most competitive players dont enjoy running around in greens doing the easiest content they can find.

5 mans are brain dead content. they are not fun for anyone with even minimal competence.

So? if you fall behind in MMo content you are just simply not invited to raid the new ****.

If I fire up SC even after having not played in 5 months, I can immediately find a game with someone equally as bad

I actually don't recall saying a competitive player that aims for the top should run around in green and do 5-mans.

Dude, you can immediately find a bad player in SC2 to play with, and you can immediately find a bad guild to raid with. You are obiously gonna fail, just like you are going to fail on the SC2 leaderboards. Or in tournaments, which would be what raiding amounts to in SC2.

you really cant see the difference with being force to deal with 24 ****** and/or bad players and being forced to play an against an equal opponent?

or being grouped with an equal talent because you havent gotten good enough yet instead of being forced to deal with a group of morons because i didnt want to raid 30 hours a week anymore?

You ain't gonna get into a SC2 tournament team without playing 40 hours a week just as you aren't gonna get into a top guild. I really don't understand what you are trying to say.

I never said you could get into the top without playing that much. Was never my point. I only ranted about someone who claimed to be a competitive player and said he got rid of his addicition by playing SC2 instead of WoW. °shrug°

I understand what everyone is saying and I thought my last post would at least shed some light on both sides but I'll try again.

WoW requires more time than skill/practice to gain a certain level of prestige. The comparison of your avatar to others is constant. The competitive nature of WoW boils down to in-game social skills and time spent playing/preparing for raids. Progression in WoW is very linear as it is almost perfectly proportional to time spent playing.

Non-MMO online games like FPS, RTS, or even DotA base their competition on strategy, execution, in-game knowledge and stuff like that. The competition is skill-based mostly, requiring lots of practice and experience. This is not as addictive because the linear progression of MMOs is not in play. If you play SC2 for 2 hours you could lose rating or just generally feel bad about your skills and take a long hiatus. Thus, easier to take breaks and not get addicted.

In conclusion, I'd say that Non-MMO games are more competitive simply because practice and execution are way more important than time spent playing, but these same games are much less addictive since your epeen isn't constantly growing.

*This post does not take into account PvP since WoW PvP is ****ing gay.*

I actually agree with you there, except that I don't consider showing that you played 200 hours more e-peen worthy than showing that you beat someone like Idra once.

As I said, in the end it all boils down to what aspect stimulates your competitive aspect.

As an example, I always loved to heal because I liked the challenge of not letting someone die. But I couldn't care less about how the other healers were equipped, so I didn't have that terrible urge to get new items fast. In Company of Heroes just getting beaten by someone made me start another match to wipe someone ass and show my dominance and reach the other top players ( never managed to do that ). I find CoH way more addicting and challenging on a competitive level than WoW.

That's why I don't agree that you can sooth your competitive spirit by switching over to SC.

If you are competitive you want to win. To beat nef hc/ to win arena games in wow. To win ladder games in SC. It requires more work to do the first, simple as that.

Also, if you think you have to 'prepare' a lot for serious raiding that is ********. My guild has 2 people online at any time, then 15 mins before raid time everyone logs on, raids and logs off. One of the main reasons I quit, actually :P.

So no one in your guild reads EJ, plays with spreadsheets or reads guides/watches boss videos?

Congratulations on once again having a guild of the best players possible, which clearly reflects on how bad other guilds are.

This also just indicates how much time your guild has invested in the past month and a half compared to most.

That's partly why I quit when I did back in December.

Our guild has server first druid, mage, and paladin. I felt like I had played an incredibly unhealthy amount of time, and I was STILL woefully behind on heroic gearing and rep compared to the true turbo nerds.

What finally put me over the edge was battleground PvP gearing. I was ranting about how ridiculous it was to need 25k honor to gear out a guy in blues, and was basically told to stop being such a Sally. Requiring "effort" is good, etc etc. It didn't require effort, it just requires massive amounts of TIME, as can be seen by the people who use Pirox to just farm honor. The night I officially quit was when doing arenas and hitting the brick wall of people who were just FAR more geared than our team was because they had invested umpteen hours in BG's that I just wasn't willing to do. I logged out that night and never returned because I just decided enough was enough. WoW had officially become a chore instead of fun.

I understand the arguments against me about how I'm "not truly competitive" if I'm not willing to invest the time to get ahead and whatnot. But when it comes right down to it, this is a game we're talking about. And if I'm not having FUN in the process, then it's just not worth my time.

I also understand that once I got over that initial grind hurdle with regard to PvP and even PvE to some extent, that the grind factor would have been significantly reduced. Like Randiek says, his guild just logs in 5 minutes before raid time and then logs out. That's how it was for me in WOTLK at the end.

I considered that as well, but in the end stuck with my decision.

Its just a decision every game has to make on how much time it takes to be at the most competitive level. It seems you are disappointed its not set up to allow you as an elite player with great hand/eye coordination and l33t mental agility to just sit down and beat people who put in work to make their characters better, and then move on to the next game. For some of us the grind is grinding, for others its part of the "fun" of the game. I understand where you're coming from, you consider yourself, and probably are, better than the rest of the people who put a full work week into wow. Those guys are going to pump 12 month memberships, real/faction changes, race changes, and probably buy those nerdy ass mugs into blizzard. Why wouldn't blizzard give them a way to be "better" by the time and money they invest?

You're absolutely right.

And just to clarify, I hold no ill will whatsoever toward WoW as a game, or the people who are able to invest the uninterrupted time necessary to dominate their server progression and battleground PvP ladders.

As I get older, I'm just not able or willing to be one of those people.

Looking at the people who have been historically very active in this thread now saying that they're hanging it up, it would seem that I am not alone.

I hung up the spurs because I didn't want to do the required grind to gear for raids. After 3 weeks plus of not playing I came back with a different mindset. There really is a lot more to enjoy in this game than I ever realized. Like, blizz may never create vanilla capped servers, but they do allow you to enjoy content at various levels. And that makes it more fun imo. Like you could level and twink 5 60s or 1 85, your choice. I don't like the movement of some essential abilities to much higher lvls, but what can you do?

Am I the only one quitting because I suck so bad at poker I have to go back to 10+hr days?

No money in poker, everyone's solid.

Time to get a job.

I know... it's weird how it went really.

I used to raid 4 nights a week (BT/MH) and that was considered "hardcore"
Compared to the situation there is now... it wasn't

I was one spec: resto. If I made sure I had my consumables and everything ready I could log in 15 mins before the raid and log out right after.

Now if you want to raid competitively, you need to have TWO sets of gear because you have two specs, you need to log on to do some stupid raid achievement crap for your "mount of the yellow i dont give a ****", you need to freaking fish 10k fish with your guild to get fish feast,...

Come on, the game has not become more casual at all, it has become more time investing so even people who don't take the time to know the fight or their own class even can do all the cool stuff.

basically:

-Casual players leave because it takes to much time to achieve anything important.
-Hardcore raiders leave because they understand baddies who play 16 hours a day will always be better.
-Baddies stay grinding it out day in day out
-hardcore NERD raiders stay like my friend with 11K achievement points
-I guess you also have the 1% of players who still play this game for fun

Baddies and nerd raiders infest the game and breaks down community
GG wow

Sorry for the rant, I felt like it

Once you realize you can't grab the carrot you've been chasing, you make a choice.

I WILL HAVE MY CARROT DAMMIT!

I think it's a LOT higher than this.

There are so many people with like 20 level 80/85's across a bunch of servers, alts of the same class but different races, etc.

People who do low level BG's and stuff.

I was just never one of those people.

FWIW I told myself in Cata that I'd get my priest a bunch of achievements and run the old dungeons and blah blah blah blah. I was just kidding myself. That doesn't excite me at ALL.

Thijs, it is simple ******** that good players quit because no-lifers will overtake them. Biggest ******** ever. Actually, because they merged 10 and 25 man locks it takes less raiding time.

Also, bads won't clear any hardmodes no matter what the gear. Maybe 3 months in, but who cares then.

If you are forced to run for achies or mounts, you are in the wrong guild.

then explain to me what happened to the community, it's so ******

I find that I spend more time trying to figure out what all the censored words are than actually being offended when I see them.

Can't figure this one out:
On topic: I agree with Thijs on most points. I don't get any pleasure out of dailys. I'm not going to complete every single quest in Deepholm just to get a head enchant - it's a waste of time to me.

So pretty much it was the realization that I feel like I'm wasting my time grinding rep, leveling all my professions, and trying to get Justice and Valor points (which I still think are pretty much worthless for the amount of time you invest to get 70 of them compared to how many JP or VP things cost). Screw all that.

I don't care if people call me bad or casual or whatever. I'll take Wrath where I can play a few hours a day and feel like I can be competitive. That's based on my understanding of mechanics and the fact that I number-crunch, itemize well, and read EJ. The gear was easy in Wrath. So now that the itemization is really easy and most gear available to you is "good" for your class, all the number-crunching in the world won't get me in my 5man blues more DPS than someone with all rep purples.

I think that's what a lot of the "hardcore" players (or whatever really committed players want to call themselves) want.

Not trying to knock "hardcore" players there. I know that a lot of hardcore players don't have ill-will towards the rest of the player base. I guess I'm saying that this play-time rewards system is more beneficial to the type of person who will go on MMO-Champ and chime in on whatever the complaint of the day is just because they have the time to do that.

You don't need any rep purples if you are only doing normal mode raids. Normal mode raids can be entered and contested with everyone hovering around 335 iLvl, as long as you know your class and have awareness.

If you want to be on the bleeding edge and do heroic content than yes, you need to grind everything to the bone as fast as you can. Not worth it to most, so just be casual and don't be dumb.

Gearing up in heroics doesn't take too long and you can grind rep to revered for the one head enchant you need while doing so. To get a shoulder enchant all you need is honored with Therazane, so just do like 3 hours of quests in Deepholm if you didn't choose to level there.

I just don't get why you think you need to play so much to have fun. Just because the ability to grind everything is there doesn't mean it's necessary for all but the most dedicated raiders.