1.)
There are quite some people who totally dislike PvP in any incarnation. No matter how big battlegrounds become, those won’t be impressed or enthralled.

3.)
There are quite some hardcore raiders (or former hardcore raiders) who simply think that raiding isn’t worth it anymore. In vanilla raiders were close to halfgods.. everyone looked up to them and their gear made sure that they were the best in every single activity this game had to offer. Today being a raider means that you are pretty much normal, everyone (including yourself) knows that you are nothing special and the gear you aquire is only useful for raiding iteself. It can’t even be used to overgear 5-mans because you can do that easily without raiding. In short: Raiding is an activity that takes up much time, forces you to cope with people you may not like so much and offers less rewards than ever.

“For alt-fans, an old worlde revamp, new races, and 5 new zones will certainly keep people busy for awhile”

That might be a overly optimistic view. I think most people who really are altoholics already have 4-7 characters and most people have several classes they don’t like. New races are cool but they don’t help me if I have no classes left that interest me. Hell I already started classes I already have on 80 on new servers just to stay busy..

@Fremskritt: I expect Archaelogy to be mandatory for every serious character. A skill that gives you passive boni will always be either mandatory or useless.

Alts-ville. Between DK’s, BoA gear and the age old demand for tanks suddenly getting rewarded by ‘insta-dungeon’ a lot of folk have leveled alts lately. Will even a make over of Azeroth and the new races make that hold our attention for _that_ long?

I guess we’ll find out but I also have my doubts.

I certainly agree to the levelling through Outland and Northrend part, I feel that already with my alts, they always hit a wall at 60 and 70, and this will be only more pronounced in Cataclysm. Outland always felt kind of tacked onto vanilla content, and Northrend feels tacked onto Outland again. Not onto vanilla content, but onto content that already feels tacked on. This will only get worse for me as the new 80-85 content will feel tacked onto Northrend again.

At least I know I will have a blast levelling my main to 85.

As to the leaks, my strong suspicion is that they’re not going to hold an external alpha. The NDA was an utter joke the last time around, and having an NDA’ed test would basically ensure that people googling alpha leaks will get keylogged. If they’re doing the alpha internally and jumping directly to beta, they’re not necessarily behind yet – it took four months for each of the past two betas.

Also, Blizzard tends to infodump just before things come up for public testing, and, sure enough, we’ve had a bunch of really long walls of blue text on the gear revamps recently…..

I think Blizzard has to fight the “endgame obsession”. The boss fight was the icing on the cake, not the whole experience. Also think of single player RPGs. While a different genre, it shows that the fun is the journey, not the slaughter of new bosses every other month.

I think the new levelling experience that Cataclysm will offer might provide the necessary sense of wonder to entice players again.

The problem is, many WoW players already have one or even several alts. While alt-players usually enjoy levelling, after a while they will start to loathe to play through the same content again to level up a new class if they already did it over and over again.

This is where a the new levelling experience, the revamped content and new zones can help new players to have an even better newbie experience and veteran players to smell the roses again.

But you are right, many of the veterans WILL start to loathe Outland especially, they already experienced it for years, then again with their DK.

But I agree, it takes a bit more to cure the World of Warcraft from the endgame raiding obsession. I wonder what they plan to breath even more life into the changed world. Because every excited newbies becomes a max level veteran sooner or later.

If this newbie was an alt, he is back to the same old badge-running in next to no time. Even faster with unnecessary misdevelopments like heirloom items that make levelling faster than it already is.

Food for thought: If there would be no levels (or every maxes quickly early on before the bulk of the game is “over”) but rather ability unlocks like in Guild Wars, they could re-use the whole world so much easier.

Imagine a world PvP event: Tauren Kitten stomping. Horde Tauren Druids stomp little kittens to honor nature, an Alliance PETA task force tries to rather stomp the evil Taurens…^^

I know that Deathwing, lore wise, is a grand enemy, but he has not been in game. Not like any of the previous ones. My guess is that I’ll buy the game, play it for a couple of months then look for d3, swtor or just stop gaming on my pc altogether. cata, definitely does not seem to have any long lasting hold.

So what could I do from now to the yet announced Cataclysm release date?
With no beta out yet, now way it’s released before autumn…