Oh noes! Change! (Warning: nerdrage)

So, while killing time today, I came across a post on the test realm forums for WoW's next big patch.  In the new build, every class is getting some work, and some specific specializations are seeing huge changes...I'm staying away from those posts to avoid the weeping and gnashing of teeth from the parts of the community that don't follow development and therefore don't know that this stuff has been discussed for months already.

One of the more general changes being made is a mana cap across caster classes.  At the current level cap, you're looking at X amount, and it'll eventually cap at Y when the level cap rises in the next expansion.  Simple concept, right?

Apparently not.  See, for years, casters in WoW have been able to raise their mana resource total by gearing up.  So, at the start of the expansion  or any new tier of content, players had to be smart about how they approached encounters.  They had to prioritize and plan ahead.  Eventually, they'd get new loot from that content and had more mana...thus eliminating the hard work.

"Wait, you expect us to not get unbelievably overpowered after grinding for gear?" -- some of the playerbase.
"We want you to play the game, not faceroll until you win and the loot chest explodes." -- devs, in my optimistic mind.

See, there are SO many other classes, across all MMOs that have static caps on their resources...and they work just fine.  But noooo, this is alien and new, so it must be broken.  Sorry, kids, but the size of your mana bar does not equate to your awesomeness as a person.  You're just grinding gear to get bigger numbers so you can get better gear to get bigger numbers to get...so on and so forth.  Accept the changes, know that you'll survive the hard cap, and read your damn spell/ability tooltips...they've already balanced your costs and throughput to match the new norm.

I just...ugh.  Buying and MMO and griping about monthly fees is like purchasing a car and griping about having to actually put gas in it.  This is like having someone come along and give you some body work for free and you complaining that you liked it all mangled on the front.

I wonder if, with each new Call of Duty title, the approach was this: market new content and changes as expansions, give it out for free if players just give a recurring monthly fee that was substantially smaller than the per-title amount they're currently giving, and see if they gripe the same way as MMO players do sometimes.  Players, Y U NO LOOK AT BIGGER PICTURE?