A patronizing or dismissive attitude is seen as standard operating procedure from Blizzard, to the point that people are still pulling out J. Allen Brack’s “you think you do, but you don’t” quote about nearly everything the studio does.
Because it’s a meme, that’s how the internet works.
Lies and falsehoods? Hoo boy. It’s hard to be sure where you exactly draw the line between lies and a lack of trust, but they both speak to the same root. People don’t believe Blizzard when the studio says something about WoW, and they don’t believe that feedback will be taken seriously. It makes for any sort of dialogue between players and developers being fraught with issues.
Good, don’t trust companies, wait and see for yourself what they do and decide what to do from there. What Blizz says doesn’t matter, the only thing that has meaning is action.
And defense? Some players out there are almost pathological in their defense of WoW against criticism, claiming that all of the things Blizzard has the resources to do but opts not to can’t be done for vague hand-waved reasons, most of which circle back to what Blizzard has claimed is possible based on more or less nothing.
Name something this doesn’t apply to President could beat a cripple person with a stick and someone will stick up for him
God I hate the word toxic but at least the article writer defined what it means to him.
You almost have to wonder if the real world is slightly less toxic because all these “toxic people” (i.e. otherwise ordinary individuals) are getting it out here rather than there.
If people using the internet to let the devil on their shoulder take over for a while means they’re not doing so in public, well, I’ll take it.
And now here comes someone saying this amounts to nothing, as though people weren’t always jerks in real life as well, completely ignoring the point.
I feel like this is one of the key elements of the flaw in their current situation, if not the primary fatal flaw in the current game’s design.
They have tons of data. They can see what every player is doing with every moment that they’re logged in, and how often they log in, and how long they stay subscribed. That data is invaluable, and there was a time when it absolutely indicated what people wanted to do and what they thought was fun and worthwhile.
That changed entirely when they decided that it would be more expedient to start wagging the dog, and started purposely designing the game to max out #engagement metrics instead of using engagement metrics as a natural gauge of what people liked doing.
Bottom line, if you’re manipulating the data to make the game look better internally to your managers and CEO and externally to shareholders, your data isn’t good anymore. So no, they really don’t know about what we think is fun anymore. They only know what we’ll do if we feel like we have to, until the point when we burn out or can’t take it anymore and leave. But until that point we’re cranky and resentful about being forced to spend longer amounts of time doing the things that the game says that we need to do to progress, in a manner that is as prolonged and time-consuming as it possibly can be for reasons that are transparently mercenary.
Most of us aren’t ten years old anymore, we know when we’re having artificial roadblocks thrown in our path and weights tied to our feet. And that resentment and discontent comes through on the forums and other official communications channels, which they resoundingly ignore. They really can’t rely on their forced data anymore as any kind of honest gauge of what people like, but since they’re still trying to, it just leads to more and more restrictions over time.
RL is “less toxic” because one runs the good chance of suffering RL long lasting consequences, including an immediate pop in the nose, for acting the way they do online. Some people just can’t behave when anonymous.
Some of the biggest babies on planet earth are WoW players that feel like they are in an “abusive relationship”
Nobody forced you to play the game. You aren’t entitled to have the game completely catered to you in every way imaginable. It’s your fault you got sucked in emotionally to a fricken video game. It’s just a game. Real world problems are worse than whatever lore problems you have with the story or whatever balance issues are bothering you. If you are unhappy with the game then quit. You don’t have to go on some diatribe on why the game has shattered your fragile soul.
Its a clever attempt at comparison between a real life situation and a gaming one but it doesn’t completely ring true for me and it comes across as making use of that clever comparison to force a point. There are far more elements in both an ‘abusive relationship’ and a person’s game experience than just to point out certain key things and say they match.
Life and human relationships have a lot of different shades and variants. Every person is different and every experience is different. A game isn’t a relationship - it’s a game, purely simple. Certain things are true - Blizzard’s past HR history isn’t a healthy one, most of us know that. But how a player perceives their game experience is entirely subjective. To say that apples aren’t oranges is correct. But to say that apples ARE oranges is objectively wrong.
More likely because threats of pain work IRL…mess with the wrong person and you get road rage incidents…or worse. Its “safe” to be toxic on the internet.
I’ve had one person say ‘you guys are bad’ in the past week. In 5 matches of League I had 3 matches where players were just trying to upset their own team, ignoring the other teams banter.
This isn’t some excuse or what have you but toxic people in my experience happen but are far fewer than plenty of other online games I’ve delved into.
President could beat a cripple person with a stick and someone will stick up for him 
don’t think their are “sides” to choose on this one - unless you’re hellbent on it, amiga.