Giving Gnomeregan some credit

Gnomeregan is one of those instances that everyone loves to hate. And I've been one of those people, chiming in whenever the subject came up with how annoyingly long and confusing it is and so on and so forth.

But then... something funny happened yesterday. Continuing my mission to do everything there is to do in the old world before it goes away, I stumbled upon this quest in Orgrimmar to kill the final boss of Gnomeregan. I wasn't thrilled at all, but decided to do it anyway. Might as well be thorough. As it turned out, there were even more quests inside the actual instance that I hadn't done before, so that was very convenient.

The really surprising thing however was that my mind was flooded with a huge amount of happy memories the very moment my priest entered the instance. What is this? Had I been suffering from reverse nostalgia all this time (where you only remember the bad things but not the good times)? Me? What an odd sensation.

Thinking about it some more, I realised that there were indeed plenty of things for me to love about Gnomeregan back in the day:

First off, I was Alliance before I was Horde, and for the Alliance there are very few instances that are more convenient to get to than Gnomer (only the Stockades in fact, though the Deadmines are probably close). Leave through the gates of Ironforge, turn right, and you're already almost there. Now, this may not mean much in today's world of dungeon finder teleports, but back then it was really helpful and made Gnomeregan very easy to get a group for. You didn't have to hang out in Ironforge for long to find a couple of people who were willing to come along.

It wasn't just the proximity to Ironforge though, there were also the quests. Gnomeregan has so many quests for Alliance players, it's silly. (The Horde shares a couple of them, but the Alliance gets so much more.) Back before old world levelling was nerfed to hell and back a trip to Gnomeregan was very much worth your while in terms of experience. And some of the rewards were nothing to be sneered at either, my night elf priest wore her Civinad Robes for quite a while (even if I thought they were extremely ugly), and every low level leather wearer drooled over the Triprunner Dungarees.

Many of the drops inside the instance are pretty damn good for their level as well. The Hydrocane may look silly to the eyes of an experienced player, but to a newbie who was struggling with all the underwater quests in Stranglethorn Vale back when your characters could barely hold their breath for a minute or so, that thing was the shit. I also remember wearing the Acidic Walkers for a very long time, despite of their garish looks.

Finally, Gnomeregan is simply a great place to be if you want to feel like a real adventurer. There are ambushes coming out of tunnels, a little Alliance base fighting to stem the tide of irradiated troggs, mysterious drops, winding tunnels and deep pits... it's pretty damn immersive really if you don't let the feeling that you don't know where you're going frustrate you too much.

Speaking of which, during my visit with my level eighty priest I pulled up the map of the instance on Wowhead and quickly found that it wasn't actually that terribly confusing if you had a map. In fact, I'm pretty sure that most of the unpopular old instances would seem much less daunting if they simply provided some in-game navigational aid. I think not having any instance maps in the original game was simply a huge oversight on Blizzard's part; to this day I sometimes get frustrated when I habitually hit the M key while in an dungeon and a screen pops up to show me that I'm somewhere on Kalimdor. Yeah, that's helpful...

Oh, and one more bit of love for Gnomeregan: it's very silly and whimsical, but back at level sixty my druid friend and me would go back into the instance, she would stealth up the tunnel leading up to the last boss, unstealth in the middle of a big group of mobs and then run for her life, creating a massive robot/dark iron train that followed her around. Then she'd lag out from the sheer size of it, they'd come over and beat me up, and we'd laugh. The ways in which you can make your own fun when you're bored...

Anyway, after having rediscovered my love for Gnomer on my main, I wanted to know whether it would hold up to the test when being run in the here and now, at level, so I logged onto my troll warrior and specifically queued up for it as a tank. I got a group instantly and off we went.

Initially it seemed to be one of those slightly eerie pugs where nobody talks, but people were obediently following my lead. As we were in the middle of the event leading up to Grubbis, a dps and the healer dropped group all of a sudden, I can only guess because they got bored of waiting for the waves of troggs to spawn? I don't know. We got replacements immediately and continued on our merry way.

I was almost starting to feel slightly disappointed by just how smoothly things were going and how easily we were killing things, when we somehow ended up aggroing multiple alarm bots or something and suddenly got buried under an absolutely massive amount of elite mobs; we're talking several dozen or so. Others might have found the resulting wipe frustrating, but I just thought that it was hilarious as it once again took me back to the "good old times" when we wiped like that all the time... Everyone patiently ran back and found their way back to the instance without any problems. I guess I got lucky in so far as everyone seemed to be reasonably experienced; about the most noobish thing that anyone did was one of our two hunters meleeing a lot (but not even most of the time).

Then as we made our way back and jumped straight down into the pit with all the oozes for the second time, the slightly noobish hunter didn't dismiss his pet and about a minute later it brought a veritable Horde of troggs down on us. Fortunately we just about managed to kill them, so I could laugh it off as yet another nostalgia-inducing noob moment.

The rest of the run went smoothly again, and I felt a bit more comfortable after the previous two incidents had tickled at least a couple of good-natured words out of the other party members. We didn't take the "detour" to kill the Crowd Pummeler since people seemed to be fairly eager to get to the end and we had already clocked some "extra time" to clear out the Alliance base and the dormitories to do the goblin escort quest. All in all it was a very enjoyable run, and I only found myself wondering how I ever came to dislike this instance. It's really not all that bad!

Scattered thoughts on Cataclysm beta news

I can't help but wonder: are there still people who are trying to avoid Cataclysm spoilers completely? I imagine that it must be quite hard by now, considering how omnipresent spoilers appear to be on the news sites and how casually people like to drop them into discussions of completely unrelated subjects as well.

Anyway, no story spoilers here, as I'm still trying to avoid those. I don't mind finding out about gameplay-related changes really, because I don't consider "being confused by my vastly changed talent trees" a fun feature of new content patches anyway. Better to be able to prepare yourself a little ahead of time.

Biggest gear reset ever

One thing that's pretty old news right now but that nonetheless hasn't ceased to amaze me is the absolutely massive gear reset that's coming in Cataclysm. To give an example, these are the leggings my main is currently wearing. They are the tier 10.25 legs for healing priests (or whatever you want to call them), acquired by running normal-mode ICC-25 or heroic ICC-10. Not the best item currently available in the game for that slot, but pretty close. This is what they look like in the Cataclysm beta, with the spell power mostly converted into stamina. And this is a green quest reward from Mount Hyjal, for a quest that you can do at level eighty. The stats are pretty damn close.

Now, this doesn't so much annoy me (though I will probably moan a little when I have to replace my epics acquired through raiding with quest greens), but it does confuse me. Remember the Burning Crusade with its also pretty considerable gear reset? If you don't, just compare this blue quest reward from Hellfire Peninsula with this robe from AQ40. Ouch.

The thing is, Blizzard agreed afterwards that this was a bad idea. This is why the gear replacement curve in Northrend was so much smoother. A green quest reward from Howling Fjord didn't really hold a candle to something from Zul'Aman for example (and not just because of the weird itemisation). And again, people mostly seemed to agree that this was a good thing.

And yet, here comes Cataclysm and they go back to the "massive gear reset" model and nobody seems to do as much as bat an eyelash about it. Or maybe they did and I've missed it; personally I haven't seen any discussion of the subject on blogs or read about any official Blizzard statements explaining this complete turnaround in attitude. It just seems strange.

Fear those normal world mobs

Larísa made a nice post last week about the fact that Blizzard has been ramping up the health and damage output of normal world mobs in the high level zones in the Cataclysm beta. Many seem to welcome this change, but I'm a bit undecided - which is ironic considering that I asked for a "healthy buff" for all outdoor mobs myself before.

I still think that it's a good idea in principle, but judging by some of the comments I've seen on the forums it could be that Blizzard has gone too far into the other direction right now. It's one thing to not want to be able to two-shot a mob of equal level and quite another to be two-shotted yourself by that same mob instead.

Plus, one has to consider that mob difficulty varies a lot depending on what class and spec you play. My holy priest still takes her sweet time killing normal level eighty mobs, even in ICC-25 gear. My hunter can kill the same mobs quickly, but can still get into situations where she'll have to feign and reset if she gets too many adds or tries to take on a powerful elite on her own. And my protection paladin could just run through any group of mobs, including elites, and tank them to death without even losing any health or mana. So I'm a bit worried that if Blizzard tunes things in such a way that they'll be challenging to even the most powerful characters, my weaker toons might just not be able to solo at all, which would obviously suck.

Also, you have to keep in mind that these characters are all at least in a mix of triumph and frost level gear, so that is a factor as well. If you tune things to push people in ilevel 264 gear to their limits, any alts that get levelled after the release of Cataclysm and try to progress into the level eighty-one zones in greens and blues a hundred ilevels lower will run into a massive brick wall all of a sudden, which doesn't exactly make for a smooth levelling curve either.

Personally I would only increase the difficulty of normal mobs a little, but bring elite areas back into the world and generally increase mob density in areas that are supposed to be "scary". Many mobs that give levelling players trouble in the old world don't actually hit particularly hard on their own either, but they come in packs and like to do things like run away and call for help, which keeps you on your toes.

Holy priest, Batman!

On a completely unrelated note, you might remember me ranting quite heavily about what holy priests looked like in the Cataclysm beta one and a half months ago. As such I'm quite happy to hear that Blizzard has finally got around to paying some attention to the spec, trying to make sure that the talents actually make some sense and just generally making holy sound interesting again.

Personally I'm not worried about the spec becoming too difficult to play, but I do sort of wonder about how much point there is in adding too many new healing spells for priests. After all, resto druids were denied any new additions to their healing arsenal with the argument that they already have enough, and while priests need a little more variety since their spellbook has to cover two healing specs focusing on different spells, there is still such a thing as overkill. Don't get me wrong, the huge variety of healing spells is one of the things that really attracts me to holy priest play, but there comes a point where spells start to look too similar and you just can't make them all equally viable. Don't introduce more spells just for the sake of having more, they are likely to just end up on the edge of people's action bars where they never get used because another spell pretty much already does the same thing anyway.

More lessons from the old world

I'm getting closer and closer to becoming The Seeker now; less than a hundred quests to go. Polishing off all the Horde starter zones and their low-level neighbours was an interesting experience.

For example I wasn't surprised to only find two quests left in Silverpine that I hadn't done yet, since I distinctly remember levelling my priest through that area back in 2007 (and repeatedly getting my butt kicked by the free-roaming Sons of Arugal). However, I was rather bewildered by the discovery that I had already done a couple of quests in the Ghostlands as well. Judging by the fact that the quest givers in question were all located relatively close to Zul'Aman, I can only guess that I decided to waste some time with them back in BC while waiting for a raid to form, but I don't know for sure. It feels strange not to remember!

Another thing that struck me as interesting about the blood elf starting zone was that the biggest difference compared to the other Horde starting areas didn't seem to be anything inherently different in the way the quests were designed, but that there were simply a lot more of them. I checked on Wowhead to see whether this impression was based on facts or just a delusion, but Eversong Forest does indeed contain nearly twice as many quests as Durotar, Mulgore and Tirisfal Glades. Maybe that's the real secret to "better" quest design, simply making more of them? After all, running to the other end of the map feels a lot more justified if you're doing it for the sake of three different quest givers instead of just one.

In Ashenvale I found myself suddenly convinced that the developers definitely favour the Alliance over the Horde. Why? This quest. Not only does my preferred faction get a second Green Hills-type quest, but in this version, pages of the same type don't even stack (the Stranglethorn pages at least stack to ten if you get extras). I mailed any copies off to my bank alt whenever I got anywhere near a mailbox (which, in Ashenvale, was not a lot, unfortunately), and didn't even try to sort them out until I was done with everything else in the zone. Even then I was still missing several pages and had to buy them from the auction house for several gold a piece. For comparison purposes, the actual quest reward at level eighty is twenty-two silver and a green item that you can vendor for another twelve. Questing in the old world is strange in terms of effort and reward sometimes.

And on a final note for this post, I was also reminded of just how much I loathe all barrow den-type caves. Through what I can only think of as a streak of bad luck, I ended up having to go through something like three of them in a row, and god, I hated it. Caves are something that you learn to fear early on as a newbie, as the high mob density often spells death for a hapless low-level, and it's easy to lose track of where the exit is. Once you've accumulated a bit of experience you learn that most caves are based on only a handful of different models and not as confusing as they might seem at first. But those barrow dens? Argh.

I remember spending what felt like hours in the one in Teldrassil on my night elf back in the day, and even now I still manage to get lost in the damn things. All those criss-crossing tunnels and bridges in tight spaces make it really hard at times to figure out which level you're supposed to be on. In my opinion the Wailing Caverns feel like a walk in the park in comparison. I hope Deathwing makes them all cave in.

Guild update

I realised that I should probably say a few words about what's been happening to my guild since my last post about it. It still feels odd to talk about my guild like that at all. For one and a half years I didn't have much of a need to talk about it simply because it was working so smoothly. Sure, we had our occasional argument or loot drama, but nothing that really endangered the guild's integrity as a whole.

Also, I think part of me doesn't actually like talking about my guild's problems too much. As soon as you mention any people involved in anything less than a glowingly positive way (even without naming them), there's the risk that someone will view it as "airing dirty laundry" or something and start a fight about it.

Still, in this case I do think it's worth mentioning that about two weeks ago our inactive guild leader finally agreed to hand guild leadership over to the remaining active officer, whose first act in his new position was to promote me and another very active guildie to officer status so we could help him breathe some life back into the guild. I think that we've been quite successful at this task so far, getting both "fun" and ten-man progression raids going each week and giving our somewhat outdated guild website a much-needed overhaul. Guild chat also seems more alive again in the evenings. This is good.

Nonetheless I remain cautious. I have to admit that the idea of officially downsizing to being a ten-man guild leaves me feeling a little insecure. There's strength in numbers. In a twenty-five-man raid, a single person is unlikely to make or break a raid, but if you're only running ten-mans and, say, one of your healers stops playing, you'll be in some trouble, even if you have more than ten raiders to allow for a little rotation. Two or three people leaving at once could be disastrous! With a roster of thirty-odd people to cover our twenty-five man raids we had a much bigger buffer for that kind of thing.

I also got word of former members who left to join Another Guild^TM about two months ago to continue twenty-five-man raiding bombarding people that remained with us with whispers to leave us and join their new guild instead. This kind of thing is exactly why claims about wanting to stay on good terms with the guild just before you leave often sound so hollow. If you want to stay on good terms you don't go and undermine the place two months later!

I used to be pretty laid back about "poaching" attempts like that because it takes two to tango and you can't convince people if they don't really want to leave anyway, but I have to admit that after putting in the work trying to get the guild back on its feet I can understand why our old officers would often become so outraged when stuff like that happened. If you put personal effort into making the guild what it is and then people whom you thought were your friends go around telling others that your guild sucks and that people should join theirs instead - yeah, that is bloody personal. Fortunately I think that the ones that remain in the guild right now are not easily impressed by the allure of more hardcore raiding, easy achievements and better epics.

For now I'm cautiously optimistic until the end of this expansion at least; and I don't see much point in worrying about what Cataclysm will bring because so many things will change that it's hard to make any reliable predictions about our future guild size, raiding habits and what not anyway.

Questing and travelling

My dabbling in old quests continues. In fact I found myself a lot more enthused about the idea than I originally thought, and finished off both the Barrens and Stonetalon Mountains yesterday. I didn't discover any new quests in either zone, that is to say that I had done all of them before on some alt or another, just never on my main.

Initially I found myself groaning at the long travel times, and wondered how I ever managed to get other characters through most of these quests back when you didn't get a mount until level forty. The effect was heightened by the fact that I had just completed the Zul'Drak quests on my night elf only two nights ago, which made for a very stark contrast in terms of a sleek gaming experience.

In the end I acclimated quite quickly however, and realised to my great surprise that all that running around actually added something to the experience too. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it did feel pointless and like it was only there to make the quests seem longer than they actually were. Running back and forth between the Crossroads and the Dry Hills three times just to kill a different bunch of harpies each time felt silly. When Kadrak at the Mor'shan Rampart asked me to plant a Horde banner in a cave somewhere in the Stonetalon Mountains, I really wanted to tell him that he had more immediate threats to worry about. And realising after completing Raptor Horns that I had to kill a whole nest of exactly the same mobs for Stolen Silver was annoying.

But for every quest-related frustration like that, there was another situation where the old quest design system actually added something enjoyable to the experience with the way it made quest givers stand around in odd places and forced me run around a lot. For example, having a crazed hermit living in a tent in the middle of nowhere and giving out a single quest may not be the most accessible way of going about these things, but it really does drive home the point that he is a crazed hermit. If he lived conveniently close to a village or people were sending messages to him, he wouldn't really be much of a hermit, would he?

Likewise, a goblin in Ratchet sending you to collect spider eggs in Stonetalon might not make for the most streamlined gaming experience, but you really get a sense that he is a smart entrepreneur who likes to hire other people to do the grunt work for him. If he was already sitting in Windshear Crag himself just to save you running time, he wouldn't appear to be nearly as clever. After all it doesn't take a genius to come up with the idea of picking up what's already right in front of you.

Or take this quest: All it does is tell you to go talk to someone else, since the quest giver feels that he's too old to handle the matter, a completely unnecessary step that could have been cut out very easily for the sake of convenience. As it is however, it makes you feel that NPCs are people too, and may simply not always have all the answers you want. There were a lot of quests like that in the Barrens region, with people telling you to ask someone else for help or seek the expertise of someone who lives elsewhere.

This certainly gave me pause and made me realise for the first time just how strangely isolated and completely self-sufficient most "quest hubs" in Outland and Northrend are. No matter what strange discoveries you make, there's almost always someone around who can make sense of it in close proximity. None of this "uh, we should report back to Orgrimmar" stuff, with the notable exception of the Mag'har quest line. I don't know why that is, are we just meant to assume that all the communication happens off-screen? Are the player characters too good to serve as messengers these days? But why? Blizzard still puts in breadcrumb quests to lead you back and forth between different zones, they just happen to be a lot less meaningful in comparison and can almost always be summed up as "go report to Guy McGuyson at [faction outpost], he might have work for you". Why not let us report some more interesting news?

Also, having to travel a lot simply makes things feel more epic. Frodo's journey to Mount Doom wouldn't have been half as interesting if he had already been living right next to it at the start of the story. I know people might argue with this, saying that travel in WoW is just a boring chore and adds nothing, but I suspect that it's simply something that we don't think about consciously most of the time. We know that we're willing to go to great lengths for things that are important to us, so we assume that if someone else asks us to do the same for them, it must be important too.

I thought a decent example of this in the Barrens was the Samophlange quest line. I mean, if you think about it it's just a goblin asking you to steal some gadget from the Venture company, completely trivial. But then he sends you to someone in the northern Barrens to repair it, and that lady then sends you to Orgrimmar, and you get asked to recover a torn manual in a mine, and so on and so forth, and you can't help but feel that this samophlange thing must be quite powerful after a while, because if it wasn't nobody would bother with all this stuff, would they?

I'm also convinced that the real reason that the Crusader Bridenbrad quest line is so popular is not that it tells a touching story, but that it makes you run all over the frikkin place: to Moonglade and into the emerald dream, to Wyrmrest temple, to Outland! If all the remedies that you try to save him had been conveniently available right there in Icecrown it wouldn't have felt half as epic I tell you.

Do I want to be a Loremaster?

I recently decided to start doing old quests on my priest. I won't say that I'm trying for Loremaster, because I'm really not fretting about it... though if I did manage to persist that's what I'd be going for eventually. Maybe I'll just get to Seeker, or maybe I'll grow bored after two zones. I'm just experimenting with the general concept.

I really like quests, but the problem I always have nowadays is that I like instances even more, and ever since BC Blizzard has worked on making the latter much more appealing. Even back at level seventy when heroics were hard and not nearly as popular as they are now, they were still rewarding to run, with new badge of justice rewards getting added with every major patch and reputation gains actually being kind of a big deal.

But quests? I remember running quests past the level cap back in Vanilla, simply because there wasn't that much else to do for a newly dinged sixty. In BC I always cleared the first couple of zones very thoroughly whenever one of my characters made it to Outland, but never completed all the quests in Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley because as soon as I hit the level cap they just stopped being rewarding. I did a few more while playing with friends and to get decent starter equipment for dungeons and raids, but after that... eh. Now with the dungeon finder out, I struggle to make my alts above seventy complete more than one zone worth of quests in Northrend, and even my low level toons have discovered chain-instancing as a more worthwhile activity than questing.

It's kind of sad really. I love exploring the world and learning about all its little stories, but at the end of the day I also really like to advance my characters. And once a quest goes grey and/or you hit the level cap, quests just don't have anything to give you but a bunch of gold, which is pretty worthless in today's hyper-inflated economy. Dungeons on the other hand almost never stop rewarding me with better items (even if the rate of acquisition slows down considerably), plus I get to play with other people and be social. It's just no contest.

So, from that point of view, going back to do quests in the old world is a very odd thing to do. After all it would be much more rewarding to simply roll up a new alt and do it all at the right level, so I get to see new content and actually gain experience from questing at the same time. The only problem with that is that it's very hard to keep track of which quests you've done on which character. I reckon I've probably done quite a few out of the overall total, spread across all my characters, but with the current quest tracking system I can't very well know. Better to just get it all done on my priest once and for all, so I can say that I've been there and done that.

I do have to say, riding around Mulgore on my Amani war bear and killing level five mobs in my full Sanctified Crimson Acolyte outfit makes me feel like a bit of a tool though. You'd think that I'd enjoy showing off to the newbies or something, but in fact I just feel embarrassed. Whenever I spot a low-level character, I flush quietly and then give them a wide berth. I feel bad about destroying their private immersion of the quillboar being a genuine danger (because to a low-level character they are) by one-shotting them with my caster dagger. I feel like I'm shooting pigeons with a rocket launcher, while attending a sport festival in an evening dress - out of place in so many ways.

It is an interesting experience though. For example it makes you realise just how much of our questing time is actually taken up by running around. Contrary to what you'd believe, killing the mobs ten times faster doesn't make you complete the quest ten times faster, because you still have to run all around the zone to find just the right kind of kitty to extract a femur from, and then back again to hand it all in. That's not all bad though. It's nice to just move through the old world again and take it in in all its glory before the Cataclysm will change things forever.

And of course you do find little gems among the quests. So far I'm only working my way through the starter zones, which I already know pretty well - being an altoholic and all - but even there I haven't seen everything before. For example I was quite surprised to discover this quest a little northwest of Razor Hill, on top of a watch tower. And here I always envied the draenei and blood elves for their bag-rewarding starter quests... without knowing that the orcs and trolls had one too, providing them with nothing less than an eight-slotter!

It really doesn't seem to matter how long I play this game, there's always something left to discover that I simply didn't know yet. It's just harder nowadays to motivate yourself to actually go out and look for these things.

How bad is the summer slump really?

It's widely agreed upon that WoW is not at its most popular at the moment. People are looking forward to Cataclysm, but the content currently in the game feels worn out. Is there anyone who wanted to see ICC and hasn't actually done so yet? It seems that there's little left to do if you aren't an altoholic or a dedicated achievement hunter. People are playing less and less.

Or are they? I mean, I have yet to see anyone disagree with the notion, but at the same time we don't seem to have anything solid to back it up. As far as I'm aware Blizzard hasn't released any information about their subscription numbers in quite a while, and anecdotal evidence of someone's guild going quiet doesn't really prove anything, does it? Dalaran still seems reasonably busy to me on my server, and while dungeon finder queues on my healers were instant the other day, that doesn't necessarily mean that fewer healers are running dungeons. (Maybe more people have switched to tanking instead?)

As we were discussing the summer slump in my guild, one of my guildies had the brilliant idea of using WoWProgress as an indicator of current raid activity. Raiding isn't all there is to do in the game, but it's definitely an important part. The statistics for my home realm Earthen Ring were an eye-opener for sure.

Let's start with the newest raid, the Ruby Sanctum. It's been out for one and a half months now, and only twelve guilds on my server have cleared it on 25-man, one of them on heroic. Considering that the site has records of no less than 91 Earthen Ring guilds killing bosses in 25-man ICC, that's a pretty poor turnout. Few people seem to care about Halion.

The ten-man stats paint a pretty similar picture. 31 guilds have successfully cleared the Sanctum on ten-man (two of them on heroic), but compared to the 110 guilds that have been active in ICC-10, that's pretty much nothing.

The ICC statistics themselves also show a very obvious slump in activity. Of the forty most progressed 25-man guilds, only eight have recorded any sort of progression in July or August (meaning a new boss kill or an achievement). Before the summer pretty much all of them had at least one progression kill a month, usually more. No less than sixteen of these "top" guilds haven't achieved anything remarkable since May or even earlier. It's unrealistic to think that they just hit a brick wall that they simply couldn't get past, all at the same time and at completely different points of progression. (Only five guilds are on 11/12 heroic.) They just don't seem to have the numbers and motivation to push on anymore.

Again, the ten-man picture is slightly less dire, presumably because these runs are easier to organise and can serve as a fallback for 25-man guilds that end up being short on numbers. But still: of the forty best guilds that are still progressing (that is to say, discounting the two that have killed the Lich King on heroic mode), less than half have killed anything new in July or August. Clearly interest in this format is currently on the decline as well, even if not quite as steeply as in the case of 25-man.

I do think that this is a strong indicator that in-game activity is on a sharp decline, at least on my server. Presumably the statistics for other servers paint a similar picture, though there might be variations of course.

Of course now I wonder how this compares to previous summers, or to the months before the release of the current expansion. I know my guild didn't fall apart the way it did recently back in previous summers, and before the release of WOTLK we were actually franticly trying to clear the Black Temple just before the final nerf. We didn't bother working on the Sunwell anymore after killing Illidan, but that drop in interest happened about two weeks before expansion release, not six months ahead of it. Too bad I don't have any numbers from other guilds for those times.

What are other people's experiences in that regard?