VentureBeat - Why I (and probably 600,000 others) stopped playing World of Warcraft. Thanks nin.
I think Blizzard dropped the ball by trying to artificially extend the life of the expansion by making the game too hard for casual players. I got to the end of Cataclysm and started running heroic dungeons — suped up versions of the regular dungeons that are designed to be the next natural level of progression. They have better rewards that are more suited to their difficulty. And I was struck by just how hard those dungeons were.

Like, really hard. Ridiculously hard. Enough to make me start yelling at my screen.

Joystick Division - Rethinking Online Gaming. Thanks Joker961.
Forget ever-improving graphics and blazing processors and goofball motion controls. The greatest advancement in console gaming over the last decade has been online play. From old friends halfway across the country to that dude right down the street whose apartment smells like a summer camp bathroom, online gaming lets us play with people we can't or don't want to hang out with in person, something that was impractical to impossible just ten years ago. Recent events have shown the downside of online dependency, though. Can the internet be trusted as a vital foundation for a video game, or should online be treated as a special bonus instead of a core feature?