This is taken from MMO Champion. I disagree with it strongly, I'll post my thoughts a bit later but would like to see what people's opinions are.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/general-discussions-22/warcraft-raiding-has-...

Copied word for word.

There's a long-running meme that going to 25 man raids from 40, or
easy/hard modes or difficulty tuning has significantly nerfed raiding. 
This is simply untrue.  Raiding in vanilla WoW was, in most cases,
relatively simple from a mechanics perspective.  Molten Core and
Blackwing Lair, which are held up as guild-breaking raids, had boss
mechanics where the whole fight was as simple as "Run away when you are
the bomb," "Line of sight his ability," or "Tank him with your back to
the wall."  There are trash packs in ICC with more complicated
execution requirements than bosses from early raids. 

What's changed is this:

1.  Tuning -
It's very easy to make a boss a progression wall.  If boss X requires a
certain level of gear to beat and boss Y requires much better gear, or
special resist gear, then your guild has to farm V, W, and X for a
couple of months to beat Y.  Blizzard used to do this.  Ragnaros,
Huhuran and Vaelestrasz were originally hard gear checks, Rag and Huhu
required you to farm lots of resist gear, while Vael required very high
raid DPS, which meant a lot of guilds that were farming Rag had to farm
him a bunch more to be mathematically capable of beating the boss. 
Nefarian is another extreme example.  His shadow flame ability killed
anyone without a cloak made from Onyxia's scales.  But you had to farm
Ony every week for nearly a year to outfit everyone in your raid with a
cloak. 

This keeps people from completing an instance for a
period of weeks or months, and some people believe it's more "epic" if
an encounter is active for months before anyone beats it.  But this is
an artificial barrier.  And it's not fun at all when a raid boss drops
resist gear instead of something cool.

2. Guild stability - Unattractive
loot incentives in the old game made it much more difficult for guilds
to push progression.  Bosses dropped 3-4 loots for 40 people.  You
generally took about 5 players of each class.  There were no badges. 
And since the oldest raiders had been raiding outdated instances for
years to gear new raiders, and building massive amounts of DKP, they
got everything first.  That meant that, when you were pushing new
content, about fifteen people in the raid knew that, whatever exciting
might drop from that boss, they would not see it for at least four
months.  So many guilds struggled with attendance on progression nights
and were oversubscribed on farming down-tier content. 

There
were also no server transfers in vanilla.  If you lost a player, you
had to either poach somebody geared from another guild on your server
or gear up somebody new.  And new recruits would always be undergeared,
because there was no casual progression.  Between raids dropping about
half as much loot-per-player as they do now, and high raider turnover,
guilds never really farmed out an instance.  Guilds ran MC for years
because new people always needed the loot.  This bloated up the raid
week, making the game an onerous chore.  And if a key raider burned
out, the loss could set the guild back weeks.

Also, having 40
people instead of 25 made ready checks more difficult and
disconnect/afk problems more frequent and time consuming.  Originally
all buffs had to be single-cast.  There were no summoning stones, you
could not summon inside an instance, and warlock summons required a
shard for each use.  Just getting people to the instance took a long
time.

3.  Commitment - This is tied closely to the guild
stability issue; since there were no server transfers, it was difficult
to get a group of the best people in the world together to focus on
breaking an instance.  In many of the world-first screenshots, you'll
see timestamps of 3 AM on weeknights.  Before server transfers it was
much harder to put a guild together that could raid that long.  Some
guilds have leveled multiple alts of the same class and geared them up
into ICC to have more attempts per week at the limited-attempt bosses.
There was no way to put together a raid that would do something like
that in 2005; the world-first wasn't even the same kind of valuable
back then, because there wasn't the same kind of attention being paid
to top guilds' progress. 

Those encounters, except when they
were impossible to beat due to bugs or unattainable gear requirements,
probably would not have stood up as well to the kind of super-guilds
that exist today.

Raiding in Vanilla also required a lot more
time spent preparing outside the raid.  Since the gear available was
often barely sufficient, consumables were very important.  You could
have unlimited elixirs on top of a flask, and pop a potion every two
minutes in vanilla, and there were also special healing tubers in
Felwood that people farmed because they shared separate cooldowns with
potions, and crystals in Un'Goro to farm as well.  And people needed
enchanting oil for their weapons, sharpening stones, etc.

Ragnaros
originally required two greater fire protection potions per raider, per
attempt, and they were a pain to farm.  People who were fourth or fifth
in DKP for their class simply wouldn't do this kind of prep for the
encounters, so officers in many raid guilds often spent 20-30 hours a
week farming consumables for raids.  If there were no fish feast, how
many of your raiders do you think would show up without their buff food?

None of this stuff makes the encounters difficult from a mechanical standpoint.
Players in vanilla had fewer abilities and simpler rotations, and the
fights were generally as complicated as modern 5 man heroic bosses, up
until the last couple of bosses of AQ 40.

As it stands, the
presence of hard modes probably means that a normal mode encounter will
never be as difficult as the hardest stuff in original Naxx or Sunwell,
although Hard Mode Lich King may very well be the most challenging
encounter ever in the game.  But the "difficulty" of the old-world
raids came from them being unpleasant to play, unrewarding from a loot
perspective, and saddled with onerous consumable requirements.

I'm just looking to get a team with a 1400 rating in order to buy the offset pieces if anyone is interested. 

my computer is done =(  It started on Tuesday night...  just randomly shutting off a few times during/after raid.  So i let it stay shut down for the night. Next morning I turned on the computer, but I had to go to work shortly after. When i got home, blue screen was up. WTF.

So i talk to roosh, we decide we are going to reformat it! It worked. Everything was wiped. While in the process of uploading the discs that came with the computer, It shuts off...AGAIN. and still continues to do so. I can't get it to stay on for more than like five minutes.

I spent a lot of time talking with Cindy and Roosh and what we have decided is that it is either a power supply problem or a motherboard malfunction. I may take it to bestbuy and further find out what exactly the real problem is. If it's the power supply, sure I may get a new one since they are relatively inexpensive. But if it's the motherboard....well. Then I am shit out of luck!

So for the time being, you guys will not see me online for a while until i get it fixed! Or..buy a new one. Which i SERIOUSLY do not want to do, since i have been trying to save for a car. This just happened at the perfect time when I need money most! yay!

Anyways, I hope you get a tank who can keep up with me ;) GL salmon and EXR, i do miss you guys tooonsssss even tho its been like 4 days!

Ever

Thursday, February 18, 2010

The newspaper is missing from the doorsteps of homes and hotel
lobbies. The stores are shuttered and the railway, stalled. Inside a
store, a TV flickers the news, but not the local news – reporters never
bothered to show up.

This is South Korea, less than 24-hours after Blizzard released the
StarCraft 2 Beta on an unsuspecting public.

South Korea, known for an exceptionally high national APM rating
(actions per minute), now stands like an ant hill, a barren exterior
enclosing a population busying beneath with menial labor.  But while an
ant colony’s actions provide for the greater good, these South Koreans
engage in self-centered Player vs Player matches, unflappable in their
pursuit of nothing more than a  commendable win/loss ratio.

“There is no time for productivity,” says a young man, his fingers
clacking on a keyboard. “By day, we practice. By night, we humiliate
Americans.”

Incumbent President Lee Myung-bak, the last man, twists open the
folding shades to his penthouse loft and observes the streets below him,
noticing the sudden  surplus of stray cats. It will be only hours, he
suspects, before felines take the city — days before South Korea becomes
a kitten nation.

Not every citizen received a beta key. As President Lee Myung-bak
peddles his bicycle across the empty city, he hears screams followed by
gunshots, then almost-silence of digits clicking at hot keys. The
streets are quiet as personal wars rage in the homes. Brothers fighting
brothers. Mothers slapping daughters.

The President’s bicycle rolls around the wooden barricades of Kunsan
Air Base, the United States military installment. Myung-bak has had his
share of problems with the installment: that it is run by a couple brats
from Texas, a place he knows and cares little about. These “cowboys”
are his only hope now. Them. Their fort. And their military-grade EMP.

Stolen from hardcasual.net

Try beating this guy:

http://www.break.com/game-trailers/game/world-of-warcraft-wrath-of-the-l...

Looks to me like Shihli on a bad wipe night after Garreth trying to pep talk us all for 2 and a half hours.

I was digging through my old screenshots wondering when exactly I started playing this game and here's what I found:

My oldest screenshot ever. It's of my warrior Caar leveling near Loch Modan.

My earliest screenshot of my druid Nuitarin is this one. I'm apparently admiring my first ever guild tabard in the city of Darnasus. So it looks like I have been since about July of 2005, how fun is that?