A letter to Blizzard - Twinking

PVP Battlegrounds
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Dear Blizzard,

My intent with this open letter is not to demonize you or attack you, or anything like that. We love WoW - even though sometimes the actions of either sides don’t reflect that. Both of us want it to be good. But what you have done recently against a lot of people has cost you a lot of subs - including mine of course.

Recently, you seperated XPoff and XPon queues, meaning that people with their XP locked will not queue into people with their XP on in any instanced PvP. This was a ninja change. This was completely unlisted in the patch notes. This was a lazy change. This is a terrible change. Twinking has been going on really strong in BfA. If ever, this was the most fun expansion for twinking so far. There were a lot of busted things, things that you correctly fixed with 8.1.5 - such as Elemental Force, Incendiary Ammunition, Crusader, Ramstein’s Lightning Bolts -, changes that made you seem like you cared about us. But now, the curtains have fallen, and your intentions have shown.

You don’t care about twinks. You don’t care about making a quality game. You are lazy. How about minimizing the differences between a twinked and a non twinked player, instead of outright taking away our fun? How about instead of adding a one time RNG casino to quest gear, you instead boost the power of the levelers so that they can match against twinks? How about you finally look back in the past and learn what makes an RPG an RPG? Why is it bad that twinks kill levelers easily, but why isn’t it bad that fully geared 120 players kill freshly dinged players? Why do you take the easy way out, when everyone knows that it’ll cost you a lot of subs, at a time when your financial stability is much weaker than before?

So how could we reach a conclusion that would benefit all three sides: you Blizzard, the levelers, and us, twinks? Instead of seperating us, focus on tweaking spells / gadgets / abilities that would minimize the differences between both sides where a leveler will not feel completely dominated. You have done some steps towards that way (Ramstein rework, Sul’thraze nerf, etc.), so why have you abandoned it? In the name of everyone who play their twinks regularly / seriously, reach out to us for insight. I, the original writer of this open letter (ghettojesusxx on reddit / liljon in game) would gladly work for you for minimum wage, heck, even for free to fix this mess. All of us want WoW to be good, and fun. But you straight up took away our fun with just a few sentences on Twitter.

Please Blizzard, don’t abandon us. If you do, you abandon our wallets. And in the modern gaming culture, voting with our wallets is the strongest thing we can do. Please Blizzard, contact me and the twinking community, to help you how we can resolve this.

Sincerely,
The Twinking Community

58 Likes
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+1
Couldn’t have said it better myself

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Twinking brackets create their own community within the game, similar to how it used to be before sharding, phasing etc. You recognize players on both factions, you make rivals, you make allies, and it’s all very fun and keeps you engaged in the game.

I main the 70-bracket. This change feels like a stab in the back for me and a significant portion of Blizzard’s current players. I agree with OP and it felt like they were at least caring a little bit of keeping the lower brackets even with the nerfs to Sul’Thraze, Ramstein etc, but alas, we get destroyed off-patch notes as is in line with the new Blizzard philosophy; only include certain things in the patch notes and leave the rest for discovery.

I know I am not speaking alone when I say that twinking is how I enjoy the game, and have been, off and on during the years I’ve been peddling between twinking and max level, with twinking taking up a majority of that time. Last time they separated the brackets I ended up leaving WoW for a good 2,5 years because I simply felt the game was too hollow.

I know that a lot of people that are not familiar with the twink communities bad mouth twinks and immediately go to the lazy argument “you’re not good enough for max level, you just wanna one shot levelers etc”, however I know me and many of my 70-friends play for the community. We play to collect gear. We play to max out reputations connected to that specific bracket, and of course we play to PvP which is a major part of twinking. With these changes twinking is essentially dead. Again.

I’m just so sick and tired of Blizzard trying to micro-manage their player base, let the players have some freedom to make their own choices for gods sake. I really hope this change does not stay permanent.

/Tci

24 Likes
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Didn’t you know? You have to play the game in the way Blizzard wants it played.

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I agree with everyone above! Make the changes necessary for everyone to enjoy the game or lose more subscribers. It is simple.

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I feel for you guys but I fear that your simple solution is not as simple as you think it is. Every time Blizz have tried to tweak the numbers from older expansions through stat squishes, more problems have arisen than have been cured by it and I think it would be exactly the same were they now to try and ‘balance’ standard older levelling gear with the BiS gear from that expansion. Hell, historically even when some of those expansions were pretty much current content there was always gear/gems/enchants available to twinks that the normal levelling player either didn’t have the time nor the gold to waste on that pushed the twinks to many levels of power above the standard leveller.

I am going to get hate for this statement but I have been reading the GD forums on both EU and US for a while now and one of the biggest gripes that has come up has been about XPoff characters being in XPon queues and how it isn’t ‘fair’ for player who want to level via PvP and to that end this news doesn’t come as any major surprise to me.

Finally can you all please stop with this nonsense that Blizzard not announcing all changes in the patch notes is a new thing as we all know that this has always been Blizzard’s modus operandi with regards to patch notes and is one of the reasons why Wowhead, MMO-C etc gained popularity because they datamined all the ‘hidden’ changes that were in a patch. Spreading this misinformation does not elp your position in any way, shape or form.

PS As a non PvPer I have no issues with twinks being in the XPon queues.

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There have been complaints from people who don’t want to face twinks. So they are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

There are always complaints about everything in wow. I have no idea what prompted this change.

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The solution truly is simple. All it takes is a couple item tweaks, not squishes, and a couple tweaks to spells (as of how they scale through the levels). It’s truly that simple.

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I am trying to think of the song that the MVP Danellos always brings up at points like this which, very badly paraphrased, goes something along the lines of
:musical_note:44 bugs in the code in the game :musical_note:x2,
:musical_note:fix one bug and put it all back :musical_note:
:musical_note:76 bugs in the code in the game :musical_note:

Whilst we would, and Blizzard, would love it if things were this simple, WoW is a by know a phenominally vast game and any ‘small’ item tweak is never going to be as simple as we would like.

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It is a sad day indeed that this is truth.

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I came into BFA looking forward to 2 things, thin humans (for rogue and mage) and fat paladins (looking like uther from warcraft 3). We all have suffered at the hand of Blizzard.

I too have a twink, level 111 speedster, and the gem change was most unpleasant, all the time leveling, all the gold spent, just for the gems to be limited to BFA gear out of the blue. -30% speed.

Sometimes I wonder if Blizzard is a big mean kid with a magnifying glass, setting fire to our hopes and dreams, things we hold dear. Oh the humanity, when will we ever have peace?

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Developer’s intentions towards twinking has always been negative and they’ve been making their lives harder and harder until they wiped them out with first bg separation.

After that all the reasonable players, who enjoyed twinking left for private servers. Only stubborn and dull (probably both) stayed on retail.

The ones keep twinking on retail probably the ones, who believe in santa claus, so doctor help them.

Stop whining and pray for classic is coming soon. When it opens, i hope you’ll be smart enough to abandon the sinking ship (retail).

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Truer words have never been said. Can’t wait to play paladin on Classic ^^ Sadly, with this change, I’m going f2p unti Classic is out.

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Twinks ruin BG’s for non twinks.

Go in leveling greens and do some BG’s against twinks and tell us what mad fun you had.

Yea, didn’t think so.

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I had fun. Do you know why? Because I am aware of the knowledge that twinks use. Put two crusaders on your warrior, a Hidden Satyr on your neck, and a couple other enchants on your remaining pieces, and have a bit of brain. You can instantly reach up to twinks. Funny thing is, I’ve been actually called a twink on my leveler because of the enchants.

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Before 8.1.5

Players: Twinks are just noobs who want to kill bad geared players.
Twinks: NO! We don’t like killing low ilvl players! We have BIG twink community and we like playing against each other.

After 8.1.5: Twinks are now playing against each other.

Twinks: WTF Blizzard??? You destroyed twinks! Our big twink community can’t Q against low ilvl characters anymore! I’m canceling my subscription!

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Yes, we do like playing against eachother, but we also like to get regular ques, and not have to wait hours and hours and hours until we finally get a pop. In leveler bgs, where there are several twinks on both sides, we are mostly competing against eachother, and not just farm the levelers. A golden rule of twinking, is that you must diss the other twink = not farming levelers. A solo twink in a bg with only levelers is one of the most boring thing there is. I’ll be honest, it’s impossible to explain this to those who never twinked.

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The community is big, but not big enough to have BGs popping every hour of the day.

If enough people twinked, it would not be a problem.

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I see complaints about undergeared 120’s vs full Mythic gear in arena/bgs at max lvl but i don’t see no changes happening to 120 to make it more fair/balance.

& Twinking be part of this game for years and ever be part of mmo community for years.

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I thought that was the fun? Overpowering every one else on the field with ease. Hence the term ‘twink’, or ‘supped-up’.

Your entire post falls apart from this. Nothing you said after or before it bears any weight or consequence in any other capacity, except as white noise.

I’m not sorry, I’m happy. Once again I might consider levelling through BGs again.

Enjoy.

8 Likes