World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade for Windows, Mac

What once was a good game has unfortunately stumbled into the same trap as many MMO's before it. That is to say, through their efforts to pander to the masses and make everyone happy, they have ultimately rendered one of the best MMO's in the history of the genre an unbalanced mess that has lost the majority of its original fun factor. With its first expansion, The Burning Crusade (TBC), World of Warcraft (WoW) expanded the level limit from 60 to 70, and opened the Outlands for the consumer's adventuring pleasure. In addition to this, Arena Player vs. Player (PvP) was added. Though none of these are inherently bad ideas, their implementation was somewhat sub-par.

First of all, the level limit expansion from 60-70. Though it seems to be a logical step in progression, the only thing the level limit expansion really accomplished in WoW was to render nearly every piece of content prior to TBC completely obsolete. Upon release of TBC, all of the dungeons and zones from the Old World no longer mattered. Even in the case of people just joining the game, the Old World was just a silly, worn race-track whose only viable use anymore was a breakneck sprint to level 55-58 (depending on your class's ability to solo in PVE), at which point you went to Outlands where the experience gain was enormously faster.

The Outlands itself was mediocre at best. Don't get me wrong there are plenty of fun zones and events in those zones to keep one busy for a multitude of hours. However, having played the game since the closed beta of the original, I have to say that I had a lot more fun in the Old World, with the level range stuck at 1-60.

Finally, Arena PvP. Initially an awesome concept, yet somehow lost along the way. The idea is sound, and Arena matches were great fun (I personally had 2 characters on 2k+ rated teams); but ultimately they sealed the fate of any sort of real PvP in the game. Once the developers saw that their servers couldn't handle loads of people in one place, they started making moves to reduce world PvP. One of these methods was instanced Battlegrounds. There were several smaller steps in between, and finally the ESport of Arena matches delivered the KO shot. With everyone competing to get their Arena teams ratings higher, the developers no longer had to worry about servers crashing due to high volumes of people raiding major cities. This is coming from a game that promised to be a PvP based game in its original conception. There are many other faults and problems with the Arena system itself that need not be covered here.

Ultimately a so-so game expansion with a mediocre delivery.