In some interview or post or some nonsense, idr, they mentioned THE CLOCKMAKER lmao… as like, the architect of the universe or something.
But who ticked off the clockmaker? Why was the clockmaker so wound up that the universe had to be created? Also, WHY – FOR GOD’S SAKES, WHY.
do you want to see my black lotus
WoW still has a few things I love, and so I cannot seem to really bring myself to leave because of them:
My friends, of course… even if some of them have left. 
Draenei.
Trolls.
Orcs.
Goblins.
Pretty much all the playable races tbh but especially Draenei. Love Draenei 
Gameplay is mostly enjoyable, even if some of the classes play kind of weirdly for me these days.
I still enjoy finding random RPs in WoW and have managed some small story-ish RPs. Mostly just spontaneous adventures come to think of it.
I can’t seem to get into RPing Alliance side at the moment, but, occasionally I do manage; mostly because cross-faction RP.
Oh, I love love love love cross-faction RP.
Also because I’ve done so much on many of my characters and just can’t imagine dropping all that now. One day, no doubt, I’ll have no choice. Will cross that bridge eventually.
I’m comfortable in Azeroth, despite it’s often frustrating lore.
They even have dinosaurs here!
Is that a euphemism for something, and if not, why not?
Oh man, don’t get me wrong. I come on here and poke a stick in Blizzard’s eye, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m here until they pull the final plug.
For me, it’s a numbers game. How much am I spending to play in the WoW sandbox? Do I get an equal or greater return on my investment?
The answer for me is still a resounding, “yes”. The expac cost, the sub fees (for me) are nominal.
I will be in this abusive relationship until the bitter end.
I don’t think I will ever return. I visit the forums occasionally, albeit less and less as time goes on.
I think I would have left sooner, to be quite honest, had the real world situation not happened.
I have a very small amount of friends who still play WoW regularly, and at this point they’re probably the happiest players I know because:
A.) They literally do not care about the story.
B.) They’re extremely casual about the game. The hardest content they’ve done is mythic dungeons.
In a way, I am kind of jealous at how they’ve been having fun in this game I find hard to enjoy. They’re currently making an all-hunter’s dungeon group where their end goal is to do a Mythic dungeon with only hunters. It’s goofy and sounds fun, but realizing how jaded and disillusioned I am would only make me not enjoy the activity.
I think the best way to play this game is to be completely uncaring about the game, and for a lot of us who’ve spent many years on it that in of itself is a terribly high hurdle to jump.
Either way, I’m curious to see how badly 9.1 burns the story and if Sylvanas actually gets a redemption I might laugh myself off the face of the earth.
I think the only thing that could permanently drive me away at this point is if they keep doubling down on the grindy, obtuse, time-gated, utterly unfun borrowed power stuff.
But no game director rules forever and I have hope that things will, eventually, change for the better.
This is how I’ve always been with WoW, to a degree. There are parts of their lore I appreciated, of course, but what I cared about was my own character(s) and having fun. Way, WAY more than their lore.
That all-hunter thing is exactly what I love about the game.
I think if you ever want some fun, casual play and a sort of reboot of WoW, consider rolling a Goblin on Moon Guard. I wouldn’t be logging in if it weren’t for that guild, and for me at least… Goblins sort of fit into any far-fetched scenario (which is what Blizzard seems to excel at, absurdity – just pretend it’s post-modern and done on purpose!).
I used to be quite taken with the lore, but the more fantasy I consumed the more and more I came to realize that Warcraft’s lore just… doesn’t have a lot of thought put into it. It’s fun, it’s weird, it’s over-the-top, and I have no doubt that the people who originally created this world loved it dearly (no comment on the people working on it now), but as far as fantasy settings go it really is just very, very shallow.
It’s still frustrating when they do harebrained stuff like, well, everything involving the First Ones or whatever the heck they’re trying to pull with Sylvanas’ soul, but this entire world (of Warcraft) is built on often frustrating, frequently very stupid, and almost always ill-thought-out nonsense so it doesn’t surprise me. It’s hard to rip the lore apart when it was already made up of post-it notes and scraps of paper covered in the faded, barely legible scribblings of a Dragonlance-obsessed madman wearing cargo shorts and a Metallica t-shirt.
What really gets me is when they do stuff that’s tone-deaf (gay ghost deer lol, lmao) or potentially harmful to the wider RP community. That’s why I hate stuff like Teldrassil, because it was stupid and in poor taste, and SoO, because it had a massively deleterious effect on the RP community as a whole.
If there’s one good thing I can say about Shadowlands it’s that it is, much like WoD before it, distant and separated enough that we should, hopefully, be able to ignore it going forward. And I am very, very eager to pretend none of this has happened, personally.
I think the key reason I can’t stay is indeed the story. For me it was always about the story.
Little bit of personal info about me: I was raised by a father who was ultra-success focused. Academic success was 110% his priority for me, and everything else was irrelevant. I was banned from all forms of fiction from the age of 7 onwards, outside of school holidays. Never stopped me fully, I’ve always had a love of stories. I still wake up at around 4:30 am habitually because I used to sneak-read books with a torch under the covers of my bed before anyone woke up 
One thing I was allowed to do was play Age of Empires 2 for 30 mins every Sunday, which I LOVED. It passed the not-fiction-test because it was at least somewhat educational. But I had two cousins around my age (they were brothers) who sorta tried to save me from the fiction restriction. Whenever I’d visit their place they’d do movie sessions with me, play some games, that sort of thing. Loved Lord of the Rings and the Matrix the most haha!
Anyway one day one of said cousins introduced me to Warcraft 3. Said it was like Lord of the Rings and Age of Empires combined. So naturally I was super hyped. He bought it for my birthday, sneakily. And my GOSH I totally fell in love. The story of Warcraft 3 was totally amazing and I spent YEARS wanting to know what happened to my favourite characters, like Arthas, Kael’thas, Jaina and Thrall. It was a powerful gateway into fantasy, and I spent quite a while knowing WoW existed but being unable to play it.
Then in early Cata, I was in Grade 12, 17 years old. I got a laptop. I got a part time job. I was able to afford my own subscription and sneakily hide my gaming behind a pretension of studying. And it was so totally freeing. WoW opened my world to the idea of role playing games, and was seriously the most fun I’d had. I spent a good lot of my early months playing just trying to find landmarks from Warcraft 3. And I even died trying to get my undead hunter to Theramore 
. I had no idea what I was doing but it was so liberating for a fairly suppressed young kid, and seriously, so much fun. I wish I could recover that feeling, frankly.
For this reason I think the story and universe of WoW were always my priority. Gameplay changes constantly and I was fairly indifferent to it… but exploring the world, getting to know the races, what they’re all about it… It was the most amazing thing.
I know it’s not the best, deepest, or most consistently written fantasy universe. But it’s one I absolutely loved… with stories and events that were actually pretty damn good. Sure some were kinda lame (*coughs * WoD) but largely there was always good stuff that could keep me engaged and happy.
So with the story being what it is now… BFA had good aspects, things I could vibe with. The Kul Tiras story especially really resonated with me. But… Shadowlands I’m just not feeling. It’s not the Azeroth I fell in love with anymore. It’s a totally different universe, that by even EXISTING creates so many plot holes, retcons and inconsistencies that frankly… I just can’t get excited anymore. I look at the game and just… feel blegh. Disappointed even. It’s not the world I fell in love with anymore.
So as someone who potentially erroneously prioritised the story above everything else… This blows. It’ll take some big changes in focus and direction for me to come back at all, and frankly I’ll be ignoring the Shadowlands as much as fundamentally possible. However I have a sinking feeling I won’t be coming back. I’ve had hiatuses in the past, but for a MAX of two months, usually less. This time I’ve been gone gone since early February, with no interest in coming back, no interest in my characters, and no interest in the world. And it friggen blows, man.
I always felt the problem with WoW’s story was power creep and needing to explain it. There’s other systems out there like Faerun and Tamriel and so on so forth that you can have war, you can have beast races and demonic invasions and gods bickering and plotting and its always a big deal but there was never a like… well oh dang, Supergod is pissed now moment, and then Oh no! VOID Supergod is pissed now! You just deal with these things as they come up, with just enough “Weird” already baked into the setting for the occasional grand sojourn into outer space or through a multiverse doorway and back again.
I don’t know why Blizzard is so against a pantheon approach or a rogue’s gallery, everything needs to be neatly tied up within a set amount of time except for one loose thread for them to go “Aha, see?? You DO care about Void Fire Supergod because it turns out its the orc’s fault they exist!” or something equally asinine.
Oh, yeah, this is absolutely something that Warcraft struggles with, and it has definitely gotten progressively worse over the years. Vanilla at least had the veneer that Azeroth was a big, open world in which multiple stories (some intersecting, some wholly disconnected from each other) could play out simultaneously, but we’re at a point now where everything is so hyperfocused on the BBEG du jour that it seems as though nothing exists outside of that.
RP can help with that, of course, but it would be nice if Blizzard spent a little more time with the world of the World of Warcraft and less time constantly trying to one-up and out-do their previous world-ending crisis.
WoW may have inconsistent and rule-of-cool oriented stories, but in the past it was always our inconsistent rule-of-cool oriented stories.
Shadowlands isn’t that story, it’s entirely divorced from the universe from the ground up. Going with the themes they did ensured that, and no amount of “well, actually…” will change it.
Perhaps this was always going to happen, that the writing would thrash around and tear everything down around it for the sake of relevance. All it needed was one expansion to apply that pressure.
So, minor mention.
But I think it stands to say that Blizzard’s own hope in Shadowlands is not so present since most their current adds that show up on Youtube show previous expansions.
Both of the previous expansions were laden with Legion or BfA content. Just gonna say.
I have a growing collection of tasty toes in my bank, 84 and counting
This resonates with me on several levels. I’ve tried to explain to people my issue with this sudden “Light corrupts now, despite literally never doing that (You can still hear the Grand Anchorite preaching about the feel of it in Shattrath)”, but I, too, get upset. I’m probably going to link them to this. Thanks.
…one issue (yes, still annoyed about this) is that if they’re going to pretend that the Light is suddenly some corrupting force? They can’t continue to have every depiction of it be as something so weak. Damn near everything that’s suffused with Light or Light powers seems to be a punching bag for everything else. Somethong gets a shot of Fel, it’s super strong. A shot of Void, super reality warping. A shot of Light, and it kinda glows.
Light corrupts? How? With what? All it seems to offer is something you can get with a lantern and a plucky, can-do attitude.
…I might still be annoyed, yeah.
I confess I get a special kind of enjoyment watching people complain about FFXIV posts in WoW forums. 
I also confess I almost re-subbed for a month just to reply to some of those posts. 
It’s glowing? Has a plucky, can-do attitude? This… sounds like corruption to me.
Also, my confession is that I had annoyed an Alliance lowbie, who I suppose promptly reported me for being annoying. Justice was swiftly brought upon me as a geared Alliance showed up and executed me for my crimes.
I, with all of my maturity, rezzed and killed the lowbie for vengeance, and was punished again.
I do not regret it.
I mean, the we see the Light -can- corrupt in the Mag’har recruitment scenario.
That said, it’s not the slow burn, gradual turn to malicious ideas like the void.
It’s literally someone willfully accepting a a gift, then for all intents and purposes they’re locked in the mental basement and the higher power is pulling the strings.
Given what we’ve been shown, it stands to reason this form of corruption -should- be something that can be resolved more easily than things like the void, since the Light corruption is a “Remove bad apple.” sort of fix.
That said, bigger issue will be if said bad apples ends up, say, being the Lord Protector of some major faction rife with revanchist sentiment.