Like many of you I’ve been playing WoW in the ballpark of 15 years. I’ve played on and off, and like almost every person who is playing classic, I preferred the first three games. Yadayada, same story.
During the pandemic, a group of my friends and I embarked on the WoW classic journey. We created an extremely friendly, very hospitable guild with a focus on doing leveling content and gearing up. Some of those friends, naturally, fell out because of a lack of time to commit to the game, but they rejoined during the launch of TBC and I had, without a doubt, the best group of people I have ever played this game with in well over 10 years of playing WoW.
After well over a thousand dollars of sub fees and transfer fees, I feel like Blizzard should have a vested interest in the opinion of someone who has, like others, kept their game afloat by siphoning my work into the enjoyable atmosphere that is World of Warcraft. However, I was unpleasantly not surprised with how everything has been handled since the launch of WoW classic, particularly towards the end of Phase 5 and 6 of classic, up until now.
I did want to say before I continue to complain, that I am grateful for my time playing this game. I will always revere World of Warcraft as one of my all-time favorite games and most enthralling online experiences, but the experience is really, really not that great without people.
Fortunately, I have a couple people that I play with but the group of people is a mere shadow of its former self. What went wrong?
Kromcrush was my server for over a year - then it began dying. It began dying because top guilds on our server were continuously, for over a week, getting murdered at the summoning stones and killed on repeat on the way into dungeons. This was the launch of TBC. Sure, that happens. My guild stuck around till just about the very end, we waited hoping that Blizzard would do something. Eventually, while waiting, we lost numerous guildies.
We put up a poll asking what we should do, as a guild, to keep our wonderful group of friends together. We stuck around for a while, and eventually we were the last of 3 active guilds on the whole realm.
We decided to move to Thunderfury, where the guild eventually voted it would be most happy moving to. We made mistake of not picking the server that everyone had transferred to, to pick and support a server that was popular, but less popular. My guild died that day.
Fast forward to today, after transferring four of my 10 characters (yeah, working a fulltime job that puts me into overtime makes me value characters with 20+ hours as >$25, I know I’m not helping the problem here), my guild has all but disbanded. Some were not willing to give Blizzard money, and some decided that they wanted to go to a more popular server.
We suffered greatly for making this move because Blizzard couldn’t merge servers or provide transfers for those on dying realms to help alleviate the problem.
After several months on Thunderfury, I have spent the days I could play this game watching people say “dead server” and watch big guilds transfer out of the server. Surely, there is no help coming from Blizzard.
I know that there is a perverse incentive for letting this rot occur. Blizzard didn’t want changes, because they didn’t want to support the game, but they surely made it fine to add server transfers early on and add a boost for a quick cash grab.
Activision-Blizzard, management, et al., exacerbated the greed that Blizzard has allowed to taint its wonderful work of art. I never minded paying $15/month, all I wanted to do was play.
As I sit and consider ending my subscription once and for all, I wonder how long it will actually be until Blizzard realizes that the short-term cash grab from their remaining players actually was worse in the long run than assisting the people who play this game for the social experience.
I don’t post on the forums often, and I can already feel the flame coming, but I want to be very clear: I worked hard to make this game a good place, not only for myself, but for others. I’ve done what I thought was right to keep this game ethical and assist those who needed it. I’ve sacrificed many hours of my life to this game, after paying full-price hard cash for every expansion to drop and the base game, to date, and sub fees for at least the majority of the months since 2007.
I have paid for transfers before, and I am sickened to watch Blizzard care more about a quick buck than trying to mend their game and make it enjoyable.
I wonder, how long will it be until Activision-Blizzard realizes that they have done literally everything wrong to stop their subscription hemorrhaging?