Indeed, it has been stated that WoW’s numbers have dropped dramatically and the once untouchable game is now looking like it’s running out of juice. Thus one would think Blizzard are trying to stay ahead of some potentially stiff completion (Guild Wars 2 anyone?). Granted I do understand the necessity of staying ahead of the competition in such a cut-throat business but why change that which didn’t need it? Why not fix something that was actually broken? I can think of several quests in the other expansions that were utter rubbish and could’ve well dome with some fixing.

But I think the biggest slap in the face was, for me, putting a lot of hard effort into this game and it ultimately didn’t matter one damn thing. I once made mention that I felt cheated by Blizzard by the ending of Starcraft but that’s nothing compared to this. Why, one would think that Blizzard are deliberately going out of their way to get people to hate them – which is never a good business model.

Still this patch does represent one more drastic change in a line of many in WoW’s evolution. Why, I started playing WoW with Cataclysm and have grown accustomed to the system that was presented within such a context. Therefore I can only wonder what WoW would’ve looked like in its original incarnation.….