This thread is something that I had been percolating and researching prior to yesterday’s news, and in fact that thread was initially released with this title before I realized my mistake and corrected it. It was going to take a long and expansive tour through topics like football violence, video game toxicity, and a prior thread which I think did a related topic more justice than I am about to do here - all to demonstrate something that I think we already know.
The story affects our behavior. Blizzard knows that and promotes that, and our behavior with respect to the story impacts the story, and in turn changes the way we feel about it.
For instance, there is not a WoW community out there that I can join as a Night Elf fan without getting mocked and disparately treated for being a fan of a concept that Blizzard has thoroughly ruined. They set up a trash talking situation in a rivalry where I’m not able to respond because the developers aren’t willing to give me basis to come back with something.
That is just one example - I have no doubt that you have examples of your own. This problem is not unique to me, or to Night Elf fans. Blizzard actively stoked the faction rivalry and made it painful for nearly everyone involved to induce these sorts of negative behaviors. That was the point of the It matters campaign, and while I believe the faction conflict in theory can be a good thing, I don’t think anyone can deny that it was weaponized in the service of engagement metrics, which they mistook for quality.
As I have a more expansive definition of “story” than I think most people here do - namely in that I define the story in terms of the player experience and attempt to account for how the player’s choices influence that experience - situations that allow for, in the case that I cited, relentless unanswerable trash talk (something that Blizzard developers actively and repeatedly participated in, both in direct engagement with the community and with content that they put in the game), negatively influence the story experience, and hence diminish the quality of the game.
That, but in far too many words, was where I was planning to leave that topic, but it’s inappropriate to really leave the conversation at that given what we now know. Personally I feel a bit deflated because while I have been an ardent critic of the story, there has always been a part of me that has at least considered that things could be improved, and perhaps Blizzard just didn’t get it, didn’t know, or didn’t realize what they were doing because they were too-closely following engagement metrics and stock business-school guidance from executives who see video games as packaged goods. I was always looking forward to being proven wrong - that better content would come and that the game would be enjoyable for me again.
I can’t delude even a small part of myself of that now. I doubt that Warcraft as a franchise will survive past this expansion, perhaps deservedly, and at this point I don’t really want it to. Because I compare everything to the financial crisis, I can’t help but to think of the scene from the end of The Big Short, where, upon commenting on the news that there was going to be a bailout he states:
“They knew. […] They weren’t being stupid, they just didn’t care.”
That’s about how I feel about this. I’m not convinced anymore that these were just misfired business decisions but the result of an intentional, mean, and exclusionary corporate culture that had no problems with actively driving people away - and on bases that are far more consequential than liking a fictional video game race.
Given that I will no longer continue to delude myself otherwise. I’ve put in the cancellation. I don’t expect that I’ll be back at any point in time after it expires.
Here’s that better thread that I was talking about, for those interested:
