Lead Game Director Ion Hazzikostas heavily implied in May 2015 that patch 6.2 wouldn’t be the final patch of the expansion.
“We’ve got plenty of more story to be told after this,” Hazzikostas says when asked whether patch 6.2 would be the last big content update for Warlords of Draenor. But Blizzard is also working hard to make sure players aren’t left waiting for new content in general.
This was not true.
In an interview just a few weeks later, fellow Blizzard lead Cory Stockton revealed the truth – there would be nothing after the upcoming patch. It wasn’t the mid-game update players expected, but the big finale. Aside from the shocking u-turn, the interview struck the playerbase as incredibly out of touch, with Cory being torn apart for statements like, “Overall we are happy with garrison feedback," and perhaps even worse,
“What kind of fucking bullshit is that, 6.1 should not even be called a fucking patch!”
[…]
“How fucking deluded is he? Being happy with how WoD turned out doesn’t give me any hope for the next expansion, which will probably be overpriced and only have one “big” patch. Pathetic.”
[…]
“Do they communicate internally at all?”
[…]
“Nicely done Corey, you just added in the final nail to the coffin.”
All this left 6.2 with a lot to live up to. But would it deliver?
‘The Fury of Hellfire’ released on 22nd June 2015. It was pretty good. Players were finally able to explore Tanaan Jungle, a tropical zone with a demonic aesthetic. Its raid, Hellfire Citadel, was long and complex. Players enjoyed it immensely.
But it served as the first raiding patch of the expansion, and was the only raid the game would get until the launch of the next expansion, 434 days away. It didn’t matter how good it was. No content could stay popular in those circumstances. Warlords went into a content drought (LINKS TO REDDIT) with an already-paltry amount to do.
“Every World of Warcraft expansion prior to Warlords of Draenor boasted either three or four content patches. Warlords settled for a mere two.
It gets worse. Those two content patches for Warlords of Draenor were some of the most anemic and disappointing in the game’s history.”
There was also the issue of cohesion. Most of the expansion lay on the cutting-room floor, and the writers had to cobble together what remained into a usable story. Perhaps that’s why many of the characters in Warlords have such promising beginnings, and such anticlimactic ends. Players often say that if Warlords had been finished, it could have been the greatest expansion ever, but we may never know.
The Farahlon patch was gone. The Ogre Continent never even made it off the ground. Shattrath City, a recreation of the most iconic location in Burning Crusade, had been planned to host a raid, but that had been cut, so it was left an empty shell that couldn’t be entered or interacted with.
The Draenei are pretty much locked out of their own capital city aren’t they? You think something as big of a deal as that would come up at some point in the story but no - we just kill some mobs on the perimeter and act like everything’s A-ok.”
If all that content had been completed, Warlords may have a very different legacy.
But setting all that aside, it may surprise you to know that the big controversy of 6.2 had nothing to do with the writing or the raid. It all came down to an achievement called ‘Draenor Pathfinder’. You see, ever since Blizzard introduced flying in Burning Crusade, they had been looking for an excuse to get rid of it.
Every time the idea was even mentioned, the community rose up in fury, and flying remained. For a long time, the solution had been to let players buy flying, but only after they had out-levelled most (or all) of the new content, so they were forced to play through it once on the ground. That came with the added benefit of making it feel so much sweeter when players could finally fly in those areas.
Prior to the release of 6.2, Ion announced that Warlords of Draenor would not have flying at all, and nor would any future expansions.
“At this point, we feel that outdoor gameplay in World of Warcraft is ultimately better without flying. We’re not going to be reintroducing the ability to fly in Draenor, and that’s kind of where we’re at going forward.”
And so, like clockwork, the outcry began.
“Keeping flight out of Draenor permanently is a truly, profoundly awful plan. Ugh.”
[…]
“The no flying at max level was a disaster. No flying while leveling was great, everything he mentioned. But, no flying at max level made for a dead world, no reason to explore or play the content.”
This was a widely repeated idea.
“I’m fine with not flying while leveling, I’m fine with not flying till the first major content patch, I’m not fine with no flying ever.”
“I just quit WoW over this, on an account active since 2004.”
The user Muneravenmn put it succinctly.
“Wading through crap may be immersive, but it isn’t fun.”
[…]
“if we lost flying it would be another hit against this game for me that would result in me no longer wanting to play. I don’t want to have something that takes 1 minute to reach turn into 5 minutes because I have to run. It would make no sense to bar flying forever, especially since they just released another flying mount with the expack.”
[…]
“Just because flying is allowed, doesn’t mean you have to use it. If you like slowly walking around exploring in old zones, knock yourself out. No one is forcing you to fly.”
“For the time I spent after resubbing I found it great. I’ve played since vanilla and I forgot exactly how much the community lost when they added flying. It was great to have that back.”
A topic on the World of Warcraft forums about this announcement reached over 500 pages, and most of the responses were overwhelmingly negative.
Inevitably, Blizzard backpedalled. They went with a ‘compromise’ that united the playerbase – against them - the Pathfinder achievement. In order to get it, players had to explore every part of the continent, complete all the story quests (each zone had easily over a hundred), collect a hundred treasures, complete twelve daily quests, and grind reputation to ‘revered’ with all three of Tanaan Jungle’s new factions. The latter could take weeks. After doing all this, players could fly in Draenor.
Unless you were willing to dedicate days upon days to the achievement, you were out of luck. A lot of players went multiple expansions without being able to fly in Draenor. And the strangest thing is that Blizzard carried the system forward to future releases.
Writing for Massively Overpowered, Tyler Edwards summed up the mood of the community.
”I think about having to do another Pathfinder grind, and my heart just sinks. The story is what drove me away, but Pathfinder is what keeps me from coming back.
Meeting in the middle always sounds virtuous and reasonable, but Pathfinder is a great example of how a compromise isn’t always fair if the original ask was completely outrageous.
It’s an exhausting, tedious grind, and the worst thing about it is you don’t even get something new and awesome out of it. You just get to go back to using a feature that has been a pillar of the game for the large majority of its lifespan.
I firmly believe Pathfinder only exists as a way to artificially extend the length of content so as to earn more subscription dollars. It’s not as if Blizzard is above that sort of thing."
By forcing players to grind in so many ways, Blizzard guaranteed that everyone would encounter at least one mechanic they hated. Players who liked levelling dungeons were forced to go back and ensure hours of questing. Players who only cared about raids were forced to grind reputations.
It should have been simple. Blizzard had been making PvP zones since Wrath. They knew what to do, and what not to do. With such a pedigree, it’s mind boggling that they fucked up so badly with Ashran. It became so overwhelmingly, unanimously hated, in fact, that it is held up as a symbol of just how terrible Warlords became.
“Ashran, a shitty battleground that no one liked and just sucked fat, meaty Ogre cocks.”
But what made it so unfulfilling?
Players criticised the layout of the zone, which tended to result in a big confused ‘soup of people’ at its centre, and which usually ended in an unsatisfying stalemate.
The design did nothing to split the factions down into groups, so individual players felt like they were just being carried in a vague, chaotic wave, with very little personal responsibility and no opportunity to shine.
In other battlegrounds, getting two evenly matched sides forced players to work harder. In Ashran, getting two evenly matched sides meant nothing you did could make a difference – so there was no reason to bother working at all. It was boring and monotonous. When you finally pushed toward the end, you won, but you didn’t really. You might get your loot, but then a new wave of enemies would spawn and the fighting would continue. Unlike Wintergrasp or Tol Barad, Ashran never ended.
“Ashran is super lame. Just two blobs of players wacking at each other until one side wins.”
According to Bellular, another flaw was that Blizzard rewarded players for completing secondary objectives which didn’t contribute much to the flow of the battle, and failed to incentivise actual PvP. As one player put it:
“It didn’t even feel like a BG, it was just a bunch of PVE events in a PVP environment.”
Other criticisms surrounded Ashran’s size - it was cramped for the number of people it was meant to host in a single match. And it’s queues were soul crushing, though that was nothing new for WoW. It was also horrendously laggy.
"Never once won it by completing the objective, it’s just raw attrition and lag.
Which speaks of terrible design. If the objectives are less efficient than butting heads for 40 minutes, the objectives clearly suck."
Tweet About It
The biggest controversy of the expansion was Patch 6.1, ‘Garrisons Update’. The name alone gives you an idea of how much effort Blizzard had put in. The patch contained an heirlooms tab, updated Blood Elf models, introduced Twitter integration and the ability to take in-game selfies, and added a few bits to the garrison. That’s it.
“When players ask Blizzard to fulfill promises that they’ve made, they get all abrupt and moody, and tell us that it will cost us a raid tier.
WHY BLIZZARD, WHY HAVE YOU GIVEN US TWITTER INTEGRATION, WHEN NOBODY ASKED FOR IT, NOBODY WANTS IT, AND ONLY A SMALL MINORITY OF PEOPLE WILL EVER USE IT? DID THAT COST US A RAID?”
[…]
“Remember how you waited 14 months with no content during SoO? And when we promised you we learned our lesson? And then when we charged extra for this expansion? And when we cut Farahlon, pushed back Tannan and BRF, and took away your capital cities?
Here’s Twitter and a few things for your garrison, keep paying us $15 a month and maybe we’ll give you something in the spring. Actually, make it the summer.
This is why I am pissed off. Because after all the promises, all the delays, all the millions of loyal fans paying $15 per month for over a year (the equivalent of buying a new AAA game every four months), taking more time to develop than any other expansion, and then still requiring us to pay more when it finally arrived, Blizzard completely drops the ball at launch and delivers less content than we’ve ever seen.
And then patch 6.1 comes along. Does Blizzard try to remedy any of this? Regain their customers trust?
No, instead we get the garrison update with Twitter integration.
“Which means that Blizzard itself admits that Warlords was only technically a two-content-patch expansion — in actuality, it was only one content patch.”
The subscriber numbers didn’t just fall, they collapsed. Warlords may have begun with an unprecedented spike in players, but just a few months later, the game was facing an all-time low. Blizzard pressed the ‘abort’ button and simply stopped reporting the numbers.
But that wasn’t enough to escape the cruel eye of the community. Through machine learning, one wise nerd came up with this graph. Warlords hit lows of just over four million. It represented the beginning of a new trend for Blizzard, in which subscribers would peak and then immediately drop with the release of each expansion. And excluding those temporary subscribers, the core community (who remained subscribed non-stop) followed an almost linear decline.
That was not remotely the only money-related drama in Warlords.
In the Wrath write-up, we covered the controversial sparkle pony. Players had been furious at the idea of paying real money for a mount. But Blizzard had assured them that it was only so expensive because half of the profits were going to charity.
Then, they added another mount to the store. And another, and another – each costing $25 or £19. Blizzard’s half-hearted excuse was that they didn’t ‘fit the theme’ of the expansion, and so there was no logical place to get them in game. But that logic didn’t persuade anyone - Blizzard had deliberately designed them that way.
Around the time of Warlords, it really kicked off. This was due to the addition of the Iron Skyreaver and the Enchanted Fey Dragon (the latter changed colour). These two mounts not only ‘fit the theme’, they were actively present throughout Draenor, both on the ground and in flight paths. It was pretty obvious that Blizzard had picked through the mounts of Warlords late into development, chosen the two most attractive ones, and cut them away to add to the in-game store. There was even an area in Shadowmoon Valley full of fey dragons and NPCs labelled ‘dragon trainers’, which suggested there had been a whole section of content surrounding these faction mounts, like the dragon serpents in Mists of Pandaria.
And it escaped no one that a vast majority of the mounts in Warlords were slight recolors of the same half a dozen models. There were, for example, nine different variations of the same wolf mount. It was almost like they had to compensate because they’d lost two of their main mount models.
“The best mounts should be ones earned in game no excuses, it ruins the game when you can just buy all the coolest stuff.”
Since mounts were technically cosmetic, there were some players who didn’t care.
“Don’t like them don’t buy them. Very simple.”
But for the most part, the community was incensed.
“Would someone please think of the wealthy corporate executives and majority shareholders!”
This usually always led onto the debate of whether Blizzard needed to sell store mounts. Costs were going up and subscribers were going down, some said, so Blizzard had no choice but to push harder on microtransactions. Profits were higher than ever, others replied.
And so the response would always be that Blizzard was a business, their goal was to make money.
A company providing a service, they were told, and the customer is king, not the shareholder.
Then quit, they’d say. Vote with your wallet. If you’re going to keep paying your subscripton, you’re implicitly supporting Blizzard’s choices, and so your arguments are in bad faith.
This was an effective rebuttal. It left the complaining party with two choices – sit down and shut up, or leave the game (and shut up). It may have been effective at stifling arguments, but more and more players were taking the latter option these days. That was becoming a problem.
When you’ve been in the WoW community long enough, you look at disputes in the forums the way Doctor Strange looks at timelines. The exact wording changes, but it always plays out the same way.
Regardless of what discourse went on, store mounts were insanely successful, and so they have become more and more prominent. For context, there are now twenty-two. It would cost you $550 dollars to buy them all.
Another money-grubbing addition was the level 90 boost. This isn’t the same as the boosting I described in the previous section. When pre-orders became available for Warlords, one of the perks used to justify the higher-than-usual upfront cost was the ability to send any character straight to level 90 – max level in Mists of Pandaria.
After Warlords released, you could buy as many Level 90 boosts as you liked – for $60 dollars each.
Casual players rejoiced.
“Free lvl 90 is exactly what this game needed. I’ve been playing off and on since vanilla, and leveling a new character to max level is the absolute LAST thing I want to spend my time doing. I’d literally rather be outside shovelling snow because I’d at least be getting a bit of exercise.”
[…]
“Hey, this isnt a bad thing ._. why does everybody treat it as such. Gives players who dont have the oodles of time to spend leveling 1-90 a character tht they can play endgame stuff with. Thats pretty awesome.”
It goes without saying that not everyone was happy. To many hard-core players, it was a slap in the face. The early World of Warcraft experience was defined by painful grinding, and now yet another rite of passage was being stripped away to pander to casuals.
“I guess this makes sense if you hate levelling (LINKS TO REDDIT) so much that it feels like work that you should be paid for, but it’s just part of the game to me. Paying extra money to skip part of the game that you’re paying a sub fee for seems crazy to me.”
It’s certainly true levelling gradually teaches players the basics of the game, and their class. Skipping that risks overwhelming newbies with systems and challenging content and an interface full of abilities they have no idea how to use.
“While endgame raiders have always bellyached about bad players, the sudden influx of level 90 characters without 90 levels of player skill has caused drama in WoW’s Looking For Raid feature. And while it’s hard to quantify the issue, it’s not hard to imagine that many low-DPS accusations are based on players who haven’t mastered their new characters.”
“In terms of the pricing, honestly a big part of that is not wanting to devalue the accomplishment of levelling,” Hazzikostas said.
"If our goal here was to sell as many boosts as possible, we could halve the price or more than that - make it $10 or something.”
How benevolent of them.
“So what are we to Blizzard? Are we just poorly educated pissants who flock to their games no matter what they do? Are we actual people who make their game live or die, or are we just cash cows to be milked until we can be milked no more (or until we start kicking)?”
Perhaps the most destructive part of Warlords was what it did to the economy – rampant hyperinflation. WoW had always had inflation, because players had always gathered more gold than they spent. Blizzard wanted to make it possible for new players to buy stuff, so each expansion rewarded more than the last. WoW’s economy sat in this delicate balance for over a decade without issue. Until Warlords.
Garrisons gave players the ability to easily farm herbs, ores, or other material, and also to process them into valuable items. They could send out ‘followers’ on missions which required zero effort to complete, but rewarded hundreds or thousands of gold. Here’s a guide from the time.
“…between 2014 and 2016, it was possible for dedicated players to generate quantities of gold that were previously impossible to obtain, and have not been possible to obtain since.
In that expansion, NPC followers could get an ability called “treasure hunter” that doubled any gold rewards they earned from a quest. And “treasure hunter” perks stacked, so it was possible to get a few thousand gold per day, per garrison. Many casual players who had never had significant amounts of money before earned hundreds of thousands of gold during Warlords of Draenor. Players could sock away millions, since each character could earn roughly the same amount of gold from their garrisons, and you can have as many as 10 characters on a server.”
Before long, the game was full of millionaires.
Blizzard’s solution to this problem was… rudimentary. They removed the ability to generate enormous amounts of gold when the next expansion came out, and they filled the game with gold sinks. A gold sink is an extremely expensive item designed to remove money from the economy. These included gear appearances and toys, but mainly came in the form of mounts. This wasn’t anything new – the famous Traveller’s Tundra Mammoth went back to Wrath of the Lich King. What changed was the sheer cost of these mounts, as well as how many there were.
The Marsh Hopper cost 333,000 gold, and there were three to buy. The Lightforged Warframe and Palehide Direhorn each set you back a spicy 500,000 gold. The Bloodfang Window cost 2 million, and the famous Mighty Caravan Brutosaur cost 5 million.
This wasn’t really a solution. The gold farmers had so much money that none of these mounts made a dent in their wealth, and it meant a lot of mounts were totally unattainable to everyone else. This was especially bad in the case of reputations. Imagine working your socks off for weeks to max out your reputation with the Argussian Reach faction, only to find out you would never get the mount, because it had been turned into a ludicrously expensive gold sink. One expansion (Battle for Azeroth) would turn ALL of its faction mounts into gold sinks.
Rather than fix the problem of inflation, this just made the non-wealthy players more angry about it. Now it was affecting them directly. And since it didn’t fix inflation, everything else remained exorbitantly expensive.
“There is massive inequality, because WoW’s trade goods economy tends to funnel wealth to a small number of players.”
If you avoided these gold-making techniques, or weren’t subscribed during the time when they were possible, you were effectively locked out of the game’s economy.
“Blizzard is fully aware of the damaging impact that some content in Warlords of Draenor has wrought onto the game economy. However, I am worried that attempts to fix it will not be heavy-handed enough, which could cause problems such as making new player experiences even more frustrating due to the sheer amount of gold they’d have to earn to make any headway into some aspects of the game.”
Blizzard did have one other trick up its sleeve to help with this.
In April 2015, Blizzard introduced the WoW Token. It was an in-game item representing one month of game play-time. Players could buy them for real money, and sell them to other players.
WoW gold had always had an in-game value on black markets, but now it was official. Blizzard took some measures to limit the tokens - unlike other items, players could neither set the price, bid or haggle, or choose who to buy from. The market price was automatically set by an algorithm based on supply vs demand, and tokens could not be directly exchanged for real money – though they could be exchanged for Battle.net account balance to spend on other Blizzard games, and those games could be legally sold on key-selling sites for real money.
“Players only need a finite amount of game time; you buy 24 tokens, and you’re fixed for two years. So the players sitting on hoards of gold had an incentive to sell only a fraction of their stash. The rest of their wealth sat idle in their coffers, out of circulation.
To motivate dedicated players to keep playing by allowing them to pay their subscription fee in gold
To give casual or new players an avenue into the economy by letting them buy gold through legitimate means
To generate more profit from their shrinking player base
To undermine the black market
It succeeded spectacularly on the first three, but failed just as spectacularly on the fourth.
Most MMOs had some kind of ‘token’ service – WoW wasn’t doing anything new. Indeed, most of the community were in favour of tokens. It was a popular addition which benefitted new and old players.
“Even though I quit WoW a long time ago it’s good to see things like this being implemented in to the game.”
[…]
“This feature is completely amazing! Thanks so much for this Blizz ! :)”
[…]
“Finally an excellent idea, now people will play easier without thinking about membership. Great Job.”
[…]
“let me just say, as someone who’s highest level non-death knight is lvl 26, that this is the best feature i’ve ever seen on a multiplayer game”
But the community was divided on whether the WoW token would actually work.
Some players worried that in order to pay for WoW tokens, more of them would start farming gold, and so inflation would rise rather than fall. Gold spent on tokens never actually left the economy. If anything, by linking all of the servers within a region in the same token market, Blizzard guaranteed that gold would hit the same value everywhere. In small servers with low inflation, that meant a huge drop in the value of gold.
“I think that it is a negative. I think that it makes the game worse, and it’s a bandage that Blizzard puts on the game in order to make up for the fact that they’re not balancing, and they’re not dealing with [back market] gold sellers. That’s what it comes down to. It fucks the economy. It makes every single accomplishment that can be achieved with gold – which is basically all accomplishments – basically an Ebay achievement.
WoW token legitimises and it provides a vehicle for pay to win to occur. […] And what is winning in WoW? Winning in WoW means something different for everybody. But I think for many people, winning in WoW does imply, to some degree, getting a good arena rating or getting very good gear. Gold can buy both of those things, and if you can buy gold, I think that’s pay to fucking win.”
It has been streamlined to the point where it has more in common with Uber than the shady websites of old. But unlike the black market gold sales, Blizzard profits immensely from the boosting industry, because players pay for boosts with gold, and they get that gold from tokens. In fact, Blizzard overtly works with boosting companies to track down RMT (real money transactions) in exchange for the implicit protection of these companies. In order words, Blizzard audits boosters to keep the profits flowing through the token system.
“Fundamentally, it’s a lot like randomly getting an insanely good group on the group finder, but reliable, repeatable and on-demand. They have made it convenient, low risk, and professional. Hell, if your run goes wrong, you can even get a refund. These companies have moderators, they have customer support staff, and of course advertisers. All so that you can have a good experience.”
Most full-time boosters come from poorer countries, where the profits from wealthy westerners can easily cover the costs of living. Globally, it’s an industry worth tens, perhaps hundreds of millions.
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.
Only two months after MoP released, the first patch dropped. ‘Landfall’ was heavily story-based, and mostly followed the Horde and Alliance as they built up fortifications on the southern coast of Pandaria. As players progressed through the story, the defences got bigger and stronger, which made it feel rewarding. Even though it was mostly more daily quests and reputations, it went down well.
Only a few months after Landfall came ‘The Thunder King’, widely considered to be one of the best patches in Warcraft history, with a new zone containing a really interesting story, and one of the best raids in the game. It had an awesome Chinese/Aztek theme.
It would have been enough to satisfy players for up to six months, but they only had to wait two. The third patch, ‘Escalation’ took players to the zones surrounding the Horde capital of Orgrimmar. It was mercifully short on dailies, and continued to tell the story of Garrosh’s turn to Tyranny.
Just four months passed before the final patch dropped. Less than a year after Mists began, it had ended. ‘The Siege of Orgrimmar’ was another incredible patch. Its raid was colossal and had a number of creatively designed fights. Garrosh Hellscream, Chad of Chads, took seven phases to kill. The Vale of Eternal Blossoms was redesigned and given a totally new story.
Blizzard brought in the Timeless Isle, a new form of end-game content which eschewed dailies in favour of treasure chests, puzzles, mini games and dozens of bosses, some of which were very creatively designed. For example, there was Evermaw, a giant whale that circled the island, which players had to chase down using water-walking spells.
The Timeless Isle was incredibly addictive and got a positive response from players.
Following the release of MoP, subscribers continued to fall. At first, quite rapidly. Then slowly. Then, to everyone’s collective shock, they began to go up again. 200,000 subscribers came back during Quarter 4 of 2013. And it’s not hard to see why. Blizzard were releasing excellent content at a rapid pace. There were talks of Mists being a new renaissance for Warcraft.
But it came at a steep cost.
The Four Hundred and Sixty Day Patch
After the Siege of Orgrimmar, players waited eagerly to see what would come next. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen. Nothing went on happening for several months, in fact. If you celebrated the release of Siege of Orgrimmar by having unprotected sex, your baby would be transitioning from milk to solid food by the time the next major patch came out. Or crawling, if it were particularly smart. Which it wouldn’t be, because its parents played World of Warcraft.
You may remember Hour of Twilight, Cataclysm’s infamously long patch from the last write-up: that one had been 301 days long. Siege of Orgrimmar lasted 460. To this day, it is the longest pause in the game’s history.
As you can imagine, the attitude among fans went from jubilant, to bored, to downright furious. And all the while, they followed the next expansion with ever-more critical eyes, but we’ll get to that absolute disaster next post.
The love players had for Siege of Orgrimmar gradually turned to hatred. They started to hate its length – it made it time consuming to finish for the hundredth time. They hated its focus on story – it was just a distraction. They hated its complicated fights, because they just wanted to get them over with so they could get to the loot. The freedom that made the Timeless Isle great started to feel like a lack of direction. The bosses, which could only be taken down when entire communities worked together, became unwinnable because no one wanted to be there anymore.
“All that time yet I only killed Garrosh once”
Oh, and by the way, the ending of the raid was… inconclusive. The only way to learn of Garrosh’s fate was to read the novel War Crimes. I won’t go into the whole ‘Faction Bias’ issue yet, because I’ll have much more material a couple of posts down the road. But these are the basics: The Horde had effectively nuked an Alliance city, committed heinous atrocities, split apart, revolted, and deposed its leader. After years of fighting on-and-off, a (mainly Alliance) force had taken the Horde’s capital city and cut off its leadership. They finally had the power to break up the Horde for good, or turn it into a vassal, or at the very least prevent it from arming again. They could have done whatever they wanted.
And what did they choose to do?
They wagged a very imposing finger in the faces of Horde leaders, told them not to do it again, let them choose a new ruler, and left. And no one questioned this decision. Well, pretty much all the fans did, but no one within WoW’s world. Garrosh wasn’t even killed, or taken into Alliance custody, he was sent to an ‘international’ court and freed, to terrorise another day. Cataclysm had experienced its fair share of writing flops, but this was one of the first real deep cuts to the faith fans held in their writers. And it would not be the last.
Anyway. The WoW renaissance had ended as quickly as it started. The Subscribers started falling again. Mists had started at 10 million subscribers and hit lows of roughly 7 million. It had been, for the most part, an excellent expansion, but its ideas were just too much for some people, and its content release schedule was far too ambitious.
Mists of Pandaria still divides fans today, but its public perception has changed dramatically. It gradually developed a sort of ‘cult classic’ status, which has grown more and more common over the years. Most of the community looks back on it fondly. It’s not uncommon to hear it described as the best expansion, World of Warcraft at its absolute zenith.
”…it was a consistently good expansion that defied its early reviews to deliver a great experience. I do wish we hadn’t been subjected to the lull of 14 months of no content…”
”Mists of Pandaria, despite any dispersions people have for the aesthetic of that expansion, was a great example of the game could be when the WoW team had a complete vision for the story and plenty of content for the players to experience.”
But there are still those who see it as a disappointment. If Cataclysm was the downward turn, Mists of Pandaria was the cliff.
”An expansion where Blizzard wanted money and weren’t afraid to degrade itself as a company along with the Warcraft franchise in the process. Have they done it before? Yes. Was it more apparent this time? Indubitably.”
[…]
”Terrible, made me leave. Leveled to 90, looked around and say “nope, not gonna jerk off the panda folk for dailies ad nauseam” and unsubbed for a year.”
[…]
”The dreadful leveling experience, the lackluster dungeons, the unbearable shitfest that is LFR, and the isle of a thousand chests can all go fuck themselves.”
[…]
”for me it was the worst expansion yet, the theme has been my big issue and I can’t get over it : /” Said the user ‘Horizon’.
You don’t tend to hear from those people as much anymore, perhaps because they quit the game and left its community. Personally, I loved MoP.
Is it okay to fuck a baby dragon? Asking for a friend.
While this isn’t one of the biggest dramas in Mists, it’s one of the strangest.
Anduin was the son of the Alliance leader, Varian Wrynn. It was clear he was one of the main characters Blizzard had singled out to become important later on. He was a recurring figure throughout almost every zone in Pandaria, and every patch too.
Wrathion was a black dragon – the last ‘uncorrupted’ one (all the others fell under Deathwing’s spell). When he took a human form, he appeared as a dark-skinned young man with red eyes, a beard, and a turban. Anduin and Wrathion had an story which proceeded through the game’s main patches, in which they had an enemies-to-friends relationship.
”it’s a 16 dating a 3 YEAR OLD. thats a toddler. unless you want to have it be bestiality your talking pedophilia pick your poison. it doesn’t matter what fantasy terms you use to dress it up the fact of it still remains that he’s DATING A TODDLER.” Said user ‘breadisfunny’.
There was some debate on this point.
”Paedophilia between this ship would be if Wrathion could not give consent as he does not have the mental maturity or physical capacity to do so. However, because he’s a dragon, he’s able to do so. Because they age much more quickly.”
[…]
”People love pushing fictional kids together. It’s really weird.”
Some members of the community were quick to disclaim that they didn’t want to portray Anduin and Wrathion having sex, only enjoying a wholesome romantic relationship. Here’s a little taste of that discourse.
”Are you kidding? They’re adorable.”
[…]
”it’s pedophile territory and you know it.”
[…]
”Seriously the most interesting relationship dynamic in WoW. Who even cares about genders at that point?
It’s basically the best. <3”
[…]
”Nice try but homosexuals do not and will not exist in the WOW universe.
Whats your next fetish, a gay relationship between a Walrus man and an Arakoa?”
World of Warcraft had dozens of main characters, and none of them were LGBT, so they couldn’t be blamed for latching on to the next closest thing, right? That’s what they thought. And in their defence, Anduin was very twinky.
“why does WoW need a homosexual character?” said one user.
Indeed, often the problem was not the ages of the characters, but the fact that they were gay. We’ve already covered how the average player sees ‘gay’ things in this post, so I don’t need to elaborate there. Homophobia was, and still is, rife in the playerbase.
”Because people do not understand what a platonic relationship is and are quick to jump into the LGBT agenda bandwagon”
Don’t worry though, this has a happy ending.
”This looks like some weird anime shipping shit”
This ship would simmer down for a while, and Wrathion would largely disappear from the scene. This is pretty common. Blizzard picks up new focal characters every expansion, and then tends to drop them straight after. But Blizzard continued refreshing Anduin’s model over the expansions to show him aging. And three expansions later, he was officially Anduin the Manduin, and had gone from twink to twunk to full on hunk. When Wrathion made his unexpected return after a glow up of his own, the shippers reawakened from their slumber.
”Anduin-kun…" “Nan deska, Wrathion-senpai?”
An almost industrial amount of fanart was churned out, with adult characters this time. I took the liberty of collecting some of it, for the good of the academic community. You may be wondering whether I really needed to assemble such homosexual multitudes, such a bevy of boy-love, just to prove my point, and to that I say you can get the hell out of my thread.
”Varian will be so proud of his son, sucking some dragon’s dick.
First Jaina, now you, what is happening to this world”
For context, Jaina was a character who also had a reputation for puffing the magic dragon - that was actually her least controversial boyfriend.
Indeed, Wrathion x Anduin the ship is so popular that there has been a lot of push for them to be canon. Considering Blizzard’s recent obsession with proving they’re definitely not evil, I can see them doing it. But we won’t get to all that for a while yet.
”With Wrathion returning at the end of WoD and with Anduin’s heavy heart of his betrayal do you think Blizzard will cave and let them be an official couple?”
Only time will tell. At any rate, this was a vast improvement over the situation during Cataclysm, when Anduin had been shipped with a cow
Another major feature was the ‘Sungsong Ranch’, a little farm players could own in the Valley of the Four Winds as part of the ‘tillers’ guild. Each player would only ever see their own farm upon entering the area, but could visit other peoples’ farms by grouping up. It worked similarly to Stardew Valley. Next to the farm was a market, where players could sell their vegetables or give them as gifts to the locals in order to improve their relationships, and gradually unlock more parts of the farm.
Despite the inevitable Farmville comparisons, it was well received overall, which was a massive problem, because Blizzard only ever works in extremes. A far more elaborate version of this mechanic would rear its head in the following expansion, with terrible results, but that’s a drama for another post.
The most eye-catching addition to MoP was ‘pet battles’. Pets had existed for years, and were just little animated creatures that followed the player around. But now a system had been created to track and collect pets, name them, trade them, level them up, and fight them in matches against NPCs or other players. It was almost identical to Pokemon, a similarity lost on absolutely no one, and yet everyone felt the need to point out. Indeed, Blizzard had to reassure the community that it was not, in fact, a joke.
“This is like a comedy reel. Everyone’s laughing cuz it’s exactly like Pokemon in every way…he mentions feature after feature and they’re all taken from Pokemon. I’m surprised he kept a straight face for the most part.”
Youtuber ‘King Beaver’ had this to say:
”I thought this was gonna be really gay at first but then i realized i loved pokemon as a kid and you know what =/ i honestly wanna give this a try”
I suppose his intentions were good?
At any other time, pet battles probably wouldn’t have raised any eye-brows. But in a time of ‘Farmville knock-offs’, simplified talents, and cuddly pandas, when the community was already freaking out about MoP being aimed at girls, children, and casuals, it only poured fuel on the fire.
Who honestly plays World of Warcraft and says “I’ve got to log in to duel my pet!”? Who gets a kick of these things? Go play tamagotchi or Pokemon if you wanna play a game like that. AND FARMS?! GO PLAY FARMVILLE OR SOMETHING!
Of course, when they actually got into the game, these people realised that the pet battles system wasn’t even noticeable unless you actually took an interest in it. And those who did take an interest usually loved it. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that development time had been spent on it. WoW players have always had a toxic relationship with the finite nature of development. Whenever they see a feature they didn’t want, they immediately imagine the things they did want, which had to be sacrificed (usually a raid), because Blizzard could only create so much content.
”Blizzard need to focus on the bloody gameplay and not waste their time on these childish things. They have dug the grave for this game with cataclysm and now they are just sh*ttin on it”
Fortunately, there were some sane responses, such as this one by the user ‘Tziva’.
Everyone I know who is looking forward to the pet battles is well into adulthood. I’m not sure why they cross the line into childish more than, say, having a pet in general. Or transmogging to play dress-up. Or riding a giant kitty. Or getting your hair style changed. Or any of the other aspects of the game one could single out and proclaim “for children.”
Standing alongside this whole drama was another one, relating to ethics. Pokemon has always managed to sidestep the ‘animal cruelty’ aspect of making creatures fight each other through heavy worldbuilding. Pokemon are treated well, given the utmost medical care, and are shown actively choosing to participate Particularly in the show, Pokemon are treated less like slaves and more like fully independent characters who just happen to live in balls.
WoW never really tried to do this. And in many cases, the pets were literally just normal cats, rats, dogs, and birds. For example, the baby ape or Whomper, whose description is “When Whomper wants to play, he’ll let you know with a playful headbutt.”. WoW had hundreds of pets, and a lot of them didn’t really fit the whole ‘pokemon’ aesthetic. Players criticised the ethics of making them fight.
There were also literal children who could be used as pets, but Blizzard prevented them from being used against each other. This decision upset some people.
If the Hunger Games taught us anything, we love to see children fight it out to the death. I hereby propose letting the little orc and human children join the pet battles. Add the little Christmas orc slaves too.
Aside from the jokes, there were some users who pointed out that many pets were just as sapient as humanoid children, so Blizzard was sort of making a statement by choosing which ones to allow. This drama didn’t really go anywhere, but it’s fun to talk about.
Blizzard’s game development operates like a pendulum. They swing one way, fans complain, so they go to the exact opposite extreme. If you know that, and you know what happened in Cataclysm, you can guess how Mists went.
Cataclysm hadn’t had enough daily quests or reputations, so Mists of Pandaria was absolutely stacked with them. Each day, you would complete quests for the Golden Lotus, the Order of the Cloud Serpent, the Shadow-Pan, the Anglers, the Tillers, the Klaxxi, and the August Celestials. There had always been a daily cap on the number of daily quests a person could complete, which was 25. Blizzard removed that when MoP released, so that players could complete Pandaria’s 48 daily quests unimpeded.
“…it looks like there will be approximately 1300 quests in Mists of Pandaria. Right this moment we don’t have the numbers off-hand to show how that that compares exactly to the previous expansions, but the quest count seems to more closely mirror Wrath of the Lich King, however with a much greater emphasis on dailies. Mists of Pandaria is actually the expansion where we have emphasized dailies the most… ever!”
And don’t worry, the first and second patches both brought yet more dailies.
It didn’t take long for daily-fatigue to creep in. Unfortunately, high level gear was locked behind faction reputation requirements, so many players felt forced to do every daily, every day, in order to stay competitive. I recall it would take me several hours. Here are some experiences from other players.
”I think what turned a lot of people off was the huge emphasis on doing dailies for literally every faction every day in order to get rep and gear upgrades. If you missed a day, it felt like you were ages behind everyone else.”
Players often cited the sheer avalanche of daily quests as the reason why they quit – they just burned out.
”The MOP dailies were so time consuming that I was unable to do all dailies for all factions in one day. It took me 3 months to get ambassador. I came tired physically from work and then got tired mentally from endless grind to get exalted in wow.”
[…]
”The rep grind was so bad it actually made me unsub. It wasn’t fun anymore when I’d spend 3 hours a day doing what felt like a tedious chore, knowing that the amount of rep I could get in one day was capped so to get exalted would take a month of daily quests. Really sucked the fun out of the game.”
There were, of course, critics. Dailies weren’t mandatory, at least not technically. And according to the user ‘Styil’, what could possibly be wrong with more content?
I will never understand this mentality. How can you have “too much” content, let alone see it as a problem?
[…]
There weren’t too many dailies. People just have zero self-control.
One of the most heavily marketed additions in Mists was that of ‘Scenarios’. These were like dungeons, only more story-based. Rather than a team of five people with three damage dealers, a tank, and a healer, scenarios were made to be completed by anyone. This was done in the hope of avoiding the lengthy dungeon queues, but as a result, they were extremely easy. There were 29 scenarios in Mists of Pandaria, and while some players (like me) loved them, they proved unpopular with others.
In order to cater to players who wanted more of a challenge, harder ‘Heroic’ scenarios were released, with such massive rewards that everyone was pretty much forced to do them.
Unfortunately, scenarios came at the cost of dungeons – a cornerstone of the game. Vanilla had 26 dungeons, Burning Crusade and Wrath had 16 and Cataclysm had 14. Mists of Pandaria had 6, and they were all rather simple, with no real variation from ‘Normal’ to ‘Heroic’ modes. Players found them far too easy.
The raids, at least, were fine. The ‘Looking for Raid’ feature added in Cataclysm continued to become more and more toxic and hated, but there’s nothing I can say about it which hasn’t already been covered.
The Talent Tree
After the content drought of Cataclysm, Blizzard took pains to create plenty of things to do.
There had always been world bosses – extremely powerful enemies roaming questing areas, which players could group up to kill – but MoP turned them into a real feature. World bosses had a tiny chance of dropping mounts.
Speaking of which, MoP introduced systems for players to conveniently track mounts across their characters, as well as toys and gadgets. ‘Elite Enemies’ were scattered across the world in their dozens. There was also the ‘Lorewalkers’, a unique faction which rewarded players for examining monuments, reading scrolls, and hearing folk tales across Pandaria. The Brawler’s Guild allowed players to take part in an underground fighting ring. Warlocks got a long requested questline to turn their fire demonic green. Professions were re-worked, gameplay was drastically changed across the board, and the talent system was totally remade.
This last change was quite controversial. The ‘talent tree’ had always offered players a number of small stat boosts which they could buy with points. Blizzard didn’t think the system felt very rewarding, and was too easily ‘optimised’, which they were kind of right about. But many players were attached to it.
”Sure, people still used cookie cutter builds, and there were plenty of worthless talents, but I enjoyed it. Getting a point to spend every level made it feel like I was actually getting stronger,” said Reddit user ‘PB-Toast’.
Others disagreed.
”Dont let nostalgia hide that a good portion of these talents were increase chance to hit 1/5% and incredibly boring.”
The replacement was this. Every fifteen levels, players had the option of choosing between three abilities. Usually, they were of similar types – they might all be damaging spells, or movement-related, or healing powers. The intention was to free players from the need to do whatever the internet said was best. But that didn’t work, and the internet quickly figured out which choices were the most efficient.
Players saw it as a departure from the classic RPG elements, and yet another appeal toward casuals.
”It’s not even about nostalgia, it’s about making it an RPG. Levelling up was rewarding, you got talents, got stronger levels of spells and had a general sense of progression. Wow is a MMO. Its been long since it lost the RPG.”
Players argue to this day over which system was better.
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.
The worst things about WoW during these years happened off screen. Some of them got pretty grim. I felt the need to include them.
World of Warcraft made headlines in July 2012 when an argument over the game in an Ontario neighbourhood ended with one man being stabbed in the chest. You can view the wound here (NSFW). The attacker, Justin Williams, was having an enraged argument with guildies over his headset. Jordan Osborne visited to see what was going on, and tried to de-escalate the situation.
“I was telling him, there is no need for you to be freaking out about ‘World of Warcraft.’ It’s just a game,” Osborne told QMI.
Williams responded, “It’s not just a game, it’s my life.” He then assaulted Osborne, grabbing him by the throat, punching him in the face, and stabbing him in his sternum.
‘I was sitting in my house today thinking I could be dead - and it’s all over a World of Warcraft game. It’s true, it takes over your life.’
Osborne was taken for treatment and made a full recovery. He later told the ‘Peterborough Examiner’, “'The doctor said he could fit his whole finger in my chest.”. Williams faced arrest and was charged with ‘aggravated assault with a weapon’.
The game had already earned its reputation for inspiring extreme and sometimes violent behaviour. But it wasn’t until 2012 that the global media began to question the effects of World of Warcraft in greater depth. Not because of the stabbing of Jordan Osbourne, though that didn’t help. But because of something much more severe.
On 22 July, just a week after the Ontario incident, a Norwegian man named Anders Behring Breivik detonated a van bomb in Oslo, right next to the Regjeringskvartalet - a collection of government buildings. 8 people were killed. By the time the dust settled, he was halfway to the island of Utoya, where a summer camp was taking place for the Worker’s Youth League, a political group associated with the Norwegian Labour Party. Breivik proceeded to hunt down and kill 69 participants, most of whom were children. 318 people were injured. It paralysed Norway. The deadliest lone-wolf attack in history would come as a shock to any country, but Norway was one of the most peaceful, prosperous nations in the world. This was unimaginable.
As more information surfaced, the world scrambled to draw a profile of the perpetrator. Breivik had them covered. He had taken a leaf out of the Unabomber’s book and distributed a number of texts called ‘2083: A European Declaration of Independence’. Long story short, he was your standard far-right fascist wannabe. His shitty little book would inspire murderers for years to come.
Among other things, he attributed his success to World of Warcraft.
Breivik said in court, “Some people dream about sailing around the world, some dream of playing golf. I dreamt of playing World of Warcraft.”
Breivik professed to playing the game non-stop (as much as 16 hours a day at points), describing it as a ‘martyr’s gift’ to himself, and using it as a smokescreen to mislead his mother while he planned his attack. Researchers found he had led three guilds, all of which focused on hardcore raiding. He played a human female mage named ‘Conservativism’ and a tauren female druid named ‘Conservative’, though his main was called ‘Andersnordic’. When the prosecution displayed a picture of his character in court, Breivik smiled.
He made multiple attempts to distance himself from the game, perhaps because he felt it damaged the ‘legitimacy’ of his message, but it was gradually becoming clear how core World of Warcraft had been to his identity.
“I know it is important to you and the media that I played this for a year,” he told the court in response to Mr. Holden’s questions. “But it has nothing to do with July 22. It is not a world you are engulfed by. It is quite simply a hobby.”
Breivik would occasionally post on the forums. In one reply, he defended a Scandinavian cyberbully who he said ‘works against the Islamisation of Sweden’. The news shook the WoW community to its core, especially on the servers he had played (Silvermoon-EU and Nordrassil-EU). Players reacted with horror and disgust.
Some of his past guildies discussed their relationships with Breivik, which gave an insight into what he was like as a person.
My memories of Anders are very good, and the atrocity was so incredible that I suppose I simply refused to see the pictures as Anders at first.
One of the replies was from a fellow Norwegian.
This is surrealistic, as an Norwegian it is hard to even comprehend what he has done and even harder to fathom his motives. The killer portraited in our news papers and on television seems so far out that it is easiest to judge him as a rabbit psychotic. To know that i have been guilded and chated with him for over a year in Virtue, at least back then he seemed pretty normal, makes this even more uncomprehensible.
The general consensus was that while Breivik had been unpleasant at times, it was difficult to imagine him doing something so evil.
Yes offler I do indeed remember him. He an I had quiet a public barney. I did think he was a jerk and a petty control freak but not true evil as he has shown himself to be. Although I did think of him from time to time in a very negative way, I really did dislike that man.
It has really affected me these last few days how I had contact with someone who was truley a monster. He is a true coward, parking a car bomb, attacking children with a automatic riffle. I do hope he suffers in prison.
“It was a sickening feeling when I realized I had played for two or three hours with the man who tried to kill me,” Fred Ove Løtuft told local newspaper Bergens Tidende. “I’ve played a lot of shooting games where you have to get away and hide,” he said.
Passing himself off as a Finn, Breivik led a clan in World of Warcraft called the Knights Templar, Løtuft said. In his manifesto, Breivik claimed he belonged to an “anti-Jihad” terrorist organization of the same name. Chatting to Breivik at the time, Løtuft said he had formed a positive impression of his fellow player. “We only talked about the game. He didn’t seem like a guy who would run amok and gun down young people, to put it mildly,” Løtuft told Bergens Tidende.
The debate over whether video game violence caused real-world violence had played out dozens of times, usually in response to the revelation that some American shooter played Call of Duty or Battlefield or something like that. I’m not American so correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it has something to do with gun lobbies looking for scapegoats so that they don’t have to ban guns.
But this time, the conversation focused entirely on World of Warcraft. The media, both in Norway and throughout the world, questioned whether WoW was a safe place for children. All of the game’s past incidents came back with a vengeance, and were held up to the light as examples of its danger.
Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen claimed that Breivik was unable to distinguish between World of Warcraft and reality. It was part of the fictional world he had created around himself, in which he was a knight defending Europe from invaders, and not an unsuccessful Norwegian neckbeard.
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.
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.
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.
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 tacklednumeroustimes.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.