TLDR: It was never about the game, it was always about the community. The game is just a vessel, which can build community if it’s designed to. There was a chance for me to reunite with the RP-PvP community after several years, but that was recently taken away from me.
The fight between players and devs is perhaps as old and as heated as the war between Horde and Alliance. It’s perfectly reasonable that a concerted understanding should be struck between the two for an optimal PvB (Player vs Blizzard) experience. When this balance is broken, players leave. Who is to blame is not the issue at hand, but should be a point where real communication should occur. When it’s effective, it’s a win-win. When it’s not, everyone loses.
So I want what you want Blizzard: for WoW Forever to be as successful as possible, but it is important for us to understand each other in order to keep not only the integrity of the game (and the Warcraft IP) as we know and love alive, but also the integrity of the communities that have formed inside of it.
I never played the original World of Warcraft from 2004, but I have always loved Warcraft from afar through private servers that return to that time since 2012 well before Nostalrius came alive to inspire what would eventually be Classic WoW.
So my official start was in 2019, on the RP-PvP realm of Grobbulus. When TBC Classic rolled around, Blizzard added purchasable Level 58 boosts and the world of Azeroth was mostly abandoned for Outland. Many still stayed after that, but I didn’t.
For many others, it was the WoW Token and the move to Cata which many consider the breaking point between Classic WoW and Retail since 2011, just repeated in Classic.
When players can’t experience the game they know and love, they don’t have much of a choice - private servers fill in the gap that Blizzard left behind.
So, inevitably, I became fluent in the private server scene. The seven years of my absence exists outside of what Blizzard could provide. Turtle WoW, Project Epoch, Project Ascension. All of these projects gave the world of Azeroth an unfelt love that Blizzard could not give to their own game at that time, and this is the primary reason why private servers became so popular.
(Now, should these private servers have made money off of Blizzard’s IP? Probably not, but that’s a whole other issue.)
The heart of it is still the aforementioned. If we do not have a home, we go somewhere else. The love for Warcraft will always be there, but Blizzard has not always been there for us. And I hate to see it happen again with refusing to give RP-PvP players a Forever home, since that is where I live when it comes to this game.
I can forgive Blizzard for 15 years of transgressions for abandoning the integrity and spirit of their original game, I can forgive them for making the same mistakes for what they did to WoW Classic, I can forgive them for ripping apart these beloved private servers with their C&D letters and lawsuits, and I can forgive the lore whiplash I received with the announcement of the Skyborne instead of Belves and High Elves, but ONLY IF they give the game I love, and the community I love, the attention and respect we all deserve.
I don’t care if they took the best of Turtle, Epoch, or Ascension (which by my eyes they did to some degree) to build WoW Forever, as long as they restore the game that we have all come to know and love.
I am only here because I believe WoW Forever is going in the right direction, by committing to stay on Azeroth, expanding it from there, and focusing on the journey rather than the destination through the philosophy of horizontal progression.
This change is the reason I’m coming back, but not having RP-PvP as a ruleset is weighing heavy on me on whether I have given Blizzard too much grace far too soon, since they are choosing to break our trust yet again. Many of us cannot and will not support that. The amount of refunds that I have heard about should be a sign that this choice matters.
I think for whatever it’s worth, even if symbolic in scale, long-term loyalty may be worth more than the savings that come with a community’s exodus and fragmentation. The most successful games are the ones where love is simply baked into it - and it comes from both devs and players. So refusing a whole community’s dedication and love for the game is just bad business. The magic is there. Capture it.
I want WoW Forever to be my Forever home, and we are not looking to experience another “you think you do, but you don’t.” At the very least, retest your assumptions, communicate with us, and let’s bring this whole thing to the finish line together, Forever.
it’s not