What is going on Lore Team Blizz - do you not understand Fans anymore?

Lore Story
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OPEN LETTER TO SENIOR DEVELOPMENT TEAM AND CREATIVE DIRECTION OF BLIZZARDS WARCRAFT FRANCHISE

Intro
Well loved franchise is in danger of losing many of its fans. And not because of gameplay, but because of story. And because of what seems a failure to understand what really matters and excites people with a story and world development in a world building media project that has a continuous evolving story like an MMO does. [It offers something books/films can’t, a story with no end, like real life, where things keep developing, evolving and experiencing, but unlike real life, one where people get excited and inspired by things improving overall for their world, races and classes and characters (each of which are very important).]

Details
Perhaps the current blizzard writers don’t really understand what balancing means… they are great at creating extravagant and dramatic tragedy to show case, but very poor at doing the opposite, or not desiring too.

As if they have some sadistic nature that only values tearing down and great harm, and just can’t understand the value and importance for the counter.

if you destroy a persons home and civilisation, surviving (often in wow been shown as wandering or existing in a destroyed state for years), or killing the person responsible alone is not compensation enough for media audiences who have enough tragedy, stagnation or no fairy tale ending in real life to want to put up with the same in-game). They may get their revenge, but compensation is getting them better, with a better land, leading them to a better state, or more improved than they original were, something better even more exciting than what they lost in a fantastic story arc that brought the lows.

Hear Me Out
For a video game, you may say the point is to create tragedy to give the players a reason to go fight something - i get that, but equally important is to show that fighting results in amazing things in the story the players witness happen and feel they contributed and can now see a better conclusion.

Gear rewards and loot is simply not enough - it is ultimately shallow (becomes less meaningful with time) and serves for personal character development, but personal character development is not the only thing that matters to the player when the game weaves a story that wants them to engage with the environs and denizens of its world. that wants to immerse them in and give them an integrated experience. Entices them with stories and races they FULL well know the players love, as well as characters, only to just ditch them and use them as canon fodder.

After a certain point in time, just developing major characters and only showing them pull through or get more powerful or the player character IS NOT ENOUGH. this is a community building game, the lore races are effectively the in-game community, the player has long since been set to be part of that fictional community which is the one he /she operates in.

If their favourite community is constantly destroyed and whipped and all the things they like and they find cool about it are just hacked up , taken away, never a moment taken to actually give it all back or give better than they lost - it ends up feeling hollow and disappointment - like you are making a statement, - sacrifice doesn’t matter, doing the right thing doesn’t matter, justice doesn’t matter, and at the end of it, all the death and pain will result in nothing but a more banal and pointless existence. -

if that is the attitude of the writer - then get him the F*** and bring people that have hope, and passion to tell more than tragedy, that understand lows need to end in highs, that races and people that your players are invested in need to get better not worse.

Like what genius thinks its enough for the player only to get more powerful while the race he loved is torn to shreds and just gets the worse end of the stick constantly time and again - all the cool things of it originally - either removed, retconned or reduced to something far less appealing - rather than the opposite. Who’d like that. NOBODY… how on earth would you think it is inspiring or uplifting and get people excited about your story - it isn’t. Then if you front load the benefits of their losses to a race they don’t particularly like, or hate or dont’ care about - you rub salt in the wound.

The Bottom Line
EVERY RACE needs to get improvements and get better. Each according to his own story and his own setting. These adventures and victories, sacrifices and tragedies need to result in good things happening - equally when a race misbehaves and/or its leader it needs to be punished and suffer - but a story that allows it to be redeemed or gain back its owner in a great way needs to be told. But it’s just crap to sit down and take a good race, make them constantly suffer and lose or sacrifice and never see them get better, never see them recover, and have the best of them locked in the past.

Examples
Please sit back and look at the span of your lore for the players’ in lore communities which are there races first, then their faction.

Notice people care more about their race first than their faction. A unified empire isn’t interesting when your own community (i.e. race) is constantly getting the shaft or portrayed as evil bad guy.

e.g. Forsaken - constnatly being the bad guy isn’t fun at all without hope of coming around or achieving something great. Evil deeds need to be rewarded with calamity but at the same time, hope for something better needs to happen in an exciting tug of war

Night elf - being good and sacrificing, losign stuff shoudl not be rewarded with more of the same. If a race has something amazing and incredible about it to start with and loses it tragically, the most exciting thing is writing a story that gets them restored to an even better state than they originally were in the lore. Not tear them further apart.

Orc: Having a good story of falling to corruption then coming out of it so heroically only to have wow portray them as losing it again and then just staying lost as something they were supposed to have come out of, is not fun at all.

Humans: While very popular, are not the only thing people want to see making all the key decisions and having hte key roles in everything - they are not the only played or loved race by the fans, but over using them, without actually really improving them just gets annoying - and others ask, whabt about my community/ They will actualy start hating hte humans instead of loving them.

Gnomes - ignoring people for so long isn’t good. 15 years of wow and Mechagon is the first instance/raid zone actually after them, when goblins, later introduced have had twice the volume.

Troll : Yes, Zuldazar finaly came, 16 years later, but did it have to take so long, and what about the original playable trolls? Vol’jin was basically the race, he’s gone, what impact does this fnatastic expose on troll lore have them - killing of a King they just met and loved?

The list goes on… the blood elves seemed to be the only race that in wow actually had something really positive come out of a tragedy, and that was because you did a patch 2.4 - the sunwell was restored, and Quel’thalas recovered. That felt amazing - why are the blood elves the only race to experience this? The draenei just saw their world die and a conclusion to their tragedy, where is the up beat for this? The night elves have been robbed of utopic state in their pre-sundering state that defined them, yet despite having their greatest enemy defeated, their problems with their intrinsic arcane affinity solved and cured - they show no signs of recovering or achieving more than they once originally were …do you know how exciting it would be to build them up to a state that superceded their original lore (not territory wise - neither the Zandalari or Kaldorei empire would ever return - but it doesn’t mean both troll and night elf cannot get the best of both their former and current eras happen on a much smaller scale like in Zuldazar and the Broken Isle that has their story end up with them in a superior condition/power to what they were, but on a more reasonable scale that allows others to also flourish in their own way.

If so much time is spent on tearing people down, why can you not have the blood elf treatment for everyone?

The Fans are Noticing The Decline
And many are wondering whether its worth their investment and love, and many concluding it isn’t and leaving (love may not be money, but people care about their hearts more than anything else, pull to their heart strings, they will spend money, take them for granted rubbishing what you drew them to care about, that love will turn to hate and they will not only leave, but put others off loving you by pointing out all your flaws.

Players care about lore, about consistency, about their races. Orcs and night elves wanted to see much more involvement in finishing off the legion consistent with their lore. If you write draenei and night elves to be great friends, why fail to show them working together afterwards especially against a shared enemy like the legion - that is inconsistent, if Azshara is the main focus of a patch, and her story involves Tyrande, Farondis and the night elven people in a key and core way, why aren’t they there? it’s like leaving the humans out of Arthas.

We all love new characters and new things, but if you keep discarding the stuff you wrote before, especially stuff that was loved and don’t properly tie it in, then no one will care about the new characters and things because they know they’ll be meaningless down the line - not to mention you’d be failing at some awesome and interesting development that definitely satisfies existing fans, but will also draw new fans to go and catch up and read the original stories - which means they will buy more of your books, more of your old games - but if they read that stuff and find that all of it ended up in retcon or just ignored, they’d figure out it’s all trash and lose interest and respect.

You are shooting yourself in the foot and you need to show the fans you really care about your lore by making the time and the space to properly show continuing threads and involving races and specs.

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I…don’t really agree.

I think a major appeal of Warcraft, in terms of story, is that it’s not a happily-ever-after. The stories where the races or characters are down and struggling to get up – those are the stories that Warcraft does well.

I don’t think a storyline has to result in a happy ending in order to feel rewarding or interesting or appealing. Arthas’ storyline is very tragic from start to finish, and it is amazing.

As far as screen time goes for the individual races, then I don’t think everyone needs equal amount of time in the spotlight. If Blizzard wants to tell a story that lends itself more to a Human and Orc background, then that is what they should commit to. They shouldn’t shoehorn some Gnomes or Trolls into it just to fill up their quota of story attention.

As WoW’s story continues the various races gets their time to shine anyway. I remember when Blizzard introduced the Draenei and the subsequent expansions saw players complain that Blizzard had abandoned the Draenei, because they weren’t given much story attention. But eventually – as with all other races – the story gets around to them, as it did with WoD and Legion where we learn of their past on Draenor and their return to Argus.

I think the fact that players are impatient about story continuation is testament to the fact that they’re interested in the story – not that they aren’t.

And I also think the fact that people are passionate about the story events is testament to the fact that people are actually emotionally invested in the narratives. I think that’s a great accomplishment for Blizzard – you would not find these kind of threads on the forums back in the early days of WoW, because the story simply didn’t have the same emotional impact. Today everyone actually has an opinion on Sylvannas, The Burning of Teldrassil, Jaina, Garrosh, and so on.

So yeah, don’t really agree with the points you put forward. I think WoW’s story development has constantly expanded and improved over the years, just as the playerbase have become increasingly more invested and engaged in the story.

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You might be missing the point of what I was trying to say, the story evolves, you need lows and also highs is what I’m getting at. Excuse me for not communicating it well enough.

Currently it is littered with lows, and very few highs, especially from the race perspective.

You need good endings, and they can be interesting… this story doesn’t end, unlike a great book or film when the great trial is over. the end, an MMO doesn’t end their, there is a new stage, and as such, if a victory is to be meaningful after enjoying it, you need to show the upswing – however in Warcraft lore at the moment, the thing most prominent and often shown is the destruction. This is what I mean.

The blood elves had a fairy tale ending with the Sunwell being restored - it wasn’t actually a fairy tale ending, it was just an ending that had a positive result and later growth was shown for the race. It wasn’t much, but even that is not visible for any other race - and this is what is depressing.

When i play or getting involved with a race, if you are causing me to mourn and cry or feel sad at the horrible tragedy or injustice or horrified at my reactions to an event, then you have to show the counters - because getting a high is all the more sweeter because of the low and has an even more powerful effect.

If you fail to capitalise on this you are wasting a lot of potential, and intentionally letting slip ways that you could get your fans even more into your world and your story… you also risk putting them off in the long run, because after a while the same all doom , gloom, destruction, everything we hold dear goes, my race is constantly trashed - gets annoying - look at the night elf fans currently, and they are not the first to suffer this, though maybe they are the most pronounced.

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I stole this from and old 2016 thread on MMO-champion but it sums up how I feel

Person 1

I somewhat agree, and this is something I’ve noticed as well. Since Cataclysm, Blizzard’s MO has been “we want to deliver epic events.” But instead it comes across as trying too hard. The game becomes overblown and cartoonish, and the story gets lost.

Really though, the change seems to have been gradual. I started playing WoW in 2005, and I remember reading about the game which ended with the following quote from Metzen: " You might spend hundreds of hours playing a game like this, and why would you keep coming back? Is it just for the next magic helmet? Is it just to kill the next dragon? It has to be the story. We want you to care about these places and things so that, in addition to the adrenaline and the rewards of addictive gameplay, you have an emotional investment in the world. And that’s what makes a great game ."

That sentiment - story comes before gameplay - was echoed widely at the time. I remember reading about all the handwringing involved in whether or not to let druids even be playable (lorewise, they were only a Night Elven and male class), seeing devs talk about the firm reasons behind class restrictions, seeing why the Forsaken start off only neutral with other factions, etc. I remember when both the players and developers took the lore so seriously that Metzen himself had to come to the forums to apologize for the Draenei retcon. And you know what? The seriousness with which Blizzard approached its lore made the game all the better for that.

Since then, the mantra has become “gameplay first, story second”, and you can feel it in all their design decisions, from the heavily-optimized zone designs, to the homogenized classes, to the removal of most class restrictions, to the constant retcons and general ‘who gives a damn about the firmness of the story’ that seems to have guided all of WoD. As Metzen had said, the story is what creates an emotional investment, and as long as they keep punting it into the back seat, the game will keep feeling more than a little empty.
Person 2 replying to Person 1

Wow, thank you for that. That was really insightful. To be honest, I was more or less a little kid even during BC, though I was still a YUUUUGE fan of the lore, especially that of the Forsaken. I’ve read that comment about the Draenei retcon that Metzen posted from Wowwiki/Wowhead, whichever website. It didn’t really occur to me until just now when you brought it up that Metzen would do something like that on the offical forums. Nowadays, stuff like that is pretty much strictly related to Ion Hazzikostas, raiding, and gameplay. It has to have been ages since something like that has happened for the story.

I agree that the game, as a whole, is MUCH better because of the trade-offs that put lore first. You can see it reflected even in the informal slang players use every now and then, nobody really shouts “FOR THE HORDE!” anymore. And I genuinely think it’s because people don’t have the same emotional attachment to the races of the horde, the orcs who were redeemed from the blood curse, the Tauren who were probably the most peaceful race in the game by far, the clever and yet noble Darkspear tribe, and even the Forskaken, who despite having ambiguous moral alignments at best, still had a rich and sympathetic backstory.

I’m not sure if I touched upon it that much (if at all) in the initial post, but I think this whole situation is a result of Blizzard over-compensating to criticism. I remember in one interview with a couple WoW devs (Ion Hazzikostas and Josh Allen I think) where they spoke about how Warlords of Draenor basically had very little to no structured content at the beginning of the expasnion, they mentioned how Blizzard tends to “swing the pendulum too far”. That is, they over-react to the criticism of MOP being too rigid that they gave WoD almost no structure.

If I had to propose a solution, it would be to try and force that pendulum shift again. Thank you for that NYT article, I’m gonna add it to my list of sources and hopefully it will inform my posts in the future.

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wow… 2016, it’s a bit damnig that negative critical observations from 3 years ago still apply today, it means the key issues still aren’t resolved.

Wow, he said that, looks like he understood, but maybe his successors do not. If they think the cheap drama ride of yet another destruction of the night elves and yet another horde warchief turning villain is getting us to love the story , i think they’ve missed it, like really missed it… it’s just pissed off everyone, Horde fans, night elf fans.

While they could be an upside to all of this, night elf fans aren’t seeing it, neither are horde fans, because this crap has happened before… second time the horde has been villaniised in wow, 3rd time over all, also the 3rd time the night elves have been majorly victimised and their second time genocided int he story, neither of these two having a period where they showed incredible honour and character for a sustained period (horde) or substantially recovered what they’d lost and ended up better than what they were before the next destruction wave hit (night elves)

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I guess it’s a matter of expectation and also a case of gameplay first.

I mean, I feel that the story gives you the rewarding moments when it needs to. Velen has his peaceful sigh after Sargeras’ defeat, Jaina becomes Lord Admiral and has her family reunion, Tyrande has her ascension as the Night Warrior, and so on.

Admittedly, WoW has definitely become darker over the years, and the story is increasingly focused around all the horror and suffering, and less around the joy and happiness.
I’m not sure if that’s good or bad…An event like the Burning of Teldrassil is to me the darkest piece of story Blizzard have ever written in any of their games – but it’s also one of their best and most emotional. In that way the WoW story feels a lot more mature these days – it’s not for kids anymore. When we get to play WoW Classic soon, I think the contrast will become clear, because the quests in WoW Classic are often rather whimsical and jolly.

The second part is that the story inevitably has to serve the gameplay, just as the gameplay has to serve the story. And WoW can’t really end Legion with a lot of happiness and festivities. That’s not a good story foundation for the next expansion’s gameplay. The game sort of demands that the end of the world is always around the corner, so one imminent threat is always replaced with another imminent threat – because that’s what the gameplay revolves around. We want to kill big evil bosses and explore dark and grim-looking dungeons. That kind of gameplay inevitably demands that the story focuses on that too.

But I get the point: The story can sometimes feel very demoralizing. It has that GoT vibe to it sometimes – everyone you care about is suffering or getting killed and everything you’ve done has been for naught.

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I am really most disappointed about the dwarven story in this regard. The cataclysm and the destructions it brought were an ideal point to make the three feuding tribes grow as a people and learn to live together. The Bronzebeards had lost their king, the Loch and their greatest harbour was flooded. The Dark Irons under Moira were living in a vulcano, when the world started blowing up. It would have made sense that they would have left it in desperation. And the Wildhammers had all this stuff with the Twilight Highlands going on, an ideal time for other dwarves to lend a helping hand. The unification story, triumph out of catastrophe, was practically written for them, they just had to let it play out!

But what did they do instead? They skipped directly to the bickering. The dwarven clans didn’t unite, because they had grown, the human king forced them together just because, and the dwarves just went with it. What the… sigh

We still see the devastations the cataclym brought to Khaz Modan today. The dam is still broken. Menethil is still flooded. The Twilight Highlands are still full of Shadowhammer stuff (and appearently they were overrun by demons offscreen. Nice to hear, isn’t it?). But nothing really came of it. The dwarves didn’t grow, change or devolve. They just have less cool stuff.

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I wouldn’t particularly describe the Burning of Teldrassil as the best piece of writing Blizz has ever done very simply because it could’ve been written by anyone. It had shock value, and it’s this sort of writing that made me lose all passion or feeling for GoT as it went on. Shocking moments can be good, yes, but in an MMO it’s a bit different since it’s not like they killed your favourite character, it’s more that they crippled the race that you’ve enjoyed playing and have no intention of giving them any decent payoff after such an event. I don’t think Blizz thought of Teldrassil as such a big thing, honestly, from what I’ve seen they didn’t expect this kind of backlash for describing the literal genocide of one of their playable races.

It’s not about darkness or light in my opinion, it’s about payoff. I’m fairly certain that Blizzard set up the Burning of Teldrassil with no intention of offering substantial payoff, even the Night Warrior thing seemed rushed, and didn’t really seem to have much meaning within the story.

When you write something so demoralizing as the Burning, then you need to be willing to give those you’ve demoralized something of worth, something that tells them there’s hope for their race and story down the line.

I don’t expect them to remember much of this next expansion either, tbh, but that’s probably just because Blizzard have made me lost all faith in them. They’ve convinced me that they’ve no passion for the story they’re writing. They’re just bumbling along, throwing in some shock value and vaguely cool moments for their favourite characters.

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But that is what the Night Warrior questline presents. A flicker of something.
I think as it pertains to the Night Elves, people just seem impatient. The fans’ timetable is that the story should progress now and over the next couple of patches – they want more, now.
Blizzard’s timetable seems to be that the story should start progressing once the next expansion comes out – Darkshore and the Night Warrior just sets the stage for now, so to speak.

I don’t think that’s true at all. I think people put pride in their work and aim to do the best they can. Blizzard’s storywriters don’t strike me as people who aren’t passionate about their jobs. Christie Golden doesn’t seem like a person who hates writing.
I think it’s kind of disrespectful to label Blizzard’s employees as people who aren’t passionate about their jobs. That’s an unnecessary low-punch.

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I’ve no intention to insult them, and I’m sure there are some who are passionate about what they do. But from what I’ve seen so far it’s passion for things other than the Night Elves, I suppose this is only natural with a story like this. When new people come along they’ll take a liking to certain parts of the story they’re writing, I understand that. It’s more so the higher ups I’d be pointing at, more than a few story beats in this expansion likely happened because someone higher up told the story team they wanted x and y to happen, and then told them to just fill in.

The story shouldn’t progress now, necessarily, but the Night Warrior really didn’t feel like much, if anything. I appreciate that at some point, something might happen. It’s not like the Night Elves should be a priority for getting anything either, they’ve simply been added to the queue of non-human races within the alliance that desperately need story focus. I’m sorry if I came off as hostile to the writers, but this expansion as a whole has just felt, well, pointless. After the burning I was more than willing to take the fight for every last member of the horde I could find, but even in the Warfront we’re not fighting horde commanders, no, the Night Elves are fighting other Night Elves because the horde doesn’t have characters to spare.

I’ll gladly zone out till this expansion is over, wait and see if something, anything comes the way of any of the races I like. But I won’t hold out hope for anything substantial.

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It does, sometimes, but way too few and far between and nowhere near enough, not with the same measure it deals out death and destruction. There have been touching moments too, Farondis and Thalyssra also in 7.x, Sylvanas at some stage including her ascension to warchief which felt good (little did we know what was to come).

But many of these if left just there don’t feel anywhere near enough. While touching and somewhat cool or nice, Velen’s conclusion alone is not enough to inspire me to love my Draenei characters more or make up for their losses. It helps and is a good thing to happen and should (at least he got conclusion with his main adversary, Sylvanas was a side plot against Arthas, Tyrande & Kaldorei didn’t even get a look in at Azshara), but by itself is nowhere near enough.

My Point Using the Draenei as an example
Now if the Draenei were to get infused by a piece of Argus, and empowered by the crucible device we infused with Xe’ra’s essence and that void Lord from Alleria’s Encounter - now this is an exciting development where after player empowerment no longe replays a role, the actual race it’s lore benefits from gets a cool gain from it THAT IS SHOWN AND EMPHASIZED IN A COOK WAY - then we are talking. And off course it doesn’t end their, this led later to recovering the 7 Atam’al crystals in an exciting story arc that resulted in the Draenei also rebuilding a smaller version of their civilisation with Auchindouin/Karabor and Shatrath WoD like jones in Azuremyst and EK Lordaeron/Hillsbrad /WPL areas or even better led to the restoration somehow of Outland. … which leaves them in a better state, great new home and greater empowered state than even where they were before Sargeras — then this is super exciting after all their loss. (Something that is a long arc over several expansions not just plunked there)

Then, like the blood elves after TBC, whenever we saw the Draenei they were competent, intelligent and effective - having had a lot of tragedy recently, end up being one of the races that are instead left out of super calamity events and instead get gains like this recovery process continuously worked on and shown through the next few expansions. (It doesn’t have to be 100% positive, they would have some setbacks, challenges, but they are shown to triumph spectacularly avoiding calamities and turning them to aid their recovery even further), but you can see it happening and authentic cos it’s not compensation stunt like Darkshore was for the night elves, but genuine commitment to building up and repairing Draenei fortunes. Then this is super exciting. After all their tragedy in lore, let them recover and improve. Exactly the same thing for night elves and forsaken.

This is what I mean.

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People still believe the franchise would die out because of bad story telling. That’s not how Video games, specifically mmos work.

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its the weekly’s and content drain that will snap it.

my eyebrow started twitching months ago.

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The bad story writing is a clear symptom of a complete lack of any consideration for the customers. One might even call it majorly disrespectful and insulting. Combined with a ‘we did brilliant’ attitude for most of BfA, until it wasn’t, long content droughts, highly repetitive gameplay and an unwillingness to innovate? Those kill MMOs. You don’t need a degree in accounting to know that they aren’t really investing into their game, when we have Legion as a baseline to compare to. Or perhaps the cinematic budget killed the content budget after 8.0.

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I think that is where Blizzard are taking the Night Elves and the Forsaken. The time perspective is just a little longer, and with some bumps along the road.
But we’ll see.

But it’s difficult to give the races too much pause. Again, the story has to serve the gameplay as the gameplay has to serve the story. And the focus of both is kind of war, conflict, tragedy, and so on. That’s just Warcraft.

I personally quite liked the ending / epilogue Blizzard did for StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void. That felt like a good kind of closure to a story arc:

In a way it’s quite reminiscent of the way Warcraft III wrapped up its story arcs:

And personally I think WoW is moving toward something similar. The final cinematic in Legion was very epilogue-esque in its portrayal, wrapping up both Illidan’s arc and Velen’s:

Blizzard’s biggest hurdle with WoW is probably the fact that making the story come to life in the game takes a lot of development time. That’s probably the constrain that limits the scope of the story development the most. I mean, there’s no shortage of ideas for more cool story quests and new cities for various races and what not. But it takes time to make. :yum:

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Gameplay is the biggest issue. And most of it will be fixed by patch 8.2. Wow is doing just fine. Really.

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PvP: Plagued by a documentable case of gear/comp > skill. Trying to fight against someone a mere 7+ ilvls above you is likely a suicide mission, even if you know the ins and outs of their class better than they do. The new Heart system will only exacerbate this problem by further empowering the OP classes with more firepower/capabilities. The last raid had a bunch of trinkets that were gamebreaking in balance terms and made the old Maledict Medallion look like a child’s toy. When the new raid comes out, expect to fight against hordes of progression raiders in BGs and arenas who laughably outgear you and are running the Flavour of the Month. It ain’t fun, and kills casual and even intermediate interest.

M+: Some new dungeons won’t fix the existing problems of restricted class/spec options for considered good runs. Just try to get two melee dps (at the same time) into a PUG for a mid-difficulty key or above. Or Guardian Druid as a tank. You’ll be waiting a very long time. The class balance is awful.

Raiding I have not looked at the upcoming raid(s) in detail, so won’t comment except for a line later.

Daily activities and WQs More Azerite farm- sorry Essences as well. Woop. Adding one grindy currency with another won’t make it more fun. Once the initial novelty wears off, we’ll be back in square one. Especially if they continue to offer HC raid level gear as a WQ reward. It completely invalidates Raiding and M+. Why go to the trouble of setting up a skilled group/team to fight against difficult and coordinated content…when you can just wait a little while and the same level of rewards are a daily.

Blizzard have fundamentally used BfA as a filler xpac and marketed it as a properly done one. It shows in the design of their timesinks.

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I appreciate this is to you, and you did specify “in game “ but I do feel War of the Ancients was darker and the first genocide. The scourge invasion of Lordaeron and wiping out of Quel’thalas was dark. Seeing Argus destroyed too was very dark and powerful. Each of them.

However there is no positive development of equal magnitude or a tangible/definitive start to one for any of those races except the blood elves. I’m sure Night elf, Draenei, dwarf, sarkspear, gnome, Tauren and Ofc Forsaken players would agree.

And this is not saying you don’t have a point, you do. But we crave more, desire more but are getting much less it is souring.

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New respect for you I’ve been trying to say this in essays, in so many ways, but this. So much this. Don’t they get it?

Maybe they don’t. And this is why we feel they don’t care. All of what you said though.

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It’s sad that absolutely nobody from Blizzard will ever read your post. Sadder even is that even if they read, they won’t give a damn about your letter, your thoughts and your feelings. You, as a player, are worthless to them and they’d rather watch paint dry than give you the time of day.

Saddest of all is that you put quite a bit of time, effort and feeling into your letter, only for it to be ignored by the recepients.

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