I posted this on a message board.
I was building up to it for a while. After over a year of logging in for some amount of time almost every day, I FINALLY finished WoW. It was a long time coming, and good times were had by all, mixed in with some frustrations.
I initially started playing WoW with a group of real life friends. We levelled up, exploring new areas together, questing together - it was a lot of fun. Eventually I and several others in this group had done all the 5-man stuff with our decidedly non-typical mix of classes. It was tricky going, but we got the job done.
Once most of us had been 60 for a while, we'd basically done all that we could do - people started getting bored with the same old stuff, and there was no new stuff that a small guild could tackle. My little guild joined an alliance of little guilds, which started to do ZG and MC. It's the same old story with that, though - they'd take one step forward and two steps back. People moved on quickly, and we saw varying degrees of success.
I picked up a friend's Mage account on another server, decided to give raiding a whirl there with a "real guild" to see what I thought of it. MC on farm status was even more dreadfully boring than MC on wipe status. Not gonna happen.
All this time, I was playing all sorts of classes. I was finding my sub-60 characters generally much more enjoyable to play than the raid stuff, so I decided to give up on raiding entirely.
I'd also been enjoying battlegrounds a great deal, especially once AB came out. I couldn't put in the raw time to get many item rewards from the system, but I hit rank 7 or 8. Then the honor adjustment came up, and I got one of my characters the rank 10 gear and hit a wall.
As time went on I noticed things getting weirder. Casters killing my Paladin in 2 hits before I even had time to shield. My Mage instantly dying from one swing of a warrior. Raid gear was starting to really hit, and hit hard - and the limited selection of battlegrounds just started tasting stale.
So a couple of months ago, I started fresh on a new PvP server. I had the notion that it'd be my sunset tour of WoW, and that's exactly what it turned out to be - I had a great time, but now that I'm near 60 again the ride is basically over.
So, now I'm done, at least for a while. I don't look back on WoW like I did with EQ, with a bitter realization that I'd essentially thrown away huge tracts of time - I like WoW, and will miss the better aspects of it.
Ultimately, though, it's just not sustainable if you play as much as I do - the only element of WoW with enough replay value to keep me playing would have been the PvP system, but as we all know there are problems with it that keep it from living up to its potential. Raiding for me is a non-starter - that's not the game I played 1-59, and it's not a game I want anything to do with.
So, thanks for a great game, Blizzard - I hope to catch up with you again in the future. Maybe a nice content patch or the expansion will pull me back in.