It’s like these incels feel entitled to 100% of the gaming space to the detriment of women because they think men “own” the gaming space. Guarantee the people who make this argument about WoW being a men’s only game would make this same argument about nearly every game out there, leaving women to play only Barbie video games. So thankful this type of regressive thinking is passé to the point at which companies are prepared to move on without the incels.
Pro tip to the people belonging to the “certain type of community” WoW should supposedly cater to: Maybe instead of questioning why games don’t market to you anymore, you should be questioning your membership in said community.
Your premise is wrong. WoW was not built to be a frat/incel haven and has never marketed or put itself out there to be such. There are obviously some tongue in cheek quests/item references, but WoW itself has always kept itself safely in the PG-13 space. In fact I’d even go as far as to argue not having any kind of sexual undertones/references/etc is far more immersion breaking because life itself is rife with that too…it’s kind of what keeps our entire species moving on after all.
You are perfectly within your rights to build a game that promotes and courts the incel market and TBH you’ll get a lot of public flak for it, but you may very well have some kind of reasonable success with it…just like you have fringe right radical lunatics keeping certain “news” organizations afloat and seedy sites where completely outlandish conspiracies flourish. That isn’t and has never been WoW though.
Appealing to a wider audience makes more money.
Ofc you have to make a quality product.
Blizzard needs to go back and look at their successes BC, WOLK, and MOP
use that formula
Convoluted systems on top of convoluted systems isn’t working for anyone.
I feel sorry for anyone that cannot distinguish between what I am saying and a call for frat boy culture. If someone feels there ought to be a safe space for one group then they cannot logically argue against a safe space for another group. I am not arguing to exclude anyone, I am arguing to progress the game as it was and let whoever enjoy it “as is” rather than warping it in a direction it was never intended to go. That is distinctly different than arguing to exclude anyone.
I legitimately feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t have the mental fortitude, wisdom, or life experience to make these critical distinctions and has to resort to redirecting a discussion into an argument about a topic it was never intended to cover. Especially for those who need to rely on logging in to a thread on multiple toons to progress their own points.
Except that, again, you are wrong on a fundamental level.
Times change and companies must adapt and evolve too.
Go look at old marketing ads. You’ll see that most were fundamentally racist and/or sexist. Nowadays it would be a career suicide to even put forth a rough draft of anything like what was common back then.
Blizzard is a business and not just a bunch of toxic gamer bros building a shared universe for them and their like-minded gamers. They may not have built or actively planned to be toxic gamer bros, but that doesn’t change things.
Like it or not, you want exactly what others as well as myself are claiming you do…a game that actively prides itself and caters to a demographic that is publicly shamed…incels. Stop fighting it and just own it.
Blizzard isn’t going to do it for the reason, like I said, most businesses today wouldn’t…career suicide. You are basically having to bet that your niche demographic will be lucrative enough and loyal enough to sustain you for all of your working years…that is a very big risk. Most businesses only care about making money and they rightfully want to increase the potential customer base to do so and that means keeping a finger on the pulse of the world to see where trends and such are heading.
Your statement is completely false, as I mentioned before, I cannot be part of the group you keep trying to lump me into, its physically impossible.
I will say that whether you see yourself apart from that group or not, your tactics, as evidenced by your own posts - your own words, align in strategy if not in ideology with the people you claim to be against.
Your deflection is noted and dismissed. I’m for Blizzard doing what they feel is best to run their own company. I don’t have to like or agree with their decisions, but I recognize they have a right to react to the world of today in whatever way they think will give them the best chances for success.
If/when I no longer feel like they deserve my money, I can and will remove it. Simple as that.
You’re not going to get a receptive audience or any worth while discussion on the general forums with a title post like that. You have failed in the department of knowing your audience.
What you are claiming is only a secondary effect of an original change much earlier in the games history. From Classic to Burning Crusade the game was rather consistent and stable in regard to difficulty, time gating and player focus. Yes, raids were cut down to 25 players instead of 40, which people agreed with. There were also some changes to how you can get the initial gear to start raiding. These were technically “easier” in the time investment, but did not detract from the experience of World of Warcraft.
Then comes Wrath of the Lich King. It too was fairly true to form in regard to all the previous things mentioned already. Blizzard did add things like more ability to purchase more gear with tokens and such. In the end, this still wasn’t as bad as it would become. At the tail end of Wrath, when a new head of development was introduced, we got the things which inadvertently destroyed the game as it was. None of this has to do with “Bro Man Dude” culture.
The introduction of lazy mechanics like dungeon finder, 13 tiers of raid content, vendor gear that you could grind from less than content, and the list here is massive. The more Blizzard moved down the path of making the game easier, the more players who thrive in an instant gratification mentality started to play the game. What was originally placed in front of players became transformed into Hello Kitty Adventure Island Blizzard edition.
This here, this transformation , which actually made the company less money over all until Blizzard could monetize vanity items. Yes people, that is why the store was created, they were losing money and sinking like the titanic. The real money store kept them afloat. The new players that had been coming, albeit slowly since Cataclysm, were more then happy to pay their way to glory instead of working for it. That is where the whole mentality of Blizzard shifted. Wanting to appease the new type of player that they could have survived just fine without, this is what led us to where we are now.
I repeat though, this forums is no longer a place for a discussion like this. You will only get push back by the very trash that infected this game some 10 years ago.
“They are the captain now”
And they will do anything they can to sink the ship.
That’s the irony here. They come here beating their chests that “it’s not a boy’s game any longer girls don’t have to play hello kitty online adventure.”
But they are. It’s just called World of Warcraft now.
Feel sorry for me all you want. It won’t make a difference in my stance on this matter. You want the game to cater to a niche market at the exclusion of the majority of players, especially women. It’s selfish and sexist. You act like the alternative to catering to incels is banning all men from the game.
If you’re not an incel, then maybe you’re just a chauvinist. Whatever, semantics. Different name, same crappy, outdated attitude that belongs in the 1950s.
What more is there to say? It’s mostly already been stated multiple times in this thread. If you can’t understand how the OP is sexist, then that’s a you problem. The rest of us and this game aren’t going to wait for you to figure it out.
The trouble with these types of zoomers is they lack self awareness. He’s an atypical male and doesn’t even realize it.
That’s the problem of listening to Twitter and their CA echo chamber. You’re not entertaining the desires of the average American man. Call of Duty does that well enough.