Hey everyone,
I’ve never made a successful post on any platform, mostly because I’ve never felt the need to address anything online that was outside of my personal control. I’m an introvert so I can sometimes take forever to explain something, since i want it understood in depth. Forgive me, and please follow along.
TL:DR - I’ve been a Blizzard supporter since Orcs and Humans/ Lost Vikings. They’ve disappointed me with their stance on Hong Kong and China (details below), and how I would like to keep WoW as a hobby and not play it as a job. I’m an adult man with responsibilities. Hell, I’d love to share this game with my son when he gets older because the concepts that were introduced in this game stayed with me in my military service. (DEEP BREATH)
Here we go. I hope somebody sees this and takes a note of what I’m going to say.
Dear Blizzard,
I love this thing you’ve created. Orcs and Humans was my first gift I was given by my best friend. I had a Macintosh PRO, he had a Windows PC. Your game changed the course of my life. I got into science fiction and fantasy because of it. If I was honest, when I was going to war for the US Military and hunting other humans down for them I imagined that I was a soldier of the Alliance fighting against the evil monstrous Horde who have invaded our home. I imagined myself a Paladin, trained under Anduin Lothar, a former woodsman protecting his home nation with duty and honor.
But really, war is nothing like a video game. However, the management skills that I got through RTS games gave me an advantage over my peers when it came to task building. At first I was ecstatic that my time gaming was actually beneficial for me. Then I killed people with those same skills and I was horrified and disgusted. I could no longer enjoy the things that I loved because they were covered with the blood of innocents.
We were not the honorable soldiers of the Light I had once believed we were. We were the Horde monsters invading the homes of others and stealing their lives and resources to power our war machines. I murdered 13 people. If I was a superstitious man I would say that I have been cursed by that. But thankfully science fiction and fantasy have given me a fantastic glimpse of what is real and what is not. I don’t believe in fate or that divinity is other than self knowledge. I understand that Karma is only that which is the consequences of ones actions, cause and effect, which is observable with science formulas in Nature.
I tell you these things because I’ve found connection and healing for my own actions through using WoW as video game therapy in the last years. Not solely on it’s own but I came back for Draenor because my best friend (mentioned above) reminded me of my love for Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal and he bought me a new account since my previous one had been hacked and banned while I had been deployed overseas. We played through as Alliance Characters. I stopped playing after the start of Cataclysm due to increased military obligations. Shortly afterwards I got hacked by some botters and hit with the banwave. The pain i experienced was probably similar to that of a person getting a Dear John letter while deployed. Broke my heart but I had a duty to attend to.
After I got out of the military due to a training accident, I was pretty lost. I tried to go to college but i was just a broken human. It got bad. I was homeless in a town where I had 14 separate family members who made over 300k a year each but due to my dropping of religion “god” told them not to help me. But they prayed for me. That was when I got back in contact with my best friend. He helped me out of it. Or at least helped me back on my feet. He helped me build my computer and bought me Draenor if I would play with him.
We made it through the story. Built up our (vastly disappointing feature) garrisons, pvped for a little bit then dropped off until Legion came out. Holy Crap, not as amazing for me as Wrath was, but damn you got a lot of stuff right there. The things you got wrong were glaring enough that I only made my first alt after I unlocked the Void elves, and grinding through everything else was not very enjoyable. I hated that I had to replay through content and grind out the same rep over and over. I just wanted to play in the world. When BFA came out I played through the Content on my Hunter, but couldn’t be moved to go through any of it again on my druid. He was shelved. I decided to make a paladin on the horde side, since that was what I played in BC and Wrath. Got him up, played through the story. Wasn’t really moved to go further with it until Voldunai were announced, but I really really wanted to pvp. Played on my hunter, but the alliance can be stupidly toxic and I haven’t had any really pleasant interactions with them.
The Horde, however, I loved. I was rarely ganked in World PVP, and when we fought there were a few times where they would come onto their alliance characters to not harass me, but to talk about how fun of a fight they had. Those interactions made my days. I started doing the same thing.
So waiting for the Voldun, I was gonna make a fox monk, since i’ve never ever played the class before, and I was going to go through the MoP story with it and finish that content with that character, because I fell in love with MOP when I went to go get xmogs and the whole aura of the expansion. Decided to play around with the class, made this guy…
I want to appologize for not playing this class sooner. Seriously I have once again loved playing this game again. And that brings me to some very glaring and broken things.
Gear iLVL is garbage. I feel like we’re back in the Burning Crusade era where people would berate you for having a low Gear Score that could only be obtained through a specific app, the precursor for the whole gear level BS. Here is my solution:
In pvp, if somebody wants to grind out their ilvl, fine. But make everyone a base level so that new max level toons are getting instagibbed. Those that grind for higher gear, raise the average iLVL of the team, so that not only are they powering themselves up, but also helping their teammates have a fighting chance. I’ve really hated it that some of the only reasons that I’ve lost fights are because of the gear difference. That’s not how real life works. The skill always overrides equipment. Equipment should give variance, not power anyways. Sets should never go “out of date”, they should simply change the way a class plays. That way gear becomes more about style and school rather than just bigger numbers.
I played through the story of the Forsaken, and i’m curious why you just didn’t give each faction it’s own “campaign story” for each race, and separate each expansion into it’s own story in the Warcraft Saga. I’d like to have a more alt friendly game. I don’t think one character could or would be able to do every single thing in the game. I want my own personal world affected by all my toons. I don’t want to make a garrison again. I don’t want to have to do a new farm in MOP. I don’t want to have to repeat items because that makes the world feel cheap and less immersive. I want to be IN the world of warcraft with my toons, not feel like i’m doing chores or a job just to stay relevant. I also don’t want to lose everything of the previous expansion when a new one comes out. Makes me feel like there is no actual progress in the game.
I’d want to play more and do more if the game was more alt friendly. I’d even like to be able to make multiples of the same class of different races. For example. This guy will always be a WindWalker. In my mind’s eye, he won’t be doing anything else. So my Voldunai monk will be a mistweaver and a brewmaster in Shadowlands. Completely different methods of playstyle, heck, Azdaja will be go to the Bastion and my Voldunai will go to the Night Fae. Pretty much almost completely different. But that’s not feasible in the the game as it is today. I’d have to redo nearly everything i have on this guy, when in game lore could be that the Voldunai monk could have made it to the wandering isle for training or whatever. There are ways to fix this.
Lastly, I want to talk about the community. We need to grow up and gain some maturity. I’m really sick and tired of the attitudes that i run into daily on here. People giving up in a BG when you’re slightly behind, and telling everyone around them that they suck or that they’re bad. Grow the F up. I want to go Staff Sergeant on these idiots. You know how many times i’ve done sh*t and i’ve never been quite sure of the outcome or if I would even survive it? More times than I can count offhandedly, and the worst times for myself were when I gave into that self pity. I never made it through without a scratch, but I always made it through and learned how to do better next time. Learn to communicate, give advice, help people out. I’m angry enough at the world in general, I don’t want my gaming experience soured by idiots who can’t learn to take a lose and still fight on.
Which brings me to another point. This is just a fricken game. When people tell me to quit or to not requeue because I’m not “geared enough for the group” (mostly in pvp when i was fresh 120 and had to rely on the catch up gear). People kept telling me to go grind gear, go run dungeons, go do mythics +… I don’t want to do that. I want to play the story and pvp. That’s it. If i have to go do a bunch of other things in order to do that, i’ll just find a game that does that for me, though I don’t want to that’s why I’m telling you this here. I have a deep attachment to this game. I connected me back to my childhood best friend and helped me gain a deeper understanding of war. It might sound weird but it’s true. Whether life reflects art or art reflects life makes no difference.
I want to find people to play with and enjoy the game and I want blizzard to start give us the quality that they once had before they went all McActivision on us. There are plenty of examples of games that they can draw from for improvements, playstyles, and sequencing. There is so much content that no casual player will ever finish it all. So please just make a game that is an enjoyable journey the whole way through. Eventually we’ll get to the destination we want to get off at. Don’t give me another job or stressor. I beg of you.
As for the whole China, Hong Kong thing, Blizzard as a company that promotes entertainment portraying certain ideals has the responsibility to uphold those ideals. Politics aside, we all know when a bad thing is going on and it is everyone’s responsibility to make sure that they’re not repeated in any point in history.
Respectfully,
(Ret) Staff Sergent Azdaja
