Obsolescence

Warcraft is entertainment. It's pretty cheap entertainment as far as that goes, for only $15 a month you can connect up and play as much as you want. Quite a few people have noted that the hardest part about quitting warcraft isn't the withdrawl - if you're bored with it, you don't want to play it - but the huge replacement cost of being entertained at the same level.

For $15 you can't even buy the family dinner at a fast food restaurant, or take a date to the movies. I've paid bigger late fees for movie rental before. $15 is chump change, which is what makes the "Omg, I'm outraged!" customers on the warcraft forums all the more amusing. For $15 you typically can't get anything of quality, but it will buy you a monthly access to the best MMO in the world.

But it is entertainment, and even inexpensive entertainment becomes undesirable if it isn't kept fresh. Television has done a good job of proving this for us. Warcraft has a huge world filled with entertaining activities, and to a large extent it is all replayable with different characters, but there are some things that should be changed because the game itself has changed so much over time.

Back at level 60 there were two sets of divergent changes being made to the game. On the one hand there were additional features being added to the game - battlegrounds, guild banks, etc. - and on the other hand there was additional content being created specifically for the 1-60 leveling experience. Some of these things are still fresh and fun, but some have become obsolete and should be either upgraded, or removed.

The first one that comes to mind is class quests. Back in vanilla Blizzard decided that it would be fun to add in class-specific quests (all of them requiring a visit to the Sunken Temple instance) that would add to the uniqueness of each class. For example, as a priest you need to visit ST and kill the dragon Morphaz and bring a vial of his blood back. In return you can choose between a ring, wand, or trinket. All three items are fairly worthless, and are guaranteed to be replaced in about six levels when you venture into Outland.

The concept at the time was that you would learn something about the instance, something about the lore of your class in relation to it, and you would gain an item that would help you level and possibly not be replaced until you raid at level 60. Well, these days are long gone. No one does their class questline anymore because it's pretty tedious and the rewards are really low. I would wager that more people complete this questline at 80 when they try to get the Loremaster title than people who are at-level trying to just get quests done for leveling.

It's a good concept, but the rewards don't hold up over time. The instance itself is pretty confusing and irritating - spiral stairs that overlap each other, mobs and bosses on multiple levels inside the temple, gobs of trash in small fight spaces. It feels like a parking ramp sometimes (where did we park again? which stairway goes where?) and has some sequential kill requirements that are a turn-off to casual dungeon crawlers.

Another thing that was added at level 60 was the tier 0.5 dungeon set. The tier 0 set was the blue (mostly BoP) drops from 5-man dungeons all over Azeroth, and dungeons had to be run multiple times to collect all the pieces from each to put together a set for all the bonuses. Tier 0.5 was a set of questlines added on top of that that allowed you to upgrade your gear pieces to 'light epics' that were superior to the basic dungeon set, but inferior to the raid set you could get from Molten Core.

On RP servers sometimes people will run dungeons and collect the gear and then do all the questlines to upgrade the gear just so they have a unique set they can walk around in on occasion, but no one does this stuff anymore for practical reasons. At level 58 when you can enter Outland your first quests will reward you with items that are far superior to Molten Core gear, much less tier 0.5, so it makes no sense to do this process for anything other than intrinsic reasons.

And then there's the issue of Alterac Valley. Once upon a time it was a battlefield of epic proportions, with NPCs stopping players from running willy-nilly all over the map, and battles took hours (occasionally even days!) to complete. There are a lot of people who miss that type of battle, one where lines needed to be maintained, and the fighting is mandatory instead of just being a race to PvE the opposing general.

In Cataclysm they are removing marks of honor for battlegrounds, opening up the possibility for Alterac Valley to be restored to its original state. The reason AV was reduced in difficulty was because Blizzard wanted each battleground to last about the same amount of time, so that marks were fairly equal in value, but if all the marks are eliminated then it's possible for them to restore AV to its original state. However... since they are including the Daily Battleground option in Cataclysm they probably don't want AV battles to last forever again.

Aside from class quests, tier upgrades, and battlegrounds, there are many other things created or conceptualized for level 60 that need to be updated for the L80 (L85) game in order for them to remain valuable as content. And content is king when it comes to entertainment. Updating the game makes the difference between $15 spent and a $15 bargain.