If you read Nicolas's post on Terra Nova, he's come to the realization he'll never be a Centurion. That's fancy talk for he's not enough of a catasser to succeed in WoW's end game content. Here's the pudding:
Using our data we can approximate how many hours of weekly play time it takes to move from one PvP rank to the next (see previous link for the full analysis, and this other post for a more complete overview of the limitations of the data). It turns out that reaching rank 5 (Sergeant Major / First Sergeant) requires spending about 20 hours per week in the game - about the average weekly play time for most MMORPG gamers, it turns out, and pretty close to the maximum I can personally invest in the game. But then the curve ramps up steeply: Legionaire requires almost a 30 hours/week commitment, and Field Marshal / Warlord (rank 13) almost 80 hours/week!
So he needs to put in another 60 hours a week into the game to get the armor he wants. My immediate reaction is to say, "fuck that." and call WoW broken… But, with World of Warcraft, Blizzard has to try to please two groups of people, the casual gamer that is the largest percentage, but also the hardcore/catass gamer that often determines where the casual gamer ends up at (through word of mouth, etc). So they have the problem of putting in content that is easily attainable and content this is extremely hard to attain.
Is that an all right business model? Is it all right to leave the casual gamer out in the cold like that? Will it drive them away? I know I'm pretty similar to Nicolas when I play, I'm good at the game, but I only have about 10-20 hours a week I can give to it. And I also know I often feel discouraged when I know there is content I'll never be able to acquire/see.
Nicolas's comment pretty much mirror my thoughts…ya know, if I was still playing WoW:
So much for my shiny new armor… I simply cannot compete with this level of commitment. I guess I will have to turn to raiding now (or not). Or maybe I should just wait for the expansion: Blizzard apparently decided to rework the PvP system entirely - a recognition that the current system is broken, perhaps?
Maybe it is broken, maybe Blizzard is working on it. I hear rumors with the expansion talk that items are up for grabs, good items, items that don't take weeks to get. Maybe.
I have a hard time believing they found some solution that is going to please both crowds. Unless, they made it based on skill instead of time. Spend enough time in WoW and you'll learn enough of the game to gather a lot of it's goodies, even if you aren't that good of a player. What if in the expansion, with it's talk of 5 and 10 man instances, it'll be how good you are at playing your character, how tactically able you are, not just how many hours per week you can login. That would be sweet.
What Would Matt Do: Hope that somehow Blizzard can please both groups with the expansion. Or at least, please me.