Honestly, this is quite disheartening to see.
I have not only been playing this game from the beginning, I’ve embraced the whole Warcraft universe since the very early RTS days. I have taken a few breaks here and there but I have always come back to WOW and spent significant amounts of my time playing this game. I would say that I am safely in the category of more longtime fans of this game, the core player that has been around forever. Also probably in the upper end of spending as well.
When I see stuff like this sudden push to sanitize content that’s been in this game for years and years, whether it be stuff like renaming skills such as Every Man for Himself, altering old voice lines to remove words like “green skins”, or more whimsical and funny aspects like the two achievements Bro’s Before Ho Ho Ho’s and My Sack is Gigantique being renamed recently, etc… (among many other things). I feel just utter disappointment.
Disappointment in the fact that this company is allowing a small group of lunatic puritans to dictate the sanitization and literal erasure of this game’s history based on the whims of their unstable emotions and neuroses. And that’s not even mentioning the totally sterilized and empty future this path will lead to.
I play this game to get away from that kind of constant toxic political garbage that has infected, spread, and metastasized in so many other aspects of the modern world. And unfortunately here it is, rearing its ugly head once again.
It’s just really sad to see you guys finally making some decent attempts at uplifting player satisfaction to get some retention and potentially even draw some players back in, only to begin escalating this political puritan purge alongside it.
Ironically, it’s the very thing that will cost you this core player who’s always been here, through thick and thin, coming back time and time again and stuck through even when many others have left out of boredom or poor dev choices, etc.
With that said, I do hope you reconsider this insane moral crusade you’ve taken up, but at the end of the day it is your game Blizzard and you do what you feel is right. If you do continue down this path though, it’ll have to be without me; I get more than enough exposure to this toxic garbage elsewhere in my day to day existence. I’ll probably finish out the next patch of this expansion and end up moving on to something new I can enjoy without being bombarded by the slowly creeping puritan toxicity and eventual transformation into a sanitized wasteland.
Anyway, like I said, you do what you feel is right for you. This is not a threat or ultimatum. And my expectation on you reconsidering your stance on this is indeed pretty guarded at this point. However, I figure after the 25+ years of my participation in the Blizzard experience, the very least I can do is leave you with an explanation; so that when you guys are counting your subs / active players at some point in the future, and you’re down one, you can understand why.
Regardless of what happens, I would like to thank the Blizzard of old for the countless great times I’ve had over the years. You guys were some of the best.
