This is not meant to be a fanboy rant, but a point-by-point rebuttal to the article's arguments. I will be the first to tell you that WoW has plenty of problems and mistakes, particularly lag.
The thing about WoW is that at least it recognizes those mistakes and endeavors to fix them.
The new achievements system has brought at least some life to the old world, and while you'll obviously never have as many people running the old content as back in its heyday it at least isn't completely abandoned anymore. The new Ulduar instance addresses the worry that "Blizz is just recycling old content" - a massive, sprawling dungeon with 14 new bosses (13 if you don't count the hard-mode only boss), 10 of whom have hard modes - that's only 1 less than Naxxramas (if you don't care about the hard modes), which was Blizzard's magnum opus at the end of vanilla content.
Wrath tries very hard to make questing more fun, and it in great part succeeds. While you still have some delivery quests & "kill x squirrels" will always makes an appearance, these are counter weighted by epic story quests you can do by yourself. Instances have also been vastly improved - rather than 5-hour super-instances like Blackrock Depths you now have instances that can be cleared in at most one and a half hours if you're running with at least a semi-decent group (Drak'tharon Keep, Violet Hold & Utgarde Keep being the example here). The gear homogenization with Wrath has also addressed the whole issue of "oh great, ANOTHER piece of loot none of us can use": although that's probably going to be around forever it is at least mitigated now.
Some other gripes the article has are rather trivial, such as the "bosses are so hard to figure out!" It doesn't take a genius to figure out "hey, we SHOULDN'T stand in the huge lightning nova" or "Ah, this dragon has a frontal cone breath people need to move out of!". I really don't see why that warrants an entire paragraph of whinging from Mr. Whipple the Third
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The new Blizz philosophy of "bring the player, not the class" directly addresses the complaint that you need a "balanced group & classes at hand". It HAS encountered a few stumbling blocks, but the new dual talent specialization feature & the spreading of vital buffs like replenishment to multiple classes will really help the problems of tanks, healers & dps who are usually sidelined. The collecting of new gear sets is really a non-issue, I managed to create a whole healset merely by tanking some instances/raids over the course of two weeks on my paladin, and also have a near-complete damage-dealing gear set as well.
Blizzard's constant tweaking of talent trees in the name of balance does get annoying sometimes, but without it WoW would be terribly broken - and probably 90% of the changes are either fun buffs or deserved nerfs. A 10% failure rate is to be expected in a game as volatile as WoW, with so many variables to pay attention to, and Blizz generally realizes their mistakes quickly.
As for Whipple's complaint that he can't find anyone to run instances/raids with is much more personal: you can get a group going for a 5-man dungeon at almost any time during the day, especially if you've been playing for a month or two at endgame and have filled your friend list up with good players. Even if you haven't you'll generally find a group by asking around in trade or lfg. As for raids, I'll admit that it IS very hard to get together 9 or 24 other people at off-peak times, but if you want to raid that badly just get on at server primetime and you'll find at least three groups looking for more players (unless you're on a completely deserted server, in which case all I can recommend is a transfer).
Sure, WoW has many, many problems, but at least Blizzard tries their best to address them every other month with new content patches, or just hotfixes every week. Their customer service in the form of GMs has never left me feeling unsatisfied the few times I've had to use it.
So I play World of Warcraft for all the things it does right, trusting that Blizzard will do its utmost to fix or at least address any mistakes they have made.
P.S. Wall of text crits you for 100000000 damage
