There are a lot of different reasons people play the game. The most common reasons I've seen are:

#1. To see as much of the content in the game as possible. You like the game itself, and the various aspects of the game intrigue you. Once you've seen all of the game's content, and know there probably won't be anything more of interest, you'd quit. You probably view guilds, raids, pvp, etc. all as means to an end. That end is to see all there is to see.

#2. To play with friends. The game is only the medium with which to have fun and as such is secondary to the enjoyment. Your friends provide the amusement. If your friends were considering leaving the game, you'd probably rather find a new game to play with your friends than find new friends to play the game with.

#3. To be recognized as a great player. Your goal is to be famous as #1 player/guild/whatever. Your in-game accomplishments provide you some sort of validation. This type of player also tends to be the one that burns out quickest. The game is your chosen tool with which you demonstrate your skill and achievement.

#4. To not be bored. You play the game because you've got nothing else to do, and it takes up otherwise idle (boring) time. If something more fascinating comes along, you'll have no qualms jumping ship.

That pretty much sums up my view. Personally, I'm a #2. I'd never leave my guild for another, and if the game changed to the point that it wasn't feasible to maintain our guild for whatever reason, I'd be looking for a new game to play with my guild rather than continue in wow.

I regard the game as a series of puzzles that has to be solved. Each encounter requires a strategy to be used to beat it, often one not intended by the developers. You need to practice that strategy to get it right. Then there is the puzzle of the classes on how things work in game and how to get the most out of each of them. Once you have beaten the content its less fun but you can at least farm for gear to make yourself batter at it and preparing yourself for the next encounter. Having 25 man fights of different classes allows for the solutions that people find.

You cant do everything in one game. Trying to be PvP and PvE is in my opinion a mistake. The explorer type couldnt care less about player killing, they will live and let live. The killers live only for the killing of other players. They will gravitate to different games, and new MMO's are coming out to cater for each type. For example Fury seems to me to be purely WoW arenas and will take some of the players that like that.

You must have ways for new players to enter. In EQ they would obsolete gear slowly whereas WoW obsoletes gear in one big hit. This is bad. You uber gear should still be decent in the next expansion not rendered useless. This is one way to allow new players to enter and reach par with the old timers. A game like EVE is totaly screwy in this reagrd in that you gain XP for time subscribed not according to how much time you play online or how skilled you are. It means that new players can never catch up and discouraged from entering.

In the dieing days of any MMO you find a core of veterans who have done it all and are determined to protect thier status as top dogs. They totaly miss the fact that there are no new people joining and the old timers are quitting. Without new blood a game will slowly fade as the vets give up and leave one by one.

Not everyone is interested is titles to show their achievements. Personaly I couldnt care, the satisfaction comes from having beaten something. Its personal and doesnt need to be shouted to the world. This is a social thing where you are tyring to say "I am better than you" and this gives you a warm feeling of superiority. These titles are going to very much appeal to the achiever type.


The big problem is that blizz isnt the least bit interested in providing content for us to play. They want to rake in the dollars without handing anything back. For the cash they make I would expect a new instance once a month. There is a problem at blizzard. They are content providers in the same way that TV and radio companies are. Yet they regard themselves as game developers. Now that they have the biggest game ever, they need to make this switch of mentality. They are not there to sell new titles but to maintain the income they have from this platform. If anything they should be outsourcing new content develpment in the same way that TV networks buy content from independent production companies.

That is just false.

[EDIT] To elaborate. Naxx was tested on the PTR and for example Black Temple was not run through completely. Same with most other instances. And as been mentioned in other threads. The top guild have always cleared the instances fast and the only show stoppers have been bugged encounters or those that required insane stacking.

Raid gear in vanilla WoW made you a PvP god most of the time. That in itself was a big enough status symbol. Dominating battlegrounds was fun, and getting in against another raid geared team was too. Now PvP gear is very easy for anyone to get.

I play for the content. For the most part I just log in at raid time and don't play much otherwise. Recognition of accomplishments does not mean much to me. I do think making PvE and PvP gear look the same was a bad choice. It kills some of the "uniqueness" that was found in raiding in vanilla WoW. Seeing that really rare raid gear on someone was something. Now we all just look the same.

I've always thought the idea of titles was a neat one. Turning in something in town after killing a big boss is always exciting. I know the Onyxia and Nefarian items weren't of much use for me, but I still did the head turn ins because it felt "epic".

On the topic of gear achievements and differentiation I speculate the reason we are seeing so many recolored sets is because of memory limitations and minimum system requirements that are almost 3 years old and haven't been updated. There's very little cost to a recolored texture as that can be achieved with an algorithm. Every new set added to the game pushes the memory requirements up slightly. Its not because of lack of art that we aren't seeing these differences. It must be a deliberate attempt to manage the amount of textures in memory at any one time.

Priorities for differentiation seem to be around weapons, shoulders, helms, and off-hands. Zul'aman adds a whole slew of new differentiation art to the game as well but for the less hard-core. Hopefully we'll see some really new unique art in the Sunwell and no arena season colorization to match.

I think there is a problem with regards to the "epicness" of raiding. In Vanilla WoW how many guilds lined up in SW/Ogrimarr after they turned in their first Onyxia/Nef heads to take an SS?? In comparison how many guilds lined up in Shatt when they got their first Mag/Kael quest item? Granted Mag and Kael had their items added in later, I don't see newer guilds doing those types of things.

My biggest gripe as far as recognition is that the arena gear and Tier gear looks the same. I got the first Warlock T5 helm on my server and when S2 gear came out I started getting tells asking me if I went for the Merciless Spellbalde first or the S2 helm first which absolutely enraged me and when I told them I raided for my epics, they were surprised. Maybe I'm just getting mad over a little detail but I personally don't want to be lumped into the "welfare epic" category, I like a lot of other people in this game spend a lot of time working on our characters and there should be some delineation between those that raid and those that pvp, I mean Blizzard has made it apparent with the addition of resilience gear that they want to keep PvE and PvP separate so the recognition of each should be kept separate.

People should be able to look at people in good PvE guilds or on a good arena team and say "that person is in a good pve guild" or "that person must be really good at pvp" not "that person looks like he is good player, is that a T6 helm or S3 helm? /inspect"

I was actually going to make a thread a lot like this, as the issue has been discussed a lot in passing recently in the context of the 2.3 itemization.

First, I'd like to respond to the prevailing trend lately to associate "achievement-style" playing with an unhealthy obsession with in-game validation. Every time someone questions whether Blizzard is undermining players' sense of accomplishment by repeatedly and rapidly shrinking any possible gear gap, a million people trot out the "if you play for loot then I feel sorry for you" argument or "QQ maybe now you'll have to stop living in your mom's basement and find something else to make you feel good about your life" trolls. A Blizzard CM recently touched on this argument in response to such a thread: "Are you sure your complaint doesn't stem from the fact that your epic raid loot makes you feel like you're better than others who have lesser gear? I'm not accusing, just asking." (thread).

But obviously that's part of the motivation, and the game design itself plays on that motivation as one of its design elements. Admitting that shoulders are a "vanity piece" and thus deserve a higher rating requirement fits into this. Making gimmick noncombat pets and pets and rare mounts that aren't necessarily inherently "cooler" or better-looking than alternatives, but are held by very few people, fits into this as well. Hell, the Red Resonating Crystals in AQ were prized solely because they were rarer, despite being pretty much identical to all the others. Is it because of Red? No, they could've made the Purple one rare and everyone would've wanted a Purple. People pay literally hundreds of dollars for a spectral tiger mount or a trinket that gives you an ogre costume.

Many people are looking for ways to distinguish themselves from their peers, and I think such achievement-oriented players do tend to be more numerous among those who raid in particular. But even if people aren't explicitly acknowledging their motivations, almost everyone on some level does measure their relative progress and happiness in comparison to their peers. (Academic Paper) Most people won't admit it, and may not be cognizant of it, but they do in some level chart their progress based on their peers -- ideas of what a good job, good home, good car, "happy" life, etc., should be come from observations and interactions with those around us who are similarly situated.

The details of this vary, and certainly do by server. I do AV a lot, and when I ride out of the tunnel on a scarab mount in full t6 armor, there are a lot of players who literally never have seen a player who looks like me given their server progression and history. I invariably get two or three tells on the subject before I reach Stonehearth. On Mal'Ganis, however, I'm one of like nine or ten shamans who regularly hang around in Skyshatter. Obviously truly casual players continue to be awe-struck, but these are people who may not even know what Black Temple is and don't particularly understand what the gear connotes; just that it looks cool and has big numbers on it. In my "peer" group that doesn't entirely consist of high-end raiders, but includes plenty of people who mostly PvP, and just in general people I've known ont he server for a long time and talk to regularly, my WoW character is fairly unremarkable. I'm known and distinguished by being a high-profile player, raid leader of a well-known guild, and of course presiding over the matches at the Ring of Blood. But my character's actual gear and stats are fairly irrelevant in that context.

WoW has largely moved away from meaningful character attributes that confer any sense of individuality or distinction. I can have a fancy title, or a mount that moves a bit faster than yours, or a gimmick pet, but ultimately characters are far, far more similar than they are diverse. The original dungeon arc pre-TBC brought us Sulfuras and Thunderfury and Atiesh. In TBC we have Warglaives (July 2007 Illidan kill and zero mainhands and zero offhands -- not exactly effective as a status symbol!), which have been nerfed twice now and are a very limited sort of distinction.

PvP, in my view, is perhaps even worse. In the name of competition and paving the way for WoW to succeed as an e-sport, Blizzard made the arenas a world of almost complete homogeneity. And then they of course have completely failed to promote the e-sport side of it, with no hint whatsoever of another tournament following their first, and meager and inconsistent support for private organizations that were trying to promote WoW. Anyway. A bit into the season, at a decent rank, every single opponent you face has pretty much the same gear, and one of a few very specific talent specs. Is the rogue maces or mutilate? Is the warlock 4X/X/11 or is he SL/SL? That's about the extent of it. I still use several pieces of PvE gear, and generally enjoy the advantages that confers in many matchups (I have much, much better regen and efficiency than a typical cookie-cutter PvP shaman in any prolonged 2v2 or 3v3 matchup, for example), but ilvl 146 PvP gear in S3 will pretty much eliminate that, and I'm currently farming BGs so that I can be exactly like every other shaman I go up against.

Flame me if you like, but I personally miss "PvE to PvP" and having PvP as a way of pitting the characters that we've built against each other. Giving everyone the same gear, talents, and so forth, strips out the essence of what distinguishes MMO PvP. I can't "build my character" in a certain way because there is only one way. I need resilience or I die. There is only one source of resilience, and that's the same arena/honor gear that everyone else uses, with no individuality to it. And there's no real sense of progression. I'll have cap arena points and near-cap honor going into next season. I'll buy 6-7 new epics the day S3 starts, and the people I'm playing against (once we get out of the initial 1500 range) will have exactly the same. Every couple of weeks after that I'll get another piece, and everyone else I'm playing against will have exactly the same.

This is starting to ramble, but I'd like to end by crossposting a post I made on FoH a few days ago in a slightly different context:
Blizzard's answer has been, I think, to remove stratification wherever possible and constantly and rapidly offer ways of catching up, on a far, far faster schedule than the original "one gear reset per expansion" model. But in doing so they've also removed much of the ability to meaningfully distinguish one's character.

I play because I like the game, first and foremost. Recently my brother and a few RL friends, none of whom live near my school, rerolled on my server - all the better. I did the hardcore raiding thing from MC through Twin Emps, and then decided that was enough of that and since then I've cared less about shiny purples and more about just enjoying myself.

Furthermore, it's an escape. If I had a bad day in classes or at work, I can log on WoW for a bit and either PvP to blow off steam (let's face it, big numbers in PvP make anybody smile) or just absentmindedly screw around.

Edit - to bring this a bit more in line with the thread, I should probably add some more. My time spent in a hardcore raiding guild gave me the opportunity to be in that "server allstar" role, though I was certainly never one to have their gear linked in chat. I rolled with the "A-Team" PvP premade that produced all the HWLs because I had good PvE gear and that was all you really needed to succeed. Specs varied widely but most were effective to some extent in PvP - it's now all uniform. A warrior in an arena will be MS 99% of the time, myself included. But it extends beyond that: WoW is the ultimate stat-stacking game, be it spellcrit or healing or resilience, the last of which is a bit of an artificial stat in the sense that Blizzard conjured it out of thin air and gave it meaning, but it's just another stat to stack.

You put on the gear that will keep your ass alive while the rogue/hunter/warrior are pounding on you, and that gear is the same gear everyone else is wearing. I think my priest has 20 or 30 "twins" on Blackrock alone, forget the whole battlegroup.

I can only chuckle at the thought of how many wipes it would cause when your whole healing crew stops healing and starts smiting/meleeing/moonfire spamming when the boss is at 2% in hopes of getting a title from a boss killing blow.

Even with all the bugs and mistuned content, PvE is designed to be beaten, and titles associated with what are essentially required progression steps feels foreign to me. Most end-of-instance bosses are already tied to a different form of character progression, i.e. attunements.

Endahl, Looter of Vashj's Vial. Uh-huh.

However, if you were to associate titles with non-required PvE achievements -- call them extra hoops to jump through if you must -- then that sounds a little more reasonable. Trials of the Naaru being the obvious example, but similarly killing Doom Lord Kazzak (with maybe a questline attached) could grant you the title "Bane of the Legion" or whatever. Heck, they like long titles, it seems, so that fits.

Personally I wish there was some way to fairly distinguish between a committed PvE raider and a hardcore PvP'er beyond just cosmetics like titles or gear textures -- but functional differences are seen as unfair, and since Blizzard hasn't done as much as they could have towards separating PvP and PvE stat mechanics, distinctions reaching into character "power level" are pretty much out of the question. I thought the oldschool PvP barracks were a nice touch, that getting in that door implied some level of PvP dedication. I wouldn't mind seeing something like that again, for both PvE and PvP.

ZA will have a 57 stam, 37 resil ring that only can be earned via doing the timed quest, not it is really not great, as its ilevel 141 stats are wasted by only investing in two stats.

I think it would be nice to have more well itemized extra loot item that is made for PvP, similar to how SSC did, but made it an item that people can see, like Shoulders.


It would be nice to have more ways to stick out (other than the bug mount!), perhaps armor dye (the devs have responded that this would be too hard, but the Tier/Season sets are just recolored versions of the same model) or more titles.

Exactly. For the vast majority of people who *won't* get to the end game, they have nothing lasting to show for it except the attunement. That sucks. It may be poor and pathetic compared to what the rest of you get up to, but I for one would be stoked to be able to put "Spire-Lord" in front of my mage's name just to show he'd killed Nefarian. In fact, I don't even have now-obsolte loot to show for it, since he never dropped the stuff I needed.

Similarly, in WOTLK, I'd be happy to have "Serpentshrine Purifier" as a title (assuming we get Vashj down). I'll wear it with pride till something better comes along :-)

When hanging round IF, I wouldn't mind being able to put up "Master Jewelcrafter Schizzle" as a sign people can spproach me for business. And so on and so forth.

One might argue that removing the stratification is actually a time-delayed option though. The T6 raiders are still distinguished right now... but won't be forever. The T5 raiders were also distinguished... until S2 arrived. You get your time in the sun, fleeting as it may be, before the next arena season arrives.

How do you define meaningful distinguishing?

Is being visually different enough?

Is being more efficient gamewise enough?

Is being able to beat all comers in pvp enough?

Furthermore... how does one meaningfully balance a game when one group of players derives their enjoyment at the expense of other groups?

LOTRO has done a nice job with the titles, for example. Titles for crafting, titles for grinding (Ok that's most of them but the basic idea is sound), titles for exploring, titles for questing, titles for raiding. People do like them and use them to customise their characters, or let others know that they are grandmaster crafters looking for trade etc.

Praetor's post about cookie-cutter, linear progression in PvE and PvP got me thinking: there used to be just one way to epix, namely raiding. Now there are several: 10-mans, heroics, raiding, BGs, and arenas. To make up for this, each one of those is easier, so you can choose to do or not do any particular one, depending on how you want to play the game. At the end of vanilla WoW, there was also BG progression, but the huge time investment required meant that very few people did either, and that either one was zomg in and of itself.

While this change towards multiple, easier progressions served its original purpose of removing Raid Or Die, it had an unintended effect with psychological character progression: how much of a badass your character is, really depends on how many different areas you've succeeded rather than how much you've succeeded in each one. I respect hardcore people on my server not just for killing illidan, or gor getting a gladiator title, but for doing both (hi digo!). There's plenty of people on my server who have done one or the other, but those that have done both is more in line with the number of people who at the very tippity-top of progression in vanilla WoW.

Problem is, you can only wear one set of gear. Which means that, asymptotically, there's no graphical distinguishing between joe blow 600 badges, and awesomity McHardcoresauce who has 600 badges, 62 exalted factions, KT cthun and illidan kills, and a gladiator title with just a glance. Unless he macroed gear swaps and switched mounts while standing around shatt.
The result is that hardcore people feel a bit disenfranchised when casual-er (relative term) people reach the same level of progression in one field, and have no way of showing that they've achieved all 5. Especially when the 5 different shoulder rewars all look basically the same.
*These are in general terms. I don't know if there are honor or badge-loot shoulders, and it doesn't change my point.

If it's about quantity over quality now (to an extent), one solution is multiple vanity displays that you can have simultaneously, since gear clearly doesn't do it anymore. Arena gear, raiding title, BG mount, badge-loot tbard, and a faction non-combat pet. Or something like that, possibly mix-matching (BG title, pheonix mount?).

Seriously, we need more awesome and special noncombat pets.

And herein is the problem. The progression differential is higher than it has ever been. The bleeding edge are three and a half full instances ahead of the casual raiders. That is much more distinction and much more achievement than was ever possible pre-TBC. However, the visible differential is much smaller. You are on Mal'ganis, with several guilds that have been farming Illidan for months. There is one guild on my server that has ever seen Illidan.

It is the worst of both worlds in that you get no sense of accomplishment - and why should you, when everyone you see has the same distinctions? Yet in real terms you are part of a far tinier elite than was ever seen before the expansion.

Paid server transfer is at the root of this. The top end raiders have transferred servers in order to be on a server with a high concentration of top end raiders - and in doing so have put themselves into a very homogeneous environment. It's a massive irony. In one thread we have you arguing that we should allow PvE to PvP transfer in order to allow raiders to more easily congregate together, while in another you're lamenting the inevitable consequences of that.


Wrong target. Think about it. Is the fact that you are surrounded by many shamans in full Skyshatter [i]anything[i] to do with the fact that your Tier 3 gear was made obsolete by level 70 blues?

Blizzard did the reset when TBC came out in order to put all new-minted level 70s on a level playing field. But that has little or nothing to do with the fact that the people on your server have all progressed through the raid game at the same rate and thus lack differentiation. That has come about because there are lots of committed raiders on your server who all put a lot of time and effort into the game - the same amount that you do. They thus progress at the same rate you do.


What can be done to fix it? I don't know. To achieve what's needed (i.e. distinction within a single server between the top end and the bottom end of the raiding ladder, you would have to abolish paid transfer. Otherwise those significantly ahead of their server will hop to a better-progressed server. And since we've already had one round of sorting, you'd still have many of the most committed raiders on a small subset of the servers. So really you'd have to sort people out randomly to different servers and then abolish server transfer. Not exactly gonna happen, and nor would it at this point be desirable.

But the key thing is that Blizzard needs to sort out the stratification between servers. Not between individuals or between guilds, because that is already higher than ever before!

Yeah I agree it would be nice, especially if you could add them up instead of choosing just one. Like the old monarchs used to do.

Example, Charles XII:
We Charles, by the Grace of God of the Swedes, the Goths and the Vends King, Grand Duke of Finland, Duke of Estonia and Karelia, Lord of Ingria, Duke of Bremen, Verden and Pommerania, Prince of Rügen and Lord of Wismar, and also Count Palatine by the Rhine, Duke of Bavaria, Count of Zweibrücken-Kleeburg, as well as Duke of Jülich, Cleve and Berg, Count of Waldenz, Spanheim and Ravensberg and Lord of Ravenstein

Something like that (but not nearly as long) would be really fun to run around with. :P

On the note of gear and unique items: I've gotten infinitely more tells about my [Time-Lost Figurine] than I've ever gotten about my raiding gear. Being the only person with it was really cool, and the thing is, you get it from an outdoor 5 man boss!

I've kept a lot of my pre-TBC epics as trophies of content I've completed. I still have a lot of my epic NR gear (and my green dragon ring), my [Striker's Diadem] to commemorate killing the twin emps, a full set of T2, and other various things. Unfortunately I joined my current guild too late in TBC to pick up any Naxx epics, but I still have the T3 quest in my log (3 Gargoyles to go!).

I break this old stuff out every once in a while when I'm bored, and sometimes people ask me about it, but for the most part, just building up your guild's server reputation is enough for people to know "Hey, that guy is in X, he must be a really good player!" However, for those whose guilds have dissolved, or have transferred, these accomplishments disappear on a personal level.

It would be pretty cool if Blizzard changed the raid zone mechanic to be more like the arena system (must be in a guild or something similar). That raises very obvious issues with people apping and such but in concept, it would be a cool idea that would allow Boss Kill Tracking on an automated level that could be in your armory profile (and your guild's). When you go to your server's forums there would be a link at the top for progression, listing all guilds alphabetically and what bosses they've killed. Maybe give these bosses point-levels or something, and track "Server Firsts." It's there for arenas, why not for raiding?

A graph to illustrate this point. I took the current US figures from Wowjutsu for realmrankings. The figure for each realm represents the average of the top 10 guilds on that realm. Here is the frequency distribution in bins of width 50.


There are four peaks to it. One at 150-200, one at 350-400, one at 500-550 and a very minor one at 750-800. Mal'ganis is in the last one.

The first peak represents realms with 1-2 guilds in SSC/TK. The second represents realms with 1-2 guilds starting BT. The third represents guilds with half a dozen BT guilds. And the last one represents realms with 10+ guilds in BT.

You are in a highly abnormal, highly homogeneous raiding enviroment - and so of course you feel undistinguished. When everyone has armor of pure gold, nobody stands out. I guarantee you that if you were on a "normal" realm, with 1 or 2 guilds part way through BT and maybe a couple of dozen BT drops on the whole realm, you would feel more than distinguished. You would look and feel like a god.

Edited to add: It is not fixable by Blizzard adding more and harder challenges and more "special" items/drops/titles which can only be achieved by a few people. If they made a challenge so tough that only 20 guilds worldwide could complete it, I'm willing to bet at least three of those would be on the same server as each other. And the other 17 would start looking at transferring to that one - because after all if you move on from one challenge-completing guild, you're going to want to move to a server with a couple more to choose from, aren't you?

I really don't have a problem with the PvE divide, or lack thereof, but I'm really not a fan of where Blizzard took PvP. It seems to be more of an all or nothing thing now. Pre-BC, players in greens/blues had a much greater chance at success in PvP against better geared opponents than they do now. I remember the awesome feeling of taking out a full t2 player or a HWL player with my blues back before I started raiding. My premade with complete mediocrity in gear, could hold its own against well geared opponents.

Now, it seems, that unless you have a lot of resilience, you don't really stand a chance, even against the worse of players. Furthermore, the days of 1vNs or 2vNs are long gone. I feel that Blizzard might have taken resilience a little too far. Part of this, of course, has to do with the fact that Blizzard wants(ed?) to create a eSport. I really think that was a misguided step. As Preatorian stated, all they accomplished was the homogenization of PvP. This, of course, leads to more and more boring battles, which, in turn, leads to an extremely boring eSport.

I believe that for this reason MMOs can never really become very good eSports. In order for the fight to be fair, there can be a very, very limited number of different abilities, gear choices, etc (Not to mention the fact that the gear all looks the same as the PvE counterpart). Because of that, we now have the same specs wearing the same gear, with somewhat similar abilities, similar group make ups, etc. This is a necessity in an e-Sport, but it just doesn't fit with the MMO model.

It works for FPSs and RTSs because there are no cast times, no resists, no crits, etc. Nothing is random, and it all comes down to reflexes and strategy. Everyone is the same, with the same exact abilities, etc.

I guess the point of this post in relation to the thread is that one form of achievement for me, killing players with better gear than me, is no longer possible. In addition, there can really no longer be any "wow that guy is incredible" PvPers like DrakeDog, the various rogues, mages, etc. Resilience seemed to have dumbed down everything in the PvP area of the game. It had its intended effect of removing PvE players to a good extent, but it also removed the non-geared players from the scene as well.

Just throwing in another vote for titles and/or some other non-gear representation of achievements.

I think that status symbols are important. I remember how awed I was when I first started the game, to see somebody with an epic mount. It evoked both a sense of respect for that person, as well as a desire to accomplish the same thing when I could. Later, it became having a lot of tier 2 gear (By the time my lazy ass hit 60, tier 1 gear was too common to be very awe-inspiring), and then tier 2.5, and so on.

Now that Blizzard's art department has decided that (for whatever reason, I'm hesitant to blame a company with that kind of revenue of simple laziness) gear should all look the same, there really aren't any status symbols anymore. Given enough time, any random scrub can look like a 2200+ rated arena player can look like a well-progressed raider. Blizzard is fixing the ability for random scrubs to have the same status symbols as the top players, but elite players of various persuasions still look almost exactly alike.

But I still get a sense of pride when I open my keyring and see my Tempest Key, knowing that I was one of the few that had to enter TK/SSC the hard way, and not just some random terrible from <I HAVE A HUGE PVPNESS LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL> guild that just kills gruul/lootreaver. And next patch, I will wear my champion of the naaru title, not just because I like seeing 5 miles of text over my character (I wish I could get a lieutenant general title sooooooo bad), but because it lets me display my pride in my accomplishments.

The old system of "gear as status symbol" sucked, because it meant that only the elite had any chance to be competitive. I personally think that various "vanity" things like titles, mounts, tabards, and non-combat pets are the way to go. They let you instantly look at somebody and see what they've accomplished, without guaranteeing that that somebody will outperform you by 85% simply due to gear discrepancies.

I play this game to farm gear and play my money's worth pretty much. It's not so much as a status symbol as much as just getting to play through content for me.

Distinctive items are of utmost importance for almost every MMO. They give an intuitive feel for the progression of chars when you spot them and that's important for a lot of people. People watching, i.e. idling in Ogrimmar or Ironforge, was a major part of the pre TBC WoW experience. Hell people even made low level alts to watch people on other more progressed servers. In TBC this doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

Getting my Benediction/Anathema was a highlight of my priest career. It was a rite of passage, an official certification being a "raiding priest" and most of all it was very powerful item for it's place in progression (you got an item from MC that lasted all through to the end of AQ40) and damn it's graphics showed it. I loved to be a priest just to carry this mighty glowing and overly sparkling staff.

Nowadays there is little that would give me the same kind of feeling. Graphics are reused all over the place and we probably won't get another "uber" epic like the Benediction. Everything clings to meticulously to it's place in progression, perfectly replaceable and exchangeable. Heaven forbid that there would be something out of place in stats and graphic design, that could draw the envy and forum rage of the have nots. The post TBC WoW is so perfectly balanced by now that it feels a bit boring and stagnant. Like the encounters themselves it just feels "over engineered".


Being a bit more daring in item design would do a lot to refresh things for the achievement crowd. It doesn't have to and shouldn't be limited to the high end itemization either. Zul Gurub was a good example of inventive and great looking "mid range" itemization. The Rank 14 sets from the old PvP grind were great and distinctive PvP items. Why not keep it this way?