As seen on AFKGamer (and I’m late to the party too–I hate when my real life interferes with my blog reading):

Because that was such a fabulous idea in EQ, it’s bound to be just as popular in Warcraft. O_O

You may now disavow yourself of these notions:

- You don’t HAVE to go to AQ if you don’t want to or if you’re not interested in the other loots. Eventually, your guild, your prospective guild and even PuGs will insist you have your upgrades. They, we, will choose someone with upgrades over you.

- Your present level 60 spells/skills are good enough. They were, now they’re not.

- Your guild didn’t have to lock up AQ loot with DKP. Ok, you don’t HAVE to lock it up, but you really don’t want some knucklehead guild applicant walking away with a spell your number one [insert class] still needs.

- You can just buy the upgraded spells/skills on the Auction House later. Ya, MUCH LATER and after guilds have outfitted their members. Even then, the price will be sky high. Enjoy.

For someone like me, who would like to someday play WoW again, that I’m not keeping up with the big boys in raiding implies that the game isn’t going to have any more of an endgame now as it had when I cancelled at the end of December.

Maybe the expansion would give me something to do from level 60 to level 70, but I certainly am not going to be able to dedicate several evenings a week to raiding, I won’t be able to stay up past 10pm (and still make it to work by 7:30am the next day), and so I can’t really play much with the guilds that base everything on DKP and are made up of west coast members and people who get to stay at home. Hiding upgrades inside 40-man raid instances creates another impermeable barrier to game content. I’m one of the lousy PUG losers who’d get all the shinies ninjaed and might be lucky to see a couple purples from a kindly and jaded raid.

Where’s all the casual content in WoW? Well, it’s there in levels 1-59. Go reroll.