Are expansions ruining World of Warcraft?

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We look at common complaints concerning the state of Azeroth

On a related note, another complaint we’ve heard is that it’s just too hard to find a group for lower level instances nowadays because the only thing anyone is interested in are runs through Naxxaramas and Ulduar, instances which were introduced in Wrath of the Lich King.

From our experience so far, this just doesn’t seem to be the case. Although we did have a tough time finding a group for Shadowfang Keep, a low-level Horde instance for characters in the 18-24 range, finding groups for instances to help us level from the mid-30s to mid-50s was never a problem.

Another common gripe we’ve heard concerns the way the expansions made your old gear worthless. We lost count of how many times our guild wiped trying to down bosses like Onyxia. But we’ll never forget all the drama and frustration that followed our guild’s attempts to master new raid instances, and the glorious moments when we finally cleared some of WoW’s hardest dungeons. The final reward for all the late nights, corpse runs, and hefty repair bills: fat loot, of course. Epic, purple items with stats and bonuses that set your character leagues apart from the common plebs who wasted their time questing for fun, fishing, and god knows what else.

It hurt to find common green gear that replaced our hard-earned epic equipment so quickly in The Burning Crusade. We spent weeks (if not months) of raiding to earn our pre-TBC gear. Although the new stuff was definitely better than what our character was wearing, we had memories attached to our old gear - and the idea of selling it to an item vendor or storing it away in our bank seemed disgraceful.

But what else was Blizzard supposed to do? It was time to suck it up and throw out our old equipment for new loot – and focus on tackling new challenges to earn fresh epic items that we could use to make our character properly purple all over again. We’re still saving some special slots in our bank for our pre-expansion equipment, but are now officially tired of the whining we’ve heard about “the good old days."