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I started playing World of Warcraft again when the most recent patch 4.3 went live on the servers and the game is still pretty fun even after all these years.  Graphics wise, the game is not competitive anymore with newer games such as Skyrim and the upcoming Guild Wars 2, but WoW still has the gameplay that those other games fail to surpass.  What many people don’t realize about World of Warcraft is that the game is not focused on the leveling a new player would spend their first few months doing, but what you spend your time on after hitting the level cap.  Raids and Player vs. Player (PvP) are the primary ways of spending time on the game after hitting the level cap.

With the release of 4.3, raids are now available to more casual players.  You no longer need to make WoW a job by dedicating 8pm-12pm 4 nights a week to progression raids.  The way this was accomplished was by making an alternative version of the current raid tier available for a queue (much like one would queue for a battleground).  The queue would take the person into a raid with 25 other players, and together they fight to clear a toned down version of the raid.  The raid difficulty is called LFR (looking for raid) and provides gear slightly better than what one could obtain through heroics, including a scaled down version of the currently available tier.   This type of gear was not always fully available to players in previous content.

PvP hasn’t changed all that much recently, but it still holds entertainment value.  However, I think PvP more than anything exemplifies a lot of the problems WoW faces with class balance, as certain classes hold a distinct advantage over others in a majority of PvP content.  Blizzard is slowly but surely addressing these imbalances, but probably slower than one would like if their main focus in the game was PvP.  The argument Blizzard uses against adjusting class abilities for PvP is that there would be consequences for the same classes people use in raid environments. That said, players playing ranged classes have had a distinct advantage over melee (most of the time) for some time now in both PvE and PvP so it remains unclear why Blizzard has waited so long (and continues to wait) to tweak things out a bit better.

Despite it’s popularity, convincing someone to play World of Warcraft has been seemingly impossible to me.  It can consume a lot of time if played compulsively, but the same can hold true for any game.  Lately, I find myself playing it not only for the content but for the social aspect as well.  Sometimes it’s nice to go on and communicate with some friends in a non-IM environment.