| Whether he is whining or not I have a real problem with their methods as well. While they work great from a business perspective, i.e. stuff drops like candy I must buy this expansion, the end result is that most of the players get screwed by this.
The top guild or 2 on the servers get mad gear/spells fast which enables them to maintain their monopolies on the best spawns/loot in the game etc etc. and everyone else is left fighting for scraps.
I realize this is not the right board for this (I can hear the shouts of GIMP already), but drop rates should be set prior to expansion release and not changed except in the most severe cases. If anything they should be lower on release and raised if found to be too low. Any other way they do things is wrong imoho. They did do this to some extent with parchments this time around, realized they were too scarce, and raised the drop rate in many places.
Everyone should have the opportunity, given the same ammount of work, to achieve the same results. Not just based on the fact that you were in the top guild on your server when it started, and got the best gear then, and every other expansion they maintain that advantage because stuff drops like candy the first few weeks. Itemization needs to be looked at more closely as well. Exibit "a" - windblades. I mean, come on, you can tell just from the stats that it was too powerful for the risk/effort involved in getting one. It's not like holgresh elder beads where they didn't realize what the effect would be used for. The damage/delay is too overpowered, such that a blind man could see it. Hmmmmmmmm *pokes out verants dev teams eyes with a nice sharp stick* | 