I feel like being a whiner here and saying I expected more topics in the initial blog post ;).

Well, I guess I'll blab about the current stuff and touch on the upcoming stuff, because I'm a spoilers of stories....

I don't see anywhere in your rant on customer service complaints about how you actually address the complaints that I hear the most about: how worthless the responses are sometimes. I think people actually like how quick the responses are, but when you serve crap to someone, it don't matter how quickly or slowly you get it, it's still crap! Sometimes you can get a GM that provides meaningful responses, or sometimes you simply get canned remarks when you actually have a valid issue with an in-game mechanic/quest/etc.

Now onto raiding. The complaints from a 40-man environment arose from the fact that what happens after awhile in a persistent game? People begin to lose interest, burn out, etc... so you have a harder time keeping up your raiding group if people drop out for whatever reason I mentioned before. Lowering the raid count also helped this as you had to maintain a smaller group... but the problem is, most guilds were designed around the 40 man encounters and may've had around 40 or less people, but certainly more than 25. So the idea is now who gets cut. Also, guilds who had no trouble keeping 40 members available for a raid only had to see some of their members benched, which some could see as good (you could get a break) and some could see as bad (more excess = more to train/gear up).

The thing you should've mentioned is that balance isn't easy... I mean, do you remember ever trying to balance on a teeter-totter with another kid when you were younger. It took many scoots up or down depending on weight/position to get in just the right spot to hang in equilibrium. That's a simplistic idea of balance, but game balance is hard to find and that's not just talking about raiding but class vs class balance, etc.

Now, let's talk about battlegrounds... I've been quite vocal about these as of late!

I think battlegrounds have only become worse ever since Blizzard removed the honor ranking system. Now, it certainly made the PVP portion of WoW more accessible (pre-BC, as in my opinion, Arena is quite accessible at its 10 matches per week minimum), but the problem is that they literally turned PVP into even more of a farm-fest. Now I know what you're saying, "aikouka... wtf? How could PVP be even more of a farm fest!" Now wait wait, hear me out! Originally, a lot of the importance of PVP was placed on winning a battleground which provided decent honor and tokens. These tokens were handed in per BG or in a set of all 3 BGs for extra honor (where all 3 at once provided more than each 3 on their own). Tokens were more like a bonus.

Now, as much as people like to make fun of other players as dumb, unintelligent beings that know nothing more than "gurrrr must crush Horde... no care about flag!" (okay, if you've played Alliance PVP you understand!) Players aren't dumb enough to realize that most of the battlegrounds aren't that great for honor and are turned into mere token farm fests. Sadly enough, it's faster to simply lose Arathi Basin constantly letting the opposing team 5-cap rather than spend 20 to 30 minutes attempting to win and still losing (remember folks, some of us play Alliance ;)). Since AV provides the honor that you need as even if you lose, you only lose... what is it, 50 honor that you get for killing the commander? During AV weekend, you can easily get between 350 and 600 honor per AV. These AV matches can take around 15 minutes a piece (or less, but the average is 15-20 minutes), so why waste your time elsewhere.

Blizzard has admitted that they want to adjust honor to help alleviate this "problem" of some battlegrounds being valued over others. The problem that Blizzard's missing is that sometimes (and I stress "sometimes") we're not dumb and realize that we can finish it faster by *not* sticking to Blizzard's plan and actually PVPing in a PVP battleground (as silly as that sounds) and end up being rewarded more because you get more honor per hour. In other words, Blizzard planned for AV to be longer than 15 to 20 minutes (I think around an hour or more per), yet we're not sticking to the game plan.

Reputation grinding? Eh, well it's just a grind just like everything else in the game. The problem with most grinds in Azeroth (i.e. pre-BC) is that there wasn't enough diversity in what to do to raise your reputation or the objectives were simply boring. Get a mage, a warrior and a priest and go farm the Deadwood camp in northern Felwood for a couple hours. Well, personally it's not that exciting. Blizzard did a decent job by sprucing this up with daily quests in Burning Crusade for factions such as the Netherwing, Shattari Skyguard and Ogri'la. Personally, I think as long as they try to create more than one path to reach the goal, I think reputation grinding will be alright.