WintryLemon, 10 months ago

t’s strangely engrossing, like if askhistorians published a tabloid magazine lol

You nailed it. This is 100% the energy.

WintryLemon, 10 months ago

The world of competitive chess seems absolutely wild.

WintryLemon, 10 months ago

Explain like I’m five?

WintryLemon, 10 months ago

Thank you very much!

WintryLemon, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I’ll start us off!

In the MUDding world, specifically the Iron Realms brand of MUD, two games (Imperian, Starmourn) have been put into “legacy mode” by the company, which means that a lot of the more useful, grabby, and/or addictive features typically found in IRE games will be unsupported going forward, as well as disabling the ability for characters to retire INTO Starmourn or Imperian, while retiring OUT of them is still doable. Everyone’s expecting mass exodus. Vitally, entering legacy mode means that the administration of these games will no longer be paid by IRE, so if they intend to stay and keep the games going they’ll be doing so out of the goodness of their hearts - it can’t be their job anymore, so their time will by necessity be focused elsewhere, at least a fair amount of the time.

Starmourn’s population in particular is panicky, as it’s very new in comparison to other IRE games and has a dedicated playerbase. Among other things like the literal end of the world looming on the Starmourn horizon, rumors abound that entering legacy mode will mean Starmourn, which already has a problem with over-indulgence in PK, to become fully “open PK,” because if the administration isn’t present then there will be no one to enforce the rules. The administration has countered this claim, but the panic continues.

Meanwhile, on more popular IRE games with ostensibly less tOxIc playerbases, people are dreading an influx of undesirables from Imperian. I guess people don’t like those guys.

This is a weird hobby.

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

It’s all so, so petty. I love it.

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

”Just because I have nipples, does not mean I want to be milked, Greg.”

Once the roll-out of Vanilla’s patches was complete, the community began to discuss what would come next. (LINKS TO REDDIT) Many players had gained top level gear, and were effectively finished with Vanilla, but didn’t want the fun to stop just yet (LINKS TO REDDIT).

”Do i just like… (LINKS TO REDDIT) keep running naxx over and over and over for years? What do these people DO with their WoW time. I literally have nothing left to do and quit playing.”

Did the game simply stay this way forever? Would Blizzard start developing new content to extend Vanilla separately to the original release (as had happened to old school Runescape)? Would they reset the game? Or was Burning Crusade Classic on the way?

Blizzard wasn’t too sure themselves. They knew they wanted to go with the latter, but they weren’t sure how to make it work. A survey was sent out, asking players for their opinions. All of the options proved popular, so they tried to appeal to everyone.

There was a lot of nostalgia for Burning Crusade – nostalgia which had yet to be monetised. I won’t explain what BC was because we’ve covered it here before (LINKS TO REDDIT).

The expansion was revealed by accident, when an advertisement appeared on the Blizzard launcher. It was immediately taken down, but the cat was out of the bag (LINKS TO REDDIT).

” ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ MY BODY IS PREPARED”

The crazy thing about the ad was that it promised BC Classic would be available in less than a month.

”We’re less than a month out of this date and we still don’t have official word, it’s fucking stupid”

[…]

”Blizzard needs to communicate better so i can book my fucking vacation lol.”

Once again, there were a number of questions to answer.

BC couldn’t overwrite vanilla - that was the whole point of Classic – so players weren’t sure how it would integrate into the existing game. But by that point, Blizzard had decide it would be a separate service to Vanilla, but still covered by a single WoW subscription.

So far, Blizzard had done everything right (more or less). But the announcement of BC was incredibly botched, and infuriated the community in multiple ways. They offered players the option of transferring their Vanilla characters to the BC servers for free. Or, for the price of $35, they could clone their character, keeping one the original in Vanilla and getting a copy in BC.

Cue the shitstorm.

”$35?! To copy some code?! (LINKS TO REDDIT) I mean even $10 would be a lot for that, but it’s in the realm of reasonable.”

[…]

“Oh wait, you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.”

[…]

”At this point (LINKS TO REDDIT) I’m reasonably sure I don’t want to spend any dime on TBC. Even a subscription. This is just going to continue to get worse.”

”This process takes SECONDS (LINKS TO REDDIT), and now we are supposed to pay 35 USD for each character if we wanna have a copy in both eras of the game?!”

[…]

”Horrifying amount of greed for something that is basically 100% automated.

Their excuse for charging so much for retail server transfers/race changes is they don’t want people to do it too much (some do anyway), what possible excuse is there to charge so much to simply ACTIVATE a clone?”

A lot of players were discussing the idea of abandoning the Burning Crusade altogether out of protest.

”Vote with your wallet. Don’t sub, don’t play TBC.”

The player base worked itself into a lather, getting angrier and angrier until the developers had no choice but to respond. Just days after announcing the price, Blizzard backpedalled and reduced it to $15.

“However, over the last week or so, we’ve gotten a very large amount of feedback from the community, and we’ve decided to lower the price.”

The players had won.

”Absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for listening! I wasn’t going to clone my main due to the high cost, but now it certainly looks a lot more tempting.”

But some were quick to point out that they shouldn’t be paying anything at all. Others suggested that this had been the plan all along. Blizzard never intended on charging $35, they just wanted to make $15 look good by comparison.

”Oh generous gods, how great thine are.

Lord Bobby has blessed us. Now I only have to pay an extra £12 on top of the annual £120 access fee, if I want to keep playing the game I bought in 2006 for a tenner.”

[…]

”They are charging money for literally a copy/paste. “

[…]

”I’m still not buying it and i’m not falling for this crap for 1 second, Blizzard have revealed their true intentions when it comes to Classic.”

Alas, the cloning fee was not the only controversy here.

Players could buy a Dark Portal Pass for $39.99, which would take any character on a BC server straight to level 58 and provide everything they needed to start playing in Outland right away. That pissed people off even more than the cloning fee.

In an AMA prior to the release of Vanilla, one of the developers had declared, “Character Boosts are not in keeping with Classic. We don’t want to break any hearts.” (LINKS TO REDDIT) That had come as a huge relief to the community at the time. And now it came back, as a betrayal. The cracks were starting to show. The only crack players wanted to see in Burning Cruade was Illidan’s, and that’s the only one they weren’t getting.

We already covered the arguments against boosts in the Warlords of Draenor write-up, but those feelings were felt more strongly here. Not only did players care far more about levelling as a rite of passage which was meant to be slow and painful, they were also keenly watching for any signs of ‘corporate money-grubbing’. They saw modern WoW as the ‘darkest timeline’ and wanted to prevent Classic going down the same road. As far as they were concerned, meddling with BC was like trying to rewrite the Bible.

”Please change your mind on providing boosts. It makes me happy to see you guys are noticing our complaints and that you’re talking to us because maybe y’all will take boosts out. Tbc is still a classic wow game, and it had no boosts originally.”

Not everyone was against the idea of boosts, however.

”The leveling was part of the draw of Classic, and so they did not want to take away from that. The boost for BC Classic takes you straight to the bare minimum level to get into BC, where that leveling can take place, and gets you to endgame faster, which had a much bigger focus in BC than it did in Vanilla”

Some players thought boosts should be conditional – perhaps they should be limited to players who had already hit max level in Vanilla, or they should only be available for a month after launch.

There were also concerns about bots. Classic already had an issue with them, and giving them a way to skip levelling risked making the problem worse. More bots meant more gold farming, which in turn meant more damage to the economy.

In protest, a thousand players banded together to ‘reboot’ BC on one of its smallest servers, starting over from level 1. ““Blizzard announced Burning Crusade Classic with no fresh servers and no mention of what will happen to the existing low population / dead servers, except hinting there could be the possible creation of new servers post-Burning Crusade Classic launch,” said the organiser behind The Fresh Crusade.

"This makes sense especially in the current state where most servers don’t have a levelling scene with players very much soloing their way from 1-60 with issues finding groups for dungeons/group quests, which is an integral part of the WoW Classic journey.”

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

”/spit /spit /spit”

And as if Blizzard was deliberately trying to infuriate their Classic players as much as possible, they announced the Digital Deluxe Edition, for the low low price of $69.99. Every single feature came like a new dagger to the heart.

As well as a Dark Portal Pass and 30 days of game time, it included the Path of Illidan toy, which caused characters to leave a trail of green flaming footsteps, a unique hearthstone, a mount for retail-WoW, and most important of all, the Phase Hunter mount, specifically for BC Classic.

Pretty bold of them to firstly cater to a hardcore traditional community by making classic versions of the game, to then add something that this community deeply despises in the pursuit of some extra revenue.

[…]

”This is precisely why I’m #NoChanges because you give Blizzard an inch and they take a mile.”

[…]

“What do u mean it’s a slippery slope?! We just want X and Y!”

[…]

”The sad part is (LINKS TO REDDIT) the whales will still eat it up.”

[…]

”I know I shouldn’t be (LINKS TO REDDIT), but I’m always amazed at the incredible amount of corporate fanboying and defending of corporate greed going on here. It’s really hard to tell if it’s bots/paid shills or if these people genuinely just want to suck the teats of Blizzard that badly for some reason.”

Asmongold, one of the biggest WoW personalities, who had followed Classic from the beginning, encouraged his fans to fire the /spit emote at anyone who used the mount. The idea was that if they disincentivised the mount enough, no one would buy it, and Blizzard would learn not to try these kinds of techniques again. The harassment campaign applied to everyone who bought store mounts, but was specifically targeted at those who bought the Digital Deluxe Edition.

It was intensely controversial.

”If you think people trying to punish others (LINKS TO REDDIT) for not conforming with your opinions isn’t toxic then you may need to take a break from the internet. That is the real childishness here.”

Most content creators strongly opposed the campaign, whatever their views on store mounts. But many players were on Asmongold’s side.

”If you think people emoting on a game is harmful, might wanna take a break from the internet until you grow up.”

An addon was created to automatically spit on players with the Deluxe Edition mount. Screenshots emerged of players’ chat logs filling up with notifications that they were being spat on.

In the PTR (Public Test Realm) of BC Classic, Blizzard removed the /spit emote entirely, and took it out of Retail WoW shortly after. This wasn’t entirely due to Asmongold’s campaign, but it was a factor. We’ll cover the rest in another write-up.

”We did it bois, harrassment is no more!” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

This once again provoked the wrath of the #nochanges gang, who wanted Classic to preserve BC to the letter.

One user on Reddit suggested (LINKS TO REDDIT), “I guess Blizz was worried people would be afraid to buy the mount LULW. While another added, “they found a spit emote too problematic and ‘toxic’ because people were using it against players who spent money on their cash shop.”

They insisted that Blizzard didn’t care about harassment at all, they were just trying to protect their golden goose. After all, Blizzard had done nothing to curb the use of racial slurs.

”Wait till they realize their game is about slaughtering others just because of racial differences” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

[…]

”You can buy the n-word pass from the ingame store.”

“Wait, is it actually dead? What the fuck? It’s actually dead.”

When Classic first released, there was little no real concern about it cannibalising the playerbase of retail WoW – the games were totally different, and catered to different people. Burning Crusade Classic didn’t have that advantage. It was directly aimed at players who had enjoyed Classic, but who wanted to move on to Outland. There was a serious risk of splitting the community in two.

When Blizzard cloned players over to the BC servers, their Vanilla characters remained, and the Vanilla servers were never going anywhere – the company had been clear on that. But with everyone playing in BC, the Vanilla community simply disappeared. Since most players went on to BC without paying the $15 dollars for the character cloning service, their favourite characters were gone from Vanilla forever.

Folding Ideas compared World of Warcraft to a religion going through a major schism, with a more progressive branch (Retail) and a fundamentalist branch who desired a return to the old tradition (Classic). And here with BC Classic, the branch split again. Vanilla was left in the hands of ‘Classic Forevers’ who rejected expansions of any form, and chose to remain pure.

In those servers left behind, it was often hard to find more than a dozen max level characters online at once. They soon grew disdainful of the traitors who had abandoned Vanilla.

I wish there was more to say on this topic, but there isn’t. The vanilla servers have languished, largely untouched and unthought of ever since. While they are technically still there, and will be there for years to come, the experience of early wow is gone once again.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

”FOR THE HORDE!”

When it came to the Horde/Alliance split, very few servers had ever been equal. Often, one faction would vastly outnumbered the other. In the fifteen years since the game began, Blizzard had worked tirelessly to find a solution. Some ideas had worked, but all of them had come at a cost. Whether it was combining servers or splitting them up or developing systems that moved players seamlessly from one to another depending on the need, it always meant messing with the delicate ecosystems and communities of the game’s many ‘realms’.

Faction ratios were just some of the many problems Blizzard recreated in Classic. Racial abilities were much stronger when the game first came out, and certain classes were exclusive to one faction or the other. After many years of debate and investigation, it is generally agreed that the Alliance had an edge in PvE content, whereas the Horde pushed ahead in PvP. The two were different, but surprisingly balanced.

That all changed (LINKS TO REDDIT) with Burning Crusade.

”Even during Classic WoW, there are many arguments about which side is actually best. In the Burning Crusade however, the player base pretty much unanimously agrees that one side is better than the other.”

Without going into too much detail, it all came down to Blood Elves. They were the one Horde race that could play Paladins, which had been an Alliance-only class in Vanilla. To differentiate them, Horde Paladins got an ability called ‘Seal of Blood’, and Alliance got ‘Seal of Vengeance’. Combined with the overpowered racial ability ‘Arcane Torrent’, Blood Elf Paladins had a major PvP advantage. The Undead racial ‘Will of the Forsaken’ was equally overpowered, and nothing on the Alliance could compete with it. To make matters worse, BC introduced arenas which pitted players against one-another in groups of just two or three. In that setting, a small boost went much further.

This imbalance left a legacy that remains even now. The Horde still dominate high-end raiding and PvP on retail.

”For some, this radical asymmetry is the biggest scar of the Burning Crusade.”

Blizzard had no choice. When BC Classic came out, it brought this problem with it. Whether they wanted to or not, they couldn’t betray the spirit of the original, or incur the fury of the #NoChanges mob.

And so, as expected, the faction ratio slid inexorably toward the Horde. Their majority quickly grew from 53% to 62%. On PvP servers, the Horde simply had no one to fight against. Queues to get into battlegrounds and arenas got longer and longer, so players went out into the world for their fun, which usually meant ganking low level Alliance as they quested in the zones of Outland. In the face of these roaming death squads, those Alliance players either quit, switched to Horde (LINKS TO REDDIT), or fled to the safety of PvE realms, where they formed a majority of 65%. That just made the problem worse.

”Obviously not all horde are like this (LINKS TO REDDIT), but there’s soo many that seem to just try to do whatever they can to make alliance experience a frustrating experience. My last straw for me was leveling in Zang. I realized out of the past 3 hours I had played, about an hour of it was spent corpse running. I could never get alliance to come help. And every day it seemed like I saw less and less alliance. Finally after seeing a horde blockade around one of the towns, I just threw in the towel. Switched to a PVE server and never looked back.”

The end result was a lot of servers where one faction made up over 99% of the population.

“My server at the beginning (LINKS TO REDDIT) of phase 2 was healthy and strong pop with the most balanced h:a ratio at the time.

It’s like 5:1 ratio now and the alliance has basically all stopped playing, or left the server.”

In retail, Blizzard had fixed the problem with ‘Mercenary Mode’, a feature that magically swapped players to a race of the opposite faction to fill in gaps. It had never been around during BC, but Blizzard piloted it anyway. It was either meddle with the game, or let it die. Horde players were given cardboard masks with Alliance races painted on them.

”A lot of players aren’t happy with the idea of Mercenary Mode coming to Classic because it does nothing to fix the underlying issue.

The #NoChanges community saw Mercenary Mode as just the first step to destroying the greatness of BC. There were even calls to reboot the whole project. And with ‘Classic Classic’, we’ve come full circle.

If Classic starts solving ‘old’ problems with modern solutions, at what point will the two MMOs become indistinguishable?”

Some disagreed.

” You know, it seems like people seem to not get that there’s a HUGE gulf of QOL improvements that could be added to Classic and wouldn’t “make it retail”. This is a strawman at its best. You can like parts of Classic and, god forbid, parts of retail and it’s not binary.”

[…]

” I think people just look at the differences between classic and retail and assume anything that retail has that classic doesn’t is “retail” and bad.

The truth is that the problems with retail are numerous, but that not all things that changed are bad.”

Should Blizzard implement modern changes, or preserve the game in its original form, no matter how broken it may be? This debate has come to define the Classic community, and corrupts all discourse surrounding it. And as long as the developers keep trying to find a way forward without upsetting either side, they will be paralysed as well.

Glad that the classic wow community has devolved into the world largest trolley problem. (LINKS TO REDDIT) You can either not pull the lever and let the game run into the same problems that have been there since the original release or you can pull the lever and implement the fixes to these problems that came later in the games lifetime BUT someone will say its retail bullshit

In the days of Nostalrius, fans had one simple goal - they knew what they wanted, and everyone was on the same page. Their united effort was able to change the will of a billion dollar company.

But that is the past. Now everyone has a different idea of where the game should go. And so the problem remains; lots of the people are mean, and most of them are miserable, even the ones with digital deluxe editions.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

Legion

The most remarkable thing about Legion was that it was, for the most part, a success.

There is drama to be had, but it’s thin on the ground. This summary is mainly for non-players, or people who skipped Legion, so that we don’t have a two-year gap in the write-up between Warlords of Draenor and Battle for Azeroth (there will be PLENTY of drama there, I promise). If you just want the controversies, skip to the next section.

It began with a teaser trailer , showing Gul’dan (the only important guy from the last expansion) awakening Illidan (beloved and iconic antihero from Warcrcaft III and Burning Crusade). It generated a lot of hype.

Blizzard officially revealed their next expansion with a features trailer at Gamescom 2015, and then went into further detail with a cinematic and the usual presentations at Blizzcon a few months later. Like a beaten hound loyally returning to its master’s side, the community overflowed with excitement, and optimistic hope that this expansion would be better than the last.

After the mess that was Draenor, Legion had a simple premise. The biggest big bad in Warcraft history was back. Led by the fallen titan Sargeras, the infinite Burning Legion had tried multiple times to escape the Twisting Nether and conquer Azeroth, but had always been thwarted at the last moment. Now it had arrived for a full invasion. The heroes and nations of Azeroth had to do the impossible - defeat the Legion once and for all.

With the previous two expansions, Blizzard had done everything possible to avoid touching their existing lore. Now it seemed the shackles were off. Major changes were happening, major characters were dying. No one was safe. Everything was coming to its natural conclusion.

That resonated with players who had been around since Warcraft first started. Everyone wanted to see the final battle between the Titans and Sargeras. When Legion released in August 2016, the number of concurrent players hit the highest peak since the launch of Cataclysm – though the subscriptions immediately fell again, as had become tradition.

The expansion took place on the Broken Isle. It had always existed in the lore as a group of tiny islands, so Blizzard scaled it way up. Dalaran was copied (with a few improvements) into the skies above the new continent, and served as the major hub.

Players began with an all-out assault on the Broken Shore, where demons were pouring through into Azeroth. But the assault failed (www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE9HVy1vgws). Both faction leaders were killed. King Varian was succeeded by his son Anduin, and the troll Vol’Jin was replaced as Warchief by Sylvanas (with whom we will get VERY familiar in later write-ups).

There were five zones at launch, and players could complete them in any order they liked. Each held a magical item, vital in the fight against the Legion.

• The Norse-themed Stormheim, full of steep ravines and jagged rocks, a deliberate call back to the popular Howling Fjord of Wrath. Players helped WoW’s version of Odin defeat Helya, the goddess of the underworld.
• Tauren-focused Highmountain, with its scenic plateaus and snowy peaks, complete with a small city called Thunder Totem. Its story revolved around a dispute with the local Drogbar.
• Azsuna was a wet, murky zone brimming with Night Elf ruins and haunted by their spirits. The main enemy here were the Naga.
• The ancient groves of Val’Sharah played host to druid society, which had gathered around the world tree Shaladrassil. Its story focused on the Emerald Dream.
• Suramar was the stand out zone of Legion. This ancient capital of Night Elf civilisation had been protected from history by a huge magical barrier, which had only recently fallen. It was basically ‘Elf Venice’, and remains one of the most visually stunning cities in WoW – or any game. Since the Nightborne of Suramar were working against the Alliance and Horde, players could only explore the city with a disguise. Certain NPCs had the ability to see through it, and would voice their suspicions whenever the player got too close. This made navigating the city frustrating for many, and caused the NPC lines (which were repeated ad-nauseum) to gain meme status.

Each player joined a Class Order – a secret society where the most iconic lore characters of each class worked to repel the Legion. Each class got a separate ‘Order Hall’, a uniquely designed headquarters that no one else could reach, with its own story and mounts. The halls carried forward several aspects of garrisons, but lacked major conveniences like hearthstone points or auction houses, so players never spent too much time in them. The community loved the Class Orders, though some of the campaigns were better than others (LINKS TO REDDIT). Priests were particularly screwed over, and had to be rescued by the Paladin class hall in their own campaign. But some, like the Death Knight story, had repercussions that are still playing out today. Since every class had such a different experience, it was a good time to level alts.

Then there was perhaps the most well-received addition, the Demon Hunter class. With a dark aesthetic, a double jump, and fan-darling Illidan as their poster child, they became wildly popular. Players have been begging for demon hunters four years, and Legion was the perfect time to make them available.

The dungeons were good (and there were ten on release, an improvement over the previous expansions), and both of the first raids were excellent. The Nighthold ended with Gul’dan’s spectacular death.

Patch 7.1 brought with it a short raid and a fantastic remake of Karazhan, one of the game’s most popular raids (the new version was a dungeon). It also added to the story in Suramar.

Patch 7.2 began when the final General of the Legion, Kil’Jaeden, made his big move, and the armies of Azeroth pushed back against him. Players returned to the Broken Shore, where they gained Legionfall reputation through a mix of world quests, rare bosses, treasures, and story quests. There was also a new dungeon called Cathedral of Eternal Night, and a raid to pair with it, the Tomb of Sargeras. Players repelled the Legion and defeated Kil’Jaeden. At the end, Illidan opened the space between Azeroth and Argus, the fractured homeworld of the Legion. It became visible in the sky in every zone.

Patch 7.3 took the fight to Argus. Players boarded a Draenei spaceship and began their offensive, meeting with the Army of the Light (the new reputation) and working to take the Legion capital. Argus had three small zones, which players could navigate by moving their ship, the Vindicaar. They were Krokuun, Antoran Wastes and Mac’Aree. The latter, a reference to lead level designer Jesse McCree, was renamed to Eredath when he became accused of sexual harassment, but that’s a clusterfuck for another write-up.

Blizzard introduced Invasion Points, which were like world quests, but they teleported the player to small alternate worlds to sabotage the Legion. And of course, there was a dungeon and the big raid: Antorus the Burning Throne. Players worked with the Titans to trap Sargeras once and for all, putting a conclusive end to the Burning Legion. In the climactic final moments, Sargeras thrust his sword into Azeroth.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

Legion was a triumph.

”Legion is proof that a 12-year-old game can still find ways to innovate and improve itself, and it’s got the strongest storyline of any previous entry.”

Almost every media outlet praised Legion, with Gamespot declaring,

”Blizzard has proven it can still craft an MMO experience as well as–if not better–than anyone else.”

It is the only instalment since Wrath to gain more positive reviews the negative ones on Metacritic. Blizzard had taken a major gamble by killing Warlords of Draenor to give Legion a shot at success, and it paid off. To many, it was the best expansion ever – the culmination of everything that had come before it, and a fitting send-off. Indeed, it felt like we were seeing the end of World of Warcraft. And in hindsight, it may have been best if the game ended there, when we look at what was to come.

”The questing is more fun than ever before and now with a ton of voice-acting and cinematics, it just oozes good story. The artifacts are amazing and a ton of fun! And the fact you don’t need to level in particular order is just amazing!”

But it was not without flaws, or controversy. And if one thing should be obvious by now, it’s that the World of Warcraft community will always find something to complain about. There are the doubters, the cynics, and those who insists that Legion wasn’t that good at all, it didn’t deserve the praise, but “being an okay expansion sandwiched between two dumpster fires will have that effect on people.”

They may have a point. While Legion has carved itself into the history of wow as a golden age, it benefits from hindsight. Most of its problems were fixed by the time its final patch released. The early days were far from perfect.

”Every expansion has faults. None are perfect. Legion just had, what I feel, are fewer faults than most others.”

Let’s have a look for ourselves.

Grinding and Gambling

One of the big features of Legion was ‘Artefact Weapons’. Every class got a weapon for each specialisation, which they gained through a unique story mission. A lot of these weapons were lore-significant, so players were eager to get their hands on them. There were various appearances you could mix and match for each weapon too, and these were all obtained in different ways.

Artefact power (AP) was best understood as a way to continue levelling, after levelling was done. Each weapon had its own progression system, with unlockable abilities and levels. This was all done through AP. Some of these abilities were woefully unbalanced, but that’s what players loved about them. Gone were the tiny stat increases and passive bonuses of previous expansions - here was max level progression that felt consequential. Some abilities made getting around more convenient, some completely changed the gameplay, and some were so good that they were made permanent at the end of the expansion. Long story short, AP was seriously important.

Unfortunately, it was incredibly grindy.

”There was an overwhelming amount (LINKS TO REDDIT) of trivial shit thrown at you that anyone not completely hardcore was daunted.”

Unlocking all of the abilities for just one weapon took weeks of work, and every class had at least three. The early traits came thick and fast, before slowing to an insufferable crawl. And if you chose the wrong weapon, you were shit out of luck. Though perhaps the worst part of AP was that it technically never ended. You could keep levelling up your artefact weapon forever. Of course the benefits were slim, but completionist players nonetheless felt the pressure.

”I actually quit this week because of it, I can’t take it anymore” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

AP is often attributed with driving away or burning out most of the players who returned at the start of the expansion.

”I log on for an hour, get burned out because I can’t do much other than daily quests, get bored, then boot up steam.”

[…]

”Being on a gear treadmill (LINKS TO REDDIT) has been part of WoW for over a decade. Yet, this neck grind just feels so much worse. I look forward to getting gear; I’m motivated to do content for it. AP, on the other hand, just feels lethargic and tedious.”

The system also did much to undo the alt-friendliness of Class Orders, by incentivising players to invest time in a single character. If you switched, you had to start from zero every time.

”It really hurts playing alts for me… Everytime an alt gains AP that’s Ap not going to my main, who already needs every ounce of power he can get because Shaman.

Even worse with low level alts… When I have time to play I have to think about not just leveling up… But leveling through Legion, getting the weapons, getting AP, getting gear…”

Another major issue was the overuse of RNG mechanics – random chance – particularly when it came to legendary item drops. Legendaries could drop during almost any max-level content, and came with unique abilities. Players were guaranteed to get the first few quickly, but the drop rate lowered with each legendary they obtained. The game gave no indication when players might get a legendary that was necessary to play competitively. Since there was no clear connection between work and reward, some felt like they were slaving away for nothing.

“You were better off rerolling your entire character in order to get the legendaries you need, and your class/spec might be completely unviable without it.” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

Blizzard gradually made it easier to gain AP, and by the final patch, the grind was removed entirely. They also created a vendor for legendary items. That did nothing to bring back lost players, but it did wonders for the reputation of Legion going forward.

”People somehow forgot that legion was a hot mess until the last patches trivialized all of its poorly received systems with catch up.” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

Unfortunately, many unpopular systems from Warlords made it into Legion (like the garrison mission table) and even more of the unpopular systems from early Legion made it into the next expansion. But that’s a story for another post.

”Legion was the beginning (LINKS TO REDDIT) of all the awful design philosophy shifts that people have been complaining about ever since.”

Tentacle Boy Just Won’t Go Down

As the general of the Burning Legion, it’s reasonable that Kil’Jaeden would be a difficult enemy to kill. But what resulted was one of the most unforgiving, brutal bosses in the history of the game, with zero margin for error. It was a fight riddled with bugs and design issues, to the point where it was impossible for even the top guilds in the world - until Blizzard tweaked it. To some, that made him the best boss ever. To others he was the worst. Entire guilds disbanded over Kil’Jaeden, such was the trauma of smacking over and over into a brick wall without making the slightest progress.

”We literally couldn’t get more than a few minutes into the fight.”

At first, only one guild was able to defeat him – Method. Here are some quotes from them.

”…after a butt load of nerfs it became manageable. It’s a very challenging fight, maybe the hardest one I’ve done in my 11 years of raiding.”

[…]

”Overall I consider it as the hardest boss ever done (in terms of mechanics).”

On the highest difficulty, every small advantage was vital. His knockbacks pushed players off his platform to their deaths. Every class had some ability to overcome it, with the sole exception of priests. And when they died, the fight failed. But Goblins could be priests, and they came with a racial ability that dealt with the knockback. When the Tomb of Sargeras released, almost all top Alliance raiding guilds had already switched to Horde, but the final holdouts were forced to bite the bullet just for a chance to beat Kil’Jaeden. (LINKS TO REDDIT)

On one server, he wasn’t killed on mythic difficulty until three years later.

Really though, the fact that these were the worst complaints about Legion should tell you how good it was. It was a fantastic time to be a World of Warcraft player. But there were storm clouds on the horizon. The two expansions that followed would reduce the game to its lowest ebb, leave its playerbase a weathered and self-hating shade of its former self, and bring Blizzard to ruin.

Until next time.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

Then there was the issue of isolation.

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.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

The Inflation Crisis and the WoW Token

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.

Once Blizzard allowed players to redeem tokens for Battle.net balance, however, there was basically no limit to how many tokens players needed. Rich players began dumping their stashes, and with so many more people trying to sell than buy, the value of gold relative to dollars plunged, and the gold price of the tokens started skyrocketing.”

The WoW token had four aims:

1. To motivate dedicated players to keep playing by allowing them to pay their subscription fee in gold
2. To give casual or new players an avenue into the economy by letting them buy gold through legitimate means
3. To generate more profit from their shrinking player base
4. 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.

Here are a few comments from the Youtube trailer

“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.

Internet angry-man Asmongold had this to say.

“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.”

To clarify, he is referring to the ‘boost’ economy, in which groups of highly skilled and geared players escort other players through end-game content or pvp so they can get the rewards, in exchange for gold. Since the creation of the WoW token, the black market has gradually transitioned away from selling gold and toward selling these boosts.

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.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

How to Monetise Fun

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.”

[…]

“Even though I hate levelling, I wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything.”

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.

“Getting a boost from level 1 to 90 is like learning how to swim by jumping off a diving board, straight into the deep end. As a newly minted level 90, I expected to see a special quest marker or notification that pointed me in the direction of adventure. There wasn’t one.”

“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.”

When asked about the steep price of the boost, Blizzard declared that their motivations were not capitalistic – far from it. They only cared about the game.

“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)?”

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

More Like Trashran

It was designed as a small island zone, rocky and covered in ruins, just off the coast of Tanaan Jungle. Players from either faction would meet in the middle and battle it out for rewards. The controversial hubs of Warspear and Stormshield perched on either end – close to the PvP action, but separate from it.

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.

The announcements came in February 2015.

“In terms of fresh, repeatable content to keep players invested, there was virtually nothing.”

It would be an understatement to say that players were upset.

“That video felt offensively underwhelming for a full content patch.” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

[…]

“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.

What. The. Flying. Fuck.”

So why did this happen?

According to Blizzard, they had always given ‘minor’ patches a second number. So instead of being patch 6.1, Garrisons would have been patch 6.05. For whatever reason, they chose to change that with WoD, perhaps because they were falling behind on their first major patch.

“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.

“Note that this is the last quarter that we plan to provide the subscriber number as there are other metrics that are better indicators of the overall Blizzard business performance,”

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.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

The Pathfinder Achievement

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,

”Sometimes we’ve had four patches in a cycle, sometimes we’ve had three, obviously here we’re looking at two big patches with 6.1 and 6.2”

[The community responded]( mmo-champion.com/…/1811060-Cory-Stockton-(Mumper) as you might expect.

“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.

“I still don’t understand the deal with Shattrath (LINKS TO REDDIT) even now at this point in the expansion.

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.”

There were more than a few players who left the game entirely due to it.

“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.”

This wasn’t a one-sided issue. Many players, such as the user ‘Steveosizzle’, defended the decision.

“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.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

“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.

She gets a cameo in the one after that, however, when it is revealed that time has sped up on Draenor, thirty years have passed there, and Yrel is now ruling the continent as some kind of Holy Hitler. Despite how major that sounds, it is never expanded upon in much detail.

Half-finished Stories – The Warlords

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.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

Kilrogg becomes a demonic follower of Gul’dan and becomes an early boss in Hellfire Citadel. The dude is basically an extra in his own expansion.

“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.

#Half-finished Stories – Garrosh and Thrall

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.”

#The Legacy of Draenor

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.”

This sentiment is echoed in an article on Gameskinny:

“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.”

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

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.

All for it to turn out to be a failure.” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

A Final Note

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.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

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.”

[…]

”Gameplay shouldn’t be something you feel you have to do; it should be something you want to do. And to me, daily quests are never something I want to do.”

[…]

”Dailies are the worst form of content, ever.”

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.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

Farmville and Pokemon

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.

In his thread titled ‘Mists of Pandaria – Made for Children?’, one user writes:

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.

”I can’t have my own little humanling running around, punching squirrels in the face!”

[…]

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.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

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 had a powerful effect on the community. In the history of World of Warcraft, no pairing, before or since, has ever provoked such an astronomical amount of smut.

The problems here were manifold. Not only was Anduin a teenager, Wrathion was a baby. He had been born during one of Cataclysm’s quests. There was a lot of criticism of this ship, considering neither member was technically ‘legal’.

mmo-champion.com/…/1825617-Wrathduin-(Anduin-Wrat…

”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

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

Things start to get better

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.

”Does Blizz just expect us to keep killing the same bosses week after week for this length of time? It seems really ridiculous. The game is getting so boring when it’s just the same thing week after week for months on end.”

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…”

[…]

”I came into padaria wanting to hate it. (LINKS TO REDDIT) But honestly it was one of my favourite expansions.”

[…]

”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.

But I’m a massive weeb, which probably helps.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

I somehow missed this one! I remember there being a ton of drama surrounding the wedding pack back when it came out, but it was more surrounding the bugs and some features not being fulfilled, fulfilled poorly, or the overall angst that surrounds basic game content that probably ought to just be included in the game you boughtinstead getting segmented off into multiple pricey packs or expansions for additional purchases.

This one is downright nutty. I really can’t even imagine what they were thinking.

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

The Stabbings, Shootings and Bombings

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’.

This wasn’t the first instance of violence attributed to WoW. There was the 2006 suicide of Zhang Xiaoyi (read Part 1 for more on this), the 2010 rape and murder of Kimberly Proctor, and another instance that same year in which a man choked out his mother, threw his son, and was shot in the head by his grandfather during a drunken World of Warcraft marathon.

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.

In a tragic twist of fate, one of the teenagers who had escaped Breivik on the island had once played World of Warcraft with him. Løtuft had survived by hiding behind a tree for an hour and a half.

“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.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

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.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

I do! As soon as time allows I’ll get the others up.

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

Indeed, while the community was divided over Karatechop, they were united in their anger against blizzard.

It’s easy to be very holier-than-thou and say YOU wouldn’t have used it, but I think past history shows that a vast majority of players would have not only used it, but used it to a much greater degree.

Blizzard screwed up.

Blizzard got embarrassed by their screwup

Blizzard overreacted by blanket-banning an entire guild, most of which had nothing to do with the screwup

Blizzard tried to cover up their over-reaction by purging all references to it from every site that they have sway over.

Karatechop didn’t seem to mind the condemnation. In another interview, he said this:

"We never meant to upset people, anyone, by personal gain of loot or achievements. That’s never how TMF rolled. It was simply a ridiculous amount of fun. That’s all.

"I cheated. I know this. The item said ‘Cheater.’ I justified it, to be sure, and it was an easy thing to find justification for.

However, it didn’t stop at condemnation. You probably know enough about the WoW forums by now – it never stops there. Karatechop received enormous amounts of abuse online, personal attacks, and threats.

Martin Fury is still visible on a number of wow databases. It’s the lowest-numbered item in the game. Its use has been changed to instantly kill the wearer, to prevent the same mistake from ever happening again.

As for Karatechop, perhaps it was worth losing his account. He remains one of WoW’s most infamous users, a figure of controversy even years later (LINKS TO REDDIT).

The Ensidia Raid Scandal

On 8 December 2009, Blizzard released the final patch of the expansion: Fall of the Lich King. The day approached with frantic excitement, as the first players entered Icecrown Citadel. Its spire had loomed in the distance for the entire expansion, and loomed large in the lore of Warcraft going back a decade. Its final boss was the titular Lich King himself.

When they first come out, bosses can take days or sometimes weeks for the best players in the world to take down. But once they do, the encounters are gradually toned down to give more causal players a chance. The Lich King first fell on 3rd February 2010, and the coveted world-first title went to a guild called Ensidia.

And then it was taken away again.

Blizzard’s design team would often watch (invisible and from afar) as guilds took down bosses for the first time, to make sure everything went to plan. Whatever they saw with Ensidia, it clearly upset them. They come to the conclusion that the guild had cheated. All of the members of the group were banned for three days, and they were stripped of the achievements and loot from the fight. Since they couldn’t complete the Raid that week, they were unable to unlock the Heroic (hard mode) version of the raid the following week, putting them firmly behind their competition. The decision proved immediately controversial.

So what had Ensidia done wrong?

Blizzard’s official reason for the ban was, “Abuse of in-game mechanics or glitches with intent to exploit or cheat in World of Warcraft.” If that seems vague, let me explain.

The problem came down to a Rogue named Naihiko, who used Saronite Bombs throughout the fight. Saronite Bombs were a kind of grenade item that helped guilds do little more damage. However in this case, the bombs caused the fight to glitch. As you progressed through the Lich King’s stages, the arena was meant to get gradually smaller, giving players less and less room to move. If you watch this tutorial, you’ll see the platform shrink around 3:05, and again at 5:15. During the final phase, the Saronite Bombs caused the stage to glitch back to its larger size, making the fight easier.

Blizzard claimed that the raid group knew about this glitch and exploited it. They deliberately brought the Lich King to the edge of the platform to make him easier to defeat. And that once the platform glitched, they should have stopped their playthrough and reported it.

The members of Ensidia spoke out extensively about the perceived unfairness of this ban. Their website is long gone now, but I’ve dug up a copy here. Almost all of the banned members made their own responses, some more polite than others. Here they are, from Poptisse, Ekyu, Muqq. Kungen, Tjani, Jinxarn, and Eoy.

Ekyo’s post is the longest and most coherent of the bunch, and reads a lot like a HobbyDrama post itself.

The entire progress on this was pretty chaotic due to 10 people actually knowing what to do and the others going with the flow.

Ekyo said “…we realized something was actually wrong with the floor respawning. […] We didn’t actually know what was causing it and we actually had one […] try without it.

Now some will say that seeing this bug we should have stopped and wait for an hotfix before proceeding for a kill. But would anyone actually have done that really ? Not only would you waste tries in the meantime, but what if another guild killed it before you. We are talking about a race against other people there after all. And what proof do we have that the dev team didn’t actually find out this bug BECAUSE we happened to trigger it

Muqq was kind enough to include a full copy of the letter he received from Blizzard. Among other things, it said, “It is with regret that we take this type of action, but it is in the best interests of the World of Warcraft community as a whole, and for the integrity of the game. The use of these items bypassed a major portion of the encounter, significantly reducing the difficulty in a clear abuse of game mechanics.”

The rest of Muqq’s post is a ‘leaving note’ of sorts, in which he promises to quit World of Warcraft when his month’s subscription runs out. “Anyway, back to the subject. This was as good time as any to drop this game and move on. Had been considering it for a while, and I always said to Buzzkill and the gang that I was just waiting for the sign. A sign from heaven to guide me on my way. Today, I received it.” It gradually gets angrier and angrier from there. It’s quite a read, honestly. And it caused a stir of its own.

“the way Muqq has ranted doesn’t put Ensidia or himself in a good light.” One player commented. “He seems to think he’s the end-all and be-all of WoW and that him quitting will end this game. I’m sorry chester, but you’re a nobody outside the game and you’re not a puppetmaster. He could have taken the high road and at least constructively posted something when he didn’t agree with the suspension, but this rant is embarrassing.

Finally, Dear Blizzard.

Fix your goddamn buggy bullshit half-assed encounters. The amount of time and effort we dedicated to get through Wrath of the Lich king and Icecrown to see this guy die and take a turn at Arthas is just sick. To finally see him die only to have the ENTIRE raid banned is simply an insult. It’s cheap enough to make a bugged fucking encounter, but to ban people when they do not know what’s causing the bugs is just a fucking joke.

Tjani claimed, “ I have never before felt so brutally insulted without being able to defend myself.” Most of his post is bullet-pointed dismissals of the points held against him.

Kungen’s contribution was a list of all the bugs from WoW’s raid bosses, and how they could be exploited. His point was that these were the rule in WoW, not the exception.

What I’m trying to say is that EVERY SINGLE end boss since Vanilla has been bugged. Sometimes it has made the boss harder, sometimes easier. But it’s something all the top guilds during these periods have been dealing with the same way. All of us were still pushing to kill it first. We’re not the ones who control these things. We play the game to advance and to kill bosses for loot and glory. While Blizzard even have a team that get paid to test these bosses and we get punished because they can’t do their job?

I recommend going through the pages I linked, especially if you enjoy seeing some vintage, finely aged rageposting.

The question of Ensidia’s guilt or innocence became public discourse. Numerous sites debated the scandal.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

Every argument, every scrap of information was taken into account. There was a truly wide range of takes, from ‘the ban was completely unwarranted’ to ‘I’m real happy. Even if this doesn’t affect me directly, I must say I am quite satisfied with what blizzard has done.’

Most players took Ensidia’s side, arguing that Blizzard should have fixed the bug before releasing the raid, that Ensidia didn’t know they were breaking any rules, and that this was all very unfair.

It’s standard at high-end for rogues to use the bombs, and Ensidia had no way of being able to tell this was an exploit, since they had no way of knowing what was supposed to happen. The ban is unfair, taking away the achieves is unfair, and Blizz should have to take it back with a lot of egg on their faces.

However a lot of users were skeptical (LINKS TO REDIT) of all this. During previous raids, they had also gotten a world first by ‘accidentally’ exploiting glitches. It seemed to be a running habit of theirs. It had happened with C’thun, the final boss of Ahn’Qiraj. It had happened with Kael’Thas, the final boss of Tempest Keep. It had happened with Yogg-Saron, the final boss of Ulduar, and Blizzard had even intervened to reset a fight with Illidan (final boss of Black Temple) and warned them to do it again without cheating. This all seemed like one step too far, and the cries of victimhood were falling on deaf ears. Ensidia was finally receiving their comeuppance and they were glad to see it.

Remember, these are the people who managed to figure out that summoning a disgusting oozeling 16 times in a row would break the C’thun fight. They’re the ones who figured out how to use Divine Intervention to cut half of Lady Vashj’s health off. They’re the ones who figured out that sychronizing JoLs allowed them to get twice as much healing on Firefighter. And now we’re supposed to think that they didn’t figure this out, when all the evidence points to them knowing something?

If you’re interested in learning more about Ensidia and Nilihum (their old guild name), someone wrote up an absolutely absurdly long essay on the dynamics of the group.

The Dungeon Finder

Releasing on the same day as Icecrown Citadel was the new ‘Dungeon Finder’ feature. Players could queue up for any dungeon based on their level and role, be randomly assigned with other players from any server, and would be instantly teleported inside the dungeon.

Prior to this, players would have to either [A] form groups with members of their guild, or [B] use regional/city chats to cobble groups together. The Dungeon Finder was envisioned as a massive improvement in speed, convenience and accessibility – and it was. To sweeten the deal, Blizzard introduced daily bonuses for using the Dungeon Finder.

But it was not without controversy.

Grouping up for dungeons was a large part of the WoW experience – it was how communities formed. If a player was a dick, he would gain a reputation on his server and no one would work with him. That kept people on their good behaviour (some of the time, at least). But the Dungeon Finder effectively eliminated consequences. You would rarely see other players from your own server. Even if you did, you were in the dungeon by the time you had the chance to do anything. No one expected the Dungeon Finder to have such an enormous impact on the culture of the game – no one even realised it was happening until long after the fact.

On top of that, the Dungeon Finder was so convenient that it made questing obsolete. A majority of players didn’t bother levelling through the game’s zones anymore, because dungeons were quicker, so the game-world became a lot emptier, which had already been a problem ever since flying was introduced in Burning Crusade.

At the time of its release, Dungeon Finder was actually quite popular. It was seen mainly as a tool for casuals, since established guilds were hesitant to move away from the old system. But over time, players would pin-point the Dungeon Finder as the harbinger of WoW’s decline. Yet others point to it as a sign of WoW adjusting to the convenience of modern gaming.

Here’s an example of that criticism.

The bottom line is all these features changed the game from vanilla to BFA so much that it’s undistinguishable. Have they made it better? For me - hell, no. I would always prefer a game with social interaction and memorable stories than a “massively multiplayer” game that most play without saying a word in 10 years judging by modern experience in guilds and dungeons. Has it become better for players who enjoy playing like this? Probably, so good luck to them if they can’t tell shit from good.

Here’s a pro-Dungeon Finder view.

I see a lot of people crying that the dungeon finder ruined WoW. Not at all. Rossi is right that the dungeon finder vastly improved the accessibility of 5 mans and later raids and made “quick” dungeons possible, but at the end of the day you zoned back out to your own server. You existed in the same world as always and there were plenty of other server-specific things to do with the folks in your own neighborhood. Which you got to pick, by the way.

And another.

Hands-down the best thing about the dungeon finder is that you can get on with doing other stuff whilst you’re queued. Sitting around in Org/SW spamming that you were looking for a group kinda sucked a lot of the fun out of the game

This isn’t as dramatic or scandalous as the other items in this post, but it’s something worth talking about. It still divides fans to this day.

While we’re here, let’s talk about the controversial addon that lost much of its popularity with the release of Dungeon Finder.

GearScore was a player-made addon (like a mod) that collected together all of a player’s statistics and boiled them down into a number. The idea was that instead of carefully examining other players to decide whether they were good enough to join a raid or dungeon, you could simply look at their GearScore instead. And they were pretty hard to fake, so players trusted them.

You might be asking where the drama is here.

On some servers, every single ‘pug’ (a group put together by players) would expect a GearScore of over a certain number. Everything else about you was tossed out of the window and only that number mattered. Your skills and experience were irrelevant. A player levelling/gearing up an alt (a separate character from their main character) might struggle to get into groups, despite being perfectly competent. And unlike ilvl (a system built into WoW which gave a number based on the quality of a person’s gear), GearScore changed based on how well a player’s gear complemented their Class and Spec.

As GearScore’s website said:

GearScore represents the maximum potential for a player to perform. The higher your GearScore the higher your potential to heal/dps/tank. Remember however, that is is up to the player’s skill to match that potential.

It was never a ‘scandal’, exactly, but it was always divisive. It took a lot of players by surprise (LINKS TO REDDIT) and they weren’t fond of the idea.

The bottom line though is gear score doesnt mean jack. All it can be and should be used for is for a basic idea of were the player has been based on the gear they have. It tells you nothing else. I cant tell you if they died on every pull spent every boss fight face planted for 99% of the fight or paid a guild to carry them and gear them.

However there are those who supported it.

As far as my stance on gearscore is concerned I’m all for it. It does really help in building >pugs my logic is: If you have determination you get pre-raiding gear if you get pre-raiding gear you can get into first tier raids if you can get into first tier raids you can go into further raids which ends up in you getting a good gearscore

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

Ultimately, I don’t think anyone misses it.

Community gating in any form should be frowned upon and broke ASAP. Gearscore in wrath is a prime example.

The Sparkle Pony

During the beta for Wrath of the Lich King, players eagerly dived through the game files in search of anything spicy. Hints at the story, patch content, that sort of thing. Blizzard have always done their best to disguise anything important, with mixed results.

It was through this method that players discovered a heading labelled ‘Paid Character Customisation’. There were whispers that Blizzard might be introducing microtransactions into World of Warcraft, but these were quickly dismissed. After all, it was a subscription-based game. Players paid full price for each expansion, on top of a monthly fee, specifically to avoid the ads and in-game shops that were beginning to plague the free-to-play genre. The mere idea of adding microtransactions was so audacious, no one could believe it at first.

But this was Blizzard. They had long forgotten what shame felt like.

At Blizzcon 2008, WoW’s lead producer J. Allen Brack revealed exactly what ‘Paid Character Customisation’ was. By putting down cash, players could change the way their character looked, in a manner similar to the in-game barber shops (which run on in-game gold). There was no inherent reason why Blizzard had to charge for this – it didn’t cost them a penny to change how a character looked. It was purely a profit-driven exercise. Many players were (rightly) worried where this could lead. If WoW could sell character appearances, what was stopping them selling mounts or gear?

Blizzard had always had an online store. It sold books, merchandise and WoW subscription cards – that sort of thing. But in November 2009, new products were added which whipped the community into a drama. These were the Pandaren Monkand Lil’KT. They were pets – non-functional NPCs that follow the player around. And at $10 each, they weren’t cheap either. To smooth things over, Blizzard announced they would donate 50% of the profits of the Pandaren Monk to the Make-A-Wish foundation (a scheme they quietly ended a month later).

That thread can be viewed here. The most obvious thing is that most of the comments were positive. Most people saw it as harmless. For the most part, the talk of slippery slopes was hand-waved away. After all, it was for charity!

These are companion pets… they have no effect other than a status symbol. Not really that different from shelling out $10 extra for a collector’s edition of an xpac (getting you an exclusive pet).

Here’s another post made in response to complaints that Blizzard were taking this too far.

Since when did pets and mounts become game breaking items? If people want to spend money on this stuff let them what right do you have to say how people spend their own money? Fair enough if it was some kind of game breaking item (eg legendary item or whatever) but its not it’s a mount… I could just as easily argue “Oh my god Blizzard are selling WoW Mousemats! How long till they start selling epics?”

They would come to rue those words.

Thank you for spending precious production time on money grabs instead of content which I’m already paying $15 a month for!

Said one user, to which another responded: “They’re a business, and are in business to make money.”

On 15th April 2010, a new $10 pet was added to the store. And more importantly, a mount called the Celestial Steed. For many, this is where Blizzard had crossed the line.

It’s hard to convey to a non-player how significant mounts were to the people who collected them (which was most players). There were some mounts you could get cheaply and easily, some you could only get through in-game events or seasonal quests, some through achievements, some through PvP, some through reputations (usually by completing daily quests for weeks).

But the rarest and most prestigious mounts of all came from drops. Each expansion usually had one mount you could get by killing an incredibly rare enemy that only spawned very irregularly, such as the Time Lost Proto Drake, and usually the final boss of each raid had a microscopic chance of dropping a mount too (in some cases we’re talking a drop rate of 0.1% or less). Players would work for years to get their hands on one. I know people who ran through a raid every week for over a decade in the hope of getting The Ashes of A’lar or Invincible’s Reins. What I’m trying to say is that mounts were a huge part of the game, massive status symbols, and were often the motivator that kept people playing.

Pets were negligible, but now Blizzard was selling something integral to World of Warcraft. And at what cost? The price tag of $25 would have been high in a free to play game, for what amounted to an art asset. In WoW, it drew shocked reactions from every corner. It didn’t help that the Celestial Steed was absolutely fucking fabulous, so naturally everybody wanted it.

Downloadable content is something which has worried gamers for a long time. There has been examples of developers charging for content that’s already on the disc, and allegations of some companies deliberately removing content so they can charge a premium for it post release. But for all the overpriced horse armor and expensive map packs out there, Blizzard’s latest offering on their online store really takes the biscuit.

After some searching, I was able to track down the announcement thread.

The response from Palisade is probably the most coherent:

I think it is extremely unfortunate that we are starting to see F2P (Free To Play) microtransactions in a game that we already pay a service fee for, not to mention the upfront costs of purchases the base retail game and its following expansion packs. 2009/2010 is certainly the era of DLC. Quite frankly I think any game or service that requires upfront retail costs as well as perpetual service fees to use the service should not include microtransactions or paid downloadable content. Period.

How long have some us been playing and paying for your product. Those who have been here for years have shelled out an insane amount of money to play a “video game”. While I think server transfer fees and the such are a little expensive, I can understand the need for such a service and why it should cost. But for actual in-game content, there is no excuse for paid DLC. You might as well promote purchasing RMT gold, because that’s essentially same mentality you are promoting here. Give us your money, get something in game.

As a Blizzard follower since Warcraft: Orcs & Humans back in the day, this company sure has changed a lot. Customer loyalty has been replaced with corporate greed. It’s unfortunate.

But this was a controversy with two sides. That forum thread is full of players excitedly talking about buying the mount. And within three hours of the Celestial Speed’s debut, it had already generated $3.5 million in revenue. They became immediately visible around the game world and glittered in their dozens in the skies above Dalaran.

The mount you rode said a lot about you. It was your way of showing off your accomplishments to the people on your server. It might set you apart as a great raider, a distinguished PvP-er, a passionate roleplayer, or a fanatical quester.

But what did the Celestial Steed say about you?

According to some, it said you were a gullible fool, easily parted with your money.

“One by one they are systamatically putting a dollar price tag on what previously you obtained through playing the game, through skill, there is no achievement and no skill in paying money, there is no challenge won buy pulling out your wallet.”

This sentiment echoed around the internet, with one Kotaku commenter saying, “umm no thanks… i appreciate cool mounts and pets… but not for real money. gotta earn that stuff in-game or its not cool.”

The communitystarted derisively calling them ‘Sparkle Ponies’, sharing memes about My Little Pony, and coming up with various other ways of shaming anyone who bought the mount. Those buyers responded with comics and memes of their own.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

For Blizzard, this was the start (and nowhere near the end) of their gradual decline in the public perception. People started to see them as money-grubbing and exploitative of their faithful audience – which they were. Much of this monetisation was blamed on the influence of Bobby Kotick’s activision, who controversially merged with Blizzard in 2008.

The message this sends to the business minded portion of the gaming industry is disappointing at best and alarming at worst - gamers don’t want good content, instead they’ll elect for anything shiny, a trend which seems especially apparent in the MMO genre. Why would the makers of World of Warcraft ever want to push the creative boundaries when something like this four-legged waste of space allows them to make so much money?

The biggest concern for most fans was that the Celestial Steed had proven so profitable, it guaranteed Blizzard would try something like it again. And they did. As of right now, there are no less than 24 mounts available to buy, each for a similarly high fee.

I won’t buy and I encourage other players not to buy.

You’re actually hurting the future of the game if you support this.

With this stuff taking off the way that it is, it won’t be long before Blizzard starts charging for things that carry an in-game advantage.

But we’ll be returning to the store during the Warlords of Draenor write-up, so I’ll leave this topic here.

The Real ID Controversy

Out of all the scandals to afflict WoW during Wrath of the Lich King, by far the biggest concerned Blizzard’s Real ID system. Basically, it was an optional feature which attached your real name to your account. In addition to befriending other characters, you could become Real ID friends with other players, and could communicate with them no matter what character they were playing, or what Blizzard game they were on.

Real ID friends would appear to you under their real names, would be able to see each other’s entire Real ID friends lists, and would see exactly what each other were playing, and where, at all times. The system was gradually upgraded so that two Real ID friends could enter a party and play together, regardless of what server they were on, as long as they were both playing the same faction.

So far, so good, right?

Well on 6th July 2010, Blizzard announced plans to integrate Real ID into the World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo forums. Players would appear – to everyone – under their real names. The idea was that if Blizzard stripped away the anonymity, it would discourage ‘flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness gone wild’.

“Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before,”

If you’ve been reading my other write-ups on WoW, you’ll have an idea of what to expect from World of Warcraft’s forums at this point. They’re absolute hives of discrimination, doxxing, abuse, and harassment, and it is perhaps their saving grace that all users are shielded from real-life targeting by their character personas.

You can imagine the reaction to this announcement, but I’ll outline it for you anyway.

People lost their fucking minds.

I’ve dug up the main thread for you, which stretches out into literally thousands of pages. But if that’s not enough, don’t worry. The conversation didn’t end there. It overflowed onto every fan site, every forum, and every server of the game. People were genuinely terrified of Blizzard attaching their names to all future forum posts, and perhaps even worse, all past forum posts too. To those who had participated in scummy behaviour, their names – and real-life reputations – would be destroyed. To those who had been the victims of scummy behaviour, their very safety was at risk.

”I’ll just stop posting on the official forums,” posted one person, “When someone googles my name they get me as the first hit. I really don’t want some overzealous HR toady taking me out of consideration because my name is also associated with an MMO. It has a negative connotation for the majority of the corporate world and I certainly don’t want to have a game hurt my ability to provide for my family.”

There were those with valid reasons to want to keep their names hidden. Some women or ethnic minorities worried about being the victims of discrimination. Others had more specific issues:

I’m in witness protection for testifying in a trial that sent a man to death, and his family swore to send me to my death too, so I will be deleting every single post I’ve ever made in FEAR for MY VERY LIFE.

Everyone knew it would be a massively consequential change. As Susana Polo of themarysue.com put it:

This has been a discussion we’ve been long due to have. The Internet is at a crossroads right now, with the Facebook argument that all personal data is more or less public nowadays coaxing us towards one path and the mootean argument that anonymity is essential to online discourse coaxing us towards the other.

In a demonstration of confidence in the new system, Blizzard employee Bashiok revealed his name in the forums – Micah Whipple. That thread was never preserved, but we know from articles that users immediately responded by posting enormous amounts of personal information about him, including his phone number, address, and the names of all his relatives. Bashiok received a shower of death-threats and abuse. What’s worse, some of the information first posted about him was incorrect, which resulted in the possibility that a totally random person was harassed because of this – and that was blamed on Whipple too. His attempt to endorse Real ID had come crashing down upon him with such ferocity that it took on a life of its own and became a news story in itself.

There was blood in the water. In order to fully drive home how easily this real-name system could be manipulated, forum users began to doxx every Blizzard employee they could find. This information was collected and categorised for easy access. I recommend you spend a few minutes just scrolling through that site, because it’s difficult for me to explain how horrifying this all was.

In hindsight, it’s possible that these kinds of tactics were necessary to make the risks clear to Blizzard. The question has been tackled numerous times.

However there were those who spoke out in favour of the change. Nicholas Deleon of techchrunch.com dismissed player concerns.

Why does your boss give a darn what you do on your own time—provided it doesn’t impair your ability to produce widgets while on the clock? Is it really so detrimental to your social standing to be seen asking where to find a certain mob, or reporting a bug in the new five-man dungeon? What planet do you people live on that this is a big deal?

And let’s not forget the fact that we live online nowadays, and that many of you claiming “INVASION OF PRIVACY~!”, I’m sorry, don’t have a leg to stand on. How many of you have Twitter or Facebook accounts? How many times does Twitter have to suffer a massive security breach before you say, “Hmm, shouldn’t be there”? How many of you post photos of you and yours on Facebook for the whole world to see—unless, of course, you take the massively pro-active step of locking your account down?

Do you really think 4Chan (or any other group, or person) is going to get away with harassing people who post on the new forums, a common complaint I’ve seen? “Now people will annoy me in real life!” That sounds like a one-way ticket to a lawsuit, courtesy of Activision Blizzard. Just because your name is “out there” doesn’t mean people are allowed to threaten you. Surely you recognize this?

Another proponent of Real ID in Wow’s forums was Krystian Majewski. In his blog, she wrote:

Maintaining a community where the only way to prevent people from physically assaulting is each other is to put everybody under a witness protection program doesn’t seam like a healthy thing to do. If real-life stalking and verbal abuse is indeed such a big problem, maybe we should start thinking about limiting user interaction in WoW in general.

It seems like a missed opportunity. Implementing Real ID in a large forum such as the WoW would have been a great test to test the Greater Internet Fuckward Theory. A lot of the protesters argued that it wouldn’t improve the post quality. On the other side, I think we shouldn’t underestimate the role of anonymity plays in ALL the mentioned problems.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

Majewski’s main point seemed to be that using real names on the Starcraft forums would make it seem more legitimate as a sport.

I think introducing Real ID into the StarCraft 2 can vastly improve the quality and professional appearance of that game. If new e-Sport players are bred from a pool of anonymous Internet trolls, it’s difficult to get that mentality out once the players reach a professional level. This has detrimental effects on the appearance of e-Sports in general. Even among gamers, StarCraft’s reputation is not that of a civilized and mature game.

There are many players who, in hindsight, think that it was a good idea.

Virtually all the problems that we experience now all stem from anonymity and the ability to socially misbehave without repercussions. Every single problem that is associate with bad behaviours, trolling, being jerks, etc, etc, all comes down to lack of accountability that Real ID would have provided.

This wouldn’t have happened with Real ID tying your account to your character and providing an entity in which you would have had to represent yourself. Having an account associated with your character would have also eliminated the need for Raiderio because you could just link you Real ID for gear score and achievements…

The crazy thing is that if Real ID was introduced nowadays it would be accepted without question. We have social media accounts everywhere now, it’s no big deal these days. It simply failed back in the day because it was a new concept to have a social identifier associated with a “video game”.

Regardless of its supporters, the overwhelming opposition won out. After just three days, Mike Morkaime – Blizzard’s CEO – made a statement in which he cancelled the idea.

We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

For most of the community, it was a massive victory. However as many journalists pointed out, Blizzard had no intention of dropping Real ID, they firmly planned on integrating it more and more into their games. It was just this specific change which had been aborted.

But perhaps that was for the best.

If you want to read about this in more detail, someone wrote a whole essay about the shitstorm, examining its sociological implications.

But I will leave you with the words of one eloquent user:

possibly the worst idea in the history of bad ideas

There are a number of other controversies we could go over: the bizarre YouPlayorWePay site, which tried to insure players for World of Warcraft server downtime, or the overly easy dungeons in Wrath, or the player anger over the disappointing ‘Call of the Crusade’ patch. And I’m sure plenty could be written about the Activision-Blizzard merger. But with my personal experience, I struggled to bulk these topics out enough to justify including them. Perhaps some other users here might be able to do that better.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

The Price of Zeuzo and his Glaives

One of the most famous guilds in Azeroth is Method, on the server ‘Sylvanas’ – that was the case then, and it is now. Over the years, they’ve been the first to take down a number of final raid bosses. During Burning Crusade, their best Rogue was a player called Zeuzo. He was perfectly kitted out from head to foot, and even had the Warglaives of Azzinoth – the best melee weapons in the game (and the most iconic for the expansion) They were one of only four ‘Legendary’ weapons available at the time, and Zeuzo was the first person on his server to get them.

Every other player looked at him with seething envy. And one decided it wasn’t worth working to get the glaives himself, when he could simply buy them. But the glaives were bound to Zeuzo – he couldn’t give them away even if he wanted to. This mysterious buyer could only get his hands on the glaives and the gear by convincing Zeuzo to sell his entire account.

So what’s what he did.

Zeuzo began to receive whispers offering money in exchange for his account. He said no, so the whispers came back with an even greater offer. Zeuzo persisted, and as he did, the offers grew and grew. By September 2007, the sum was 7000 Euros - $9500 at the time. Zeuzo was encountering financial difficult times in life, and found himself unable to resist.

The sale went ahead. Zeuzo’s account changed hands, and the character was renamed to Shaks.

Buying and selling accounts is nothing new. It happens all the time, with accounts going for about $300 on average. It’s often easy to spot a bought account, because their skill doesn’t match the gear they’re wearing.

“The problem is,” said Ms Vaughan, “you have no idea how to play the character properly.”

“Within a short space of time, you would be subject to the embarrassment of other players noticing your lack of skills, and it would be very apparent that you had either bought your account, or had paid to have your character levelled,” she said.

It became immediately obvious to everyone on the server what had happened. It was obvious to Blizzard, too. The best-geared Rogue on the server had spontaneously changed his name, left his guild, moved to another server, and become astonishingly bad at his class. Word spread like wildfire. After a paltry five days, Shaks was banned.

He and his precious Warglaives were consigned to the abyss.

In a panic, he turned to Zeuzo in hope of a refund, with no luck. He stated he had plans on suing both Blizzard and Zeuzo (who had just created a new Rogue and re-joined Method), but nothing came of that either. I suppose if their goal was to headline on the BBC News, they achieved it.

But at what cost?

The Misled Moose

This isn’t really a drama, but I wanted to include it just because I thought it was cool.

World of Warcraft once again hit the headlines in December 2007, and for once it wasn’t due terrible reasons. According to the Norwegian news site ‘Nettavisen’, 12 year old Norwegian player named Hans Jørgen Olsen was saved from a life or death scenario due to his knowledge of WoW. Hans and his sister enraged a local moose during a walk near their home, and after using the ability taunt to attract the moose’s attention away from his sister, Hans did what his Hunter would do – he used feign death.

In World of Warcraft, feign death causes the hunter to appear to die, dropping their health bar to zero, and all non-player enemies instantly lose all aggression toward them. Apparently it works in real life too, because the moose decided he wasn’t worth pursuing, and both siblings were able to get away safely.

For once, World of Warcraft had done something good.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

The Rogue Who Got Thor’idal

This is another story of how players can be corrupted by the tempting shine of a legendary weapon.

This surrounds ‘Sunwell Plateau’, the final raid of the final patch of the Burning Crusade. In this 25-man raid, the game’s best players would delve into the Isle of Quel’Danas to find the Sunwell, and stop the evil Kil’Jaeden from stepping through into Azeroth.

Exciting, right?

Back then, raids were a big deal. Guilds would carefully select their team members, work tirelessly to get them the best gear, practice and research every fight, and set aside entire evenings or even multiple days to get the raid cleared. Every boss dropped loot – armour, weapons, resources, or if you were extremely lucky, mounts. Some rare pieces only dropped once in a dozen, a hundred, a thousand raids. Players worked for years in pursuit of the most coveted drops.

Control over the loot went to the raid’s leader, who would distribute it as he or she saw fit. This has resulted in a lot of internal guild drama over the years. When multiple players wanted an item, the one who missed out might cause a scene. But in the summer of 2008, there was a loot scandal so great that it shook the forums to their core.

The guild was Vicarious, on the server ‘Area 52’. They had just defeated Kil’Jaeden, and were rewarded for their hard work when their loot flashed up on screen. Thor’idal appeared. Its orange text indicated it was a legendary item – the fifth to be added to the game. It dropped for only 6.5% of raids.

Why was Thor’idal such a big deal, I hear you ask.

At the time, Hunters had to maintain a stock of ammunition because every bow used up arrows, and every gun used bullets, and that all cost money and took up storage space. But Thor’idal magically generated its own ammo. Not only was it the most powerful Hunter weapon in the game, it was incredibly cost effective. Plus it looked really cool. Any Hunter would have killed to wield it.

And there were two Hunters in that raid group.

But neither of them got Thor’Idal. It was given to a Rogue named Analogkid.

Rogues could equip bows, and would enjoy their stat bonuses, but couldn’t actually use them. The idea of handing such a game-changing Hunter weapon to a Rogue was absolutely unimaginable. And to make matters worse, Analogkid already had a Warglaive of Azinoth in each hand. So he didn’t need the bow anyway. No matter how you slice it, it was an astonishing snub to the Hunters in the group.

right. screw a class out of their ONE legendary to someone who wont make 1/10th of its potential just because hes been in the guild longer. riiiiight.

One of the guild’s members went and told the forums, which promptly exploded in righteous indignation. The thread is lost to time, but I was able to dig it up for your viewing pleasure.

Wow, I’m speechless. Giving a ranged weapon to a rogue when two hunters are present? I don’t care who you are and what situation you’re in, this is a r****ded decision.

Vicarious had been a major raiding guild before the incident took place, but afterward, their name was dirt. No one wanted to raid for a guild that might give a vital drop to someone else – perhaps someone who had no use for it. The guild’s members bled away over the following days, some leaving in protest, some leaving to preserve their reputations as serious raiders, some leaving simply so they could walk the streets of Shattrath City without a dozen players using the /spit emote on them.

All in all, on behalf of the rest of the hunters of Azeroth, we agree not to ninja anything else if you don’t ninja this bow. Please. We beg of you. PLEASE! That means you rogues! Youre a meelee dps class! You don’t need this!

There were members of Vicarious who tried to defend the decision, but they were rapidly shouted down.

Though I can’t speak for Kharhaz on this matter I can see why he would want to give Analogkid priority on this over Tums and Zzerg. Analogkid has been raiding with us since we rerolled here and were doing kara and gruuls lair. He has had an excellent attendance and has given his best using full consumables alot of the time, even on farm content throughout all of raiding from t4 to sunwell and in this respect deserves loot, especially legendaries over people who transfered to our guild after we killed pre-nerf M’uru, a fight which i might add that was very trying for our guild.

Many of the responses were something along these lines:

One would only do that out of pure disrespect and arrogance. Is the GM 5 yrs old or an idiot or both?

You don’t trick people into spending months of their time to help you and others get gear (of course they gear up some too but still…) and then f*** them over by giving their most coveted, well earned item (98% attendance, etc.) to the wrong class.

If GM called that crap a “loyalty test”, that’s just a flat out lie or he’s f****** re*****d. What the GM did was just plain disrespectful and childish.

If I was a director in my company and said “let’s work hard everyone and you’ll get a bonus from your completed MBOs” and then decided to slash salaries or not give the bonus to the employees after they did everything they were expected to…as a loyalty test, everyone would leave the company or I’d get fired immediately.

I feel sorry for those who tried so hard only to get mistreated. I don’t blame you for being less loyal after this sad incident.

But no one received more hatred than Analogkid. He had committed the cardinal sin of taking Thor’idal. He had been offered the bow as a gesture of loyalty, but the consensus was that he should never have actually accepted it. And perhaps if he had taken a moment to think it through, he would have politely declined. But he didn’t, and once equipped, a piece of loot can never be traded away.

Even if he had said no, and one of the hunters had gone on to wield Thor’idal, I’m sure they would remember being passed over. That kind of rejection can scar a person.

and after talking to both the hunters present, they feel that it was a sign of pure disrespect towards them to be called disloyal to the guild and have them be pretty much negated from the equation.

To this day, Analogkid is the posterchildren loot ‘ninja’ – a term to describe players who sneakily take loot they don’t need from other group-members. As for Thor’idal, it was just one of many legendaries that ended up being defined more by its controversy than its value as a weapon.

Luckily for the members of Vicarious, there was a new expansion on the way.

By November that year, Thor’idal would be obsolete.

I recommend reading this comment (LINKS TO REDDIT), which goes over a drama from BC that I totally missed. It’s interesting.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj

This was, and remains the most well-known event from Vanilla WoW, and for good reason. The date was 3 January 2006, and Blizzard were releasing the much-anticipated patch 1.9.0. Food buffs would no longer stack, shard bags were introduced, and the Ahn’Qiraj world event would begin. It would affect every one of WoW’s six million (at the time) players.

Ahn’Qiraj is a huge complex of insect-strewn architecture in the south-western corner of Kalimdor, crowned by impenetrable mountains and only possible to enter through a monumental, hexagon-shaped gate in Silithus, to the north. Ahn Qiraj contained two raids, the Ruins and the Temple. But rather than simply throw open the gates to all and sundry, Blizzard created an event designed to unite entire servers around the goal of getting in. What followed was a clusterfuck of such enormity that it made headlines even outside of the gaming sphere.

There were three phases to the event.

Firstly, players on both factions would work for weeks to collect resources – hundreds of millions of them. Food, bandages, metals, herbs. Everyone chipped in. The economies across every server collapsed as resources were siphoned away to open the gates. Prices shot through the ceiling.

This part of the process could last from several weeks to half a year. Since each faction had a separate shopping list, it was meant to become a race to see who could get there first. However most servers had/have a major faction population imbalance, and so one finished drastically quicker and ended up waiting in frustration.

Then came a set of extremely long and challenging quests, which only the best guilds could even think of tackling. The reward was a legendary item – the Scepter of the Shifting Sands. To be the holder of the Scepter was a magnificent honour, with much political backstabbing and conspiracy to ensure it fell into the right hands. Only that person with the Sceptre could ring the Scarab Gong and open the gates (and once they did, they would gain a legendary mount to ride around on).

(Gong Ringer’s Name), Champion of the Bronze Dragonflight, has rung the Scarab Gong. The ancient gates of Ahn’Qiraj open, revealing the horrors of a forgotten war…

With the gates open, the real battle would begin. Obelisks appeared throughout the world, floating ominously in the sky. For ten hours, ultra powerful enemies flowed out out, swarming players and killing them off in droves. But the enemies dropped valuable loot, so thousands of players flooded Silithus to get a piece of the action. Many thousands. Too many, in fact.

More than had ever assembled in one spot, and it was enough to break the game. Servers saw rolling crashes and such colossal lag that players began to flee the battle ground in the vain hope that it might make the game more stable. Boats glitched out and disappeared with the players still on them, reappearing in a ghostly nonexistent space beneath the world, dead players got transported to cemetaries on another continent - it was utter chaos.

The server to open the gates first was Medivh, on the 23rd January (still an effort lasting twenty days), but others took months. Aside from the greater drama of the event itself, there were many smaller stories taking place within the insanity. Major guilds coveted the wealth of Ahn’Qiraj for themselves, and went to great lengths to get it.

Rather than slowly contribute to the resource pool, they would privately hoard them until they had enough to open the gates on their own. In some guilds, spies would sell information on when the gates were going to be opened. Players would try to steal the sceptre from other guild-mates.

And it didn’t end here. It needed to be repeated every time Blizzard opened a new WoW server – which they were doing a lot, as the game was leaping from strength to strength. It was only in February 2009 that a patch was implemented so that all new servers would release with the gates already open. Ahn’Qiraj was finally over for good. The world event entered into history.

History became legend.

Legend became myth.

And over many years, the gates passed out of all memory. They were still there, quietly seething in a dark forgotten corner of the world. But to many new players, they were nothing more than window dressing in an old zone that no one wanted to level through anymore.

But they were all of them deceived, for another gate was made. But that story will have to wait until later down our timeline.

#The Funeral of Fayejin

This is one of the many strange and curious events that took place in WoW’s early days, back when guilds were more than a place to collect an XP boost. They were closely knit communities who stayed friends for years. These days, when a guild member logs off for the last time, it goes by without notice. But that was not always the case.

Fayejin was a well-loved player on the Illidan PvP server (we’ll get to that), where she played a horde mage. On 28 February 2006, she died of a heart attack. Her guildmates decided to honour her with a digital funeral. Fayejin loved fishing and snow, so they went with one of Vanilla Wow’s most atmospheric zones, Winterspring. It was one of her favourite places in the game.

The funeral was advertised online on all the popular forums of the time, with an open invitation to anyone who wanted to come along. There were dozens of respondents. When the time came, they were summoned to Winterspring. One of Fayejin’s friends was able to get onto her account, and logged on so that other players could say their final goodbyes. It was beautiful.

There were even characters from the Alliance present, in a cross-faction gesture of respect. Rather a lot of them, in fact. And they were all carrying weapons. If that struck anyone as odd, they never had time to contemplate it.

Within minutes, everyone was murdering each other and teabagging the corpses. As is tradition. Black tuxedos don’t do much against knives, and you can’t change your armour when you’re in combat, so the mourners were left defenceless. It was a slaughter.

The raid was the work of the ironically named Serenity Now, and would follow them for years. The organisers insisted that they were honouring Fayejin with one final battle – she was an avid PvP fan, after all. Perhaps the bloody violence that ensued was more fitting than a load of people standing around making sombre emotes at one another. But nonetheless, the forums reacted in anger, though many found it hilarious.

A video of the funeral survives to us from the time thanks to a youtuber named ‘Women Shouldn’t Vote Productions’. Here’s another video about it. And another. It made it to the gaming media, partly because of its climactic ending, partly because of the discourse over whether the raid was acceptable, and partly because nobody had ever held an event quite like it before. On the one hand, it was a funeral, and you can’t just attack a funeral. On the other hand, it was a PvP server and attacking was the whole point of the game. The ethical quandry still divides players today.

Fayejin’s Funeral is referenced in a 2009 academic paper by Stacey Goguen, titled Dual Wielding Morality: World of Warcraft and the Ethics of Ganking and submitted to the ‘Philosophy of Computer Games Conference’ in Oslo.

Regardless of ethics, the raid is what made the funeral famous, and gave Fayejin a place in WoW history. What more could you ask for?

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

The Barrens Chat

Every zone in WoW has its own regional chat. Opon crossing the border, you will enter that chat and be able to talk to other players in the area. In most cases, these chats are silent and ignored, with one glaring exception.

The Barrens was a large, relatively empty zone where most new Horde players were funnelled after level 10, and where they would remain until level 20. It was a really boring zone, so players chatted to make it go quicker. Barrens chat became infamous for its juvenile and incessant nature, its bizarre conversations and memes, but players would sometimes find themselves talking about philosophy, physics, theoretical science, ethics, law, or whatever subject happened to come up. After out-levelling the Barrens, a lot of players would go back to hang out and make jokes about Chuck Norris.

One of the most popular Barrens memes was Mankrik’s Wife. You see, one quest tasked players with helping an NPC named Mankrik find his lost wife. But since the game didn’t indicate where she was, and there is no NPC called Mankrik’s Wife – she has the unfortunate name ‘Beaten Corpse’ - they often never found her. This all happened in a time before every single answer to every question could be found online. So naturally, newbies would consult the local chat. (LINKS TO REDDIT)

Over time, the players loitering in the Barrens for the social scene began to find this question annoying. It got asked over and over and over again. And as you might expect, the answers gradually became less and less helpful. New players found themselves pointed toward bizarre, far off destinations like Blackrock Mountain or Stormwind City.

In 2010, the Cataclysm expansion released, and all of the Vanilla zones were revamped, Barrens included. Mankirk’s wife was laid to rest, but her name would live on forever.

Even today, Blizzard sells a shirt that says “I survived Barrens chat.”

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

The Racism Problem

From the very beginning, questions were asked about WoW’s relationship with race. Often, fans laughed them off, or responded with aggression, but these conversations continued well into the present.

Every race has a different backstory, a different home, and most importantly, a different set of abilities. Undead (who had once been humans) could originally speak to humans – the only race who could communicate across the faction boundary – but that was removed because it was being rapidly abused. Certain races could only be certain classes – the nature-oriented Tauren could be shamans and druids, but never warlocks or mages, whereas the more civilised humans could be hunters, but couldn’t be druids.

But what drew the most attention was the real-world people these races were based on. Cultural borrowing is nothing new to MMOs or the fantasy genre, with Tolkien directly comparing his Dwarves to Jews and his orcs to ‘Mongoloids’. Tauren, Humans, Dwarves, and Trolls were caricatures of real world cultures.

Dwarves, taking a leaf out of the Lord of the Rings movies, were Scottish Human architecture was generically European, though they spoke with American accents. Many players pointed out that there was a distinct lack of non-white humans in the story, and while it was possible to create a dark-skinned human, none of the face options had non-white features. So even the blackest human looked like a white person with a tan.

There are no non-white human heroes or NPCs as far as I am aware, I certainly cannot think of a single one off the top of my head.

A lot of players asked Blizzard to add more variety to the character designs, but it would take an astonishing 16 years for that to happen

The Tauren are clearly based on Native Americans – they’re giagantic, nomadic bull-people with braids and piercings, who boast a spiritual connection to the hand, live in teepees, and whose capital city is literally a colossal totem pole. For years, Native American people drew issue with this.

When you grow up as a Native American, you grow up seeing your culture used as a plaything by the mainstream. We are constantly reduced to a caricature and commodified. Blizzard has perpetuated this history in American media with their massively successful and long-running MMORPG.

Their developers gave the borrowed elements a fantasy paint job and stripped them of their real world cultural identifiers. In doing so they created a race that is instantly identifiable as Native American to its users, while retaining nothing directly belonging to an actual tribe. The Tauren are thus doubly offensive to me for being blatant cultural appropriation for the express purpose of commercial gain, while also continuing the erasure of actual real life natives in the popular consciousness. Hundreds of distinct cultures amalgamated into one group of bull people and their “braves”.

Trolls were… well, just read their description for yourself.

…Lean predators, they’re as tall as night elves when they stand fully erect, but normally bob along, hunched over, coiled and ready to spring. While Warcraft players know them by their Jamaican accents, voodoo-flavored culture and wild hairstyles, the trolls are also cruel, sadistic and evil…

This description neglects to mention they were also cannibals. They hobble around with scabbed knuckles, pock-marked skin, tusks, skull adornments, and wild shaggy hair. They were heavily inspired by Haiti/Jamaica, with Zulu influences thrown in for good measure. This portrayal in particular ruffled a few feathers, because it’s not a positive one. A significant subset of fans found the game’s trolls offensive, and demanded change.

But if Blizzard even noticed this outcry, they didn’t care. Later expansions would introduce more races based on stereotypes – far stronger ones, in fact. Worgen are a pastiche of Victorian cockneys, Goblins are Jewish-Italian New Yorker mob bosses with some unsettling antisemitic references (huge noses, disgusting skin, accents, obsession with wealth, absolute psychopathy, con aritsts and crooks). Draenei are vaguely Eastern European refugees from another world, and Pandaren are literally just Chinese pandas with fake accents – but we’ll get to them later.

In the essay “Multiculturalism in World of Warcraft”, Christopher Douglas examines the issue in enormous detail, and long story short, he agrees that the portrayals in the game are racist.

In Azeroth, of course, race is not understood as socially constructed, but rather to be a biological fact. Composed of inherited, immutable, essential differences, race in Azeroth is the old-fashioned (which is to say, nineteenth and early twentieth-century) notion that the outward packaging signifies an inner reality, where the differences are.

WoW has an incredibly complex backstory, with vast amounts of worldbuilding, so it would be wrong to say these races are just thrown lazily together. But the fact remained that there were overtones of racism in many of them. If anything, the story sometimes supports this, such as the time Humans locked up Orcs in internment camps and used them as slaves, which apparently had the positive effect of reducing their desire to kill. Those based on non-European ethnic groups went in the Horde (the faction associated with chaos, primitivism, bloodthirst, barbarism, and savagery), those based on Europeans went in the Alliance. And a large part of the game involved taking allegiance based on your race and killing members of the ‘enemy’ races.

If you are a member of one race, you hate and are hated by this “other” race. We’re literally fighting race wars here, and it’s more than a little unsettling how much it’s just accepted.

Blizzard has tried to undermine the idea that the Alliance is good and the Horde are evil many times, over multiple years. But they would fail again and again, and seem to be inexplicably drawn to portraying them as absolutely vile. Many players like to imagine WoW as a utopian society where – despite the clear connections between certain races and real-life cultures – all players can be whoever they want without prejudice. But it doesn’t take a very close look to see that isn’t true at all.

It doesn’t help that the WoW community long had its own issue with real racism toward players.

We are all Mexican and had really strong accents. One of my friends couldn’t quite speak much English at all. We got a lot of bad responses from guilds and got kicked out or resigned because of reactions to our accents and stuff like that. Eventually we found one that was really awesome about it and we would even feel comfortable talking to each other in Spanish during raids in order to not distract anyone else." Said Hernandez in an interview with NPR.

These problems seem to have improved over the years, as WoW’s userbase has grown older and become more open, but in many ways they have not. And this is just race. WoW has always had a similarly strange relationship with sexuality and gender. Speaking of which…

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

The Homophobia Problem

Gamers have long had a querulous history with homophobia. You couldn’t get through a single conversation in Vanilla without someone calling you a fag, and it still pops up a lot now. Blizzard themselves have denounced prejudice toward the LGBT community many times, but this may be a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’. .

When a woman named Sara Andrews set up a guild marketed toward being LGBT inclusive, she was threatened with a ban from administrators, due to the language she was using. They claimed ‘advertising sexual orientation is not appropriate for the high fantasy setting of World of Warcraft’. That’s pretty rich considering the kind of things WoW players say every day – in a much worse tone. The controversy was so great that – once again – WoW ended up in the headlines.

To publicise her plight, Ms Andrews visited many discussion sites and forums where Warcraft players gather. The debate that followed largely criticised Blizzard for its heavy-handed treatment.

Many pointed out that Warcraft has a thriving community of gay players, or gaymers, and that it made no sense to censor talk about players’ sexuality outside Azeroth.

Gay pride marches are known to have taken place in Warcraft and there are many other guilds in the game that are known to be friendly toward the gay community.

Two such guilds, Stonewall Champions and The Spreading Taint wrote an open letter to Blizzard criticising its policy.

At first, Blizzard tried to defend their stance. “Topics related to sensitive real-world subjects – such as religious, sexual or political preference, for example – have had a tendency to result in communication between players that often breaks down into harassment”, they said. Quite simply, their police on sexuality was ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’, and that only amplified the rage aimed their way. Discussions began to stir of possible legal challenges. They eventually backtracked and publicly apologised to Andrews, promising that its GMs would be given more thorough training on how to handle LGBT issues, but this would be far from the last incident.

Blizzard landed in hot water again in 2011 as one lesbian gamer pointed out during a Q&A session at Blizzon there had not been a single LGBT character in any Blizzard game or property – ever. Creative Director Chris Metzen responded that LGBT characters were ‘certainly a possibility’. The woman who asked about diversity was then harassed on the WoW forums afterward.

Metzen’s open-ended statement would soon turn sour. Blizzard had collaborated for years with the band Cannibal Corpse, who was recorded during an interview at that same convention saying, “Go fucking cry in a river and tell me about how you’re going to slit your wrists you Night Elf f*****.”

Blizzard’s art director, Sam Didier, endorsed the video and invited the band to play on stage. It took a week of negative press for Blizzard president Mike Morkaime to apologise.

A year later, Blizzard turned the profanity filter on by default, and players suddenly noticed that the words ‘transsexual’ and ‘homosexual’ were filtered out, but not ‘fag’ or ‘faggot. Blizzard was quick to change the filter, but the damage was done. The community wanted to know why those words had been blocked in the first place – someone at Blizzard had to have made the decision. Unfortunately, that thread seems to be lost now, but I can tell you it was an absolute clusterfuck that spun rapidly out of control. Members of the Gaymer.com forums had tried on previous occasions to force Blizzard to address the use of homophobic slurs in the game, with no success.

I emailed Blizzard and asked them to do something, Blizzard’s response was “just ignore em, they’ll go away”, riiiiiiiiight, like that’s ever worked with a gay basher. So my retort was why would other slurs against minorities go punished, yet calling someone a faggot in open forum is to be “ignored”…

When asked again about diversity at a 2015 MIT Media Lab event, then-chief creative officer Rob Pardo dismissed the idea, stating:

I wouldn’t say that’s really a value for us. It’s not something that we’re against either, but it’s just not … something we’re trying to actively do.

For this gaff, they received an open letter which spoke on behalf of LGBT players, stating they no longer felt valued by the company.

The comments made by Mr. Pardo and Mr. Browder, speaking as employees of Blizzard Entertainment, seem to imply that representing people like me will never be a priority to the company. They seem to be suggesting I go elsewhere.

Morhaime once again apologised (be prepared for that to happen a lot going forward). “This will be an ongoing process for us—it’s likely that we will make mistakes again in the future, but we will continue to listen, learn, and grow.”

Sadly it would take a few more years for Blizzard to learn how to not hate the gays.

Just recently in 2019, there would be another controversy over LGBT guilds. A pro-homosexuality guild called ‘GAY BOYS’ was reported “an inappropriate number of times” by other players until Blizzard forcibly removed the name. The guild had been warned before by a forum moderator in 2016, who said, “Picking a name that you can identify with without also using words that would illicit [sic] a reaction from other players would be far more beneficial.” Indeed, members of GAY BOYS claimed they had received abusive messages for their guild name over the years, such as “Fuck the gays, reported.”

The Guild Master blamed rampant homophobia within the WoW community, and accused Blizzard of kowtowing to this subset of players. An in-game pride march was held in protest of the decision, and they were able to successfully appeal it.

“To say there is anything inappropriate about the words GAY or BOYS is, in and of itself, inappropriate, childish, and discriminatory,” Jilani said.

Blizzard had often taken the stance that ‘if you ignore it, it will go away’, but in 2020, they finally declared that homophobia had never existed in Azeroth, with the intention of undermining roleplayers who tried to RP as bigots. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

It’s hard to say whether Blizzard has improved over the years, but based on recent allegations (we’ll get there), I have my doubts.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

The Devilsaur Mafia

No sooner had WoW developed an economy than pernicious capitalists began to exploit it. Sites opened up, offering gold, rare items, and accounts with powerful characters in exchange for real money. Where these sites acquired it, no one knew for sure, though there were rumours. Most assumed they just bought it from players at a low price and then sold it at a mark-up, and that definitely happened. But the owners of these sites sought to maximise profits, and minimise costs. The solution was to set up sweat shops in China. Dozens, if not hundreds of them.

Multiple interviews have been done with Chinese gold farmers. They all described it as mentally exhausting, with working days of at least 12 hours, often spent killing a single enemy over and over. The value of farmed gold is different across the world. A day’s worth of gold could sell in China for $4 dollars, but could fetch triple that amount when sold to Americans.

It’s by exploiting the differences and selling to cash-rich, time-poor gamers that Chinese gold farms prosper. Former Wall Street banker Alan Chiu founded an online trading platform for virtual currency, a virtual stock exchange, if you will. And he sees videogame work as another opportunity for outsourcing.

“It’s a very labor-intensive job. I don’t see it any different from low-cost Chinese workers working in Guandong, producing Nike shoes, and for Nike to be sold eventually - sold at retail stores for maybe 600 percent margin.”

Yet it is different because gold farming is a gray area. Gaming companies like Blizzard, which owns World of Warcraft, see gold farming as cheating, and regularly ban the accounts of suspected gold farmers. Robin admits he’s been closed down four or five times, losing thousands of dollars each time. However, there’s always a market for gold farmers. Surveys show 20 percent of gamers admit to buying gold.

According to the New York Times, while some gold farmers enjoyed playing games all day, they nonetheless had strict quotas and were constantly supervised. They estimated that there were between 100,000 and 500,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers, earning less than a quarter an hour. It’s true that this practice did not originate with WoW. But WoW is perhaps the first time it became a major issue due to the sheer size of the playerbase, and the overwhelming demand for black market gold.

For its part, Blizzard has tried to crack down on black markets, but arguably their most successful attempt was by creating the WoW token, effectively creating a legal avenue to sell gold via Blizzard. That has its own controversy, which we’ll get to later.

Gold farming was known to evoke a strong reaction. It was seen as violating the spirit of the game, and players looked down on those who used these sites. There was a sense that if you had suffered to reach where you are, then everyone else should have to as well. Others defended it as yet another part of the free market, which catered to players who wanted to sacrifice money to ‘get ahead’.

In an interview with Jared Psigoda, a market leader in virtual trade, he states that originally, these black markets were regionally exclusive. Europeans worked in the European black market, Chinese players in the Chinese, and Americans in the American, which resulted in dramatically different prices. It was in the early 2000s that the use of Chinese labour was used across the board, undercutting western currency exchanges, in order to make further profit.

Perhaps the most infamous group of gold farmers were the Devilsaur Mafia. They realised killing devilsaurs in Un’Goro Crater had the potential to return the highest profits out of any creature in the game. While devilsaurs didn’t drop much, they could be skinned to get Devilsaur Leather, a material from which a number of powerful pieces of hunter armour could be made, such as the Devilsaur Leggings and Devilsaur Gauntlets. Outside of raiding content, this was the best gear you could get in Vanilla wow. All in all, a single devilsaur could net its killer 20 gold – a kingly sum at the time.

But where most enemies constantly reappeared, devilsaurs did not. They regenerated sparingly, and could appear anywhere in the zone. Players would spend their whole day in the zone, waiting for one to spawn. And so, a group of sellers decided to coordinate their efforts. They completely took over the crater (LINKS TO REDDIT), using their organisation to out-compete other farmers, and this indirectly gave them total control over the Devilsaur economy.

On PvP servers, these cartels had teams on both factions working as security – if a Horde player tried to step on the Mafia’s turf, the Alliance security team would be alerted and sent to hunt them down, kill them, and keep killing them every time they resurrected at a graveyard. Technically speaking, cross-faction communication was against the Terms of Service, but it was almost impossible for Blizzard to prove players were communicating using third party apps (LINKS TO REDDIT). The only way to get close to a devilsaur on any PvP server was to submit to the whims of the mafia, which meant selling at regulated prices and handing over a cut of the spoils. All-out turf wars were known to occur when multiple cartels came up against each other.

This was not remotely the only instance of farmers banding together to control resources and manipulate the economy – that happened every single day. But it may be the most well-known. And when Classic Wow came about, players eagerly worked to recreate the Devilsaur Mafia.

It’s an interesting case study, but the Mafia disappeared as WoW’s economy grew and changed. The gold farmers did not. For years, WoW’s economy would be driven by a black market that depended on sweat shop labour from China (and later other countries like Mexico, the Philippines and India). It never stopped, but the practice of online black markets for virtual currencies expanded far beyond WoW, to encompass many of the biggest games in the world. Blizzard still hasn’t been able to get rid of it. No company has.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

The Game-breakers

No one had ever made a world as big as Azeroth before. It had been a massive undertaking, a wonder of programming and code which cost $64 million ($94 million accounting for inflation) before it ever even began to see returns – making it comfortably the largest and most expensive game at the time. Thousands of hands left their mark on its world, and while Blizzard would spend years polishing them away, they would never succeed completely. Even now. But it was a lot more obvious in Vanilla and that was part of the charm. For many players, it wasn’t the erotica or the world events or the combat or the gold that drew them to WoW, it was the world itself. As you might expect from a world that big, it was full of oddities. Little holes in the world, carefully hidden in spots players weren’t meant to see, written messages under the borders of the world, slabs of random environment thrown together in private areas, unfinished or rejected zones, exclusive locations for the developers and game-masters. An entire community grew up around investigating these curiosities, unravelling their meanings, and showing other players how to reach them.

Looking at this map, you can see large empty patches between zones, or on the coast. Below Silithus lay the inaccessible land of Ahn’Qiraj (meant to contain the city of temples we covered earlier), north of the Eastern Plaguelands is the elf nation of Quel’Thalas, somewhere in the inaccessible west of Eastern Kingdoms lay the Twilight Highlands, and then there was the blocked off city of Stratholme, the focus of an iconic moment in Warcraft Lore. Players would agonise for years over the islands in the sea, and what they might be. The challenge became all the more tantalising when players discovered that many of these areas did exist in some form, sometimes mostly finished. Sometimes the reward was standing on a platform or tower in a major city, where no other player could get, and becoming a minor celebrity for the day.

But Blizzard had hidden their secrets well. It wasn’t possible to just ‘go to’ these areas. Explorers had to break the game to do it. A game of cat-and-mouse arose, with players discovering new ‘exploits’ and Blizzard racing to patch them out. There were techniques to fall through the world, climb vertical walls, teleport to a specific graveyard upon death, or overcome fatigue (a timed effect that begins when players move too far from the coast, which rapidly drains health).
To detail all of these hidden spots and how to reach them would take literally hours. To those who want to delve into this topic, I present a quick-fire montage. To the rest of you, let me elaborate on a few of the best ones.

[1] By far the most famous secret area in the game was GM Island, designed to serve as a ‘lobby’ for Game Masters. For years, the island was located north-west of Kalimdor, way off the map. To get there, players had to overcome vast distances of nothingness – a land without texture or direction, which made it totally impossible to reach the island without exploits. So many stories have been penned about GM Island that it has taken on an almost mythical status.

Members of the company were cagey about the island. An image of the island was visible on Blizzard Europe’s Career Opportunities page, but Blizzard rarely spoke publicly on it. Before patch 1.8, players could add GMs to their friends list, and their locations would be listed as ‘GM Island’. A forum moderator ‘Zarhym’ explained in 2010:

The game masters who respond to you in the game are doing so through a separate chat/support tool. They’re not actually using the game client to whisper you, however, logging into the chat client means the character they use to contact players with is logged into all of the realms they need to. While GM invisibility exists, it makes it safer and easier to have a simple storage/port point to keep all of these characters out of the normal game world.

The island itself was small and round and covered in dense vegetation, with a tall peak on one side. It included a mansion (taken from Stormwind City), a wall, and a graveyard. There were two NPCs, a Gnome named Ari and Tuskfyre the Troll. Embedded within the lower structure of the island (about 100 yards below the surface) was a hidden room known as ‘The Prison Chamber’. It’s textured with large blank white tiles and lit with a single light source. The only object in the room was a single chair, right in the middle. Players could enter, but can never leave without the help of a GM. Its walls couldn’t be climbed, teleport/hearthstone spells did not work, and it was the only place in the game where players could not be located using the /who command. While the room had no official purpose and seemed to have been added by a programmer purely for their own amusement, it is said that in the early days of the game, before an out-of-game chat interface was added, GMs would take offenders there to discuss their crimes.

GM Island was one of those things you spoke about in a hallowed whisper, hunched in front of a blurry youtube video in 3x4 ratio with an ‘Unregistered HyperCam 2’ watermarked across the top. Those who could reach the island were legends. Most fans would only ever be able to reach it on private servers, which allowed them to teleport straight there – and that is where we get most footage of it today.

The first adventurers to come across GM Island got there by swimming (there was water back then), constantly casting spells to heal themselves from the fatigue damage. It took an hour, and if the player’s direction was even slightly off, they would be forever lost in a seemingly endless ocean. Blizzard removed the water, so players tried manipulated the models in the game files to let them cross. This back and forth process went on for a while. Players found a new way, blizzard patched it out, players found a way around the patch, and so on. When all other attempts failed, the island was moved into an instance, effectively placing it in a separate world upon itself, and then eventually it was removed from the game completely. (LINKS TO REDDIT)

Other locations created for developers include Designer Island and Programmer Isle. Neither was ever accessible in live version of the game – only on private servers. Both are filled with stock assets, written messages, and a few test quests. The regions of Programmer Isle are named after some guys called Jeff and Patty Mack, and there are even a few test NPCs.

Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that so few players ever reached GM Island on a live server, and also due to its mysterious origins, it is still one of the most iconic places in the game. Even years after its removal.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

WintryLemon, 11 months ago

[2] Another famous location was ‘Old Ironforge’. Canonically, Ironforge is a colossal warren of tunnels and halls under the mountains of Dun Morogh. When it was first realised in-game, its scale matched that vision, but it was so big that it seemed unfair – the Horde had no cities that big. So the lower half of it was gated off (though it remained in game). Players were able to reach it by clipping through the world. It was never much of a secret – and even came to hold a more and more important position in the story.

[3] Mount Hyjal was another major test for explorers. It had always been extremely important to the lore of the game, and Blizzard left it out because they wanted to save it for a later expansion. Positioned right in the middle of Northern Kalimdor, its main defence was being a plateau so tall that players had no chance of climbing it. But as we have learned, nothing can stop bored WoW players. Players came up with various ways of slowly, painstakingly clawing their ways to the top, and once they reached it, they found a surprisingly complete zone, with forests, caves, temples, lakes, and an early version of Nordrassil, the World Tree. At the foot of the tree were ‘Blizzard Construction Co.’ barriers.

[4] There’s also the Island of Doctor Lapidis and Gilijim’s Isle – two small islands off the coast of southern Eastern Kingdoms. They’re visible in early maps and seemed to have existed in the WoW alpha, but were taken out after that. It’s possible their names were a reference to the Island of Doctor Moreau and Gilligan’s Island. Minimaps exist from that time and we even have a few screenshots. Almost nothing more is known about the islands, but they nonetheless intrigued fans for years.

[5] The biggest unreleased area is Emerald Dream, which had a number of distinct regions with their own unique design. Players speculate that this was the early version of a planned expansion or raid.

A Blizzard representative said in December 2003:

Actually, we have some pretty cool stuff planned for druids. They will definitely have a link to the Emerald Dream. […] I was running around the Emerald Dream last Thursday… you guys are in for a real treat. The level designers are doing a killer job.

However, by September 2006, the developers had clearly changed their minds – either they had soured on the idea completely, or had decided it would be revisited in a later expansion. A statement by Nethaera says:

As for the Emerald Dream, there are no plans for anything as of yet but it is a consideration for the future. The Emerald Dream opens up a lot of different opportunities and the Burning Crusade is definitely not oing to be the last of the expansion packs.

True to their word, the Emerald Dream would surface many times over the course of the game’s life, in the form of instanced or dungeon/raid content, but the original zone was never made accessible.

[6] My personal favourite secret area is the Forgotten Crypt, hidden under the cemetary in Karazhan. Based on its shape, it was originally intended as a dungeon, and I went there once myself For the intrepid explorer, it was one of the easier places to visit. Part of the area includes the infamous ‘Hall of Upside Down Sinners’, which features underwater corpses hanging from hooks. Players speculated that the area was never implemented because it was disturbing, and may have unsettled younger players. However Community Member ‘Bashiok’ commented on the Crypt in 2014, confirming that it was simply an area Blizzard changed their minds on.

Oh yeah, I remember that! Haven’t seen a screenshot in quite a while. Not sure I know the story on it but knowing our development processes back then there tended to be a lot more stuff made that we just didn’t use. I can’t imagine the game rating rumor is accurate, because if it was content we wanted to use we’d just take out the upside-down sinners or whatever the issue was and use it for whatever it was we wanted to do with that space. It’s not like they’re permanent fixtures. Fun rumor though! :) More likely we just changed our minds.

The area was actually partially opened for players in the Legion Expansion in 2016.

[7] Gilneas was canonically a small peninsular kingdom sticking out of Silverpine Forest in the Eastern Kingdoms, cut off from the rest of the continent by the huge ‘Greymane Wall’. Behind the wall was an incomplete land with no definition, bordered by mountains and ending in a beach. Getting on top of the wall, or finding a way around it was a test for any explorer. Gilneas was fully added as a zone in Cataclysm, in 2010.

WoW has always fostered speculation, theorycrafting and conspiracy among its most ardent fans. Players have spent hundreds of hours piecing together developer ideas from Vanilla, including playable ogres, potential zones in the South Seas, and player housing.

So where’s the drama?

It comes in Blizzard’s ‘hot and cold’ relationship with these explorers. Any player found reaching hidden areas of the game through exploits is deemed a cheater and is banned, as a matter of policy. This is despite the fact that Blizzard clearly leaves hints to incentivise explorative behaviour.

Ultimately, players are still finding new tricks, and Blizzard continues to hunt them down. A lot of fans are against exploration because they don’t want to encourage other players to develop exploits which could be used to give them a leg up in the parts of the game that matter – progression and pvp. During Vanilla, the forums were often full of players complaining about others using exploits, which was part of what motivated Blizzard to monitor them so carefully.

When Classic was released, players leapt at the chance to recreate the iconic exploits of Vanilla. But once again, we will have to wait until later for that.

Right now, we are nearing the end of our time with Vanilla, and the release of World of Warcraft’s first expansion, the Burning Crusade. I really appreciate anyone who took the time to read this far, and I hope to upload the next part of this series in a few days.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)