Sky Pirate's Den: WoW, Blizzard, Just WoW

At first, I was going to defy the minimal-cursing rule that I have to abide by in order to keep this blog up (note: if you want to write a blog here, you can curse all you want. But for my purposes I have to hold my tongue sometimes). I'm still going to curse a bit, but what I'm going to do originally would've drawn negative attention towards my blog. What I'm about to do might still draw negative attention, but it's the exact negative attention I'm looking for. I really hope people on the Internet see this. I hope somebody from Blizzard sees this. Ready?

BLIZZARD, YOU ARE ALL MASSIVE BLOWHARDS. YOU BLOW SO HARD IT LEAVES PENISES SHRIVELED AND BRITTLE AND WHATEVER.

I'm beyond angry. I'm beyond infuriated. The faun from Pan's Labyrinth was pretty pissed at Ofelia for eating a couple of grapes and waking up the Pale Man. I'm even more pissed than that. Batman in The Dark Knight Rises seemed pretty furious at Bane in their final confrontation. I'm more pissed than that. Donald Duck is pissed in every Disney cartoon. I'm more pissed than that.

My best friend has decided to give World of Warcraft another shot, and he told me he, his cousin, and our friend all got really into it again. I asked if they were playing on a private server, and he told me that they were playing on the original, retail servers of WoW. I remembered those good old days of spending so much of my time on the computer killing things and leveling up and checking out Blood Elves. As much as I try to avoid playing World of Warcraft again, I genuinely miss those days. I don't like what they did with Cataclysm's Edge, and I hate that they included this really silly panda race in Mists of Pandorica or whatever the hell it's called. Still, there's so much more to WoW than those things, and the game is definitely quite an experience. I've tried to replace it with this other game called Continent of the Ninth Seal, but that game has many shortcomings.

I would love to play WoW again, and I will. I'm going to make a trial, not free to play (more on that later) account and make a billion characters and level them up to 20. This should take a good half a year or so. Hopefully by then I will have what's called a disposable income to blow off on this game.

More desperately hopeful than that, maybe I can make enough characters to take however the hell long Blizzard needs to finally switch WoW over to a free to play model. In today's day and age, more and more MMO's are being released with the free to play business model. Valve is probably the cornerstone of success with that model, with Team Fortress 2 showcasing how excellently profitable a free to play game can be with an ingame market. Of course, TF2 was never subscription based. Still, many subscription based MMO's have taken the turn towards free to play. Take The Old Republic, for example. The thing they all have in common is that they all were losing subscribers. WoW is bleeding out, and Blizzard just don't seem to give a damn.

It turns out I didn't make the point I wanted to make on the day I started this post, so I'll get to that point now. Allow me to quote good John Lagrave, WoW's producer.

You know, we looked at it lots, we looked at whether Level 20 would give you a good sense of what our game is, and we think it does. There's also a lot of things in the game that are special that we want to reserve for our paying customers.

Are you stupid! You're losing paying customers! Who's going to enjoy those "special things" you are "reserving" for paying customers when most of them are gone? Besides that, what good is there in reserving these "special things?" He makes it sound like paying customers are going to lose those "special things" if they decided to make the game free to play, but the thing is, those "special things" are the game itself. When you play up to Level 20, sure, you are experiencing enough of the game to get a feel for what it is. But are you experiencing the whole game? NO! There's nothing "special" about being able to trade with other players. There's nothing "special" about being able to be in a guild. There's nothing "special" about being able to type in all of the chat channels. There's nothing "special" about having more than ten gold. All of these things are available to players Level 20 and below who pay for the game. Is there any difference between them and free to play players, other than restrictions placed on free to play players? Do people Level 20 and below who pay for the game say to themselves, "Man, I really hope Blizzard doesn't allow just anyone to yell, or else I'm going to fell like they went cheap"? NO! So do you think people who pay for features available to them after Level 20 are going to say, "Man, this raid dungeon doesn't feel fun anymore because anyone with Internet access and money to pay for the game alone just ruins that fun." NO! So what the hell is Blizzard's problem?

Well, it's obvious, and I said it before. Blizz don't give a shit. I read an article that said a great point. In today's world, there are three types of business models for MMO's. There are free-to-play models, there are free-to-play models that were at one point subscription based, and then there's World of Warcraft. Blizzard's insistence on keeping the archaic subscription based model is about as ridiculous as Rick Santorum's archaic beliefs of banning contraceptives, placing women in the low aspects of society, discriminating against African-Americans, and so on.

That said, I've decided to pay for WoW again. WHAT? AFTER ALL OF MY COMPLAINING AND WHINING? Yep. There is only one reason why I do so... well, two. First of all, paying for WoW every six months is easily exploitable, in a legal and good way. I don't have a job, yet, so how do I pay for WoW every six months? There are two holidays, one midway through each billing period, allowing me to just afford this game's subscription. So there's that, and there's the longstanding belief I have that Blizzard is going to have to man up, live up to today's world, and move on from archaic stupidity. It's like forcing our government to remain in the Bush years. So I believe WoW will be free to play, and that day may come sooner than anyone would guess. Therefore, I'm going to man up first and pay for the game, show Blizzard that yes, even the biggest crybaby can still be a bigger man than a blowhard. That's my "F you" to Blizzard right there. What are they gonna do? Ban me? Disable my account? Stop making money off me? Or are they going to man up and make the game free to play?

As for my time with WoW itself, it feels wonderful to be back... too wonderful. The last time I played WoW was in Ninth Grade. The last time I played WoW in general was in Eleventh Grade, but that was on a private server. Private servers used to be fun, but now that I've lived with the bugs and the donors and all that jazz, I've decided that playing retail again would be such a warmer and more balanced experience. Plus, I finally get to play scripted dungeons! Scripted dungeons, for some reason, never work on private servers.

So now I got all these things going on. I'm reexperiencing some things while learning so many new things. I stopped playing WoW around the time the Lich King was defeated for the first time. Now, with Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria released, I'm discovering so many exciting new things about the game, even with the stupid looking Pandaren race.

I haven't found much motivation for recording my time in WoW. I do have plenty of screenshots though, and to end this post on a note, I'll post some of those moments for you Readers.