World of Warcraft.... almost a full 10 years of existence and I still think the worst thing about it now is what the worst thing about it was when I quit the first time at the launch of Cata, and when I played as a noob so long ago at the tail of Vanilla.
The removal of content.
I CANNOT understand why a company would waste their money paying someone for man hours to design or create something for the game and then after a few months, or ever a year or two, remove that something. I have always, and will always, think it is the stupidest idea ever. Collectors can NEVER truly collect because of temporary content, only the most elite and rich stand a chance, but even they will never get it all, and the truth is, that now WoW has started posting things they took out of the game on the Black Market Auction House, and announced that in 6.0 they intend to do even more so.
This is good for people who cry over what they can never have, but HORRIBLE news for everyone else, because this means all current content can at anytime be removed and put in that BMAH instead, meaning, you spend hundreds of thousands of gold on something that if WoW had left alone, you could have just done the chain, the farm, the achievement, whatever, for.
The BMAH is proof that Blizz DOES NOT care about giving people an elite feeling for having gotten a mount or title or set before it was removed, and that they are trying new ways of CONTROLING players and their mass saved up gold. It is a money sink, purposefully designed to make people get excited that they can have something removed, when what would have made ACTUAL sense would be to leave it there in the first place.
A game that removes good things just for the sake of removal, without there being a glitch or a bug in it, but to create a sense of 'elite' players who can flaunt their mount, is making a huge mistake.
Firstly, I stated with guild wars 2, that someone saw something I had from their horrible "every 2 weeks we put out something temp again, and never expand the game world we made in our game" and asked me about it. I explained that you could never get that particular pet again, and the person said, "Well, that is the coolest thing I have seen in your game, but no point in playing if I can't get it."
IT LITTERALLY DETERS people from playing the game who have never played to remove content.
Secondly, it makes your current gamers feel like the company is segregating them into "good players" and "casual players". Now the 'good' will think this is great, feel patted on the back, and feel lordly over the other players who have excuses like "life" for why they fail. The casuals, who are the majority of the players, will feel abused, dejected, robbed, and smacked down. Why can't the 'good' players be made to feel great about themselves WITHOUT treating casuals like crap? You could put a badge of the logo of the expansion someone got a mount in, since people complain about only having a date for proof, to their achievie, or you could give titles and transmog sets for doing content at the max lvl for that expansion. Anyone can turn off their xp for a while, and then back on, when they want. You could even just do like with CM's and push the gear lvl's down. But removing content is so unreasonable and foolish.
Another reason to NOT remove it, is this was LITTERALLY my reason for leaving WoW back at the launch of Cata, that and the dailies, but mostly, I had been farming ZG for over a year and a half weekly for the mounts, seen both drop 3 times but lost the rolls, and you were removing them. You already removed the mounts from Naxx when I had just started getting the achievements required, and I won't even speak about ZA. In Cata, you not only were removing the ZG mounts, but destroying the raid and making it a dungeon, which I have tried once since I returned to WoW and it is HORRIBLE compared to the raid. Whoever re-did it made it terrible to even want to try. People like the warm fuzzy nostalgic feelings of content as it is, not ruined redone stuff that shows you are too lazy to create. You lose players every time you take away instead of add. Every single time.
But Cata was, in and of itself, an expansion designed to take away. You took away auberdine, a place filled with some of the fondest memories I have in the whole game, and you didn't even replace Gubba Bump, which my sis in law cries over anytime anyone mentions the ransacked upheaval you have turned that zone into. Not a single change made in the cata expansion made anything that was destroyed or removed better. Nothing. Every single thing you ruined. None of it was improved.
Which is really the point.
Even if you didn't have a single player in your game, which you lose more everyday cuz instead of adding content you keep removing it, but even if there were none, the GAME does NOT get BETTER by removing content. You will NEVER improve a game by taking away rewards, incentives, and things for people to enjoy.
But since you don't seem to care about the game and whether or not it is good, think of it this way: The more crap people have to strive for, the more hours they will waste trying to get the crap, and the more subscription time they will buy. People want more, not less. You want more people, not fewer. This is not hard.
STOP removing good things from World of Warcraft.
