Random Roar: Maybe I’m Not Going To Try World of Warcraft, After All…

 

The first time that Asmongold, the biggest and most popular World of Warcraft streamer on the planet, tried Final Fantasy XIV, the entire world of MMOs was turned upside down.  Was Asmongold quitting WoW?  Was Final Fantasy XIV so big now that it was going to eclipse WoW as the number one MMO in the world?  Was WoW finally dead?

Asmongold has gone on the record to state that he’s not giving up his WoW account and that he fully intends to return.  I would definitely expect to see more WoW streams from him when a new content patch arrives (as few and far between as they are) or when the next expansion hits.  I don’t think Final Fantasy XIV has successfully caused him to quit his favourite MMO.

That said, the amount of popular streamers who actually have been quitting WoW and deleting their account with Blizzard probably should be worrying.  To put this into context, World of Warcraft players quitting and moving on to other games is nothing new.  There’s even a term for that in the MMO community that was coined a while back.  “WoW refugee.”  Whenever a patch came out that changed things for the worse, the Final Fantasy XIV Reddit community would suddenly start fielding questions from curious players who willingly labeled themselves a WoW refugee, as if the game itself was torturing and abusing them for years and they finally got themselves out of a bad situation.  Other popular MMOs also received their share of players sick and tired of WoW during these times.

But only recently have I been watching Asmongold’s videos, and now that I’m hearing what he’s been saying about the game’s systems, along with some of the criticisms that YouTuber Lily Orchard has voiced about the game’s lore and the direction of its story for the past few years, I’m beginning to wonder if maybe the term “WoW refugee” is more apt than we realize.

And also recently, several popular and long time WoW streamers have thrown in the towel and made videos about why they’re quitting.  Stoopzz quit after fifteen years, Madseasonshow has quit, Preach has quit, and people like WillE aren’t quitting but are wanting to branch out to make videos about more games than just WoW Classic for his YouTube channel due to the direction Blizzard is taking their Classic releases.

It doesn’t help that Activision Blizzard is currently in very serious legal trouble in California for both the way they treat their female workers, and the way they disclosed this information to their shareholders.  They say that when it rains, it pours, but if you look at it in a certain way, Activision Blizzard has no one but themselves to blame for what’s happening to them.

All of the allegations that have come out regarding the work ethic of their workers has gone a long way to possibly explain how come it takes so long to put out even one content patch between expansions.  As a player of Final Fantasy XIV, where new content comes out every three months without fail (with a slight interruption at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic), it feels like one patch per year is a huge content drought.  There had better have been enough content and things to do in the actual World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion to justify why the first new content patch came over half a year later, with a 9.2 patch coming whenever the company can get their shit together, stop abusing their women employees, actually do some work on it and not just play Call of Duty all day.

With how big World of Warcraft was, it’s inevitable that I would want to try it out and see whether it’s a game I can see myself playing a lot.  It’s apparently great when you’re playing with friends, and as someone who prefers to play games as the lone wolf except when I need to work together in dungeons and raids, a game that’s built around community can be a little intimidating.  On the plus side, I have the support of a good friend who’s looking forward to returning to the game in order to show me the ropes and go questing with me.

I may have to disappoint her, though, because everything I’ve been hearing about the game lately has made me not want to play it, from the way the workers treat each other, how they treat the work they’re supposed to be doing and how they treat the fans, to the quality of the actual work being done when they can be bothered to do it.

I want to unlock the Vulpera and create an alt so I can play as one, but the current state of the game doesn’t sound favourable for actively maintaining more than the first character I create, and keeping the one character long enough to create the other means I’m going to have to somehow not get too emotionally attached to the first character and everything I accomplish along the way, and only really start to pay attention to everything once I’m a cute little fox boy.

You’d think the obvious solution would be to try WoW Classic, because it’s supposed to be a snapshot of how World of Warcraft was, back before any of the expansions were released.  Apparently, there are still straight vanilla servers available, but Blizzard chose to install The Burning Crusade to the main Classic servers… after making some tweaks first.  Unlike the original release of The Burning Crusade, there are several kinds of microtransactions available, the most notorious of which are character boosts.  What’s the purpose of releasing a Classic version of your game for the fans who want to play it, then add in a way for them to not play the game?  That tells me that, despite the fans assuring the company that they love playing Classic, Blizzard is ashamed of the game and doesn’t want anyone to play it, even after they gave in to the fans and released it.  If the Classic game is that terrible, why should I buy a copy and play it?

Honestly, everything I’m hearing about the current state of both Classic World of Warcraft and current World of Warcraft makes me hesitant to try any version of this game.  The next expansion would need to be amazing, followed by some well received patches (and not just one per year, either) in order to attract my attention again and make me finally consider giving Blizzard my money every month.  Blizzard is going to need to work very hard if they want to bring new players like me into Azeroth, but I really get the feeling that they’re not willing to.  They just want to ride their current subscribers into the ground.

I’m sure I would find ways to have fun in World of Warcraft, I really am.  And with my friend by my side, it would be an enjoyable experience.  But it doesn’t sound like Blizzard is trying very hard to entice me as a player.  I remember when World of Warcraft was so popular that it took all day, no joke, for me to sort out all the Wrath of the Lich King pre-orders on release day at one of my previous jobs.  If I was still working there today, I doubt Shadowlands would’ve made much of a blip on the radar.  And if the fans feel this way about the game they’ve been playing for fifteen years, I don’t know that I’d be willing to waste even fifteen minutes with it.