Why I Am Finally Finished With World of Warcraft – No, Really, For Real This Time

Once upon a time, I had an amazing set of experiences playing World of Warcraft (WoW). I met my husband, my best friend, my roommate and two of the contributing writers of this very blog through WoW. I spent a great deal of money on a subscription, on expansions, and on merch. I was possibly more than a little addicted – when I started playing the game I was 18 years old and often very, very dumb. Once I got so caught up in a dueling event that I was late for work and ended up with a three-day suspension, during which I played more WoW (and tried not to think about being an adult).

Now, though, I’ve been clean of WoW for over a year. As I look back on my eight or so years of World of Warcraft I find myself becoming increasingly bitter towards the game that devoured my time as if it were Galactus and I was a Fantastic Four-less planet. A few of my friends still play WoW and I’ve had some very long and very involved conversations with them about my issues with the game. Many more of my friends no longer play WoW and I’ve had much more fun conversations with them about why I hate this game with the passion of a thousand burning suns. So today in the spirit of blunt honesty, I’m going to tell you all just why I hate World of Warcraft.

The World of Warcraft

I remember reading an article a few years ago talking about Chris Metzen and the design of Karazhan, where an observation was made about his encyclopedic memory of Warcraft lore, with the example of him suggesting horse’s head decor in an area due to a lore character’s membership to the obscure Brotherhood of the Horse. What I would rather they would have done was talk about some of the incredible plot holes and ridiculous measures that have been taken with WoW’s story, which far surpass the delicate and subtle horsey decor.

Once, a dancing kitty was enough for me.

How about the fantastic example of Hakkar? Hakkar was originally one of the big bad Burning Legion demons to come through the Well of Eternity 10,000 years before current game-time. This was a character from one of the novels that took place after WarCraft 3 (WC3) but involved time travel.  A couple of years later an end boss in a large raid dungeon showed up, also named Hakkar. No relation. The author of the novels says that it was an “accident.” Even if this wasn’t somebody being lazy and flipping through the nearest book for some name ideas (without checking to see if the book had their own game’s logo on the cover), this is an incredible accident. This is like if the hulked-out, masked villain of The Dark Knight Rises was also named The Joker. Completely different guy. Completely different story. But man, isn’t The Joker a cool name?

Warcraft didn’t exactly start with a complicated plot – Humans versus Orcs is about as simplistic as fantasy goes up until the hobbit-hero’s journey. Soon the universe spiraled out from simplistic generic fantasy RTS to widespread property. Warcraft seems to lack a Style Bible, the cohesive story guide that most properties use to guide and shape their plot. Instead, WoW displays giant plot holes (draenei), weak plotlines (Thrall getting married/Aggra getting pregnant), and characters that can’t seem to keep a single personality, much less a personality that’s engaging and interesting.

Speaking of which. Female characters. Looking at major lore characters, I can’t remember the last time any of these females passed the Bechdel Test.

Probably the most egregious case of a female character that WoW destroyed is Jaina Proudmoore. At the end of WC3 she was nearly single-handedly responsible for bringing the orcs to the table in helping to fight the Scourge; she was the human that reached out a kind hand to Thrall. She stood up to one of the most powerful men in the world who also happened to be her father. She’d established a neutral domain, Theramore, and seemed to be well on the way to helping establish peace between the Horde and the Alliance.

As of recently in Mist of Pandaria, Jaina Proudmoore is a madwoman who walks through the streets of Dalaran, kidnapping blood elves. Really Jaina’s downfall began when King Varian Wrynn of Stormwind returned to the game. They needed to sell Varian Wrynn, who was a character the player-base both Horde AND Alliance hated from the get-go. Selling a character is important, sure, but shouldn’t be done at the cost of destroying another character. It would have been much better if Wrynn had been a well written compelling character from the beginning. Instead they made him a hot-headed jerk with absolutely no logic behind his motivations except ‘I HAET ORCS.’

Sometimes graphics took a vacation without much notice.

To sell Wrynn, Jaina Proudmoore became a weeping shell of her former badassitude. She cried when Wrynn did a single kind action, began calling him ‘my king.’ Since when did Jaina Proudmoore, leader of a powerful mage-state, need to call anybody HER king? Especially when Wrynn, up until that point, was single-handedly destroying all of the work she did to help create a (to be fair, unstable) treaty with the Horde. ‘Her King’ tried to kill her dear friend Thrall, and a few months later she’s weeping because Wrynn decided not to kill a grieving father.

Then the destruction of Theramore happened and they made her go off the deep end entirely. She went from a brave woman who led her people strongly and independently to a crazy near-homicidal whacko who supposedly destroyed a treaty Wrynn was attempting to make to bring the sin’dorei into the Alliance (which was a cheap plot point when it’s incredibly obvious in a meta-sense that the blood elves were never going to be in the Alliance).

Jaina is the biggest example but she is only that; an example – she is one of many. There are tons of other female characters (Sylvanas Windrunner, Tyrande Whisperwind, etc) who have been very badly written.  Most MMOs aren’t well known for their writing and story, which is truly unfortunate. But World of Warcraft has had the better part of a decade to try and better what has long been regarded as terrible storytelling and characterization. And their long-time horrible treatment of female characters (which is getting worse, amazingly) is so frustrating that it becomes difficult for me to discuss without lapsing into mouth-foaming ranting.

The Definition of Cookie Cutter

WoW did a lot of things right here, originally; there’s a reason it’s the most popular MMO ever. Gameplay was fluid and simple, with rewarding abilities (lots of flash and sparkle when things go right) and the ability to easily solo to level cap (even easier now). The problem with WoW’s style and not substance based design aesthetic is that its gameplay got boring fast. Constant changes to the game in attempts to balance and tweak (or completely overhaul, as what happened more often than not) kept things ‘fresh’ in an awkward fashion; in vanilla WoW, by the time you got bored playing your class, your class was overhauled. By the time you got sick of playing that style, Burning Crusade happened, which resulted in more overhauls. With each overhaul of the individual class or with the class system in general, the game got easier. Talents were rolled into more talents, the talent trees were expanded, cut and then cut again. It became impossible to build a bad character, not because of a broad range of really excellent abilities that synergised well, but because there were so few talents that it was obvious even to the most baddie of bad which talents to pick up. And then the leftovers were a handful of utilities that were cool but functioned as little more than icing.

HERP AND DERP REPORTING FOR DUTY

WoW’s character gameplay design flaws (IMO) stem from an over reliance on dedicated class roles. If you are going to DPS, you had better believe you’ll be DPSing. Don’t worry about doing anything else – well, here’s a decent buff or two, but you’re not going to support anyone in anything more useful than stabbing things. There was a day when you had more flexibility when the need arrived (say you could have a hunter off-tank); but that changed with how complicated crit caps and resilience became and how simplified the classes became. Now, if you don’t have tank in your class description, you can forget pulling utility. Even secondary class usefulness became a thing of the past when instances transformed into something your party wanted to rush through in an easy steamroll.

One thing Blizzard did right was the Looking for Raid system. It’s a good system and they balanced the gear well for the challenge it presented. The problem the LFR system discovered that massively impacted the tail-end of Cataclysm’s end-game raiding was that with a LFR group and a downtuned instance, one could sweep through Dragon Soul and kill WhatsHisDragonJaw in a surprisingly short period of time. This wasn’t an instance people were spending months in to see the end boss fight – or maybe never seeing it at all (thank you, Sunwell, Breaker of Raids). And once you can steamroll an instance, even downtuned, it’s hard to really want to do it again for better gear when nothing has changed but the difficulty. Much less to get them to do it three times all told (LFR, normal, and heroic difficulties).

Now my biggest problem doesn’t stem from LFR, but that Blizzard ran away. They washed their hands of Cataclysm a year before Pandaria was due to be released and essentially stopped supporting WoW for that year. With no content patches released in 10 months, there was nothing going for the game except the same recycled holidays and retreading the same dungeons and raids over and over and over again. (This is the period of time in which I peaced out of Warcraft for the final time.)

It speaks far more to WoW’s incredibly dedicated playerbase and the game’s penchant for addicting gameplay than the actual quality of the remaining game that ignoring your players for nearly a year keeps your subscriber base still paying. About a million of those subscribers were people most likely very excited (and then very disappointed) to be playing Diablo 3, who signed up for the WoW annual pass.

If It’s Red, It’s Dead

If it’s red, it’s dead! (And so is your server.)

There’s a lot of schools of thought on what an MMO should be ‘about.’ Some games want to tell an immersive story in which player characters become closely entwined with. Some want to make difficult content that players must band together to overcome. Some are an indulgence in setting, allowing fans to construct a character in their favorite worlds. The thing that binds all MMOs together is what they ARE – Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs.

What I’m focusing on here is the Massively Multiplayer part. MMOs are inherently social games. From the get-go WoW took a huge misstep by dividing the player base into two factions and didn’t allow them to speak to each other in game.

This created a minor civil war among Warcraft fans; brothers fought brothers! Friends fought friends! If it’s red it’s dead! For the Horde!

This could only have ever happened on an RP server.

The inability to communicate with the other faction started out as a way to limit in-game shit-talking and it worked to a very minor extent. While /say was spared the usual X-box Live style trollish spewing, a lot of that language still moved to the forums. What it really succeeded in, though, was massively stymieing social attempts between the factions and created a level of hostility between factions that translated to a lot of breaking of Wheaton’s Law when it came not only to in-game activities but out of game discussions.

WoW seriously limited its players ability to be social – if you wanted to play Forsaken because you thought Sylvanas kicked ass but all of your other friends wanted to play pretty pretty nightelves, you either played an Alliance race or you didn’t play with your friends. A divided community is a sad community and a lack of ease in communication means people fall out of touch.

The implementation of RealID (the Battle.net chat system) helped with this issue, but not nearly enough. RealID requires you to use your real name – that’s something for an article on the loss of online anonymity, but the short of it is that using your real name, especially in a very PvP-centric MMO sucks. Like a lot of other flaws based in WoW, too many games took this faction idea and ran with it, costing us a generation of MMOs with limited social possibilities – games like Age of Conan, which was nearer WoW’s release and Rift, which was much later. Games are finally starting to get out of that mindset, thank god, with offerings like Guild Wars 2, where PvP is server versus server, or The Secret World where factions can freely communicate, group and quest together.

Behind the Times

Other MMOs are also bounding forward in leaps and strides – the marketplace is a very different world from the one that WoW Kool-Aid Man’d it’s way into in 2004. But WoW is still striving for those early days when its biggest competitors were City of Heroes and Everquest. Nowadays, Free To Play MMOs are becoming more and more the norm. People are realizing they don’t have to play $15 a month for a very involved MMO gaming experience. In-game stores selling clothing, weaponskins and other fun items are more compelling than an ongoing credit card charge.

Literally the last time I cared who the endgame big bad was.

WoW has aged badly. It’s incredibly jarring to log into new content with pretty graphics only to run around and quest on your vanilla character model. For me, it’s nearly painful to watch other people play WoW; I sit back and wince, thinking of Guild Wars 2 with its stunningly lovely graphics, The Secret World with its inventive use of sound effects or even DC Universe Online with its surprisingly fluid character animations. A lot of other games provide content regularly, from monthly to quarterly, though monthly content patches are becoming the norm among the newest big name releases.

WoW is the WoW-Killer

All of these things put together tie into why after over half a decade of WoW, I am bitter and disillusioned with what was once by far my favorite game. A lot of these problems could have been fixed early in or at any other point in time during WoW’s long reign of the market, but Blizzard never did. They’ve had a mostly horse-with-blinders forward-thinking mindset that hasn’t worked out very well in the long term for players. Blizzard looks forward, yes, but while rarely looking back. They spend ages to meet player requests (transmogrification of gear took years to get), if they ever even get addressed at all. The year of downtime between content patch and new expansion is painful – many people I know continued paying their $15 a month just to do the same content over and over, all the while saying they were only really there to do stuff with their friends. Other people like me, gave up the ghost and finally quit.

I loved World of Warcraft. I spent countless hours of my life playing it. But in the end, you can only play the exact same game for so many years. That’s why games have sequels-  That’s why games get massively retooled and brought up to modern expectations.  WoW has never really done that – WoW is still trying to ride high off of that magical year when we logged in for the first time and thought ‘oh man. This game is like nothing else I’ve ever played before.’

I want Blizzard to try to bring back that innovation, try new things and to fix, then perfect old ones. If there’s a World of Warcraft 2? Maybe I’ll play it. But it has to be a new game, a different game. A better game that changes with expectation and need, with creativity and responsibility to players.