Today I unsubbed, with a bitter taste in my mouth. There’s a lot to love about World of Warcraft. A huge amount of good times and experiences, and friends made. So just want to make clear that I don’t want to hate on the game, I’m just making this post for awareness and to share my thoughts on the current experience, and why I’m quitting now.
First a list of the things I like to do the most in the game;
Raiding. First up to Heroic for many years with my semi-casual guild, into recently trying mythics. The fights are usually cool, and I’ve liked the gameplay a lot.
M+. Again, I like the gameplay, and the increasing difficulty and extra affixes made them much much more repeatable, and it’s felt good to progress higher as my skill increased. Much appreciated, good stuff. My M+ experiences have probably been some of my best gaming experiences, and doing them with friends (and sometimes pugs) has been a blast for years. I think they’re in a fairly good spot now, though I’m a little unsure about the seasonal affixes, but they are in my opinion what WoW does best that nobody else does.
Exploring and lore. I’ve done a great amount of the quests in the game over the years, and I’ve enjoyed the massive world building a lot. The lore has been thick, and I would say that it’s been pretty good for most of it. There’s been some ups and downs, but it’s always moved steadily forwards, and there’s been many truly great moments.
But, those aren’t the reasons I’m quitting. Don’t bother replying to me expecting a response about what I’m writing, as I’m not looking to get into a discussion here. This is mostly for my own sake, but also in case a dev should happen along. Remember that these are my personal opinions, and I’m not claiming to speak for everyone, so if you don’t agree, you’re welcome to make a new topic where you talk about why you like that particular piece of content, rather than wasting your time here arguing with a wall.
First off, legendaries. I really do not like this current system. It is timegated into oblivion, extremely costly, and incredibly important for nearly every class and role. The concept of having a legendary item you work to build up is fine enough, and for example the legendary ring in WoD, while maybe a bit too powerful and mandatory compared with how difficult it was to get (both debatable points, let’s leave it at that), made for a good journey and sense of accomplishment. Likewise, Powers in Legion were pretty fun, although it was implemented in the most horrible way possible, being pure RNG drops that limited player access and would often leave players going long periods of time before they got the powers they wanted. Not ideal.
The legendary system now teases you with the same possibility of choice as Legion, but is limited in a different way. On a glance you’d look at it and think “oh wow, that’s a lot of cool stuff I can’t wait to play around with”, but in reality we’ve again suffered under limited access and frustration. First being locked into one choice due to the time gated resource acquisition, and every week we have had the “choice” of either upgrading, or delay and instead craft another one at rank 1.
So many options. So many wrong choices to make. So little room for play.
I do not understand why Blizzard made all these cool new powers, only to then so severely limit our access to them. I really don’t. (yes yes, many of them are revamped effects which we’ve seen before at one or another point in the game, alright. The Primal Tide Core as an example, coupled with the Necrolord restoration shaman ability, bears striking similarities to a tier set effect from WoD.)
Second, which somewhat ties into the legendaries, and this one is what I imagine to be the one that splits the most people right now. Torghast.
Now I have some friends who really enjoy it, but I hate Torghast quite a lot. For me it was a very unwelcome addition to the gameplay I’ve been used to and stayed for through many years. I want to call it a wannabe roguelike, but one with poor randomization, for the most part uninteresting powers, extremely boring aesthetics (do you want to cover your screen in grey, and only grey? Ask the Jailer, he’s got just the man you need), and despite the fact that you get a random selection of choices as you go through it, every run for me ends up being nearly exactly the same, because I know that before the end my pool of powers will still look much the same anyway, and there’s few to none actual gameplay changes, it’s just that the more powers I get the faster and harder my spells hit, and that’s pretty much it. Every new run also feel incredibly bad compared to any previously ended run, as you’re stripped of all your special powers and have to find them all again each time, and it can take a while to get rolling. (I know some people are doing runs quite fast now, regardless of early powers. I’m sorry, I can only imagine how many runs you’ve done to be able to do this.)
The randomized powers also means that there is a big element of luck involved. A little awkward.
Still, I wouldn’t have minded if it was just extra content. But it is required for your legendary, and it’s been incredibly unpleasant to be forced into doing an entirely new type of content I had no interest in doing from the beginning. I don’t buy and sub to WoW for the roguelike experience. The Twisting Corridors is fine, I honestly do not care about it since it’s not required for my power, it’s just extra content I don’t find particularly fun but I would probably have ended up doing a bit of on occasion. Required Torghast runs for Souls Ash and now the new Cinder currency however? No thanks. Torghast has, for me, very little to do with anything else that is World of Warcraft, and it just ends up being weird. And while some might say that it’s “only” two runs a week, that’s two runs of time every week I’d rather have spent having fun in a M+ or doing anything else, like farming herbs, but I can’t. What’s typically happened is that I’d do the required runs, and then quite frankly be so fed up that I’d be done with WoW for the rest of the day.
Third, story. It’s been quite a sad journey the last few years, struggling as I have been to get to with grips on the story again. It used to be simple. The villain would do evil things, and the quest lines would take you through the story, as you battled with and did quests for the many different heroes of Azeroth (not the players), thus progressing the story as you explored the world and grew in power. For a while now though, huge parts of the main story has been told outside of the game, in books and out-of-game cinematics. In Legion (which for the record is my favorite expansion so far and the one I thought presented the story in the best way) chunks of it was separated into the different class order halls, which was a huge blow to someone like me, who mainly only plays one character, and have been for years. The lightborn comes to mind, as they appear in the main story without explanation, unless you’ve been playing either a priest or a paladin, I forget which. Heck, there are even lightborn dreadlords, and since I didn’t play the right class at the time I still have no idea what the deal is with those, and I don’t believe it’s explained elsewhere in a meaningful way. We continued this problem in BfA to some degree, with even more of the story now being split up depending on if you were alliance or horde. There were always parts of the story you would only see if you played a certain race or class, but they used to be fairly minor details in the grand plot. BfA however was two distinct experiences that felt very different and unique, but you almost needed both sides at once to follow the main plot, or you would end up confused, and quite frankly that felt pretty bad.
We continue that in Shadowlands with Covenants, now split into 4.
About the contents of the story, I have my opinions there too, but those are honestly less important here than the sheer difficulty of access lately. It’s really hard to give informed opinions on lore when I don’t get to see so much of it.
Basically I think the Jailer is weird and barely there, while Sylvanas needs a compass to her own character, and otherwise I don’t really know.
Fourth, Covenants. An unwieldy extra talent tree and two new abilities each dependant on which you pick, penalties for switching between them, and story locked within each.
Again like the legendary powers, covenants are not in of themselves a bad idea! But I feel very much like the implementation has been mishandled, and players are straight up punished for wanting to experiment and have fun with all the different abilities, so that’s not great. I switched covenants because I wished to perform better in my role in the raid, from Night Fae, which I enjoyed being in, to Necrolord, which I dislike except that I think the abilities I get from them are just too good to pass up for what I do in the game.
Fifth, and probably the last one. I’m getting pretty tired of the revamped content. The Maw in general has been horrible, and Korthia is pretty empty, kinda like a worse, greyer Argus. There’s nothing exciting about the chests and treasure’s anymore, they’re everywhere and going in a circle to pick them up is just another chore, it’s not gameplay anymore when we do it this much. Same with the rares in a way, and absolutely the dailies. You’ve standardized the entire process and rewards to the point where it feels like I’m going down a checklist required for the little content I wish to partake in, instead of actually playing a game all the time.
Sixth, last one for real. Why are the zones just floating in space? It doesn’t feel like I’m in one world anymore, and while I guess that might be part of the point since we’re in the afterlife and all, I don’t think forcing players into playing the new flight master simulator is an entirely ideal thing.
Damn, this took way too long. Anyway, best of luck you poor fool who read through all of that. I hope you enjoy your time in Azeroth, or whatever else you find yourself doing.
Good night.
EDIT: I did read some of the comments, and feel free to reply how vehemently you disagree with me, you’re free to do so. Your input is valid, you’re paying customers too. Just don’t expect a response from me, is all.
