This has been brewing up for a long time, I have 2 more days of my sub to go before my ability to forum post is removed. Once again they insult our intelligence … making claims about being able to fly in a patch or at the release of an expansion, only to omit the fact that there will be untold(literally) steps and months of daily/weekly activities to do BEFORE we will get to flight, all so they can string us along and drain month after month of subscription money out of us, like donkeys lead along with a carrot. Are we really going to fall for this deception, what? for the 4th/5th time now since Warlords?
Think about this, we had flight for years, we had player agency and freedom, it was a wonder and a pleasure to log in, we were never short of things to do in the game, then came Activision. Warlords was released and suddenly our entire gaming experience was all micro-managed into an expansion spanning series of content gates. The entire focus of the company was put into building systems to control and manage every day of the player experience where we find ourselves with 30 minutes of progress per day only to be hit with a daily content gate that quite literally says, “sorry folks that’s it for today, we won’t let you do anymore til tomorrow”. They killed player freedom/choice and agency and then they repeated the same thing for another 3 expansions. YUou can test this out quite literally by staying away from the game for 3 months, go play something else, then come baclk and you will find you are able to do the entire 3 months of content in under 2 weeks, because youare not being held back with their content gating BS. This proves there is almost no actual content being developed and what little they have is simply put on timed delay release, they are not earning the subscription fee anymore, especially when they sit on the subscription fee they are supposed to be using to design content for us to play and they instead design things to go into the cash shop so they can charge us twice(double-dipping), essentially.
The latest, we get the Shadowlands reputation deception. They knew full well we didn’t want yet another reputation bar grindfest and they all sat around and thought, “How can we remove reputation but still maintain the same amount of grinding and long drawn out subscription dipping model we have had for the last few years, while cutting costs(laying staff off) and producing even less actual content” and so they decided to rename the reputation bar to “the renown bar”, 1 bar of activities with no end in sight the bar that just never stops being added onto. This was like pouring fuel on a fire and I literally exploded at the insult of it. But this time it’s even worse, not only have they continued the pathfinder /reputation bar system as it has always been, by simply renaming it and shuffling it around a bit, this time around they decided to literally chop the zones up into sections that cannot be directly traversed even with flight and 1 zone where they have even purposefully removed our ability to even use land mounts in … INSANE! All the while, treating all of us like idiots who won’t catch on or see it for the pathetic greed of it. Is this going to happen to a greater degree going forward? will they remove our ability to use ground mounts even more in the future?
How has this really affected things? Well, I used to pay monthly subscriptions, back to back, I had no reason to cancel, on the odd month/period I did cancel, I was making time for real life things. But now, as a result of this I have cancelled for months at a time and quite literally been pushed to other MMO’s to get the same gratification and some of them don’t even charge me a subscription fee. It’s sad when a subscription game cannot provide a paying customer the same level of satisfaction that a F2P MMO does. My view on the company has changed, things have declined where I have a deep resentment for the company now, none of which is my fault.
I am not coming back at 9.1 release. I will watch the patchnotes, listen to the community, speak to people who blindly went in and started paying from 9.1 release, and if flight has been pushed behind months of content gating as has been the habit every time, those months will go unpaid and I will stay in Elderscrolls Blackwood which has just been released or FFXIV which will be coming out with Endwalker in a few months. I am sick and titred of being insulted and treated like a donkey. 20+ years of a customer relationship with this company across multiple IP’s and this is where they have brought us.
