The worst crisis for an MMORPG from my experience is when most of the experienced players accurately can predict the future changes of the game.

Content alone can not prevent this problem, maye mask it for a little longer.
 

then that crisis has been going on since about a year before the launch of BC.

I saw nearly every thing they did in BC predicted on the forums by some of the old timers.
 

Reminds me how my spoof "Freezing Jihad" post wasn't too far off from the announcement of the actual Wrath of the Lich King.
 

I just posted something similar on another blog...

RE: "WoW + TBC fatigue".
Blizzard has pulled off making a moving-target hardcore gear chase look like any casual could do it!

The expansion is over a year old, and there have been few patched additions to the WoW 1-60 content in these 14 months (only the Duskwallow Marsh content comes to mind).

There is a limit to how many BGs even I, a rather tolerant grinder, can stand. I can't bring myself to set foot in a BG right now. Whole evenings or days of grinding? Just not interested.
Arena is IMO very, very limited, too. It seems to me that it’s really difficult to improve because of the speed plus lack of feedback, and that I'd guess that most of us are pretty much clueless as to how gear vs. class vs. skill really adds up (without extensive extra-game research anyway). Unless someone clues me in on how to reach and maintain a 1800+ rating, there just aren't enough weeks left in TBC to make using a full gaming night time-effective.
And while Kara is definitely a neat place, I truly got my fill of it after about 5 runs, and don't care to grind it for the sake of badge loot. A grind is a grind is a grind.

The endgame 'incentives' have obviously degenerated into loot chases.
For raiders, Kara badge grinding.
For PvP, BG and Arena grinding.
For gold, daily quest grinding.

And it's been disheartening to watch TBC gear inflation; such as the 2.4 offering of level-70 PvP blues that cost a ton of honor at TBC release now sold for a pittance by PvE faction vendors.

But it won't be long now and a brand new 70 will be on a par with a year-long+ 70 who ground Kara/BGs/Arena, when WotLK resets the playing field, and your level-80 toon finds that leet level-70 epics are just bank clutter - and no more useful than your Mr. Pinchy or Romantic Picnic Basket or Delicious Chocolate Cake!

I'll dabble in Sunwell, but I'm not interested in grinding a new raid or instance or daily quest regimen (and PvP looks to be the same old grind). Definitely "fun" will trump "gear chase".

If anything (well, other than inertia) keeps me actively in WoW until WotLK, it will likely be leveling a new toon of a new-to-me class by finding new quests (though being funneled into Outland will really be a downer...)
 

Reminds me how my spoof "Freezing Jihad" post wasn't too far off from the announcement of the actual Wrath of the Lich King.

When reading through that post at first I actually thought it was a Wrath of the Lich King parody, before reaching the end of the post. (Obviously the date was not quite obvious enough for me to notice)

The endgame 'incentives' have obviously degenerated into loot chases.
For raiders, Kara badge grinding.
For PvP, BG and Arena grinding.
For gold, daily quest grinding.

I'm wondering if blizzard will try something different than gear to keep people interested and playing. (It seems very unlikely, but there's always that tiny chance of it happening.) It does seem that constant gear chasing would wear a lot of people doing it out after awhile, but it seems they are quite invested in it and have stuck around.
 

Burnout from lack of content is something the guild I play in has been experiencing.

We have been very competitive against the other Horde and Alliance guilds for server-first kills on bosses, and as such there has been a lot of boredom with the repeated farming of BT/Hyjal.

New content gives us a reason to pull together to experience something new, it relieves the boredom of clearing the (horrific) trash of Hyjal for the Nth time.

I just hope WoTLK rolls along pretty quickly.
 

New content gives us a reason to pull together to experience something new, it relieves the boredom of clearing the (horrific) trash of Hyjal for the Nth time.

If "horrible trash" is a view people have on Mt. Hyjal, than it seems the instance design was a bit iffy.

For those who don't know, the Mt. hyjal instance is based off the last mission in warcraft 3, a "big final battle" type of setup where a large undead and demon army attacked the mountain, and the humans, night elves, and Orcs were defending it until the bad guy could be defeated in another way.

For everyone again, it seems that there was a communication breakdown between either blizzard developers and community, and/or between different parts of blizzard, since to be true to what the Warcraft 3 mission was, the battle has to have large amounts of "trash" enemies, but to make a raid, loot instance, etc., it would need a higher percentage of bosses.

It seems that blizzard developers got a bit too far into the "raid and loot" mentality to do something different with the instance, given that its appeal would most likely be for Warcraft 3 fans, not to hard core raiders who as likely as not wouldn't care all that much.


My personal preference would be to use the instance to set up a new type of "full scale battle" instance with slightly changed aggro rules, collision rules, terrain rules, etc., to allow players to fight their characters in large scale army battles where they fight large groups of enemies that work together, rather than the usual pull, tank and spank 1-2 at a time, repeat that most group stuff is.
 

For me, nothing short of the next expansion will make me resubscribe to WoW at this point. The PvE game hasn't really had anything new added that shakes up the game dynamic other than random nerfing/buffing of classes and content -- this is fine up to a point, after hanging out at level 70 for nearly a year, I found that all the strategic options in the game had been exhausted, leading me to cancel my subscription in early January.

New abilities and/or new classes are needed to make the game feel fresh again, at least for me. A new dungeon, new daily quests, etc. are nice to a point, but at the end of the day I was still playing the same old characters, doing the same old thing that I was been doing for a year. If the expansion pack doesn't come out in a reasonable time frame, WoW will start to bleed customers again around May or June, once the charm of 2.4 starts to wear off.

If Warhammer Online or Age of Conan ends up rising to the challenge and releases a good product around that time (as they are theoretically aiming to do), then WoW will undoubtedly have another content patch before WotLK. If neither of those games releases by mid-Q3 and/or they both end up being disappointments .... well, let's just say City of Heroes has been looking REALLY good lately.
 

I think they get so wrapped up in designing the next "Masterpiece" of a raid instance that they just dont' think hiding the grind with quests and fun stuff is worth thier time. Its a shame.

To this day some of the best times I remember are things like the end of the Marshall Windsor Quest. I think they lost sight of how important the quests and how they are presented are to makeing the game fun for most.