Breakfast Topic: Changes and adjustments

I’ve been seeing a lot of people complaining about the nameplates for enemies in World of Warcraft following patch 7.0 — to the point where they claim they are so bad that they can’t even play the game anymore. I’ve also heard a lot of complaint about the change that disables the ability to zoom your camera out to certain distances — a lot of people I used to raid with were apparently doing so zoomed out far enough they could see the entire room, making it easier to call out when stuff was happening.

Now, as a tank I had just accepted that I was going to be staring at boss crotch a lot, but I do find myself wondering if in this case we’ve seen too much change for some players to be expected to adapt to it.

In the case of nameplates, for example, some people used the old system instead of Tidy Plates (which I used) or other alternatives because that was exactly what they wanted their nameplates to convey, and now they find the default options lacking. Similarly, when I look at my character window now, I find that it doesn’t tell me much of anything — a lot of useful details are no longer on display, and I find myself wondering why the change was made in the first place. I can accept maybe there was a lot of information there for starting players, but now there’s almost nothing there. Couldn’t there be an option to display more information when you’re ready for it?

These changes aren’t huge game breakers for me, but they might be enough to break the game for some people. If you’re used to raiding with a wide view of the entire screen, or used to having as much detail as possible without cluttering your screen, or used to knowing exactly what stats you have, these changes can be disruptive instead of elegant. What do you think? Is there any change this time that you feel went too far?