World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

Hello friends,

I got suspended today for supposedly and blatantly exploiting the Lich King encounter in 25-man mode. Here's the mail:

First of all, I took the time to log onto the account management page and discontinue my payment plan. It's been a long and good 5 years and 2 months since day 1 of the US release of World of Warcraft. Many good memories were made, and fun times were had. That's over now. My subscription runs out of February 21st, which marks the last day of World of Warcraft for me. One player out of 11 million is nothing, so don't give me the crap about can I have your stuff. This isn't about me or my guild. It's about Blizzard and the fucking shit they pull.

Looking back, moving from Final Fantasy X! to WoW was a big step, and there's times that I regret making that decision, while on occasion I was happy to have taken the step. World of Warcraft was different back then. It was new, challenging and interesting. undoubtedly though, it was nowhere near as feature-rich as it is today, but that didn't matter back then. The game was a continuation of EverQuest, a game most of the senior development staff of World of Warcraft are familiar with on firsthand basis. Many of them played the game for years, and I can see that it served as a major inspiration when I look at what World of Warcraft was when it was released. Being an avid EverQuest player myself during a time, It drew me in further into the game.

Things have changed since those days, changed a lot. The game stopped being that fun. Less challenges were present in the game, and as we got through TBC and more so in WotlK, homogenization started to rear its ugly face in World of Warcraft. Everyone running around with identical gear, looking the same, doing the exact same things. With arenas, changes were made on a monthly basis that affected the way classes were developed, and subsequently also lead to how PvE was being done in the game. It got stale, predictable and repetative. The whole notion of hybrids in the midst of all this was just a fucking slap in the face by Blizzard. If you're going to remove everything unique and interesting about the classes, at least make them equal in the roles that they are performing.

Their idea of hybrid was something taken from classes in EverQuest, where people played classes that were jack of all trades, master of none, or very specialuzed roles, such as a pure buffer (bards etc). Classes that existed for one purpose, and nothing else. They removed most of those in WotlK, but still stuck with the notion that hybrids somehow offer something special just because they have the ability to respec to a different role. Kind of a strange take on the whole thing, considering what they've already done to make it easy in leveling and gearing up characters on the same account, with more and more things being accountbound rather than characterbound. Two-faced by Blizzard in my opinion. Removing the boundary between account characters on one hand, and at the same time claim hybrids needs to be penalized because they have the option of respeccing to perform different roles that a simple log out/log in would have taken care of.

Let's face it. This game is boring for veterans. The only reason it's still being played is because there has never been good alternatives during these 5 years. Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and Aion fucking flopped like shit. Really developers, if you want to make an MMO, don't go and fucking try to copy WoW. If people wanted to play WoW, they'd play WoW, not your shitty gimp ass version of it. Let it be a lesson to all you developers out there.

Anyway, back to the subject. This was as good time as any to drop this game and move on. Had been considering it for a while, and I always said to Buzzkill and the gang that I was just waiting for the sign. A sign from heaven to guide me on my way. Today, I received it. I doubt we'll ever get a perm-ban, as the loss of PR from banning topguilds is going to hurt their subscription numbers much more than quelling angry cries of the fucking noobs in this game ever would. Really, if you don't know shit about this game, just shut the fuck up and do something else. You level 1 posters and the forums can honestly go fuck yourselves, since you're too shit to know even the basics of this game.

Finally dear Blizzard:

Fix your goddamn buggy bullshit half-assed encounters. The amount of time and effort we dedicated to get through Wrath of the Lich king and Icecrown to see this guy die and take a turn at Arthas is just sick. To finally see him die only to have the ENTIRE raid banned is simply an insult. It's cheap enough to make a bugged fucking encounter, but to ban people when they do not know what's causing the bugs is just a fucking joke. Whoever came up with this sheer fisting of an idea can go fuck themselves. If you spent hours observing us in GM-mode when we beta-test the encounters for you on live, at least make sure you ban us for the right reason. Handing out suspensions when players encounter a portion of the game that is bugged is very short-sighted and insulting. There's been hundreds of thousands of bugs in this game up til now, and most people don't get banned, when just playing their game through the bugged content you throw in their face.

Shoving PTR down our throats every patch is one thing, it's fine that we fucking beta-test shit for you, but then you go and suspend players when they do content that was never tested on PTR, and happened to be bugged. Content which you don't bother quality-assuring more than sticking a fucking godmode GM and 5 test dummies into the encounter and blasting past the phases without using abilities. Give me a break. You know more than us that we kept using our normal rotations and didn't do anything out of the ordinary. Why would we bother trying to kill valkyrs every attempt, and have the bug happen on only about half of them before wiping? You think we wanted to waste attempts if we knew how to exploit this clusterfuck of an encounter of yours?

Do me a favor so I don't waste my guild's time on this kind of jackass fuck-fest again, send me an email at [email protected] when you decide to A) Implement an encounter that wasn't designed by a retarded chimp chained to a cubicle Get a Quality Assuarance Department C) Actually beta test the fuckinging thing and D) Patch it live. And please for god's sake -- do it in the order I laid out for you. Don't worry, I won't charge you a consulting fee on that one. And for good luck you might as well E) Pull your heads out of your asses. While you're at it rename the game to World of Betacraft.

Rethink your fucking bullshit. Fix all the buggy motherfucking ICC encounters (I suggest you let whoever made the Blood Queen one do this since that dude apparently laid off the crack the rest of you were smoking). Fix fucking arenas, or better yet, remove that shit. Fix heroic modes (just guessing it's fucked up considering your track record). Don't have the resources to fix this stuff? Move the ENTIRE Cataclysm team over to fixing Icecrown Citadel AND DO IT NOW. If you don't fix this shit, you jackassess together with the 2 month-subscribers will be the only ones playing Cataclysm.

You got 1 week.

Thank you Blizzard, for these 5 years, but also, fuck you Blizzard, for these 5 years.

I just got banned, and I liked it.