Remember the eleven separate times (and two HobbyDrama posts) where people leaked classified military details because they didn’t like the inaccuracy of the military vehicles in the video game War Thunder? It happened again.
Probably going to do a writeup on this, including both this new leak and the old ones that the two HobbyDrama posts didn’t cover. Right now it’s breaking drama so I need to wait.
Garrisons worked much like the farm from Mists of Pandaria. When you approached, you were ‘phased’ into a kind of pocket dimension exclusive to you. You could be standing in the same spot as someone else, but you wouldn’t see them. They would see their garrison, and you would see yours.
You may recall the ‘never leave the city’ problem of Cataclysm. That had been bad, but at least the players had been visible. This was so much worse. Once everyone had finished levelling through Draenor, the entire playerbase simply disappeared. Ironically, you had millions of players crammed within a few feet of each other, but none of them knew the others were there. And that’s how it stayed for the whole expansion.
“A couple of months into the expansion pretty much everyone was already in the “logging, afk in garrison, raid, logout” routine.”
[…]
“…they allowed the community to get too isolated, which I’m afraid Blizzard is going to use as an eternal example of why it should never try to do housing in the future. And that wouldn’t be fair, because real housing is inviting and social, whereas there’s almost no point to ever visiting someone else’s keep here.”
What’s more, people quickly realised that the real ‘core system’ of garrisons was effectively a facebook mini game – one which got rapidly boring.
“Even before the game’s general release people were making jokes about the fact that we were sending other characters out to do things instead of going out and doing things. That was always kind of ridiculous.”
On top of that, there were complaints about the aesthetic. Every race in WoW has its own architecture, but most of them tend to get overlooked in favour of Human and Orc architecture for everything. The latter was starting to feel particularly unwelcoming and harsh.
“We have tremendous levels of power but we always live in mud huts. I thought I was a General in a power that controls half of a world. Why is the garrison from which I lead my campaign a timber shack that the Swiss Family Robinson would find primitive? Why do we have all of this power and technology but I’m walking around in mud? Maybe we could stop living like filthy hobos and put our engineers on inventing the road.The Alliance figured out the cobblestone walkway. Why can’t we?
I get it. The Horde is brutal and savage. But, one, I’m fucking tired of every single building everywhere being in the Orc style. That’s so fucking boring seeing the same aesthetic everywhere.”
[…]
“The horde one (LINKS TO REDDIT) is just… like their entire design brief was “SPIKES AND HUTS AND PUT SPIKES ON THE SPIKES”.”
[…]
“I realy dislike the orc themed buildings so goddamn much. The arctic location looks more apeasing to me but those huts with tusks are so old and boring now.”
[…]
“God that looks lame (LINKS TO REDDIT), all those ugly orc huts, I would kill for some undead, troll, Tauren, belf or goblin buildings.”
Professions were totally overhauled to integrate them completely into garrisons, and became extremely grindy and slow in the process.
“Have you ever spent a month gathering the materials for a new bag, or an epic item upgrade? Until Warlords of Draenor, neither had I.”
You had to take primary materials to a building in your garrison, where an NPC would turn them into secondary materials at a crushingly slow pace. These systems were designed to limit what you could do in a single sitting, and force you to log in regularly to make progress.
“If you were anything like me, you found yourself feeling that all you were doing in Warlords of Draenor was sitting in your garrison setting up work orders and waiting for cooldowns.
You asked yourself if this was what you had to look forward to for the entire expansion. Was this really all there is to gold-making in Warlords?”
Luckily, Blizzard was aware of this problem. Toward the release of Patch 6.2, they said:
“We are actively trying to shift rewards back our into the world (gearing, professions, etc.) Felblight, for example, you’ll need to get out in the world.
The Garrison-centric profession system and daily cooldown of professions took away from the image of being a craftsperson vs. a player collecting daily materials.”
When asked about whether garrisons would be carried forward into the next expansion, Blizzard insisted they would be left behind in Draenor, but various systems from the garrisons would be cherry-picked and integrated into new content.
“From the outset, we have said Garrisons as you know it in Draenor are rooted/tied to Draenor. You won’t be bringing those things back to Azeroth. But the core gameplay of followers/army/base gameplay? We like the system. Is it likely to take the same format as WOD? Probably not.”
Most of the community celebrated this announcement, but not all. There were those who saw potential in garrisons – they just needed to be refined.
“Soon enough, garrisons will be a thing of the past, an interesting idea that didn’t quite pan out the way anyone had hoped — developers or players. Personally, I think it’s a shame and slightly aggravating that Blizzard spent so much time working on garrisons only to throw its hands up and walk away from them now.”
These players had nothing to worry about. Garrisons would show up again, but in a very different form.
Perhaps the most destructive part of Warlords was what it did to the economy – rampant hyperinflation. WoW had always had inflation, because players had always gathered more gold than they spent. Blizzard wanted to make it possible for new players to buy stuff, so each expansion rewarded more than the last. WoW’s economy sat in this delicate balance for over a decade without issue. Until Warlords.
Garrisons gave players the ability to easily farm herbs, ores, or other material, and also to process them into valuable items. They could send out ‘followers’ on missions which required zero effort to complete, but rewarded hundreds or thousands of gold. Here’s a guide from the time.
“…between 2014 and 2016, it was possible for dedicated players to generate quantities of gold that were previously impossible to obtain, and have not been possible to obtain since.
In that expansion, NPC followers could get an ability called “treasure hunter” that doubled any gold rewards they earned from a quest. And “treasure hunter” perks stacked, so it was possible to get a few thousand gold per day, per garrison. Many casual players who had never had significant amounts of money before earned hundreds of thousands of gold during Warlords of Draenor. Players could sock away millions, since each character could earn roughly the same amount of gold from their garrisons, and you can have as many as 10 characters on a server.”
Before long, the game was full of millionaires.
Blizzard’s solution to this problem was… rudimentary. They removed the ability to generate enormous amounts of gold when the next expansion came out, and they filled the game with gold sinks. A gold sink is an extremely expensive item designed to remove money from the economy. These included gear appearances and toys, but mainly came in the form of mounts. This wasn’t anything new – the famous Traveller’s Tundra Mammoth went back to Wrath of the Lich King. What changed was the sheer cost of these mounts, as well as how many there were.
The Marsh Hopper cost 333,000 gold, and there were three to buy. The Lightforged Warframe and Palehide Direhorn each set you back a spicy 500,000 gold. The Bloodfang Window cost 2 million, and the famous Mighty Caravan Brutosaur cost 5 million.
This wasn’t really a solution. The gold farmers had so much money that none of these mounts made a dent in their wealth, and it meant a lot of mounts were totally unattainable to everyone else. This was especially bad in the case of reputations. Imagine working your socks off for weeks to max out your reputation with the Argussian Reach faction, only to find out you would never get the mount, because it had been turned into a ludicrously expensive gold sink. One expansion (Battle for Azeroth) would turn ALL of its faction mounts into gold sinks.
Rather than fix the problem of inflation, this just made the non-wealthy players more angry about it. Now it was affecting them directly. And since it didn’t fix inflation, everything else remained exorbitantly expensive.
“There is massive inequality, because WoW’s trade goods economy tends to funnel wealth to a small number of players.”
If you avoided these gold-making techniques, or weren’t subscribed during the time when they were possible, you were effectively locked out of the game’s economy.
“Blizzard is fully aware of the damaging impact that some content in Warlords of Draenor has wrought onto the game economy. However, I am worried that attempts to fix it will not be heavy-handed enough, which could cause problems such as making new player experiences even more frustrating due to the sheer amount of gold they’d have to earn to make any headway into some aspects of the game.”
Blizzard did have one other trick up its sleeve to help with this.
In April 2015, Blizzard introduced the WoW Token. It was an in-game item representing one month of game play-time. Players could buy them for real money, and sell them to other players.
WoW gold had always had an in-game value on black markets, but now it was official. Blizzard took some measures to limit the tokens - unlike other items, players could neither set the price, bid or haggle, or choose who to buy from. The market price was automatically set by an algorithm based on supply vs demand, and tokens could not be directly exchanged for real money – though they could be exchanged for Battle.net account balance to spend on other Blizzard games, and those games could be legally sold on key-selling sites for real money.
“Players only need a finite amount of game time; you buy 24 tokens, and you’re fixed for two years. So the players sitting on hoards of gold had an incentive to sell only a fraction of their stash. The rest of their wealth sat idle in their coffers, out of circulation.
To motivate dedicated players to keep playing by allowing them to pay their subscription fee in gold
To give casual or new players an avenue into the economy by letting them buy gold through legitimate means
To generate more profit from their shrinking player base
To undermine the black market
It succeeded spectacularly on the first three, but failed just as spectacularly on the fourth.
Most MMOs had some kind of ‘token’ service – WoW wasn’t doing anything new. Indeed, most of the community were in favour of tokens. It was a popular addition which benefitted new and old players.
“Even though I quit WoW a long time ago it’s good to see things like this being implemented in to the game.”
[…]
“This feature is completely amazing! Thanks so much for this Blizz ! :)”
[…]
“Finally an excellent idea, now people will play easier without thinking about membership. Great Job.”
[…]
“let me just say, as someone who’s highest level non-death knight is lvl 26, that this is the best feature i’ve ever seen on a multiplayer game”
But the community was divided on whether the WoW token would actually work.
Some players worried that in order to pay for WoW tokens, more of them would start farming gold, and so inflation would rise rather than fall. Gold spent on tokens never actually left the economy. If anything, by linking all of the servers within a region in the same token market, Blizzard guaranteed that gold would hit the same value everywhere. In small servers with low inflation, that meant a huge drop in the value of gold.
“I think that it is a negative. I think that it makes the game worse, and it’s a bandage that Blizzard puts on the game in order to make up for the fact that they’re not balancing, and they’re not dealing with [back market] gold sellers. That’s what it comes down to. It fucks the economy. It makes every single accomplishment that can be achieved with gold – which is basically all accomplishments – basically an Ebay achievement.
WoW token legitimises and it provides a vehicle for pay to win to occur. […] And what is winning in WoW? Winning in WoW means something different for everybody. But I think for many people, winning in WoW does imply, to some degree, getting a good arena rating or getting very good gear. Gold can buy both of those things, and if you can buy gold, I think that’s pay to fucking win.”
It has been streamlined to the point where it has more in common with Uber than the shady websites of old. But unlike the black market gold sales, Blizzard profits immensely from the boosting industry, because players pay for boosts with gold, and they get that gold from tokens. In fact, Blizzard overtly works with boosting companies to track down RMT (real money transactions) in exchange for the implicit protection of these companies. In order words, Blizzard audits boosters to keep the profits flowing through the token system.
“Fundamentally, it’s a lot like randomly getting an insanely good group on the group finder, but reliable, repeatable and on-demand. They have made it convenient, low risk, and professional. Hell, if your run goes wrong, you can even get a refund. These companies have moderators, they have customer support staff, and of course advertisers. All so that you can have a good experience.”
Most full-time boosters come from poorer countries, where the profits from wealthy westerners can easily cover the costs of living. Globally, it’s an industry worth tens, perhaps hundreds of millions.
That was not remotely the only money-related drama in Warlords.
In the Wrath write-up, we covered the controversial sparkle pony. Players had been furious at the idea of paying real money for a mount. But Blizzard had assured them that it was only so expensive because half of the profits were going to charity.
Then, they added another mount to the store. And another, and another – each costing $25 or £19. Blizzard’s half-hearted excuse was that they didn’t ‘fit the theme’ of the expansion, and so there was no logical place to get them in game. But that logic didn’t persuade anyone - Blizzard had deliberately designed them that way.
Around the time of Warlords, it really kicked off. This was due to the addition of the Iron Skyreaver and the Enchanted Fey Dragon (the latter changed colour). These two mounts not only ‘fit the theme’, they were actively present throughout Draenor, both on the ground and in flight paths. It was pretty obvious that Blizzard had picked through the mounts of Warlords late into development, chosen the two most attractive ones, and cut them away to add to the in-game store. There was even an area in Shadowmoon Valley full of fey dragons and NPCs labelled ‘dragon trainers’, which suggested there had been a whole section of content surrounding these faction mounts, like the dragon serpents in Mists of Pandaria.
And it escaped no one that a vast majority of the mounts in Warlords were slight recolors of the same half a dozen models. There were, for example, nine different variations of the same wolf mount. It was almost like they had to compensate because they’d lost two of their main mount models.
“The best mounts should be ones earned in game no excuses, it ruins the game when you can just buy all the coolest stuff.”
Since mounts were technically cosmetic, there were some players who didn’t care.
“Don’t like them don’t buy them. Very simple.”
But for the most part, the community was incensed.
“Would someone please think of the wealthy corporate executives and majority shareholders!”
This usually always led onto the debate of whether Blizzard needed to sell store mounts. Costs were going up and subscribers were going down, some said, so Blizzard had no choice but to push harder on microtransactions. Profits were higher than ever, others replied.
And so the response would always be that Blizzard was a business, their goal was to make money.
A company providing a service, they were told, and the customer is king, not the shareholder.
Then quit, they’d say. Vote with your wallet. If you’re going to keep paying your subscripton, you’re implicitly supporting Blizzard’s choices, and so your arguments are in bad faith.
This was an effective rebuttal. It left the complaining party with two choices – sit down and shut up, or leave the game (and shut up). It may have been effective at stifling arguments, but more and more players were taking the latter option these days. That was becoming a problem.
When you’ve been in the WoW community long enough, you look at disputes in the forums the way Doctor Strange looks at timelines. The exact wording changes, but it always plays out the same way.
Regardless of what discourse went on, store mounts were insanely successful, and so they have become more and more prominent. For context, there are now twenty-two. It would cost you $550 dollars to buy them all.
Another money-grubbing addition was the level 90 boost. This isn’t the same as the boosting I described in the previous section. When pre-orders became available for Warlords, one of the perks used to justify the higher-than-usual upfront cost was the ability to send any character straight to level 90 – max level in Mists of Pandaria.
After Warlords released, you could buy as many Level 90 boosts as you liked – for $60 dollars each.
Casual players rejoiced.
“Free lvl 90 is exactly what this game needed. I’ve been playing off and on since vanilla, and leveling a new character to max level is the absolute LAST thing I want to spend my time doing. I’d literally rather be outside shovelling snow because I’d at least be getting a bit of exercise.”
[…]
“Hey, this isnt a bad thing ._. why does everybody treat it as such. Gives players who dont have the oodles of time to spend leveling 1-90 a character tht they can play endgame stuff with. Thats pretty awesome.”
It goes without saying that not everyone was happy. To many hard-core players, it was a slap in the face. The early World of Warcraft experience was defined by painful grinding, and now yet another rite of passage was being stripped away to pander to casuals.
“I guess this makes sense if you hate levelling (LINKS TO REDDIT) so much that it feels like work that you should be paid for, but it’s just part of the game to me. Paying extra money to skip part of the game that you’re paying a sub fee for seems crazy to me.”
It’s certainly true levelling gradually teaches players the basics of the game, and their class. Skipping that risks overwhelming newbies with systems and challenging content and an interface full of abilities they have no idea how to use.
“While endgame raiders have always bellyached about bad players, the sudden influx of level 90 characters without 90 levels of player skill has caused drama in WoW’s Looking For Raid feature. And while it’s hard to quantify the issue, it’s not hard to imagine that many low-DPS accusations are based on players who haven’t mastered their new characters.”
“In terms of the pricing, honestly a big part of that is not wanting to devalue the accomplishment of levelling,” Hazzikostas said.
"If our goal here was to sell as many boosts as possible, we could halve the price or more than that - make it $10 or something.”
How benevolent of them.
“So what are we to Blizzard? Are we just poorly educated pissants who flock to their games no matter what they do? Are we actual people who make their game live or die, or are we just cash cows to be milked until we can be milked no more (or until we start kicking)?”
It should have been simple. Blizzard had been making PvP zones since Wrath. They knew what to do, and what not to do. With such a pedigree, it’s mind boggling that they fucked up so badly with Ashran. It became so overwhelmingly, unanimously hated, in fact, that it is held up as a symbol of just how terrible Warlords became.
“Ashran, a shitty battleground that no one liked and just sucked fat, meaty Ogre cocks.”
But what made it so unfulfilling?
Players criticised the layout of the zone, which tended to result in a big confused ‘soup of people’ at its centre, and which usually ended in an unsatisfying stalemate.
The design did nothing to split the factions down into groups, so individual players felt like they were just being carried in a vague, chaotic wave, with very little personal responsibility and no opportunity to shine.
In other battlegrounds, getting two evenly matched sides forced players to work harder. In Ashran, getting two evenly matched sides meant nothing you did could make a difference – so there was no reason to bother working at all. It was boring and monotonous. When you finally pushed toward the end, you won, but you didn’t really. You might get your loot, but then a new wave of enemies would spawn and the fighting would continue. Unlike Wintergrasp or Tol Barad, Ashran never ended.
“Ashran is super lame. Just two blobs of players wacking at each other until one side wins.”
According to Bellular, another flaw was that Blizzard rewarded players for completing secondary objectives which didn’t contribute much to the flow of the battle, and failed to incentivise actual PvP. As one player put it:
“It didn’t even feel like a BG, it was just a bunch of PVE events in a PVP environment.”
Other criticisms surrounded Ashran’s size - it was cramped for the number of people it was meant to host in a single match. And it’s queues were soul crushing, though that was nothing new for WoW. It was also horrendously laggy.
"Never once won it by completing the objective, it’s just raw attrition and lag.
Which speaks of terrible design. If the objectives are less efficient than butting heads for 40 minutes, the objectives clearly suck."
Tweet About It
The biggest controversy of the expansion was Patch 6.1, ‘Garrisons Update’. The name alone gives you an idea of how much effort Blizzard had put in. The patch contained an heirlooms tab, updated Blood Elf models, introduced Twitter integration and the ability to take in-game selfies, and added a few bits to the garrison. That’s it.
“When players ask Blizzard to fulfill promises that they’ve made, they get all abrupt and moody, and tell us that it will cost us a raid tier.
WHY BLIZZARD, WHY HAVE YOU GIVEN US TWITTER INTEGRATION, WHEN NOBODY ASKED FOR IT, NOBODY WANTS IT, AND ONLY A SMALL MINORITY OF PEOPLE WILL EVER USE IT? DID THAT COST US A RAID?”
[…]
“Remember how you waited 14 months with no content during SoO? And when we promised you we learned our lesson? And then when we charged extra for this expansion? And when we cut Farahlon, pushed back Tannan and BRF, and took away your capital cities?
Here’s Twitter and a few things for your garrison, keep paying us $15 a month and maybe we’ll give you something in the spring. Actually, make it the summer.
This is why I am pissed off. Because after all the promises, all the delays, all the millions of loyal fans paying $15 per month for over a year (the equivalent of buying a new AAA game every four months), taking more time to develop than any other expansion, and then still requiring us to pay more when it finally arrived, Blizzard completely drops the ball at launch and delivers less content than we’ve ever seen.
And then patch 6.1 comes along. Does Blizzard try to remedy any of this? Regain their customers trust?
No, instead we get the garrison update with Twitter integration.
“Which means that Blizzard itself admits that Warlords was only technically a two-content-patch expansion — in actuality, it was only one content patch.”
The subscriber numbers didn’t just fall, they collapsed. Warlords may have begun with an unprecedented spike in players, but just a few months later, the game was facing an all-time low. Blizzard pressed the ‘abort’ button and simply stopped reporting the numbers.
But that wasn’t enough to escape the cruel eye of the community. Through machine learning, one wise nerd came up with this graph. Warlords hit lows of just over four million. It represented the beginning of a new trend for Blizzard, in which subscribers would peak and then immediately drop with the release of each expansion. And excluding those temporary subscribers, the core community (who remained subscribed non-stop) followed an almost linear decline.
Lead Game Director Ion Hazzikostas heavily implied in May 2015 that patch 6.2 wouldn’t be the final patch of the expansion.
“We’ve got plenty of more story to be told after this,” Hazzikostas says when asked whether patch 6.2 would be the last big content update for Warlords of Draenor. But Blizzard is also working hard to make sure players aren’t left waiting for new content in general.
This was not true.
In an interview just a few weeks later, fellow Blizzard lead Cory Stockton revealed the truth – there would be nothing after the upcoming patch. It wasn’t the mid-game update players expected, but the big finale. Aside from the shocking u-turn, the interview struck the playerbase as incredibly out of touch, with Cory being torn apart for statements like, “Overall we are happy with garrison feedback," and perhaps even worse,
“What kind of fucking bullshit is that, 6.1 should not even be called a fucking patch!”
[…]
“How fucking deluded is he? Being happy with how WoD turned out doesn’t give me any hope for the next expansion, which will probably be overpriced and only have one “big” patch. Pathetic.”
[…]
“Do they communicate internally at all?”
[…]
“Nicely done Corey, you just added in the final nail to the coffin.”
All this left 6.2 with a lot to live up to. But would it deliver?
‘The Fury of Hellfire’ released on 22nd June 2015. It was pretty good. Players were finally able to explore Tanaan Jungle, a tropical zone with a demonic aesthetic. Its raid, Hellfire Citadel, was long and complex. Players enjoyed it immensely.
But it served as the first raiding patch of the expansion, and was the only raid the game would get until the launch of the next expansion, 434 days away. It didn’t matter how good it was. No content could stay popular in those circumstances. Warlords went into a content drought (LINKS TO REDDIT) with an already-paltry amount to do.
“Every World of Warcraft expansion prior to Warlords of Draenor boasted either three or four content patches. Warlords settled for a mere two.
It gets worse. Those two content patches for Warlords of Draenor were some of the most anemic and disappointing in the game’s history.”
There was also the issue of cohesion. Most of the expansion lay on the cutting-room floor, and the writers had to cobble together what remained into a usable story. Perhaps that’s why many of the characters in Warlords have such promising beginnings, and such anticlimactic ends. Players often say that if Warlords had been finished, it could have been the greatest expansion ever, but we may never know.
The Farahlon patch was gone. The Ogre Continent never even made it off the ground. Shattrath City, a recreation of the most iconic location in Burning Crusade, had been planned to host a raid, but that had been cut, so it was left an empty shell that couldn’t be entered or interacted with.
The Draenei are pretty much locked out of their own capital city aren’t they? You think something as big of a deal as that would come up at some point in the story but no - we just kill some mobs on the perimeter and act like everything’s A-ok.”
If all that content had been completed, Warlords may have a very different legacy.
But setting all that aside, it may surprise you to know that the big controversy of 6.2 had nothing to do with the writing or the raid. It all came down to an achievement called ‘Draenor Pathfinder’. You see, ever since Blizzard introduced flying in Burning Crusade, they had been looking for an excuse to get rid of it.
Every time the idea was even mentioned, the community rose up in fury, and flying remained. For a long time, the solution had been to let players buy flying, but only after they had out-levelled most (or all) of the new content, so they were forced to play through it once on the ground. That came with the added benefit of making it feel so much sweeter when players could finally fly in those areas.
Prior to the release of 6.2, Ion announced that Warlords of Draenor would not have flying at all, and nor would any future expansions.
“At this point, we feel that outdoor gameplay in World of Warcraft is ultimately better without flying. We’re not going to be reintroducing the ability to fly in Draenor, and that’s kind of where we’re at going forward.”
And so, like clockwork, the outcry began.
“Keeping flight out of Draenor permanently is a truly, profoundly awful plan. Ugh.”
[…]
“The no flying at max level was a disaster. No flying while leveling was great, everything he mentioned. But, no flying at max level made for a dead world, no reason to explore or play the content.”
This was a widely repeated idea.
“I’m fine with not flying while leveling, I’m fine with not flying till the first major content patch, I’m not fine with no flying ever.”
“I just quit WoW over this, on an account active since 2004.”
The user Muneravenmn put it succinctly.
“Wading through crap may be immersive, but it isn’t fun.”
[…]
“if we lost flying it would be another hit against this game for me that would result in me no longer wanting to play. I don’t want to have something that takes 1 minute to reach turn into 5 minutes because I have to run. It would make no sense to bar flying forever, especially since they just released another flying mount with the expack.”
[…]
“Just because flying is allowed, doesn’t mean you have to use it. If you like slowly walking around exploring in old zones, knock yourself out. No one is forcing you to fly.”
“For the time I spent after resubbing I found it great. I’ve played since vanilla and I forgot exactly how much the community lost when they added flying. It was great to have that back.”
A topic on the World of Warcraft forums about this announcement reached over 500 pages, and most of the responses were overwhelmingly negative.
Inevitably, Blizzard backpedalled. They went with a ‘compromise’ that united the playerbase – against them - the Pathfinder achievement. In order to get it, players had to explore every part of the continent, complete all the story quests (each zone had easily over a hundred), collect a hundred treasures, complete twelve daily quests, and grind reputation to ‘revered’ with all three of Tanaan Jungle’s new factions. The latter could take weeks. After doing all this, players could fly in Draenor.
Unless you were willing to dedicate days upon days to the achievement, you were out of luck. A lot of players went multiple expansions without being able to fly in Draenor. And the strangest thing is that Blizzard carried the system forward to future releases.
Writing for Massively Overpowered, Tyler Edwards summed up the mood of the community.
”I think about having to do another Pathfinder grind, and my heart just sinks. The story is what drove me away, but Pathfinder is what keeps me from coming back.
Meeting in the middle always sounds virtuous and reasonable, but Pathfinder is a great example of how a compromise isn’t always fair if the original ask was completely outrageous.
It’s an exhausting, tedious grind, and the worst thing about it is you don’t even get something new and awesome out of it. You just get to go back to using a feature that has been a pillar of the game for the large majority of its lifespan.
I firmly believe Pathfinder only exists as a way to artificially extend the length of content so as to earn more subscription dollars. It’s not as if Blizzard is above that sort of thing."
By forcing players to grind in so many ways, Blizzard guaranteed that everyone would encounter at least one mechanic they hated. Players who liked levelling dungeons were forced to go back and ensure hours of questing. Players who only cared about raids were forced to grind reputations.
“Draenor Pathfinder is a bitch and a half, especially the rep grinding. Instead of grinding rep with all the factions we care about and have been playing alongside for the entire expansion, we’re introduced to three new factions toward the end of the expansion, which can only be grinded via dailies and weeklies. To me this just seems like a time waster.”
Pathfinder has somehow stuck around, requiring players to fill out a new arbitrary shopping list of goals with each expansion. It remains a hated part of the game (LINKS TO REDDIT) by most, though some players have come to embrace it. Blizzard keeps toying with the idea of removing flight completely, only to add it in a later patch. It has become just another part of the cycle of life.
Half-finished Stories – Yrel and Maraad
Cutting several zones, raids, and entire patches had a serious effect on the characters who were meant to develop over the course of the expansion. None suffers more due to cuts than Yrel – particularly unfortunate since she is the only significant Draenei in an expansion which is technically meant to be half Draenei, half Orc. She’s introduced at the start of the expansion as a native of Draenor, and is intriguing by virtue of how normal she is, in a game-world where everyone with any importance is either ultra-powerful, royal, or both. She is immediately likeable.
The plot of Shadowmoon Valley focuses heavily on her and AU-Velen, and ends with his self-sacrifice. It’s a great cinematic, but it fails to hit emotionally for reasons this blogger explained better than I could.
“…making an alternate reality your story is BAD, especially when you’re revisiting characters that exist/existed in your main reality.
You know why? Because those characters had their shot, or are currently having their shot, shall we say. Those MU characters are YOURS. See, the Velen on Draenor that died? Well, what did it matter? That wasn’t OUR Velen. Our Velen is still doing nothing in the Exodar, so the AU Velen’s sacrifice comes off as almost false or not as horrible. Emotional, yes, but something easy to shrug off when you remember that our Velen is still okay. Therefore the emotional connection to the AU characters is more or less carved in half with this in mind.”
She appears again in Gorgrond, in the company of the other main Draenei, Non-AU-Maraad. Accrding to the writers, Maraad had originally been married to Non-AU-Yrel, but she died, so he has a whole big story with AU-Yrel, who doesn’t know him (AU-Maraad died before he could meet her). Gorgrong’s story was meant to focus on their relationship, with the two gradually falling in love. That whole backstory and love affair was cut, so they never get beyond acquaintances. Maraad still gets his climactic death in the next zone, but it’s hard to care because he was such a minor character.
Yrel skips Spires of Arak, but comes back for Nagrand, where she is suddenly wearing Maraad’s armour (one size fits all, I guess) and using his ceremonial title, and multiple characters are talking about how ‘Maraad would be so proud of you’. Presumably some important stuff was cut there. Then in the Garrison questline, Yrel goes through a series of trials to become an Exarch – one of the three people who lead the Draenei on Draenor. It’s sudden and inexplicable. There’s even a quest where she emotionally lays Maraad’s ashes to rest and says goodbye to his spirit – even though they only knew each other for like an hour.
When the player investigates her backstory, they learn she has a ‘dark secret’ with enormous consequences, but that part of her story was cut too. When she was added to Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard’s tactical game tie-in), one of her flavour dialogues referenced this.
“You want to know what my dark secret is? I see dead people. Kidding! About that being my secret, that is. We Draenei see dead people all the time.”
Yrel appears in the final raid and has a speaking role in its cinematic. Another character foreshadows the following expansion, and she says ‘If you ever need us, we will be here,’ and then expresses her intention to rebuild Draenor alongside the Orcs (a goal she never mentions prior to this, presumably because it was cut). But any future she might have had is cut too. Yrel doesn’t appear in the next expansion. Like almost all of Draenor’s characters, she’s simply forgotten.
The seven Warlords of Draenor are Kargath Bladefist, Blackhand, Kilrogg Deadeye, Durotan, Grom Hellscream, Ner’Zhul, and Gul’dan. They all appear briefly during the introduction at the Black Portal, but after that, their fates become a little scattered. Almost all of them fell pray to content cuts. Also, as far as I can tell, no AU-character meets their non-AU counterpart, ever. Blizzard didn’t want too much time travel in their time travel expansion.
Arguably the most important Warlord was Ner’Zhul. His non-AU version had been responsible for turning Draenor into Outland, and had become the first Lich King. Despite barely appearing in WoW, he had been pivotal to the entire game’s narrative. But in Warlords, he comes to a pathetic end. After a foiled attempt to create an evil Naaru (light god), he gets killed off in a dungeon.
“What pissed me off (LINKS TO REDDIT) the most was they bring back all of these iconic and cool characters, then we literally just steamroll all of them.”
Kargath comes to an even more inglorious end. After barely appearing in the questing zones, he becomes the first boss of the first raid, Highmaul, and you can really tell he was thrown in because they couldn’t think of any other way to get rid of him. Considering he had gotten a short film and everything, players were unimpressed at his death.
Blackhand appears multiple times over the questing of Gorgrond, gets a cool cinematic, and becomes the final boss of the raid Blackrock Foundry, which is dedicated entirely to him, and is arguably the only Warlord who gets a satisfying ending in this expansion. He’s literally the only orc in this expansion that no one complained about.
As the leader of the Iron Horde, Grom Hellscream is the most fleshed out Warlord before the expansion begins. He fills the cover of the game, but barely appears until the Hellfire Citadel raid, where he was originally meant to be the final boss until he was ousted by rewrites.
In the raid trailer, he is shown having a random and inexplicable change of heart, and now totally supports the players. He is freed in the raid, and lives on to make the Iron Horde good. It’s an incredibly jarring transition which can only be the product of cut story content. He proudly lifts his weapon at the end and declares ‘Draenor is free’ as if the Iron Horde was never even a thing. There’s no talk of him facing consequences for trying to genocide the Draenei or take over Azeroth. The Iron Horde never even officially disbanded, and he never stood down as its leader. It’s all nonsense. He is one of the most butchered characters of the expansion.
“What in the world? GROM gets to have the victory salute while yelling “Draenor is free!” ? Grom, who TERRORIZED Draenor by slaughtering Draenei, threatening annhilation on the orc clans who wouldn’t join the Iron Horde, and transforming various parts of the continent into his own personal war machine so he could slaughter even more people on a world he’d never been to?
???
And just because Gul’dan is the “bigger bad,” we suddenly have collective amnesia and go: oh yeah! Gul’dan had Draenor in his clutches the whole expac… not Grom for the majority of it.”
[…]
“Now this utter lack of commentary about Grom’s villainy would be better (but still horrible) if we got some hint – ANY hint – that Grom is remorseful for his actions. That he saw what his absolute greed for conquering and war had done to his people (sounds familiar, I’m sure.) But instead, we get nothing. Grom only allies with us because he got captured and Gul’dan got the best of him. If Gul’dan hadn’t happened, Grom would have kept pushing back with the Iron Horde despite his heavy losses. Victory or Death, and all that. Hundreds, if not thousands more, would have died – both his soldiers and ours, and innocents besides.”
As the only ‘good guy’ of the lot, Durotan gets more development, especially since he’s Thrall’s dad. Most of Frostfire Ridge is dedicated to his story, but he accompanies Horde players throughout the expansion. At the end, he is promptly forgotten about for multiple years. Two expansions later, we’re told he was killed by Nazi Yrel.
“Kilrogg? He might as well have been any no name boss.”
Gul’dan himself ends up being the primary antagonist of Warlords, by summoning Archimonde, one of the two generals of the Burning Legion. Not AU-Archimonde, just Archimonde. Apparently there isn’t a different version of the Burning Legion for each timeline, there’s just one, because their home in the Twisting Nether exists outside of space and time. But this time when he’s killed, it’s for good. It’s confusing and rife with plot holes (LINKS TO REDDIT). A lot of players joke that the only purpose of the expansion was to introduce him to the story, so that he could set up Legion.
While not technically one of the warlords, Orgrim Doomhammer was a major character in the original timeline and was promised to be significant in Warlords. He ended up being written almost completely out. As one reddit user put it, his story became. “I follow the Iron Horde! Wait, the Iron Horde is bad! Agggh, I am dead!”
“Orgrim…that pissed me off so bad. Iconic guy relegated to a stupid quest chain and then just casually dies…no big deal”
So out of seven Orcs, one gets a solid story with a good ending. These are literally the people they named the expansion after. How could it go so wrong?
It was mentioned in one of the art blogs that the expansion was originally designed to focus entirely on the Iron Horde. Each zone had a clan, each clan had a warlord, and each warlord had a story. However at some point during development, Blizzard realised this caused, in their own words, ‘Orc-itis’. They expected players to get sick of the constant Orcs.
Halfway through the alpha, large parts of the story and zone design were scrapped, and new threats were brought in to make it all feel more varied. Gorgrond was almost entirely remade. It originally had an entire functioning train system (which is still inexplicably present in the Grimrail Depot dungeon) but it was changed to focus on Primals (sentient plants). Nagrand became Ogre-centric, Tanaan got its demon makeover, and the Iron Horde invasion of Shadowmoon Valley from the trailer was removed entirely.
Draenor pivoted from a theme of all-out war to a focus on exploration. The Iron Horde got pushed to the background. There was no time to rewrite the warlords to make their stories fit around this new premise. Instead, we are left with small snippets of their original plot lines, and hastily thrown-together resolutions.
Perhaps the most hated writing choice was Garrosh’s death.
He had been the main antagonist of Mists of Pandaria, and its final boss, but had escaped and set the plot of Warlords in motion. You might expect his ending to be climactic, and involve the player heavily. But you would be wrong. He runs into Thrall, the two have a mak’gora – an Orcish tradition of ritualistic duelling. On its own, that sort of works. Garrosh had actually had a mak’gora with Thrall before, during Wrath of the Lich King, and Garrosh began his ‘downward spiral’ during a mak’gora at the start of Cataclysm, during which he dishonourably killed another major character, Cairne Bloodhoof.
The cutscene that follows is wildly controversial. Not only does Thrall steal the kill for the second time in a row, not only does he blatantly cheat in order to win, he also completely dismisses any responsibility he holds for making Garrosh into a villain. But since it’s Thrall, and as we established in the Cataclysm write-up, Thrall can do no wrong, he is treated like a hero.
“First of all Thrall (LINKS TO REDDIT) and his babymomma stole the spotlight when we killed Deathwing. Then Garrosh starts pulling all this shit and Blizzard finally says, “Hey you can kill that asshole now!” So we gather up a raid, we fight our way to him, we fight him, we defeat him, only to force us to spare him, put him on trial, have him travel into the past, so we follow him again, lead an assault on the Warsong, fight our way to him again, fight him again, only to have Thrall interrupt the fight, and have us sit on the sidelines while we watch Thrall kill him.”
[…]
“Thrall doesn’t even bat an eye when Garrosh starts screaming at him that he left him to pick up the broken pieces of the Horde. Thrall isn’t stupid, Thrall isn’t heartless, in that green Mary-Sue is the feeling that he DID have a hand in breaking Garrosh. The fact they ended the story between them by saying “No…you did this to yourself” and calls down Zeus on his ass, just left a sour taste in my mouth.”
[…]
“Ahh, Garrosh. We get a quest called “Justice for Thrall” and watched as Thrall takes the player’s fight with Garrosh into his own plot-armored hands and slaughters him in a shoddy duel in a horrifically brutal way.
Right. “Justice for Thrall.” Not Justice for Pandaria, Theramore, the Trolls… okay. Whatever.”
Warlords did basically nothing to forward the main plot of Warcraft, outside of the final boss of its final raid. It was a pointless diversion that existed purely to familiarise players with the characters in the movie – which was delayed twice and hadn’t even come out by the end of the expansion.
“Warlords, in the end, hardly affected our world. The Blasted Lands got hit, sure, and Stormwind got that annoying Everbloom portal, but other than that, Azeroth is A OK. We did lose some great characters (Maraad and Baros come immediately to mind) but otherwise…
Nothing happened that mattered.
See, that’s it. In my opinion, Warlords didn’t give us ANYHING THAT MATTERED. The story could have been completely annihilated and we wouldn’t have lost any development, except getting back a couple characters.”
“Call me unfeeling, but there’s really no connection between the players, who have lived and died as heroes in one timeline’s Azeroth and Outlands, and this alternate timeline Draenor. The alternate universe Draenor is not Azeroth. It would be one thing if the timelines were bound together in some manner and actions in one timeline had consequences in another. But they are separate, and by the next expansion this alternate Draenor may be almost entirely forgotten.”
This expansion left behind a troubled legacy. It’s a scar on the history of Warcraft, spoken about in the same tones used by cliche Vietnam veterans. It has become the benchmark for bad quality, the low-water mark against which all other disappointments are compared.
“At best, Warlords of Draenor is something that never reached its full potential. At worst, the expansion sets a precedent for future expansions: that Blizzard will be giving us less content, and poorer quality content at that, for more money.”
[…]
“It’s important to look at the data to understand just how disastrous Warlords of Draenor has been. There isn’t just a vague feeling that the game is worse now than it used to be; there is objective evidence that this is the expansion with the least amount of additional content Blizzard has ever provided.”
Blizzard had long established a system in which three expansions were always in production. At any one time, they were working two expansions ahead – or so they claimed. But nothing about Warlords matched up with that.
“If Blizzard had planned properly, we could now be enjoying some sort of post-Hellfire denouement for Warlords in Farahlon, just as the Timeless Isle provided a satisfying resolution to Mists.”
When they unveiled their next expansion, Legion, it was with the promise that things would be better. You live and learn. At any rate, you live. But they had been making this game for a decade, with development often led by the same faces. How was it possible they were getting worse with practice?
“Blizzard developers have been very upfront and honest about their failures with the last expansion. The studio has, if it’s to be believed, learned its lesson.”
No one was quick to trust them there.
“With every expansion, Blizzard states that they know that these content gaps are terrible for the game, but whatever actions the company takes to rectify the situation continue to fail.”
After reading all of this, you might be asking why? Why did Warlords of Draenor fail so spectacularly. Well we have a few reasons.
Firstly, Blizzard was hiring. During the development of Warlords, they expanded their team by 50%. Blizzard had to divert a large portion of their staff to help train up the new recruits.
I’ve already mentioned the huge sweeping rewrites and redesigns of Draenor, but Blizzard also got held back in other areas. Garrisons turned out to be far more time-consuming to build than anyone expected, with huge amounts of content half-finished and thrown away, and updating character models proved unusually resource-heavy.
Blizzard’s leaders also brought up the idea of yearly expansions with fewer patches, and suggested that Warlords was meant to pilot the idea. Consumer backlash put a quick stop to it.
And of course, when Warlords started to flop, they cut their losses and shifted most of their staff onto the next expansion, effectively leaving Warlords to die.
And die it did.
“[WoD in my opinion is still the biggest wasted potential that Blizzard ever made with this game. The hype for this expansion was huge. WoW saw a huge spike in subscriber numbers for this expansion.
If you follow the HobbyScuffles threads, you may know that halfway through writing this, I shattered the radius and ulna bones in my right (dominant) arm, severed a number of tendons, and had to undergo a four-hour surgery to reassemble my arm. I have typed this with my left hand and the help of voice dictation while on extensive painkillers, which is a new thing for me. As a result, there may be some errors in the write up. Please point them out and I will make sure to fix them.
I really appreciate the help, kindness and support I’ve gotten recently from this sub, and want to thank everyone who has read through these posts or posted feedback on them.
I saw no errors and I’m keen on spotting that stuff. You did a great a job, Wintry. Feel better soon and heal fast. Thank you for making this epic available on Lemmy. I now have rich historical context for my own experiences, playing far too much from 2014-2015. It was a “lost year” of depression and anxiety which I tried to medicate with WoW. I’m so glad I quit, based on my therapist’s recommendation. =)
Blizzard’s game development operates like a pendulum. They swing one way, fans complain, so they go to the exact opposite extreme. If you know that, and you know what happened in Cataclysm, you can guess how Mists went.
Cataclysm hadn’t had enough daily quests or reputations, so Mists of Pandaria was absolutely stacked with them. Each day, you would complete quests for the Golden Lotus, the Order of the Cloud Serpent, the Shadow-Pan, the Anglers, the Tillers, the Klaxxi, and the August Celestials. There had always been a daily cap on the number of daily quests a person could complete, which was 25. Blizzard removed that when MoP released, so that players could complete Pandaria’s 48 daily quests unimpeded.
“…it looks like there will be approximately 1300 quests in Mists of Pandaria. Right this moment we don’t have the numbers off-hand to show how that that compares exactly to the previous expansions, but the quest count seems to more closely mirror Wrath of the Lich King, however with a much greater emphasis on dailies. Mists of Pandaria is actually the expansion where we have emphasized dailies the most… ever!”
And don’t worry, the first and second patches both brought yet more dailies.
It didn’t take long for daily-fatigue to creep in. Unfortunately, high level gear was locked behind faction reputation requirements, so many players felt forced to do every daily, every day, in order to stay competitive. I recall it would take me several hours. Here are some experiences from other players.
”I think what turned a lot of people off was the huge emphasis on doing dailies for literally every faction every day in order to get rep and gear upgrades. If you missed a day, it felt like you were ages behind everyone else.”
Players often cited the sheer avalanche of daily quests as the reason why they quit – they just burned out.
”The MOP dailies were so time consuming that I was unable to do all dailies for all factions in one day. It took me 3 months to get ambassador. I came tired physically from work and then got tired mentally from endless grind to get exalted in wow.”
[…]
”The rep grind was so bad it actually made me unsub. It wasn’t fun anymore when I’d spend 3 hours a day doing what felt like a tedious chore, knowing that the amount of rep I could get in one day was capped so to get exalted would take a month of daily quests. Really sucked the fun out of the game.”
There were, of course, critics. Dailies weren’t mandatory, at least not technically. And according to the user ‘Styil’, what could possibly be wrong with more content?
I will never understand this mentality. How can you have “too much” content, let alone see it as a problem?
[…]
There weren’t too many dailies. People just have zero self-control.
One of the most heavily marketed additions in Mists was that of ‘Scenarios’. These were like dungeons, only more story-based. Rather than a team of five people with three damage dealers, a tank, and a healer, scenarios were made to be completed by anyone. This was done in the hope of avoiding the lengthy dungeon queues, but as a result, they were extremely easy. There were 29 scenarios in Mists of Pandaria, and while some players (like me) loved them, they proved unpopular with others.
In order to cater to players who wanted more of a challenge, harder ‘Heroic’ scenarios were released, with such massive rewards that everyone was pretty much forced to do them.
Unfortunately, scenarios came at the cost of dungeons – a cornerstone of the game. Vanilla had 26 dungeons, Burning Crusade and Wrath had 16 and Cataclysm had 14. Mists of Pandaria had 6, and they were all rather simple, with no real variation from ‘Normal’ to ‘Heroic’ modes. Players found them far too easy.
The raids, at least, were fine. The ‘Looking for Raid’ feature added in Cataclysm continued to become more and more toxic and hated, but there’s nothing I can say about it which hasn’t already been covered.
The Talent Tree
After the content drought of Cataclysm, Blizzard took pains to create plenty of things to do.
There had always been world bosses – extremely powerful enemies roaming questing areas, which players could group up to kill – but MoP turned them into a real feature. World bosses had a tiny chance of dropping mounts.
Speaking of which, MoP introduced systems for players to conveniently track mounts across their characters, as well as toys and gadgets. ‘Elite Enemies’ were scattered across the world in their dozens. There was also the ‘Lorewalkers’, a unique faction which rewarded players for examining monuments, reading scrolls, and hearing folk tales across Pandaria. The Brawler’s Guild allowed players to take part in an underground fighting ring. Warlocks got a long requested questline to turn their fire demonic green. Professions were re-worked, gameplay was drastically changed across the board, and the talent system was totally remade.
This last change was quite controversial. The ‘talent tree’ had always offered players a number of small stat boosts which they could buy with points. Blizzard didn’t think the system felt very rewarding, and was too easily ‘optimised’, which they were kind of right about. But many players were attached to it.
”Sure, people still used cookie cutter builds, and there were plenty of worthless talents, but I enjoyed it. Getting a point to spend every level made it feel like I was actually getting stronger,” said Reddit user ‘PB-Toast’.
Others disagreed.
”Dont let nostalgia hide that a good portion of these talents were increase chance to hit 1/5% and incredibly boring.”
The replacement was this. Every fifteen levels, players had the option of choosing between three abilities. Usually, they were of similar types – they might all be damaging spells, or movement-related, or healing powers. The intention was to free players from the need to do whatever the internet said was best. But that didn’t work, and the internet quickly figured out which choices were the most efficient.
Players saw it as a departure from the classic RPG elements, and yet another appeal toward casuals.
”It’s not even about nostalgia, it’s about making it an RPG. Levelling up was rewarding, you got talents, got stronger levels of spells and had a general sense of progression. Wow is a MMO. Its been long since it lost the RPG.”
Players argue to this day over which system was better.
Another major feature was the ‘Sungsong Ranch’, a little farm players could own in the Valley of the Four Winds as part of the ‘tillers’ guild. Each player would only ever see their own farm upon entering the area, but could visit other peoples’ farms by grouping up. It worked similarly to Stardew Valley. Next to the farm was a market, where players could sell their vegetables or give them as gifts to the locals in order to improve their relationships, and gradually unlock more parts of the farm.
Despite the inevitable Farmville comparisons, it was well received overall, which was a massive problem, because Blizzard only ever works in extremes. A far more elaborate version of this mechanic would rear its head in the following expansion, with terrible results, but that’s a drama for another post.
The most eye-catching addition to MoP was ‘pet battles’. Pets had existed for years, and were just little animated creatures that followed the player around. But now a system had been created to track and collect pets, name them, trade them, level them up, and fight them in matches against NPCs or other players. It was almost identical to Pokemon, a similarity lost on absolutely no one, and yet everyone felt the need to point out. Indeed, Blizzard had to reassure the community that it was not, in fact, a joke.
“This is like a comedy reel. Everyone’s laughing cuz it’s exactly like Pokemon in every way…he mentions feature after feature and they’re all taken from Pokemon. I’m surprised he kept a straight face for the most part.”
Youtuber ‘King Beaver’ had this to say:
”I thought this was gonna be really gay at first but then i realized i loved pokemon as a kid and you know what =/ i honestly wanna give this a try”
I suppose his intentions were good?
At any other time, pet battles probably wouldn’t have raised any eye-brows. But in a time of ‘Farmville knock-offs’, simplified talents, and cuddly pandas, when the community was already freaking out about MoP being aimed at girls, children, and casuals, it only poured fuel on the fire.
Who honestly plays World of Warcraft and says “I’ve got to log in to duel my pet!”? Who gets a kick of these things? Go play tamagotchi or Pokemon if you wanna play a game like that. AND FARMS?! GO PLAY FARMVILLE OR SOMETHING!
Of course, when they actually got into the game, these people realised that the pet battles system wasn’t even noticeable unless you actually took an interest in it. And those who did take an interest usually loved it. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that development time had been spent on it. WoW players have always had a toxic relationship with the finite nature of development. Whenever they see a feature they didn’t want, they immediately imagine the things they did want, which had to be sacrificed (usually a raid), because Blizzard could only create so much content.
”Blizzard need to focus on the bloody gameplay and not waste their time on these childish things. They have dug the grave for this game with cataclysm and now they are just sh*ttin on it”
Fortunately, there were some sane responses, such as this one by the user ‘Tziva’.
Everyone I know who is looking forward to the pet battles is well into adulthood. I’m not sure why they cross the line into childish more than, say, having a pet in general. Or transmogging to play dress-up. Or riding a giant kitty. Or getting your hair style changed. Or any of the other aspects of the game one could single out and proclaim “for children.”
Standing alongside this whole drama was another one, relating to ethics. Pokemon has always managed to sidestep the ‘animal cruelty’ aspect of making creatures fight each other through heavy worldbuilding. Pokemon are treated well, given the utmost medical care, and are shown actively choosing to participate Particularly in the show, Pokemon are treated less like slaves and more like fully independent characters who just happen to live in balls.
WoW never really tried to do this. And in many cases, the pets were literally just normal cats, rats, dogs, and birds. For example, the baby ape or Whomper, whose description is “When Whomper wants to play, he’ll let you know with a playful headbutt.”. WoW had hundreds of pets, and a lot of them didn’t really fit the whole ‘pokemon’ aesthetic. Players criticised the ethics of making them fight.
There were also literal children who could be used as pets, but Blizzard prevented them from being used against each other. This decision upset some people.
If the Hunger Games taught us anything, we love to see children fight it out to the death. I hereby propose letting the little orc and human children join the pet battles. Add the little Christmas orc slaves too.
Aside from the jokes, there were some users who pointed out that many pets were just as sapient as humanoid children, so Blizzard was sort of making a statement by choosing which ones to allow. This drama didn’t really go anywhere, but it’s fun to talk about.
Is it okay to fuck a baby dragon? Asking for a friend.
While this isn’t one of the biggest dramas in Mists, it’s one of the strangest.
Anduin was the son of the Alliance leader, Varian Wrynn. It was clear he was one of the main characters Blizzard had singled out to become important later on. He was a recurring figure throughout almost every zone in Pandaria, and every patch too.
Wrathion was a black dragon – the last ‘uncorrupted’ one (all the others fell under Deathwing’s spell). When he took a human form, he appeared as a dark-skinned young man with red eyes, a beard, and a turban. Anduin and Wrathion had an story which proceeded through the game’s main patches, in which they had an enemies-to-friends relationship.
”it’s a 16 dating a 3 YEAR OLD. thats a toddler. unless you want to have it be bestiality your talking pedophilia pick your poison. it doesn’t matter what fantasy terms you use to dress it up the fact of it still remains that he’s DATING A TODDLER.” Said user ‘breadisfunny’.
There was some debate on this point.
”Paedophilia between this ship would be if Wrathion could not give consent as he does not have the mental maturity or physical capacity to do so. However, because he’s a dragon, he’s able to do so. Because they age much more quickly.”
[…]
”People love pushing fictional kids together. It’s really weird.”
Some members of the community were quick to disclaim that they didn’t want to portray Anduin and Wrathion having sex, only enjoying a wholesome romantic relationship. Here’s a little taste of that discourse.
”Are you kidding? They’re adorable.”
[…]
”it’s pedophile territory and you know it.”
[…]
”Seriously the most interesting relationship dynamic in WoW. Who even cares about genders at that point?
It’s basically the best. <3”
[…]
”Nice try but homosexuals do not and will not exist in the WOW universe.
Whats your next fetish, a gay relationship between a Walrus man and an Arakoa?”
World of Warcraft had dozens of main characters, and none of them were LGBT, so they couldn’t be blamed for latching on to the next closest thing, right? That’s what they thought. And in their defence, Anduin was very twinky.
“why does WoW need a homosexual character?” said one user.
Indeed, often the problem was not the ages of the characters, but the fact that they were gay. We’ve already covered how the average player sees ‘gay’ things in this post, so I don’t need to elaborate there. Homophobia was, and still is, rife in the playerbase.
”Because people do not understand what a platonic relationship is and are quick to jump into the LGBT agenda bandwagon”
Don’t worry though, this has a happy ending.
”This looks like some weird anime shipping shit”
This ship would simmer down for a while, and Wrathion would largely disappear from the scene. This is pretty common. Blizzard picks up new focal characters every expansion, and then tends to drop them straight after. But Blizzard continued refreshing Anduin’s model over the expansions to show him aging. And three expansions later, he was officially Anduin the Manduin, and had gone from twink to twunk to full on hunk. When Wrathion made his unexpected return after a glow up of his own, the shippers reawakened from their slumber.
”Anduin-kun…" “Nan deska, Wrathion-senpai?”
An almost industrial amount of fanart was churned out, with adult characters this time. I took the liberty of collecting some of it, for the good of the academic community. You may be wondering whether I really needed to assemble such homosexual multitudes, such a bevy of boy-love, just to prove my point, and to that I say you can get the hell out of my thread.
”Varian will be so proud of his son, sucking some dragon’s dick.
First Jaina, now you, what is happening to this world”
For context, Jaina was a character who also had a reputation for puffing the magic dragon - that was actually her least controversial boyfriend.
Indeed, Wrathion x Anduin the ship is so popular that there has been a lot of push for them to be canon. Considering Blizzard’s recent obsession with proving they’re definitely not evil, I can see them doing it. But we won’t get to all that for a while yet.
”With Wrathion returning at the end of WoD and with Anduin’s heavy heart of his betrayal do you think Blizzard will cave and let them be an official couple?”
Only time will tell. At any rate, this was a vast improvement over the situation during Cataclysm, when Anduin had been shipped with a cow
Only two months after MoP released, the first patch dropped. ‘Landfall’ was heavily story-based, and mostly followed the Horde and Alliance as they built up fortifications on the southern coast of Pandaria. As players progressed through the story, the defences got bigger and stronger, which made it feel rewarding. Even though it was mostly more daily quests and reputations, it went down well.
Only a few months after Landfall came ‘The Thunder King’, widely considered to be one of the best patches in Warcraft history, with a new zone containing a really interesting story, and one of the best raids in the game. It had an awesome Chinese/Aztek theme.
It would have been enough to satisfy players for up to six months, but they only had to wait two. The third patch, ‘Escalation’ took players to the zones surrounding the Horde capital of Orgrimmar. It was mercifully short on dailies, and continued to tell the story of Garrosh’s turn to Tyranny.
Just four months passed before the final patch dropped. Less than a year after Mists began, it had ended. ‘The Siege of Orgrimmar’ was another incredible patch. Its raid was colossal and had a number of creatively designed fights. Garrosh Hellscream, Chad of Chads, took seven phases to kill. The Vale of Eternal Blossoms was redesigned and given a totally new story.
Blizzard brought in the Timeless Isle, a new form of end-game content which eschewed dailies in favour of treasure chests, puzzles, mini games and dozens of bosses, some of which were very creatively designed. For example, there was Evermaw, a giant whale that circled the island, which players had to chase down using water-walking spells.
The Timeless Isle was incredibly addictive and got a positive response from players.
Following the release of MoP, subscribers continued to fall. At first, quite rapidly. Then slowly. Then, to everyone’s collective shock, they began to go up again. 200,000 subscribers came back during Quarter 4 of 2013. And it’s not hard to see why. Blizzard were releasing excellent content at a rapid pace. There were talks of Mists being a new renaissance for Warcraft.
But it came at a steep cost.
The Four Hundred and Sixty Day Patch
After the Siege of Orgrimmar, players waited eagerly to see what would come next. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen. Nothing went on happening for several months, in fact. If you celebrated the release of Siege of Orgrimmar by having unprotected sex, your baby would be transitioning from milk to solid food by the time the next major patch came out. Or crawling, if it were particularly smart. Which it wouldn’t be, because its parents played World of Warcraft.
You may remember Hour of Twilight, Cataclysm’s infamously long patch from the last write-up: that one had been 301 days long. Siege of Orgrimmar lasted 460. To this day, it is the longest pause in the game’s history.
As you can imagine, the attitude among fans went from jubilant, to bored, to downright furious. And all the while, they followed the next expansion with ever-more critical eyes, but we’ll get to that absolute disaster next post.
The love players had for Siege of Orgrimmar gradually turned to hatred. They started to hate its length – it made it time consuming to finish for the hundredth time. They hated its focus on story – it was just a distraction. They hated its complicated fights, because they just wanted to get them over with so they could get to the loot. The freedom that made the Timeless Isle great started to feel like a lack of direction. The bosses, which could only be taken down when entire communities worked together, became unwinnable because no one wanted to be there anymore.
“All that time yet I only killed Garrosh once”
Oh, and by the way, the ending of the raid was… inconclusive. The only way to learn of Garrosh’s fate was to read the novel War Crimes. I won’t go into the whole ‘Faction Bias’ issue yet, because I’ll have much more material a couple of posts down the road. But these are the basics: The Horde had effectively nuked an Alliance city, committed heinous atrocities, split apart, revolted, and deposed its leader. After years of fighting on-and-off, a (mainly Alliance) force had taken the Horde’s capital city and cut off its leadership. They finally had the power to break up the Horde for good, or turn it into a vassal, or at the very least prevent it from arming again. They could have done whatever they wanted.
And what did they choose to do?
They wagged a very imposing finger in the faces of Horde leaders, told them not to do it again, let them choose a new ruler, and left. And no one questioned this decision. Well, pretty much all the fans did, but no one within WoW’s world. Garrosh wasn’t even killed, or taken into Alliance custody, he was sent to an ‘international’ court and freed, to terrorise another day. Cataclysm had experienced its fair share of writing flops, but this was one of the first real deep cuts to the faith fans held in their writers. And it would not be the last.
Anyway. The WoW renaissance had ended as quickly as it started. The Subscribers started falling again. Mists had started at 10 million subscribers and hit lows of roughly 7 million. It had been, for the most part, an excellent expansion, but its ideas were just too much for some people, and its content release schedule was far too ambitious.
Mists of Pandaria still divides fans today, but its public perception has changed dramatically. It gradually developed a sort of ‘cult classic’ status, which has grown more and more common over the years. Most of the community looks back on it fondly. It’s not uncommon to hear it described as the best expansion, World of Warcraft at its absolute zenith.
”…it was a consistently good expansion that defied its early reviews to deliver a great experience. I do wish we hadn’t been subjected to the lull of 14 months of no content…”
”Mists of Pandaria, despite any dispersions people have for the aesthetic of that expansion, was a great example of the game could be when the WoW team had a complete vision for the story and plenty of content for the players to experience.”
But there are still those who see it as a disappointment. If Cataclysm was the downward turn, Mists of Pandaria was the cliff.
”An expansion where Blizzard wanted money and weren’t afraid to degrade itself as a company along with the Warcraft franchise in the process. Have they done it before? Yes. Was it more apparent this time? Indubitably.”
[…]
”Terrible, made me leave. Leveled to 90, looked around and say “nope, not gonna jerk off the panda folk for dailies ad nauseam” and unsubbed for a year.”
[…]
”The dreadful leveling experience, the lackluster dungeons, the unbearable shitfest that is LFR, and the isle of a thousand chests can all go fuck themselves.”
[…]
”for me it was the worst expansion yet, the theme has been my big issue and I can’t get over it : /” Said the user ‘Horizon’.
You don’t tend to hear from those people as much anymore, perhaps because they quit the game and left its community. Personally, I loved MoP.
The worst things about WoW during these years happened off screen. Some of them got pretty grim. I felt the need to include them.
World of Warcraft made headlines in July 2012 when an argument over the game in an Ontario neighbourhood ended with one man being stabbed in the chest. You can view the wound here (NSFW). The attacker, Justin Williams, was having an enraged argument with guildies over his headset. Jordan Osborne visited to see what was going on, and tried to de-escalate the situation.
“I was telling him, there is no need for you to be freaking out about ‘World of Warcraft.’ It’s just a game,” Osborne told QMI.
Williams responded, “It’s not just a game, it’s my life.” He then assaulted Osborne, grabbing him by the throat, punching him in the face, and stabbing him in his sternum.
‘I was sitting in my house today thinking I could be dead - and it’s all over a World of Warcraft game. It’s true, it takes over your life.’
Osborne was taken for treatment and made a full recovery. He later told the ‘Peterborough Examiner’, “'The doctor said he could fit his whole finger in my chest.”. Williams faced arrest and was charged with ‘aggravated assault with a weapon’.
The game had already earned its reputation for inspiring extreme and sometimes violent behaviour. But it wasn’t until 2012 that the global media began to question the effects of World of Warcraft in greater depth. Not because of the stabbing of Jordan Osbourne, though that didn’t help. But because of something much more severe.
On 22 July, just a week after the Ontario incident, a Norwegian man named Anders Behring Breivik detonated a van bomb in Oslo, right next to the Regjeringskvartalet - a collection of government buildings. 8 people were killed. By the time the dust settled, he was halfway to the island of Utoya, where a summer camp was taking place for the Worker’s Youth League, a political group associated with the Norwegian Labour Party. Breivik proceeded to hunt down and kill 69 participants, most of whom were children. 318 people were injured. It paralysed Norway. The deadliest lone-wolf attack in history would come as a shock to any country, but Norway was one of the most peaceful, prosperous nations in the world. This was unimaginable.
As more information surfaced, the world scrambled to draw a profile of the perpetrator. Breivik had them covered. He had taken a leaf out of the Unabomber’s book and distributed a number of texts called ‘2083: A European Declaration of Independence’. Long story short, he was your standard far-right fascist wannabe. His shitty little book would inspire murderers for years to come.
Among other things, he attributed his success to World of Warcraft.
Breivik said in court, “Some people dream about sailing around the world, some dream of playing golf. I dreamt of playing World of Warcraft.”
Breivik professed to playing the game non-stop (as much as 16 hours a day at points), describing it as a ‘martyr’s gift’ to himself, and using it as a smokescreen to mislead his mother while he planned his attack. Researchers found he had led three guilds, all of which focused on hardcore raiding. He played a human female mage named ‘Conservativism’ and a tauren female druid named ‘Conservative’, though his main was called ‘Andersnordic’. When the prosecution displayed a picture of his character in court, Breivik smiled.
He made multiple attempts to distance himself from the game, perhaps because he felt it damaged the ‘legitimacy’ of his message, but it was gradually becoming clear how core World of Warcraft had been to his identity.
“I know it is important to you and the media that I played this for a year,” he told the court in response to Mr. Holden’s questions. “But it has nothing to do with July 22. It is not a world you are engulfed by. It is quite simply a hobby.”
Breivik would occasionally post on the forums. In one reply, he defended a Scandinavian cyberbully who he said ‘works against the Islamisation of Sweden’. The news shook the WoW community to its core, especially on the servers he had played (Silvermoon-EU and Nordrassil-EU). Players reacted with horror and disgust.
Some of his past guildies discussed their relationships with Breivik, which gave an insight into what he was like as a person.
My memories of Anders are very good, and the atrocity was so incredible that I suppose I simply refused to see the pictures as Anders at first.
One of the replies was from a fellow Norwegian.
This is surrealistic, as an Norwegian it is hard to even comprehend what he has done and even harder to fathom his motives. The killer portraited in our news papers and on television seems so far out that it is easiest to judge him as a rabbit psychotic. To know that i have been guilded and chated with him for over a year in Virtue, at least back then he seemed pretty normal, makes this even more uncomprehensible.
The general consensus was that while Breivik had been unpleasant at times, it was difficult to imagine him doing something so evil.
Yes offler I do indeed remember him. He an I had quiet a public barney. I did think he was a jerk and a petty control freak but not true evil as he has shown himself to be. Although I did think of him from time to time in a very negative way, I really did dislike that man.
It has really affected me these last few days how I had contact with someone who was truley a monster. He is a true coward, parking a car bomb, attacking children with a automatic riffle. I do hope he suffers in prison.
“It was a sickening feeling when I realized I had played for two or three hours with the man who tried to kill me,” Fred Ove Løtuft told local newspaper Bergens Tidende. “I’ve played a lot of shooting games where you have to get away and hide,” he said.
Passing himself off as a Finn, Breivik led a clan in World of Warcraft called the Knights Templar, Løtuft said. In his manifesto, Breivik claimed he belonged to an “anti-Jihad” terrorist organization of the same name. Chatting to Breivik at the time, Løtuft said he had formed a positive impression of his fellow player. “We only talked about the game. He didn’t seem like a guy who would run amok and gun down young people, to put it mildly,” Løtuft told Bergens Tidende.
The debate over whether video game violence caused real-world violence had played out dozens of times, usually in response to the revelation that some American shooter played Call of Duty or Battlefield or something like that. I’m not American so correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it has something to do with gun lobbies looking for scapegoats so that they don’t have to ban guns.
But this time, the conversation focused entirely on World of Warcraft. The media, both in Norway and throughout the world, questioned whether WoW was a safe place for children. All of the game’s past incidents came back with a vengeance, and were held up to the light as examples of its danger.
Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen claimed that Breivik was unable to distinguish between World of Warcraft and reality. It was part of the fictional world he had created around himself, in which he was a knight defending Europe from invaders, and not an unsuccessful Norwegian neckbeard.
Norwegian gamers responded that Jens Stotenberg, leader of NATO and ex-Prime Minister of Norway, had played online games too, and even used his KGB codename Steklov as a username.
The topic rippled out across the game’s servers, its forums, and public discourse too. Studies had already been done on video game violence and found that they had no real impact on behaviour. Time Magazine weighed in, saying that Breivik’s relationship with WoW probably meant nothing at all.
Blame video games — that’s the watch phrase these days when something tragic happens. The non-gaming media seem to enjoy zeroing in on video games that are highlighted in horrifying crimes, invoking the rhetorical question: Do video games screw people up?
When horrible things happen, we look for simple answers, for easy rationalizations — ways to essentially say, Oh, this is why so-and-so did such-and-such. We want the “why” right now, when the spotlight’s on.
Reality, of course, is far more complex, and the answers we’re after require patience and careful research. Preliminary studies that attempted to link violent video games with increased aggressive behavior failed to control for critical variables like family history, mental-health issues and gender (they also failed to contextualize increased aggression levels, e.g., more than aggression upticks caused by playing football, say, or drinking a cup of coffee?).
The most up-to-date research, according to academic and TIME contributor Christopher Ferguson, “has not found that children who play VVG [violent video games] are more violent than other kids, nor harmed in any other identifiable fashion.” In Ferguson’s own longitudinal studies, recently published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, he found “no long-term link between VVG and youth aggression or dating violence.” And Ferguson references another recent longitudinal study involving German children, published in Media Psychology, which similarly found no links between increased aggression and violent video games.
But to many players (and parents of players), none of that mattered. Shortly after all of this came to light, a lot of people left the game for good. Being associated with World of Warcraft had never been a grand thing, but in the wake of Breivik it became a black mark.
The WoW community was quick to defend their game. Some commentators were more reasonable, such as Reddit user /u/Saltybabe
While I personally don’t think all video games in all contexts are 100% harmless, they are usually only harmful when adults don’t supervise or explain to young kids what is ok and what’s not. We have an 8 year old here who loves castle crashers, one of the moves is to throw a guy down and jump on him… this was tried once at the play ground. It’s not a violent game and we told him that’s not ok people could get hurt, and problem solved.
WoW isn’t even a violent game, it’s cartoonish and fanciful. This isn’t really any gore to speak of and for the most part unless a person has a 2 handed axe or a huge mace there aren’t any weapons in the game short of a gun/bow and arrow, and lets face it none of the guns in WoW look even remotely realistic that one could link to real life violence.
I let our 6 year old run around the blood elf starting zone and smite things on her priest, she loves using the map and counting how many bad guys we have to get and it’s challenging to her to use the mouse and keyboard. She’s supervised and it’s not like she’s going to go to school and conjure up some magic and kill people… WoW is an insane target for this whole “video games cause violence” because really, if even young kids can easily be guided into understanding there is no excuse an adult could not understand this, short of mental illness.
Others treated the whole conversation with derision.
I heard he also drank milk!
As one pundit pointed out:
If video games had anything to do with what people did in real life, more than half of the US population would be farmers by now.
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