Blizzard: Yes, some players left for AoC

Those french(blizzard)!!! (shakes fist in air) sadly, playing AOC really disgusted me with a bunch of lousy everything, the biggest being non existant customer support.

and damn ye frenchies(blizzard)!! you forced me to come back to wow, twisted my arm and soothed my soul after playing that abomination called AOC.

i am cursed for sure! there is still one hope though...............soon, soon. :)

I am (still) playing AoC. Then again, I quit WoW in disgust a month or two before AoC went live, shortly after the arena rating for improving your battleground PvP gear rule was announced.

That was more or less the last straw. WoW felt more like a second job towards the end. Raiding was like a second job with a nasty boss screaming at you; and where you had to compete for perks with your co-workers, otherwise they'd take them all and leave you with all the garbage. There was too much performance anxiety and performance monitoring for a "game", and too much failure and frustration.

I went back to City of Heroes / Villains, a game that is monotonous in some ways, but does many things right. Loot is plentiful. More importantly, loot is PRIVATE and PERSONAL. And the game is not balanced around having it. Frankly, this makes the player community sunshine and light compared to WoW.

I fear that Conan may have taken a turn for the worse with the introduction of character binding on all loot with any stats. Time will tell, and I'm at least willing to give Funcom a couple of months more. The other thing that Conan does right, that I enjoy, is to have a very open ended world for roleplaying.

I may or may not play Warhammer; if it has elves and dwarves, that's a minus. I may or may not keep playing AoC. I may or may not keep playing CoH. But nothing is dragging me back to Warcraft, ever again.

@Heraclea

"...WoW felt more like a second job towards the end. Raiding was like a second job with a nasty boss screaming at you; and where you had to compete for perks with your co-workers, otherwise they'd take them all and leave you with all the garbage. There was too much performance anxiety and performance monitoring for a "game"..."

This is the perfect description of the WoW endgame.

Very nicely stated. :D