I hit up the BG Queue and then go raid towns or farm for phat loots while I wait. I also manage to get into the big 40 man raids with my Guild at least once a week. By doing this I have been able to get enough gear to keep up with most people, without ruining my life

I've stopped playing Wow since augest, it's just not worth $15 a month for it, for me anyway. I constantily feel that unless I play it everyday for  at least 4 hours, I'll never get anywhere in it. I've recentily become addicted to Albatross18 , it's a free online golf game like hot shots.

I stopped WOW about 2 months ago.
It's just too hard for casual gamers to keep up.

By the time I get all Blues, everyone is decked in all Purp
By the time I get all Purp, they are on the next tier....

it sounds like they just finished turning it into Everquest. Those are the exact, i mean exact complaints I have heard about Everquest for years, you could substitute a couple of words and find this post on numerous EQ websites. It seems odd that when they claimed to be improving on the genre, that they would take steps after to adopt the old problems of the genre...

WoW relise on beig able to hook casual gamers even if they don't play that much whil keepingthe hardcore online as much as possible. Given the difficulty in canceling an account they make a ton of money this way.

Another game I had similar problems with was A tale in the desert, I loved the game, but realistically, I could never have enough time to get into it.  Everything you do and make in the game take real time to do it. So if takes 30 minutes to create one item, that's 30 minutes of actual time.  I mean if I didn't have school or work, I would play it, but even with taking classes now I would never have enough time to play that and anything else.

I have quit wow for the second time... in the name of having a life. I got tired of feeling guilty for wasting hours on end on that game. 8 hour instances and beyond is crazy... what kind of normal american has that time to dump into a worthless game.

And I agree BG has practically crippled it. I agree they should of went the other direction.. and if they were worried about those just trying to quest.. give the town NPC's with quest an honorless kill status. How hard is that?

I have just sold my account on Ebay for 200.00 bucks.
Not too bad for a 60 warlock with no professions and no epics

Unless you're on a PvP server, what difference does it make if someone has better gear?

And just as a note, the end-game was always raid and gear focused, you just didn't see it until you hit 60 and ran out of meaningful content to go through.

It is a PvP server.
I was level 60 and half my gear was still greens.

Sounds like what happened to UO.. thats why I quit playing it. PVP was item based, and the game was just getting ridiculas.

PVP is not entirely item based, the best players will still crush people with better gear. Alot of my friends have alts with mediocure gear but still manage to pound on people who are higher with better gear because they know what they are doing.

Good gear isn't always just epics, its the combination of the gear in a certain fashion that gives the biggest edge.

I totally agree with the original poster. I'm also another former World of Warcraft player. The more I played it, the more I realized that WoW missed a huge opportunity with the Warcraft universe; the game's background would have provided the perfect opportunity to implement a world-wide conflict-oriented persistent world, but instead they went the EQ (endless questing) route.

Blizzard certainly hasn't fully realized this, although they are (belatedly) working on adding world PvP back in--to Outlands, for the expansion, of course. The problem they're likely to face is that potential challengers have figured out how important PvP is and are designing MMOs that are PvP objective oriented from the ground up. The most serious potential challenger at this time is probably Warhammer Online, which may end up becoming what World of Warcraft should have been. WH is still a year or so off, though, so Blizzard has a little time yet to fix things, but there's no indication that there's any intention to make any deep changes to the game.

I guess starting over as a new class/race/alignment/personae is out of the question?

A few notes:

1) A Casual Level-60 player is an oxymoron.

2) PVP in an MMORPG has little to do with "skills"!!!

If you want twitch "skills" based competition try: RTS, FPS, fighting games, flight combat....
If you want thought "skills" try TBS, Chess, Go...

If you personally don't care how "good" you are and just want to prove you have the least life then MMORPG is right up your ally.

3) players who don't have the time to run 12 Hour Raids so they can get Gold Master Sword of Wonderment is so sad. No really... where did I put my world's smallest violin. I'll play a few tunes for you.

I left WoW in like March or February or something, several months ago, maybe more actually.

I got tired of the ganking and plus I was getting bored from the constant grinding

I'm glad I left WoW actually, its just a pure dead end at 60 and all you can do is grind the dungeons.