In the wake of World of Warcraft Classic: The Burning Crusade getting its official release date, and a public test of Shadowlands patch 9.1, popular WoW streamer Asmongold has shared a post urging Blizzard to re-evaluate some of their choices.
In a Twitlonger post written by the streamer, he detailed a handful of issues that present in WoW and over the last few expansions.
The WoW community has been extremely critical of Blizzard’s decision to introduce microtransactions with features such as level boosts and character cloning. These were not present in the original TBC experience, and Asmongold went in hard on Activision Blizzard’s choice for “ridiculously overpriced” microtransactions.
“Now, when I see a pop up that Burning Crusade is releasing less than a month from now, and Illidan’s iconic ‘You are not prepared!’ quote co-opted to sell ridiculously overpriced microtransactions, I see the last bit of heart and soul of a game I love being drained away for a quarterly earnings report,” Asmongold wrote.
Asmongold claims that many of the systems introduced into WoW over the past few expansions have been implemented with the intention of extending playtime instead of adding to the experience of the game.
The streamer also wrote that the company had been releasing systems into the game with “obvious flaws” far before they were ready, purpose releasing a fix in later patches.
“Stop waiting until the .2 or .3 patch of an expansion to implement QOL changes that were suggested in ALPHA,” Asmongold wrote. “It’s fucking ridiculous to think that we get fed obviously dysfunctional systems only to be hyped up later into coming back and paying more money so that we can play them properly.”
According to Asmongold, there are two realities where problems like this occur, the first being where the developers are genuinely incompetent and the other being that quality-of-life changes are being withheld to “artificially extend gametime and boost performance metrics” later in an expansion instead of creating new content.
“Blizzard has mired themselves down into micromanaging expansion-specific systems.” Asmongold wrote. “Micromanaging these systems is coming at the cost of genuine innovation. The last time the game had REAL innovation was in Legion. Now, almost all our systems are lesser derivatives of their Legion counterparts. Covenants are innovation to an extent as well. We need NEW ideas. Not the same 8 ideas and each expansion we get to pick 5 of them.”
In closing, Asmongold urged the developers behind WoW to give fans something worth wanting and quit launching “dysfunctional systems.” He also suggested that the WoW community stopped “accepting dogshit,” and that there is no “no pride in having your time wasted.”
