It’s pretty cowardly to make a bold statement and duck out from the push back. I got some heat from my similar thread about the increasing use of pseudo dev-speak among some of the playerbase, but I at least had the courtesy to stick around and engage with the people who disagreed.
In any case, I think some people are too quick to just slap “bad writing” labels on any story development they don’t like but there are also lots of flaws in the story as well. Inconsistent characters, logic gaps, intentionally forgotten story elements, multiple unresolved plot threads. So there is well deserved criticism as well.
I think the issue stems from folks outright going against accomplished writers.
Like I don’t agree with some of the story elements and I mean most people don’t agree with everything they read. But it’s kind of odd for folks to suggest they can do better.
I mean if you can do better, then do better. Blizzard has hired writers before. I’ve looked at the requirements. You need accomplished works when you apply. You need to show them that your words get readers attention and you have good sale numbers. Because your peers on the blizzard writing team are NYT bestselling authors.
It’s like guys at the bar yelling at the TV when watching football saying they can do better than some 25 year old who missed a catch.
You don’t have to be a writer to know the story you’re consuming is bad, and to express opinions on which way you think the story should have gone.
Blizzard constantly abandoning their story beats, and retconning them at will when it suits them is a bad way to write a story. I don’t need to go to college for four years to tell you that.
I don’t like that logic. It’s like saying fans of Game of Thrones can’t talk about how Season 8 ruined basically everything they built up to. Heck, WoW has been suffering through similar issues: Where things that are built up are either rushed, cut, or retconned.
Saying, “no u do better” is not a good response to people who have taken in the narrative, and have various issues with it. I’m not a professional writer, but I’ve been reading Warcraft related stuff for a good while and will certainly bring up issues I have with it if I have any.
Can I do better? Heck if I know, I’m not an English major, I don’t professionally write for a living, but Warcraft’s story is a story I enjoyed in the past, and I certainly have issues with it now. By golly, I’ll voice them.
None of these things are an actual measure of good(subjective) or talented(objective). It’s like the Billboard Top 100, which these days almost exclusively measures just on sales. And just because Billie Eilish and Teka$hi 69 are often on that top 100 doesn’t reflect that they’re talented or good musicians, or that some guy in his garage who played guitar over 20 years for fun isn’t more talented or a better musician just because he doesn’t have a record or top 100 song and goes to work everyday pouring concrete slabs.
Yes, I actually am qualified. The only qualification required is to be able to distinguish what is well-written and what is not. It’s usually pretty obvious in WoW. Sometimes you get the good writing (usually in smaller, self-contained quest lines or scenarios, or even some of the longer ones like the class hall and artifact quests in Legion), but at major plot points, you frequently get the bad. I am capable of distinguishing between the two.
If two novels go on amazon one sells 1,000 copies and one sells 1,000,000 copies. Isn’t it pretty clear that the one that sold 1,000,000 is a better novel?
If her writing was bad, wouldn’t people stop buying the novels? Again, these novels aren’t trying to be compared to hemingway or taught in literature classes. They’re not supposed to be analysed and compared to “classics”.
This is just entertainment. It’s like Danielle Steele. She is a formula writer, but a successful one at that. Same with Lee Child. Some folks say Lee Child is a trash writer. But the guy has sold millions of copies. Again with Dan Brown, people say his writing is bad, but still has millions of copies sold.
I think most writers just want to tell a nice story, not try to write a novel that will be taught in some English class in two hundred years.
Chuckles I see you didn’t answer my question, cause the answer is “none”.
Every novel she has written has been for established fanbases with 10’s to 100’s of millions of fans with guaranteed sales. Star Wars, Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons IPs, etc.
Yes and if she was a bad writer, she’d be dropped no? People would stop buying the books.
I’m not reading her novels because of the writing. I"m reading them because of the characters. Heck, I think most fantasy writers spend far too much time on useless detail instead of moving the story forward, but again, I enjoy the story.
But I think she does a good job with the story, so I’ll continue to buy her works. Her writing is far more polished then some of the fanfiction I read and way better than the stuff I write.
Proving that bad writing doesn’t in fact mean not selling books if you know your audience. The fact that so much of the WoW story lately reads like Fan Fic will have an audience
