Anyone else just find these forums kind of boring all of a sudden? I think people are finally just kind of hanging up the towel around here and honestly I can’t blame them.
My sub’s out in 12 days and my raiding team has repurposed our discord into a place for us to get together to play other games like Valheim and Terraria together.
I can’t speak for everyone but I think the Elune cinematic and the follow up dialogue that recently made the rounds on Twitter finally just truly made me numb to it all.
Honestly, yeah. I don’t know if I’m just jaded, but BFA at least managed to pique SOME intrigue, cause the premises (silly as they were) were grounded in Azeroth and things that’d been teased for awhile.
Shadowlands is just so narratively absent - the setting is unfamiliar, so theorization really has nowhere to start from. They consistently refuse to give any plotlines closure or consistent through lines, so it becomes difficult to care about what’s even going to occur. And frankly, given the attitude towards the game from the people who made it, it becomes even more difficult to care when you realize the people behind the plot probably don’t really care all that much themselves.
And obviously, none of that is touching on the whole ABK debacle (to put it lightly). If it looks like people have hung up the towel, it’s cause they have. World of Warcraft in its current state is neither a game nor story worth caring about, and I’m unsure if it will ever become that again.
Blizzard has kinda thoroughly ruined the fantasy of:
Night Elves (Teldrassil, Elune shenanigans)
Forsaken (Undercity, no Primus development)
Tauren (Spirit Walking is fake)
Trolls (The Other Side is instanced content)
Orcs (Golden’s and Copeland’s weird/horrible framing of the race)
The entire afterlife of the universe (imagine if we had gotten a Dia de los Muertos/Voodoo afterlife as one of the core covenants at the very least lmao, imagine if they had hired an actual theologian to help them flesh out the metaphysics)
And various other elements of fantasy otherwise (surprise, any race that speaks to any ancestor is actual speaking to an Echo!!! surprise, any race whose core fantasy is family/clan unity actually ends up in any after life!!! surprise, Ardenweald is the shaman afterlife!!!)
Which together are probably around 60% of the player population in any demographic.
On top of that:
Mishandled in-game SA
Mishandled genocide topic
Villain batted a faction beyond redemption
Impotence batted the other faction therein beyond coherence
Like really, I don’t think I could’ve possibly created something worse if I tried.
And on top of all of that we are now told the company’s leadership was an endless stream of abusers whether of the sexual, racist, or laboral variety, and that there are so few people of color at Blizzard most devs can’t name more than five in the 5-10 years they’ve been at the company on their teams.
But hey if we all quit the game, then profits go down, which dooms the survivors who are paid so little by the multi-yacht overlord Bobby that they all live in groups of 3-5 per household and can only make ends meet by carpooling, sharing food, and depending on the profit sharing, which in turn depends on us playing and the whales.
The cop out of “infinite zones in the Shadowlands” to explain away why none of the established afterlives that are believed in by the races of Azeroth are present immediately made me not like Shadowlands even more than I already did knowing Night Elves were just gonna be ruined further.
So they’re out there somewhere. Cool. But they don’t matter one iota when there’s only four zones in the Shadowlands important enough to have their leader reside on the Death Pantheon.
While I feel bad for the people on the lower rungs of the totem pole it’s not our responsibility as players to take care of them nor should we feel bad about not paying for an inferior product because of them.
They deserve to be treated better and paid well. But that’s not on us. That’s on Bobby and the other execs.
People who really loved the game are at a really low point right now. something shifted over the last three weeks and it hasn’t been the same. But I feel like it’s also shifted in a better direction.
I think it’s oddly coincidental the weird person that was stalking me across threads and social media with the same copy pasted message I thoroughly reported on the forums and some users have since disappeared as well, almost as if it was one person pretending to be multiple people
I know for me it’s a couple things. For one, I feel like every story development is the opposite of what I’d like or find interesting. The Night Elves are my favorite race in the game, and the Forsaken are my favorite race in the Horde. This character is my main, and my #1 alt is a Forsaken warlock. So for me, BfA felt like getting kicked in the balls twice. And there’s been nothing to show for it. I haven’t really talked about it but I really, really do not like the direction they’re going with Elune. I feel like Tyrande’s story has been a giant waste of time, too. That’s it for Night Elves, and Forsaken have gotten nothing at all. Truth be told, I don’t count Tyrande’s storyline as “night elf content” just like I don’t count Sylvanas as “forsaken content”. It’s Tyrande content and Sylvanas content. I’m interested in the story of the Kaldorei and Forsaken peoples, not the superhero faction leaders.
The other major thing is that I just don’t care about the Shadowlands. They’re completely disconnected from everything I find interesting about Warcraft’s lore. There’s only ONE new character that I actually like: Ve’nari. And that’s entirely because I think the voice actress is fantastic. At least with BfA, as infuriating as it was, we had a lot of things to speculate about. Kul Tiran lore/history, Zandalari lore/history, Mechagon lore/history, the faction conflict, Azshara and the Naga, and finally N’Zoth and the Old Gods. Plenty of things that could go a variety of ways, that had the potential for major impacts to our characters and factions.
With Shadowlands, they’re so freaking obsessed with secrecy and mystery that there’s no basis to even speculate on what comes next. “The Jailer goes to The Sepulcher.” That’s it. And again, I don’t actually care about either of those things, so I’m not motivated to devote brain power to baseless theories.
Wait And See turned into Waitency and our ping time until next patch is feared to take another half-year so it’s no surprise our interest connections are timing out.
I know it’s been said time and again, but I gotta reiterate after what Sarm said.
It’s one thing to get 15 minutes of story every six months, usually gated behind days of sparsely and inconsistently rewarding grinds, and plagued with plot points that serve only to accommodate the next narrative beat that Blizzard wants to tell, rather than give a satisfying conclusion to what was previously established. That’s one thing.
It is another thing ENTIRELY to be handed that, and then to be told by both the writers and the fans that we need to “wait and see” before we pass judgment. This story has been dragging its feet for upwards of three years, and after the eighteenth mystery box that leads to nowhere, the playerbase is somewhat sick of waiting and seeing for no payoff.
If you’re gonna keep your playerbase in the dark for half a year, then flash meaningless buzzwords like “I will never serve” or “choose renewal” at them, they’re gonna check the hell out.
There’s nothing for people to endlessly have circular arguments about right now OP. Check back in a few months when we get another 3 lines of dialogue about Night Elves or Sylvanas and everyone goes ballistic about it
That’s sich a nonsensical, stupid take and to be clear. This is copium and nothing else. With that you are coping why you are still supporting all of the abuse and very low wages. You can do what you want. However this will stay coping.
Nah actually some of the leaders of the ABK Alliance (proto union) has brought up how they barely make ends meet as it is and if everyone abandons the game they’re screwed in the meantime.
It’s been a reiterated point.
They’re not telling anyone what to do mind you, because they understand why people would want to boycott, but they’re being honest about their financial situation.
Personally I wish they’d open a donation page so we can pay the 15 bucks but to the workers entirely while they continue their struggle.
You know exactly enough whales keep on playing . You don’t need to write such nonsense. You aren’t suppirting those employees while you are supporing their misserable working conditions.
You should know better. You can cope all you want. It’s really nothing more than that. You are trying to finde a reason to still give Bobby your money. That’s all it is.
I do not know if WoW can actually survive on whales alone.
Eventually the income gained from whales will not counterbalance players lost.
And neither of us knows where that line is nor where WoW is in relation to that line.
Nor do we know how any of this will pan out regarding Bobby and the workers and Wilmer Hale and the ABK Alliance and the lawsuit and the possible criminal charge and who else may be implicated and what the workers will do in the meantime.
? It could actually?
If they form a union we could actually just donate that money to the union and they agree to redistribute to the workers.
Revendreth is awesome! I get to run around with cool vampires and ride bats around gigantic castle walls and have tea with Theotar and use a parasol to fly like I’m Mary Poppins!
I haven’t been particularly hopeful that I would enjoy the overarching story of whatever Sylvanas is up to or what would happen with the Night Elves since the very first time I saw the Sylvanas Warbringers cinematic and nearly felt nauseous watching it. I couldn’t foresee any resolution to that event that I would find satisfactory, and nothing in the last three years of story has really changed my opinion on that point (important note: this is entirely about my personal taste, I’m not looking for an argument or casting judgement on anyone who disagrees). However, there has been plenty of other content since then that I do enjoy, in both BfA and Shadowlands, and so I keep an eye out for things that I do find fun while not being particularly invested in the areas of the story that I expect to dislike. For example, I am a shameless sucker for Sin’dorei lore, death knight lore, and Mograine family drama, so I had a blast this week because I got voiced lines about Kael’thas’ continuing personal journey along with Alexandros and Darion having a long overdue chat. I don’t at all fault anyone who dislikes or isn’t interested in the story or game anymore, though.
I got fed up and switched to Alliance. Things have been better. Part of it is that it is easier to ignore how Blizzard sees the Horde. Part of it is that, doing my unsubscription period, I got some distance from the forums and the toxicity in them.
