I'm "wow" for WoW

What is it about World of Warcraft that is so appealing? I don't know about you guys, but I've never been able to leave it permanently. No matter how many times I have gotten bored with it and canceled my subscription, I still managed to come back and play with newly found enthusiasm.

Actually I have a love-hate relationship with WoW, mainly because Blizzard loves to jump from one extreme to another. And it can be frustrating. Firstly, they make it extremely difficult to acquire materials for high level crafting patterns. I would spend weeks grinding for money and materials only to find out months later that healing and spell damage does not matter anymore because everything has been dumbed down to spell power. All of those hours spent grinding for materials are totally wasted.

I can guess why - to make it more user friendly for people who play hybrid classes.
On one hand it is great because a holy priest would still be able to do damage while questing, but on the other the same holy priest and a warlock would have a cat fight in a raid about who should get a +spell power staff.

During the Burning Crusade the conflict between Horde and Alliance has been completely undermined by the arena PvP system because it allowed teams of the same factions to fight against each other. The fights between the Horde and Alliance teams resembled more of a friendly sparring than an actual conflict. Of course Blizzard outdid themselves in the Lich King by reigniting the war between the two main factions through the chain of events in Dragonblight. Apparently the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" philosophy is outdated in the latest expansion.

However, some things have been improved. I love the fact that reputation is not only exclusive to specific instances anymore, like it was in the Burning Crusade. The Lich King introduced the tabard system to the new factions. Now all you need to do is wear a tabard and run any high level instance and the rep is easily yours.

Despite the fact that I have several high level characters and think that the Lich King could have introduced more class variety instead of just new talents, I still have fun leveling my second Death Knight. It's probably because I amuse myself with the though that tanking is fun and I could maybe, probably, one day bring myself to actually do it. Even though Blizzard almost destroyed the dark setting that was present in the Warcraft series by adding a lot of pop culture references and silly events during the holiday seasons, I still look forward to having my character run around with candy buckets during Halloween and sharing Christmas milk and cookies with friends.