As an old player that has seen WoW through its glory days, played every expansion to some degree and has had some of the greatest moments in World of Warcraft, i’m utterly disappointed in the state of the game and the changes that have been made to the gameplay and the gaming culture in general. I’ll state my reasons below, and i encourage others to express their concerns here in this post, so blizzard can reflect on the state of the game and hopefully make it better in the future.
Patch 9.2 has come out and i’ve decided to stop playing the game as i find the ending to Shadowlands very disappointing. Shadowlands is an expansion that started off very well with its exciting new maps and campaigns, but slowly deteriorated due to the lack of content to keep players interested, come 9.1 with the Sanctum of Domination raid that made the expansion better. The time lag from 9.1 to 9.2 was so significant that it bored most of the player base i was in contact with and the ones that stayed on mostly grinded mythic plus dungeons, raids or pvp with no new exciting content. Come 9.2, the introduction of Zereth Mortis and the new Sepulcher of the First Ones raid was an utter mess. The raid is unexciting, and combines many aspects that players have seen before, just displayed in a slightly different context. The raid is long, dragged out by developers each week locking out raid finder/heroic at the beginning, or cross realm mythic. A lot of the content is locked per week, which is no fun for gamers literally waiting for the next week. The number of players i know creating alts for the sake of creating alts because they’ve already finished all the content is staggering. That is just the tip of the iceberg and anyone who would like to add onto this I encourage you to, i can’t cover everything.
The main topic of discussion i’d like to address is the toxicity now prevalent both in high level play, normal play, and progression play. For any new Wow players i would like to tell you that there was a time when the game was not toxic at all ( Back in Vanilla, TBC and WoTLK). Yes, not a single bit. Communities were very friendly, open to trying out the game, adventurous and free-spirited. The concept of dungeons and raid was never competitive, it was only done for completion, and maybe a couple repeats for specific gear sets. It was actually the dungeons and raids that brought people together rather than divide people. Friends and family working together, and if the raid wiped or the dungeon wiped, people would laugh, not curse. Wow was never a toxic game. Toxic games were reserved for shooter games, but it never crossed over to the MMORPG world. This was about 10-15 years ago.
Now I have seen the game become so increasingly toxic that it brings me to tears knowing that i have to hold onto my memories and never revisit them in a game i love so much. The player base is different, people’s attitudes are different, the gaming culture is different, even the campaigns are different. Everything is different.
So why is the game so toxic? I believe i now know the answer, and i am only speaking the truth as i see it:
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The emphasis on perfection: This is a NEW concept in wow that never existed originally. We can see this in many parts of the game now, especially mythic plus and raiding. Perfection stresses out players, and the whole goal of the game now seems to be about getting better gear, testing out different dps builds to get the highest dps possible, practicing tanking/healing strategies. Simcrafting. Reputation grinding, World Boss Grinding, Creating new alts to perfect every spec of the game.
Players simply do not want to talk to other players that aren’t as hungry for perfection as they are and so create communities that blacklist ‘bad’ players and keep perfectionist players to push themselves. There is a general consensus that in order to even play the game, you need to be ‘good’ at the game, and to be ‘good’ at the game, you need to be the ‘best’ at the game ( as in the top 100 players in the world). Bad players are ousted before they are given a chance, and good players do not want to play with bad players. So when a bad player is invited into a raid or a dungeon, they get toxic abuse from so called ‘good’ players, and if a good player is invited into a raid or dungeon with lots of bad players, they hurl toxic abuse at the bad players. The game has been segregated because of the need for perfection or ‘the ideal’ which has destroyed players experiences, and everyone gets abused in this system. I cannot count how many times i have seen players ragequit the game because of ‘not being good enough’, including myself to some extent. -
Cancel Culture: This is a very big problem in WoW, it is almost a simulated 1984. Everything you do in wow gets recorded now, your dps gets logged, your wipes on bosses gets logged, your mythic score gets logged, your raid completion gets logged, even your dps rotation gets logged. Even all the moves that your player can do is in full view for everyone else in the game who has the right addons to inspect exactly what you are doing, every single movement you’re making. There is no room to make a mistake, and if you do, you get kicked, banned, muted, ignored by your group, and everyone in the group follows suit because they are afraid to be kicked themselves in case they accidentally invite you again, which would obviously be a mistake. I have literally noticed how quick players respond to good runs and bad runs. Whenever i do a good run or led a good raid, for SOME reason i get thousands of responses from players asking and begging me to let them join the raid or run. Whenever we wipe on a boss or something goes wrong, all players leave the group, and for some reason, i get no one wanting to join the raid at all for a very long time. I could relist/requeue after a day and still nothing. That is no coincidence at all. There is some system ( not by Blizzard, maybe there are addons) that is logging all of this and influencing players decisions on who they want to spend time with and who they don’t ( only those in the know would know) . You simply get cancelled if you make any mistake. This obviously drives a lot of toxicity whenever there is a wipe or problem in the raid. Players fight for their lives and have huge arguments because they don’t want to get cancelled. I have tried every alternative to arguing and unfortunately this is the best strategy to stay in a raid. To ‘pretend you know everything and everyone else is wrong’.
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High tier guilds are elitist and authoritarian: Obviously saying this will get me cancelled, but it’s true. We have little dictators running CE guilds, and i hate the phrase CE ( cutting edge) back to my original point on perfectionism. They are run like cults or gangs, it’s very mafia/ gang-like. The cancel culture is everywhere here, and i believe this is where the cancel culture behaviour starts. The emphasis of control and cutting out weeds from the guild ( each with their own shady strategy to get rid of people) is manifest. To live under fear and control by your own guild that is supposed to help you enjoy the game teaches the negative in this game and that the only way to succeed is to be like them. I don’t really understand what’s bonding people in these guilds, the psychology is far too complex for me to understand. Most of what i see are negative messages being thrown around. I believe a lot of the bonding in guilds happens outside of the game that i have not participated in.
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Blizzard locking content: This is just unnecessary. Stopping players from completing the game ruins the gaming experience for everyone. Imagine if you had to watch a movie in 10 installments, where you would see the first part on the first week, and you had to buy a ticket to see the 2nd part of the same movie the next week. It leaves players very unsatisfied with the game, and when they’re sitting around doing nothing, they turn violent and toxic. Release the content, why are we holding patch content in week installments? It’s ridiculous.
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The Competitive Scene: I think this hits the nails into the coffin. Mythic + and mythic raiding hold the highest gear in the game. So naturally everyone is drawn towards mythic + and mythic raiding, there is nothing else in the game that matters more anymore. I have tried to work my way up the ladder to complete high level +20 keys and mythic raiding, and i can tell you there is a point where content is permanently locked from you that you can never attain, for casual players ( now defined as playing every day for 4 hours). With hard work and determination, you cannot succeed by yourself, which is the most annoying part of this competitive scene. Believe me, i have tried very hard. To succeed in the game does not require you to be the best player. It requires you to have a mindset that ticks all the boxes i mentioned before: A drive for perfectionism that you make very obvious in your behaviour, high tier guilds that carry you if you do everything they say, and to engage in cancel culture. People will support this and your complicity in their behaviour and will reward you with mythic raid runs, mythic dungeons on high tier keys. It is almost a form of payment. If you are not these kinds of people, you will never make it to the final boss on a mythic raid or a +30.
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Outside of the competitive scene, there is nothing else exciting. Professions Blizzard oh my gosh what have you done to them? It’s nothing more than a grinding exercise. Campaigns are boring. The storyline doesn’t make any sense ( and don’t pretend you understand what’s going on, you don’t). There are no exciting events, or other player content that people can engage and just have fun, so players who don’t want to engage in toxic communities are forced to by the nature of the game being centered around it, which brings me to my next point.
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Anti-Fun. How many times have you heard this in a raid/dungeon. ‘Wow is not for fun’. ‘Go play mario kart if you want to have fun’. ‘Wow is not a game, it is very serious’. ‘We’re not here to have fun, focus and stop getting it wrong’. They’re right, Wow is like life to many players, and they take it so seriously now. So anything toxic becomes more toxic, because people take the insults personally.
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Pugs. Raid finder. People can join a raid and ruin it, it happened today. People do not listen in pugs for some reason, they do not co-operate at all. There is no accountability at all, and people do not feel invested in pugs so they treat others like trash, which is a result of the guild system i believe that has changed over the years in its culture. Anyone who knows nothing about the game will enlist on a raid finder or a pug to then receive unwanted abuse for the pettiest reasons.
I could go on but i think i’ve made my points. How should blizzard solve this? Remove high-level competitive play completely, that’s what’s driving all the toxic behaviour. Develop the campaigns and side questing more with detours from the questline so players can engage in special events or games or thematic play that’s experienced in the world. This should be the most exciting part of the game. Pugs and raid finder are a disaster and should be removed. Players should make friends with people on their realm, on their adventures, so you get more intimate relationships. Teaming up with people cross-realm means nothing. Allow the highest gear to be obtainable outside of dungeons and raids. There should be a more creative system to obtaining gear than dungeons or raids, perhaps rewards for quests that take you on a journey, or rare drops that are actually worth something, or for teaming up with people and showing good sportsmanship. This is the sort of system we need. Speed breeds toxicity, the game needs to slow down in its pace ( and i do not mean locking content) focusing on storyline and the MMORPG experience of exploring new worlds and actually caring about the story and the characters involved in it. You need a creative and literary team!
I really hope Blizzard fixes the game in the right way, and i pray for everyone else in the game that you get some enjoyment out of it in the way i described in the beginning.
bruuuh this hurt my brain