I managed to get into an Oondasta raid group, which ended up being roughly 2 1/2 raid groups in total. Initially, I was excited about getting in because it would be my first time doing this boss. Oondasta is notorious for the level of difficulty and is supposedly intended for heroically geared raiders and presents a challenge that is meant so that people employ tactics.
Are you fucking shitting me?
This is a world boss. The only tactic is to fucking mindlessly zerg it. How can Blizzard be so blind that they could not see this coming? Of course, the current strategy for beating this boss is to bring everyone on your server and hope that the opposite faction won’t try to grief you as you die over and over.
You have the initial problem of getting as many level 90s as possible on top of a horrible repair bill. Best of all, when you get through all this shit, you get nothing. And even when you spend your hard earned re-roll charm, you still get nothing that does not compensate for the repair bill.
Fuck you Blizzard!
Seriously, fuck you Blizzard. Fuck you Blizzard. Fuck you.
Lower population servers will end up suffering the most from the inability to get people to join them. So the only possible tactic was to bring players from other servers over. Naturally, high population servers ended up bitching because of the crashes. So since it requires actual work from a Blizzard employee to re-start a server, Blizzard’s usual cheap ass response is to make it to discourage the use of CRZ and prevent others from being able to loot the boss.
The encounter and the way the encounter has been handled demonstrate everything that has been slowly building within me that makes me hate the direction of the game and the company. There was the whole infamous Valor Point near disaster where Blizzard themselves admitted the “meanness” of removing all the hard work in the accumulated Valor Points that was planned for the 5.2 release. But that’s the whole internal attitude at Blizzard these days, especially with World of Warcraft. It’s this diseased mentality where you force people to put in far too much effort for little to no reward. In essence, it’s a fucking waste of time.
Fortunately, Diablo 3 was a massive disaster, not from a sales point of view, but from a community backlash. With other games like Torchlight 2, Path of Exile and the upcoming Marvel Super Heroes presenting possible alternatives to the Diablo franchise, Blizzard slowly has been reacting to ensure that the game doesn’t lose its customer base. However, that situation should be a massive hint that Blizzard needs to stop thinking about it’s accounting practices and more about their players.
World of Warcraft though is too entrenched and is something that has a strong enough brand where new franchises are having difficulty cracking into the MMORPG area. However, that doesn’t mean that the game itself isn’t flawed nor can be usurped by a superior product. At the same time, the franchise is in danger of destroying itself because of the poisonous mentality of people inside of Blizzard.
But this said, I wanted to point out other aspects that directed me to my decision.
- No friends to play with anymore on my server. Virtually, all my friends have quit or are on different servers. I refuse to transfer my toons back to a PVP server until the game overall becomes more reasonable.
- I hate the grind. People have this misconception that MMORPG == grind. The grind existence to provide content once people complete the main content. It’s like playing an old RPG where you kill off all the bosses, max level all your toons and get the best gear in that game. What do you do afterwards? The MMORPG did the opposite where they created ways to repeat content and making progression extremely slow. My problem is that the time and effort to get anywhere in the game is ridiculous. More than that I feel that the grind itself isn’t really rewarding and lacks any point.
- Shit community. I find that it’s really hard making friends in World of Warcraft. It’s easier to meet someone outside of World of Warcraft and find that commonality. But inside of the game, it’s extremely anti-social. People are rude and many are pretty discouraging. If this is supposed to be a social game, why do I feel like setting Earth into a supernova and not having a single regret?
- Clusterfuck encounters and design. I have a $3000 PC specifically for gaming. Even on 25 man encounters, the game lags out so horribly because there’s so much unnecessary useless shit everywhere. The first few trash mobs of Heart of Fear illustrate the direction of this clusterfuck mentality. Here, let’s just put more shit on the ground that people can’t see because there’s 300+ more glowing effects that end up fucking everyone in the group up. Or the Isle of Thunder with the densely packed mobs that respawn like crazy. I’ve seen Blizzard’s original offices. Did they design these areas to mimic the sloven aspects of the developers’ lives?
- Dailies, dailies and more dailies. Yes, I don’t have to do them. But if I miss a day then I fall behind where I need to be. And what happens when I fall behind so much that I can’t group with friends because we’re all at different points? What happens when I’m far ahead of a friend because I have the reputation bonus and my friend lacks the motivation to continue?
- World of Waitcraft. 40-50 minute queues. Then once you get in, you’re not at the point where you want. Or you’re with a group that’s struggling against a boss, fails multiple times and you end up with a ridiculous repair bill. The game already has a horrible sense of time management. But waiting for queues to pop just to go into a situation where your reward for the precious charms you grinded out on a single toon is barely the gold repair bill that covers all the wipes just isn’t worth it. It’s a huge slap in the face to all but the most tenacious players. It’s part of the little snot big fat nosed scheme that the accountants and cheap ass designers have concocted to keep the dangling carrot in front of you. But what happens when that carrot has dangled for almost a year and you see the pattern? Eventually, people are going to wise up. Or better yet. Why even bother making it hard for yourself in doing current content when you know the next raiding tier is going to end up increasing the drop rate? Oh, but the players are getting things finally and having fun. Blizzard will detect that and nerf that. That’s their MO.
- Pointless leveling. I don’t get leveling in World of Warcraft. I used to back when it had some semblance to an RPG based game. Now, leveling is just a chore before you get to the “good” stuff. And to be honest, the good stuff isn’t good. It’s just rehashed shit. Or rehashed more shit. Leveling, especially once you hit Pandaria, is just about getting a few more levels, some better equipment and entering a new zone so that you can handle more mobs, with more hit points. But there’s no real personal growth for a character.
- The game is becoming street fighter + super mario brothers + starcraft. I thought that this game was an RPG. But the game pretty much centers too much around raiding and high end PVP as the ultimate goals. But that part of the game is just jumping around, dishing out combos and stupid resource management. After a while this just gets old. Give me mindless AOE because that isn’t a pain to do over and over again. Also, I don’t really feel that the classes have a sense of identity anymore. They might as well just start relabeling all the abilities into things like stun, small heal, big heal, aoe heal, damage, etc. because that’s what all these abilities are at the end of the day. Bring the player not the class? Bullshit. Why not just kill the class and have people pick and choose which abilities they want at this point? I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up going this route because the developers are too lazy to QA anything anymore.
- CRZ. I don’t experience the World PVP issues that other PVP servers do. But the only feature that I thought was great now has been revoked (at least on my server). I can’t see anything good about it and it doesn’t seem like they put too much attention into progressing it. Instead, it seems more like a cheap way to put people together and claim that a shit designed zone is populated. But what’s the point of having people in a shit designed zone when no one bothers to talk? It’s an absolute waste of a feature and stinks of hardware resources. But even that seems to cause problems.
- Just lack of foresight in the game. I really want to meet these people who design the game. I badly want to meet them. I want to understand how they they think of the way the game is designed. Because my impression right now is that they smoke a lot of crack. Also, I think these people are really spiteful, evil mother fuckers.
I’m going to stop here. I’ve probably got a huge number of other reasons. But mainly I stopped wanting to be frustrated. I punched my keyboard the other day because the lag in a stupid encounter was killing me and I could do nothing. The encounter was designed so poorly and the lag was unforgiving in this situation. I was going to pull the plug that day. It’s already bad enough that some keys on my $100 keyboard are busted (not sure if that was me pounding on the keys). But the thing is that the game has done enough damage to my life without me needing to want to throttle David Kosak, Ghostcrawler (i.e. Asscrawler), Bashiok, Chris Mentzen (for awful writing), etc. as well as the apologists and so-called hard core players that make this game stink.
The real thing is that the game needs fresh blood to drive the vision. The people who are leading the game development just don’t have what it takes. I’m not even sure if Blizzard has the “IT” factor anymore. The general quality of their games has shot down geometrically since the Activision merger. For myself, I’m hoping to continue working on the designs of my own RPG. As they say, if you think other things are absolute shit, then try to do better.
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