With beta coming out on Tuesday I started to think about my Warcraft opinions. I’m still a little salty that Ion apparently thinks that all WoW players are brainwashed lemmings just repeating the takes of the ‘popular kids’ (aka parroting feedback from influencer videos). Anyway, I had a nice little rant about that and then started to wonder why it had got under my skin so much. I started to wonder if maybe that’s because I feel trapped? Constrained? Voiceless basically. I’m not on any of the ‘usual’ social media places (I’m on tumblr and I watch some videos on YT but that’s it). I’m not sure if discord counts as social media but I’m not in anything that the WoW devs are looking at.

The WoW forums scare me. When I’m really looking forward to something, I’m enthusiastic, eager etc. I’m not good at waiting and I try to still immerse myself in the thing. I’ll watch loads of videos on it for example, and I want to talk about it! This is usually when I make the mistake of checking out the forums and the relentless negativity and name calling upsets me everytime. Seriously looking at the ‘comment section’ on YT videos (or anywhere) is always such a mistake. It’s sad and it’s scary. If anybody expresses anything vaguely positive then they are a ‘shill’. It’s like the only acceptable thing is to ‘love to hate’ and that’s just so sad.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about beta because I desperately want to give feedback. Blizz are turning addons off and creating in house versions, and it probably won’t do any good but it’ll make me feel better if I can tell them what’s good, and what needs work.

Anyway! This post isn’t about beta feedback because that hasn’t started yet – it’s about something I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot bargepole, controversy.

Just found this in my drafts. I forgot to finish it haha.

So player housing huh? Did anyone have that on their bingo card? Honestly no I wasn’t expecting it. I figured they’d have to have an announcement of something for the 20th anniversary but I pegged my expectations a lot lower, I was thinking a new allied race. I remember reading an interview with Ion I think and he said player housing would take so much dev time, that it would only be something they’d do if they were effectively ‘sunsetting’ the game. Like you can have player housing, or you can have new raids/dungeons. I mean that was the joke when garrisons happened. They actually put a gravestone in the garrison of ‘Ray D Tear’ or something like that.

Part of me is worried. I mean are subscription numbers dwindling so much they need to pull out the ‘big guns’ like this? On the other hand content pace seems to be increasingly massively (I can’t keep up!) so it’s not like they are slowing down on patches. I don’t get the vibe of a game sliding into retirement. Maybe it was simply that they wanted something super big to celebrate 20 years and it doesn’t get any bigger than player housing!