Note – if your immediate reaction here is to judge my neurodivergence, please just step back and walk away from this post.
Tl;dr (because it really is too long) – for neurodivergent folks like myself, most of you have no idea how this plays out in our minds.
Every couple of days since this thread started, I’ve logged on, checked the characters who are GMs, and still I’ve only received 1 message with 1 stack between them. I look at the things going on, want to log in with other characters to play, and then stop, thinking about what the whole thing has done.
First and foremost, because it matters to this – I am autistic and have ADHD. For someone like me and my particular autistic platter (or salad or soup, or however you might prefer to define it) has a lot of hyperfocus and special interests at the heart of it, along with a near obsession to have things for the purpose of memory.
I’ve been playing WoW for around 17 years (started sometime during Burning Crusade). I’m not much of a social player – my communication inhibitors are such that even online interactions with strangers can stress me out (esp. in a game where folks are often less than forgiving of mistakes). But I’ve diligently stuck with the game itself through all of the expansions and, as part of my connection with it, have generally gone with everything collector’s edition of one sort or another.
Yeah, I play for fun and to level and to generally have an easily accessible fantasy-based pasttime. But I also collect things – and it’s not always the things folks would expect. I love the flavor text. I love the oddball things we can find – sometimes very time/event-limited, and so I’ve always done what I could to keep playing, even in moments where I might have felt the game itself was lacking a bit for one reason or another. I think the longest I ever stepped away was for 2 months partway through DragonFlight. Yeah, I have FOMO issues on top of all this.
I wanted to keep these various things which are reflective of almost two decades of playing the same game. They hold value to me in ways that many folks might not understand. In a way, they form a set of memories for me – memories that I may otherwise likely lose without those anchor points. I have to do this with many, if not most, things in my life. Those anchors hold a lot of significance – and right now, what happened has stripped me of a fair number of those.
I also have trust issues. I know things happen – as many others have said, if the folks at Blizzard had just been upfront from the outset, I might be handling this a bit better (ok, likely not, but I would feel somewhat differently about the situation). If there had been an acknowledgement of what occurred and perhaps something more than “we lost the data, oopsy!” had been said. If there had been something tossed our way for how much time many of us have put into this game which is now apparently lost beyond recall (or lost beyond Blizzard’s willingness to put forth the effort for it). If and only if.
I suppose since it took a month or so to get to this post, maybe in another month we’ll hear more. More likely not, it seems, but who knows?
All I know at this point is that I don’t know what to do. On the one hand, if something does change and they do something to fix this, if I leave then I may miss it. If I stay – it’s tacitly saying it’s ok this happened. This isn’t something to just ‘get over and move on.’ Sure, it’s not the end of the world overall, but it is, on some level, the end of a world, one which has been part of my habitation for so many years. I tried others along the way, but this is the one which captured my attention the most. Something clicked in the right way, and now it feels wrong.
I realize this is a bit of a ramble, so I’ll try to finish up quickly. But those judging the ones who are impacted by this and are upset by it simply have no idea. We’re not all coming from the same place, but there’s no reason to denigrate the importance of this to some folks. That it is important to us should be the point, not whether or not we should give it such importance. Yeah, it’s pixels on one level. But I didn’t devote these years to pixels. I devoted those years to a place, an outlet, an experience that I needed, not just wanted.
I guess in a way I hope that someone there at Blizzard reads this overly lengthy post and at least tries to understand why some of us are here, why this has affected us so harshly, why we’d just like something to acknowledge this beyond the original post. I mean, when you have a game that has kept a large following for two decades, it really feels like something more than this post is deserved to those who have been here for a long, long time.
If you made it this far, thank you and I hope this gives you some understanding where I, and others, are coming from.
