This is a goodbye post, both from me personally and on behalf of my guild. Yeah, I know, no one cares, bye, don’t let the door hit you. But we have spent literal years of our lives building and managing our community to work towards, and finally achieve, Cutting Edge, and so this is quite a sad and emotional moment for us. I’m sharing it here with a very small hope that it will actually help change things for the better. I’ll also say right off the bat that this is not primarily about the current Blizzard scandal (although that certainly didn’t help), but the state of the game.
BACKGROUND
I have played WoW since technically vanilla, more accurately since BC, and before anyone digs through my armory and calls me a liar, before Cataclysm was on US servers.
Raided hardcore in BC until the time zone issue started conflicting with RL, played casually in Wrath, rerolled on EU in Cata, raided every tier since SoO and joined my current guild, which I have now been Co-GM of for years, in Blackrock Foundry.
My Co-GM, who also started playing in vanilla and has been running and raid leading this guild since 2009, and I decided to start pushing for Cutting Edge in Hellfire Citadel when we suddenly had the numbers for Mythic and a very long tier ahead of us. Since then we have poured a lot of effort and time into building the community, recruitment, managing roster, boss strategies, all that good stuff, to offer a competitive raiding environment with 2 raids per week that works for people with jobs and lives.
We finally succeeded and achieved Cutting Edge in Ny’alotha and Castle Nathria and it’s something we’re incredibly proud of.
THE SCANDAL
Just to address this – we were horrified by the recent revelations about Blizzard as a company, but also hesitant to pull the plug on the community we’d spent years building over it. And there’s the dilemma between not wanting to support Blizzard as a company anymore, and wanting to support the hundreds if not thousands of employees who did nothing wrong and went on strike to protest these conditions.
THE STATE OF THE GAME
In short, WoW has become more and more of an unenjoyable chore and we finally (a bit belatedly, perhaps) hit the point where it all came to a head and we asked ourselves, “Why are we putting up with this? What are we doing with our lives?”
The current patch is a copy paste “here’s a new zone with dailies and a new currency to grind” that didn’t particularly excite anyone. No one likes doing dailies or feeling like they fall behind if they don’t log on every day. The fact that the more relevant faction for raiders (due to conduit upgrades and sockets) is Archivist’s Codex, which technically also requires farming treasures, rares and the Rift to minmax, was just adding insult to injury. Let’s be generous and say the Covenant assaults were interesting the first time around – repeating them twice every week as an added chore definitely is not.
Torghast has been another chore we put up with for most of us from the start, but the new system definitely doesn’t help – the difficulty and length of a run is now wildly RNG based on the powers and torments, and with Adamant Vaults potentially offering conduit upgrades, there is now an incentive for repeated grinding that was mercifully absent before.
These things aren’t optional – as it was favourable to craft legendaries in non-jewelry slots in 9.0 due to primary stat and now the opposite holds true due to Domination Sockets, people have to recraft several legendaries to be competitive and/or able to enjoy different forms of content.
Speaking of Domination Sockets – tier sets, but worse. Why?
Speaking of enjoying different forms of content – this all comes on top of the Covenant system, which people have been rightfully suspicious of from the start. We as a guild have never required or encouraged players to level and gear multiple characters; we’ll leave that to the world 100 crowd, but we did expect people to master their class and bring the best spec for the encounter, or in the case of hybrids, be able to play multiple roles. I and many if not most others also personally enjoy playing all the specs of our class. The Covenant system forces many players to pick a spec and stick with it for the tier as each one requires a different Covenant (e.g. mages, warriors), to say nothing of conflicting choices for different types of content. And, of course, if the meta changes, you have a soul-destroying grind ahead of you.
Add in soulbinds, not being able to change the conduits themselves with a tome without visiting the Forge, and conduit energy (why??), and the whole expansion has been deeply hostile to people who enjoy more than one spec, or more than one type of content.
To say nothing of alts; I personally have abandoned playing those other than for herbing since Legion as the whole point of playing an alt was to get away from the grindy chores required for the raiding main, but since Legion those have been mandatory to keep a character even remotely playable.
The current M+ seasonal affix is lackluster to say the least (the same dudes in the same places giving the same powers every week) and managed to turn off those for whom M+ had been enjoyable rather than an obligation for the weekly box.
A word on Legion and BfA while I’m at it – Legion was when some of the game’s current issues started, with the AP grind and both AP and legendaries making the first half of the expansion or so incredibly offspec hostile. But it had great zones, a great story, great raids (Tomb of Soakgeras and its over the top tuning notwithstanding), and introduced M+ as a breath of fresh air.
Regarding the AP grind – I seem to remember a Blizzard justification at the time being “we want you to feel like you’ve made some progress towards whatever goal you’re working on in the game even if you didn’t get loot that week”. Not only is that a fairly weak justification for a grindy plague on the game, but it seems to reflect Blizzard’s general attitude of abandoning guilds as the pillar of the WoW community. Everything in the WoW end-game is collaborative in some way or another, and if I personally didn’t get loot one week, someone else did, so as a team we did make progress; I’d rather not do extra busywork for a consolation prize. But this is the same overly individualistic attitude that sprouted mandatory personal loot.
I don’t think I need to elaborate too much on BfA’s issues, but we still enjoyed raiding and I think a lot of us were carried through it by the prospect of a better expansion to follow as the “one bad, one good” pattern had been holding fairly reliably and early looks at Shadowlands were promising.
THE RESULT
I personally am not interested in FFXIV and will be enjoying some single player games I’ve missed out on over the last years because I felt like every minute of free time had to go into WoW in order to be optimally prepared. These games also look amazing on my high-end gaming PC rather than providing me with a 15 fps slideshow because there’s too many swirlies and I want a decent UI for raiding and not uNinSTaLl aLL aDdoNs.
Many other guild members, however, have discovered FFXIV and realised in a bit of an eye-opener that it doesn’t have to be this way. You can have a game with competitive high-end PvE without forcing players to log in and do chores every day. You can have such a game without making players feel like they are not allowed to play anything else.
So our guild will now change to a community with many, but not all members enjoying FFXIV. The good times we had in WoW that built our community will stay with us, but we will also be sad at how it ended. A small handful of members will be moving on to other WoW guilds as they still want to pursue Mythic raiding, and we wish them all the best. We are keeping the option of returning to WoW with 10.0 if we see substantial change in both the company and the game on the table, but not holding our breaths.
Thank you if you’ve actually bothered to read all of this, and so long.
