Cynwise on what makes content replayable

I highly enjoyed reading Cynwise's long post on what makes content in WoW replayable, or even appealing at all. For example, he points out that PVP activities endlessly grow due to the presence of other people in them, whereas most PVE content is pretty much the same the second and third time around.

I enjoyed reading such a good analysis of the tradeoffs, but I do come to different conclusions about what I like to spend time on.

• I prefer the new zone-wide quest lines to the old style of having a five or more clusters of small quests in a zone. There are only so many kinds of individual quests that Blizzard has thought up, so what really makes them interesting is when they are put into an arc.
  
  
• I still prefer raiding to PVP. I enjoy the camaraderie, and I like that a broader group of people is able to learn the dances than are able to learn to think competitively with other humans. For that matter, I really enjoy kicking my brain down a notch. I like to relax when playing Warcraft.
  

I agree about Tol Barad being boring. On defense, there's little hope of saving the towers, so you end up lasting out the siege. Twenty minutes is a lot of time to wait out. On offense, you have to somehow magically capture all three flags at once, which is rather difficult to do. I also agree that the current raids are tuned too hard for my liking. As Cyn writes:

I was willing to spend months wiping on the Lich King. There’s a sense of completion there, a huge amount of motivation there, to do it at least once. But wiping for months on a raid at the beginning of an expansion? Really?

Indeed. In the end, Warcraft is a game, and 10 hours a week is a lot of time to put into a game. I wish the game were balanced so that 10 hours a week were enough to make an enormous amount of progress in the normal modes. Hard modes, fine. Leave those to the guys who spend more time in Warcraft than doing a job.