I played WoW years ago. I think what did it in for me was that I wasn't really done with EQ yet at that time and playing two games just wasn't working for me. EQ was a more demanding game at that time compared to now, so it took all my gaming time just to keep moving forward. I guess I never found my social niche in WoW.
All the changes I've heard about recently make WoW more interesting to me at this point. I've got friends still trying to talk me into it anyway, and if I can find people to play with during my weird off-hours play times, all the better.
EDIT: Please note that I am not comparing EQ and WoW at all. They are both good games. I was saying EQ now isn't as demanding, in any sense, as it used to be, and it used to hog up all my time. WoW was cool, but I wasn't as established in it at that time.
The global attitude of the WoW community : every man for himself.. People used to group and play together just for fun. After a while, I could only find people to play with for instances and even then, everyone was in for their own interest... No real sense of community, even inside my own guild...
I'm still trying to find a game where I could find that kind of feeling.
I only played WoW for 3 or 4 months, so I didn't have a vested interest. I found the community horrible. The gameplay was pretty boring. I didn't see any reason to put any more time into WoW.
I wouldn't say a gave up WoW, since I never really played it religiously.
I finally quit when the game became more about the gear then the game. When your gear score determined what kind of player you were. Add that to many of the issues already voiced in this thread and the game was no longer enjoyable to the player who didnt want to spend all of their time just grinding or making sure their lives revolved around a guilds schedule. Worse thing that happend to WoW is it became popular. I was their at launch, and yeah it wasnt perfect, but I would take it over what the game has become.
You've all known people like that. WoW....for me....is a GAME like that. It gives you just enough to keep you chasing after the carrots, but eventually you realize....all there is to look forward to is....more carrots. And once you actually GET the carrot....it's never all you thought it would be, and you look up to see....yet another dangling carrot, and the first carrot you spent SO much time trying to acquire...is now being given away to others for a wink and a smile. After a while....your appetite for carrots begins to wane and you realize that you're just being strung along, teased, enticed, and used for your money. It's kind of nauseating when you first realize it. Then you accept it....and move on.
I almost died laughing in Work now, If you had said Carrot one more time I probably would have just had the stroke and been done with it. Quality post, and quite true, but funny as hell.
Blizz took the game to easy mode after BC (ex. if you had a mount you saved a lot of gold to get it, if you had an epic mount that was status if you were a lock or a pal). now its just tooooo easy, if you want good armor, just battle ground it out (after BC the battle grounds armor was some of the best in the game). I played from open beta to just before WotLK.
1.) Burnout. Very simple. I had played the game quite a bit for quite a while, and just no longer wished to play it.
2.) Community. This just made the burnout worse. I simply had bad luck finding good guilds, and the community of the game at large in WoW is rather bad. Lots of games have lots of annoying and/or stupid people, but it seems a lot worse in WoW than in most MMOs.
Those are the reasons I quit. The reason I'll never go back, though, is Activision. I don't even mind them making the game more and more casual friendly, as long as the content is still fun, but I despise Activision.
"I am the weapon that strikes/In the hearts of men I thrive/Feeding their fear with lies/I will devour/I will divide/I am the god of hellfire/inside every man there lives a liar/before their gods they cower/I will divide/I will devour" - "Divide Devour" by Iced Earth
Well i quit for a couple of reasons, one being that im a pvp person and BC just went backwards imo, ppl wearing full arena gear and had soo much resilience you couldn't do jack against them. Vanilla wow pvp was all about skill, yes you had the blue pvp set and the epic Marshall set but all they gave were more health, it was still based on skill and knowing your char inside out. BC comes along and in comes resilience which ruined pvp imo along with the fact that most pvp guilds died and once you got your full arena season 1 set i think it was through bg farming or through arena, that was it, no fun at all in it. I did some raiding but thought that the raids were short and lacked that wow factor like in vanilla wow.
Vanilla WoW was not "all about skill". It was in fact very gear based and had an exclusivity to the gear than made the entire system inherently unfair. If you really were a PvP person how do you not remember that? One of the biggest complaints in the entire PvP community was that PvP gear was abyssmaly weak compared to PvE gear. If you were a PvP'er you were stuck with a sub par set of gear fighting a big up hill battle against the raiders. That is why resilience was introduced, because PvP'ers were tired of getting the short end of the stick. Resilience and the stamina increase also did alot to remove the one and two shoting that plagued late vanilla PvP. It was not only a needed change it was good for PvP and indeed TBC had clearly surperior PvP to anything in Vanilla.
Skill mattered alot more in TBC and later in WotLK than it did in Vanilla. In straight terms of PvP combat the game got alot better. The average player skill in PvP has improved significantly since Vanilla. Back then it was crawling with terrible players. The shere amount of players that could not cope with their opponents circlestrafing them was ridiculous and a clear testament to this.
Oh, and the old rank system was a damn travesty rewarding time spent (unhealthy amounts of time spent, and given my exessive platying time I don't use the term lightly) rather than skill was not good design. The mix of "undeserving r14's" and the horrible strain on anyone trying for rank made it widely hated and was the direct reason why it was changed and why it was a much wanted change.
What made me give up warcraft? I quit WOW shorttly before BC, i think 1.9 the patch called calm before the storm or something similar. I, like many people, jumped on the wow bandwagon shortly after release, when it was becoming a worldwide pheneomon. At the time I was playing eve online, and was drawn in by WOWs lack of time commitment and "easy" play mode. I remember my first character, he was a night elf warriror, on which server I do not recall.
So i get my warrior to 60, thinking okay i beat the game, the grinds over. Little did I know. I have always been a pvp player, ever since my first pvp kill in Everquest 1 rallos zek server, ganking people and stealing the phat loot of their corpse while teabagging them just seemed appealing. I am a competative gamer by nature, that mentality is reflected in MMOs.
As for the reason I quit wow, it wasnt a single one. Part of it was the honor grind, and the ranking system, which was totally borked. Basicly it equated to wherever spent most time grinding in BGS was the highest rank with the best gear. Very unbalanced. The other "good gear" that you could get, was from raids. At the time raid and pvp gear werent seperate, and if you had top raid gear you could kick serious ass in PVP. Problem is, raids were 40 man. FOURTY people to take down the top raids at the time, Molten Core, Black Wing Lair, Onyxia, ect. The pre quests were difficult, and the raids required such orgization and tactics that only raiding guilds could do them. THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS PUG RAIDING BACK THEN. I hated having to log in at a certain time, each day, for a scheduled raid., so that left me without good gear.
So really, I , like alot of players, ended up forsaking the game and turning to the dark side, aka delving into RMT , buying gold, to buy gear so we could compete. In the end it didnt matter, because at this point Alterac Vally was the endgame PVP expereince, and world pvp was pretty much dead at this point. Tired of playing Alterac vally, 40 times, each game lasting at minimum of 2 hours, and only seeing a victory ONCE, I said, fuck this game, I am quitting and never returning. To ensure that I would never again be tempted to return to this game, I sold my account and used that money to buy a new graphics card.
Burning crusade came out, as did Wraith, too much fanfare, while I have tracked the games progress, it has always been from a distance. I did try to start over in wow, atleast twice, with the recruit a friend trial, because my brother is a hardcore wow fanboi. However, even with 3x triple xp, I just cannot stand to quest grind. Both times I burnt out within a week around level 40. By this point I had become so encapsulated (pardon the pun) with EVE online, that i really did not care. I was sick of themepark mmos, and eve provided me with an experience no other game could, or would ever provide a hardcore pvper.
To this day, I continue to play EVE, other mmos I play are only for a slight diversion. If some gave developer could take the sandbox ideas of eve, and put them in a fantasy universe, by god it would be the best thing to happen to the industry since EQ1 .... but thats a story for another topic.
I played it to much. I had a 130+ /played after 4 years of alots of fun
same, well, not the same, but played alot. 125 days played in the first year on my bloodelf warlock, rerolled from Tauren to BE in BC release, was 2nd warlock on my RPG server to hit 70, and then after that i whent zerg mode in Raids, so much zerg that i was 2nd best warlock in DPS terms (acording to wowjutizy) when we started on Sunwell. Quited in sunwell, the guild (showdown) did way to much MH and BT there.
The problem for me was when the new content (wotlk) came around, i played for some time, naxx, was fun for a while, but then all when causal mode, and nothing hard left to do. NOTHING (A bit hardmode, but that was just the same bosses again). Not like in the early days of BC and pre bc, well.
In other words, hardmode made all get epic items on normal, and better epic on hardmode. Whats with the epic word?
So now im waiting to a new BC look 'a' like PvE game.
Basically the core game play no longer appeals to me.
I burned out on raiding night after night to acquire gear only to have to repeat the process for the next level of boss. When BC came out I saw nothing but more of the same in my future and 18 months of that was enough for me.
I had a good time while playing WOW, but I needed a game that was quite a bit different and I found that in EVE.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Played Vanilla WoW, and the first expansion. As much as I love Blizzard, and the Warcraft lore, this game is nothing more than a cruel joke, similar to fishing wire pulling a 20 dollar bill across the sidewalk and having some sap (in this case the players, or myself) chase it.
You play because it's Warcraft. But the novelty wears off very quickly and you realize that this game has not done a single innovative thing since Ashron's Call. All you hear is praise over how WoW has "changed MMOs forever", but when you think about it, it's ALL been done before. And in many cases, better.
As someone prior mentioned, this is basically a Barbie Sim. During the early years of WoW, I found myself quitting it twice. Once to go back to Anarchy Online (back in its prime), and a second time (after only 2 months) to go and play CoX again (which to this day has remained the only MMO franchise to keep me interested longer that a year straight... in this case it was 4).
In short. The game was always set to "Easy Mode", with semi-re-invented ideas that other MMOs have already done. And I detested that. Now apparently it's set to "Very Easy". Do. Not. Want.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
I left WOW because the game was not longer a challenge. The game was all about mods to complete the dungeons. Some mods were great but mods that tell a person when to push a button or telling a player what a boss is going to do next was a waste of time for me.
Basically the core game play no longer appeals to me. I burned out on raiding night after night to acquire gear only to have to repeat the process for the next level of boss. When BC came out I saw nothing but more of the same in my future
Same scenario here.
I stayed past BC and gave WOTLK a chance to evolve on the game play, and when it failed to do so, I quit then and have not looked back since. I simply could not take another second of grinding for gear, so that I could progress a little and then grind for more gear, in order to take down a boss to get more gear...
The game is the ultimate treadmill with no real goal to accomplish other than getting new gear. Everything in the game leads to that end, whether it be crafting, raiding, running 5 mans, doing dailies, etc... it is all about the gear and nothing else.
Even the PVP is gear based and very little skill comes into play other than knowing your opponents class-abilities and then countering them, watching for trinkets being used and then acting on that, etc... It is by no means difficult (I had a 2.2k rating in 2s and a 2k+ rating in 5s when I quit, so don't bother trying to pull the "scrub" card out because it does not apply here).
The core game play no longer appeals to me, bottom line.
Well i played many games before wow and i'm still playing diffrent games after, Uo,lom,Ao,Swg,Wow that was pretty much my order all off and on, wow did not bring nothing new at the start but i did find it addictive for a while.
Just seems pointless playing now you can farm a new kit in pvp/pve then the next month ur have to do it all over again same old crap Bg's get boring i have every class at 80 just dont feel the urge to play it, i dont enjoy my time spent on wow anymore i just get pissed off.
I dont think its just wow its mmos in general you play them all for years then you realize they are all the same time sinks, when you feel like its work doing something ingame i usualy can't stay very long.
For me and the 5 people I played with all the time it really broke down to the insanity of raiding. WoW became a mechanical thing...you had to @2.5 seconds in fire off this while the mage does this and of course @7.78 seconds in if the tank does not X then all is lost we wipe and everyone is pissed. IDK I have enough time constraints and stress at my job I don't need them while gaming. I loved the game for the most part pre cap but in the last 20 levels or so the amount of insane BS just drove us mad. I also thought the overall game was very thin. I mean it seemed to be a UBRS gear get more gear then go do this to get more gear to get this and go there and get more gear so you can not be a jerk in X so Y can then be done to get that uber gear...rinse repeat.
I have friends that still play and love it. We, that being my droogs and I, are more casual and enjoy other games. I am one of those "every one likes different things" guys. I HATE celery with an intense passion but my wife likes it and my friend loves it...I choose not to eat it. I love sushi but some hate sushi. Just different tastes.
I will say that more content geared towards smaller groups, solo and duos and more crafting/life stuff, like great housing etc, might make me come back.
Comments
no world raid killed wow for me
i loved the pvpve of world raid dragon.
some might say its a small thing in that big world but to me its what made wow a mmo
now its just a mo .since all game are top end now a days!
Removal of strategic game play from 5 man dungeons. Tank and spank = boring.
I played WoW years ago. I think what did it in for me was that I wasn't really done with EQ yet at that time and playing two games just wasn't working for me. EQ was a more demanding game at that time compared to now, so it took all my gaming time just to keep moving forward. I guess I never found my social niche in WoW.
All the changes I've heard about recently make WoW more interesting to me at this point. I've got friends still trying to talk me into it anyway, and if I can find people to play with during my weird off-hours play times, all the better.
EDIT: Please note that I am not comparing EQ and WoW at all. They are both good games. I was saying EQ now isn't as demanding, in any sense, as it used to be, and it used to hog up all my time. WoW was cool, but I wasn't as established in it at that time.
The global attitude of the WoW community : every man for himself.. People used to group and play together just for fun. After a while, I could only find people to play with for instances and even then, everyone was in for their own interest... No real sense of community, even inside my own guild...
I'm still trying to find a game where I could find that kind of feeling.
I only played WoW for 3 or 4 months, so I didn't have a vested interest. I found the community horrible. The gameplay was pretty boring. I didn't see any reason to put any more time into WoW.
I wouldn't say a gave up WoW, since I never really played it religiously.
I finally quit when the game became more about the gear then the game. When your gear score determined what kind of player you were. Add that to many of the issues already voiced in this thread and the game was no longer enjoyable to the player who didnt want to spend all of their time just grinding or making sure their lives revolved around a guilds schedule. Worse thing that happend to WoW is it became popular. I was their at launch, and yeah it wasnt perfect, but I would take it over what the game has become.
I almost died laughing in Work now, If you had said Carrot one more time I probably would have just had the stroke and been done with it. Quality post, and quite true, but funny as hell.
Blizz took the game to easy mode after BC (ex. if you had a mount you saved a lot of gold to get it, if you had an epic mount that was status if you were a lock or a pal). now its just tooooo easy, if you want good armor, just battle ground it out (after BC the battle grounds armor was some of the best in the game). I played from open beta to just before WotLK.
I quit for two reasons:
1.) Burnout. Very simple. I had played the game quite a bit for quite a while, and just no longer wished to play it.
2.) Community. This just made the burnout worse. I simply had bad luck finding good guilds, and the community of the game at large in WoW is rather bad. Lots of games have lots of annoying and/or stupid people, but it seems a lot worse in WoW than in most MMOs.
Those are the reasons I quit. The reason I'll never go back, though, is Activision. I don't even mind them making the game more and more casual friendly, as long as the content is still fun, but I despise Activision.
"I am the weapon that strikes/In the hearts of men I thrive/Feeding their fear with lies/I will devour/I will divide/I am the god of hellfire/inside every man there lives a liar/before their gods they cower/I will divide/I will devour" - "Divide Devour" by Iced Earth
Because it was a place holder mmorpg that over ran its course after swg died in a ball of flames. Barbie sim, plain and simple.
Vanilla WoW was not "all about skill". It was in fact very gear based and had an exclusivity to the gear than made the entire system inherently unfair. If you really were a PvP person how do you not remember that? One of the biggest complaints in the entire PvP community was that PvP gear was abyssmaly weak compared to PvE gear. If you were a PvP'er you were stuck with a sub par set of gear fighting a big up hill battle against the raiders. That is why resilience was introduced, because PvP'ers were tired of getting the short end of the stick. Resilience and the stamina increase also did alot to remove the one and two shoting that plagued late vanilla PvP. It was not only a needed change it was good for PvP and indeed TBC had clearly surperior PvP to anything in Vanilla.
Skill mattered alot more in TBC and later in WotLK than it did in Vanilla. In straight terms of PvP combat the game got alot better. The average player skill in PvP has improved significantly since Vanilla. Back then it was crawling with terrible players. The shere amount of players that could not cope with their opponents circlestrafing them was ridiculous and a clear testament to this.
Oh, and the old rank system was a damn travesty rewarding time spent (unhealthy amounts of time spent, and given my exessive platying time I don't use the term lightly) rather than skill was not good design. The mix of "undeserving r14's" and the horrible strain on anyone trying for rank made it widely hated and was the direct reason why it was changed and why it was a much wanted change.
I played it to much. I had a 130+ /played after 4 years of alots of fun
I7@4ghz, 5970@ 1 ghz/5ghz, water cooled||Former setups Byggblogg||Byggblogg 2|| Msi Wind u100
What made me give up warcraft? I quit WOW shorttly before BC, i think 1.9 the patch called calm before the storm or something similar. I, like many people, jumped on the wow bandwagon shortly after release, when it was becoming a worldwide pheneomon. At the time I was playing eve online, and was drawn in by WOWs lack of time commitment and "easy" play mode. I remember my first character, he was a night elf warriror, on which server I do not recall.
So i get my warrior to 60, thinking okay i beat the game, the grinds over. Little did I know. I have always been a pvp player, ever since my first pvp kill in Everquest 1 rallos zek server, ganking people and stealing the phat loot of their corpse while teabagging them just seemed appealing. I am a competative gamer by nature, that mentality is reflected in MMOs.
As for the reason I quit wow, it wasnt a single one. Part of it was the honor grind, and the ranking system, which was totally borked. Basicly it equated to wherever spent most time grinding in BGS was the highest rank with the best gear. Very unbalanced. The other "good gear" that you could get, was from raids. At the time raid and pvp gear werent seperate, and if you had top raid gear you could kick serious ass in PVP. Problem is, raids were 40 man. FOURTY people to take down the top raids at the time, Molten Core, Black Wing Lair, Onyxia, ect. The pre quests were difficult, and the raids required such orgization and tactics that only raiding guilds could do them. THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS PUG RAIDING BACK THEN. I hated having to log in at a certain time, each day, for a scheduled raid., so that left me without good gear.
So really, I , like alot of players, ended up forsaking the game and turning to the dark side, aka delving into RMT , buying gold, to buy gear so we could compete. In the end it didnt matter, because at this point Alterac Vally was the endgame PVP expereince, and world pvp was pretty much dead at this point. Tired of playing Alterac vally, 40 times, each game lasting at minimum of 2 hours, and only seeing a victory ONCE, I said, fuck this game, I am quitting and never returning. To ensure that I would never again be tempted to return to this game, I sold my account and used that money to buy a new graphics card.
Burning crusade came out, as did Wraith, too much fanfare, while I have tracked the games progress, it has always been from a distance. I did try to start over in wow, atleast twice, with the recruit a friend trial, because my brother is a hardcore wow fanboi. However, even with 3x triple xp, I just cannot stand to quest grind. Both times I burnt out within a week around level 40. By this point I had become so encapsulated (pardon the pun) with EVE online, that i really did not care. I was sick of themepark mmos, and eve provided me with an experience no other game could, or would ever provide a hardcore pvper.
To this day, I continue to play EVE, other mmos I play are only for a slight diversion. If some gave developer could take the sandbox ideas of eve, and put them in a fantasy universe, by god it would be the best thing to happen to the industry since EQ1 .... but thats a story for another topic.
same, well, not the same, but played alot. 125 days played in the first year on my bloodelf warlock, rerolled from Tauren to BE in BC release, was 2nd warlock on my RPG server to hit 70, and then after that i whent zerg mode in Raids, so much zerg that i was 2nd best warlock in DPS terms (acording to wowjutizy) when we started on Sunwell. Quited in sunwell, the guild (showdown) did way to much MH and BT there.
The problem for me was when the new content (wotlk) came around, i played for some time, naxx, was fun for a while, but then all when causal mode, and nothing hard left to do. NOTHING (A bit hardmode, but that was just the same bosses again). Not like in the early days of BC and pre bc, well.
In other words, hardmode made all get epic items on normal, and better epic on hardmode. Whats with the epic word?
So now im waiting to a new BC look 'a' like PvE game.
.. o and ofc! PvP sux in wow!
Basically the core game play no longer appeals to me.
I burned out on raiding night after night to acquire gear only to have to repeat the process for the next level of boss. When BC came out I saw nothing but more of the same in my future and 18 months of that was enough for me.
I had a good time while playing WOW, but I needed a game that was quite a bit different and I found that in EVE.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Played Vanilla WoW, and the first expansion. As much as I love Blizzard, and the Warcraft lore, this game is nothing more than a cruel joke, similar to fishing wire pulling a 20 dollar bill across the sidewalk and having some sap (in this case the players, or myself) chase it.
You play because it's Warcraft. But the novelty wears off very quickly and you realize that this game has not done a single innovative thing since Ashron's Call. All you hear is praise over how WoW has "changed MMOs forever", but when you think about it, it's ALL been done before. And in many cases, better.
As someone prior mentioned, this is basically a Barbie Sim. During the early years of WoW, I found myself quitting it twice. Once to go back to Anarchy Online (back in its prime), and a second time (after only 2 months) to go and play CoX again (which to this day has remained the only MMO franchise to keep me interested longer that a year straight... in this case it was 4).
In short. The game was always set to "Easy Mode", with semi-re-invented ideas that other MMOs have already done. And I detested that. Now apparently it's set to "Very Easy". Do. Not. Want.
I began to want more graphically. It began to feel like I was logging into cartoon network.
The game play and constant grinding did begin to get tiresome, but I think you have to earn items and gear.
More of the same with nothing new in site.
--John Ruskin
I left WOW because the game was not longer a challenge. The game was all about mods to complete the dungeons. Some mods were great but mods that tell a person when to push a button or telling a player what a boss is going to do next was a waste of time for me.
Same scenario here.
I stayed past BC and gave WOTLK a chance to evolve on the game play, and when it failed to do so, I quit then and have not looked back since. I simply could not take another second of grinding for gear, so that I could progress a little and then grind for more gear, in order to take down a boss to get more gear...
The game is the ultimate treadmill with no real goal to accomplish other than getting new gear. Everything in the game leads to that end, whether it be crafting, raiding, running 5 mans, doing dailies, etc... it is all about the gear and nothing else.
Even the PVP is gear based and very little skill comes into play other than knowing your opponents class-abilities and then countering them, watching for trinkets being used and then acting on that, etc... It is by no means difficult (I had a 2.2k rating in 2s and a 2k+ rating in 5s when I quit, so don't bother trying to pull the "scrub" card out because it does not apply here).
The core game play no longer appeals to me, bottom line.
Well i played many games before wow and i'm still playing diffrent games after, Uo,lom,Ao,Swg,Wow that was pretty much my order all off and on, wow did not bring nothing new at the start but i did find it addictive for a while.
Just seems pointless playing now you can farm a new kit in pvp/pve then the next month ur have to do it all over again same old crap Bg's get boring i have every class at 80 just dont feel the urge to play it, i dont enjoy my time spent on wow anymore i just get pissed off.
I dont think its just wow its mmos in general you play them all for years then you realize they are all the same time sinks, when you feel like its work doing something ingame i usualy can't stay very long.
For me and the 5 people I played with all the time it really broke down to the insanity of raiding. WoW became a mechanical thing...you had to @2.5 seconds in fire off this while the mage does this and of course @7.78 seconds in if the tank does not X then all is lost we wipe and everyone is pissed. IDK I have enough time constraints and stress at my job I don't need them while gaming. I loved the game for the most part pre cap but in the last 20 levels or so the amount of insane BS just drove us mad. I also thought the overall game was very thin. I mean it seemed to be a UBRS gear get more gear then go do this to get more gear to get this and go there and get more gear so you can not be a jerk in X so Y can then be done to get that uber gear...rinse repeat.
I have friends that still play and love it. We, that being my droogs and I, are more casual and enjoy other games. I am one of those "every one likes different things" guys. I HATE celery with an intense passion but my wife likes it and my friend loves it...I choose not to eat it. I love sushi but some hate sushi. Just different tastes.
I will say that more content geared towards smaller groups, solo and duos and more crafting/life stuff, like great housing etc, might make me come back.
easy answer: Gear Check/Score has killed the complete game for me and not only me, but many I know..