Funny breaking up letter

There is a funny breaking up with WoW letter on Aeropause. The complaint is a familiar one, the writer likes to solo and is disappointed with the forced grouping of the end game. But the way in which he describes playing WoW like a romantic relationship is well done, funny, and insightful.

Soloing is a pure interaction between a player and the game. As soon as you start with groups and raids, the interaction between players come to the foreground, and the player/game interaction is less intense. Now me, and many other people, do prefer interaction between players, because players are less predictable than artificial intelligence. But you can use the same argument, players are less predictable, to explain why you would prefer a pure player/game interaction. You know where you are with a game, and the game never complains if you turn it off.

The post also mentions in passing that while the expansion will bring back soloing, that will only last a limited amount of time, and then its back to the familiar raiding end game. In a way that is inherent to games with leveling and a level cap. Leveling is transitory, and therefore more suited to soloing. At the cap there is the highest concentration of players that all have the same level, which gives you a much better probability of being able to organize large raids. World of Warcraft could not have a level 35 raid dungeon for 40 players, because by the time you have 40 playes organized for raiding it, half of them have leveled up so far that the loot in that dungeon aren't worth going there any more. So we all know that the expansion will bring solo and small group content up to level 70, and mostly group and raid content at the new cap. As Saylah said in the comments on yesterday's post on player numbers after the expansion comes out, there is a significant risk that most of the players coming back for the Burning Crusade expansion will be gone again after a few month, when the soloing content has run out again.