the only thing wow has contributed to the MMO market is training a generation of young gamers to believe that PvP is about the acquisition of tangible reward, rather than the satisffaction of killing your enemies.

the more popular wow became the more popular it became. people started buying wow not for enjoyment of the game, but simply because of its popularity and lack of well-funded competition. wow gets greedy and decides to try on a pretense of being a PvP game. now we have young players who have gained their PvP experience in an arena/battleground environment and dont know any better. these are the current generation of gamers that MMO devs are marketing to. its sad. even the so-called "PvP" concepts being developed are watered down with the hope that even a percentage of bored WoWers will stick around and leave their credit cards pumping.

i wonder if another publisher will ever have the balls to step in and try to fill the shoes of games like old UO or (the greatest GvG experience ever made) shadowbane. battlegrounds? try logging in your spec characters with 15 groups of your nation brothers (and sisters) and rolling up in walk-mode while you load your enemies city walls. 15 group leaders in formation, protecting your trebuchets from people trying to flank you. 8 hour epic sieges while you burn your enemies walls down and finally smash their lines until the ones not dead turn and run - and die anyway. seeing your nation tags replacing theirs, where their city used to be, on the world map. or just burning the whole thing to the ground and selling the location to another guild.. because, after all, you didnt really want the city. you just wanted to burn their house down because they smack talked you in world chat (oh my god, being able to communicate with your enemy? whats the world coming to? surely we need our MMO's to censor the world so we dont all die from having to think for ourselves?).

i really feel sorry for people that join queues and run around in circles for some "points" to get their name on a list.. and then call it PvP. in my day that "list" was called a community, and if people knew your name it was out of respect..coloured with a healthy amount of hate, of course =). on servers with 5,000-10,000 players every player knew every guild/nation tag on the map. everyone knew who your allies were and who you hated. when you attacked someone or killed their leveling groups, you had to calculate if your nation had the strength to ignore the threats that would come out of it.. or be prepared to watch your hard-earned cities burn. "factions" (Lol) were called POLITICS. and they were decided by who you liked and who you killed. they changed constantly when a guild would break away from a nation because of some disagreement or other.. and usually join with its enemies out of spite.

now people download shadowbane, log-in for 3 minutes and complain about the older client and the lack of pointless, glowing shoes and scripted "instances", designed to give you a safe place to prove your "skill" slaying your 9,999th computerized dragon for a new pair of shoes with a slightly different colour glow. like a baby that cant think past a mouthful of milk to see the gorgeous creature attached to its dispenser.

meh. end of an era. /rant. i hate wow and everything it represents. if i cant break your epics and burn off your silly rabbit ears, i can at least burn your eyes with walls of text.