My mindset on WoW has shifted dramatically all over the board for the last couple days. Everywhere from me packing up and moving shop to another game, to stubbornly sticking it out, because of all the time I’ve invested in it. With the notes released yesterday morning about the stat changes, I was stuck between the middle of those. One one hand, I like the idea of the new ‘minor’ stats; Avoidance, Movement Speed, Indestructible, and Leech. This gives more… flavor… to each piece of armor you pick up. While certainly one would be desirable over the other, none of them are horrible enough for me to /table flip.
As I was reading further though the dev watercooler I was starting to get grumpy. Why? All these stat changes seemed like they were making the game, the gearing game especially, a little more complex than I particularly liked. I don’t play my tanks anymore, other than messing around on baby alts, so the tanking stats I don’t have much input on, just due to my lack of knowledge on how they work this expansion. Change is scary, I don’t care who you are. It might be varying degrees of scary, people might handle it differently, but when things change which aren’t in our direct control, we all get a little antsy. Then I realized something, as I was driving home form work last night. Blizzard has a rhyme and reason for what they’re doing. This game has been around and has been popular and known and played for 10 years for a reason. Yes, I am positive they listen to input from the community, but they are still a company that exists, as all companies do, to make money. They’ll listen to input, they’ll see stuff posted on the forums, social media, heck, they prowl Tumblr for all I know. But they are still going to do whatever they feel is best for the game, to progress their company further.
At the end of the day though, what they’re doing, their goal, is to make dolla dolla bills ya’ll.
My attitude has (literally overnight) shifted dramatically. I welcome this more as a challenge to me as a player, the new stat changes, the item squish, the everything that is changing. It’s a new expansion, the world is going to change, if you don’t like it, don’t play it. You are free to do that. There are certainly enough games out there to suit anyone’s fancy. I personally will probably be frolicking around Wildstar until we get closer to launch. I am however getting far more excited and jazzed up for Warlords. I think it is going to offer a lot, for raiders and non raiders, for hardcore raiders and for more casual raiders. I honestly don’t even know if I’ll be raiding, I’m not 100% sure where my warlocky bum is going to be parked when the Savage Expansion of Savagery hits.
I am excited though. And ready. And feeling far more optimistic than I was about 20 hours ago. The wonderful thing is, as people, we can change our minds. We can take a day, revisit things, can embrace and welcome change. This has been brief, but it’s just some things I’ve wanted to get off my chest. This is always an interesting time in the game. Some people are seeing it, experiencing it firsthand now that the Friends and Family Alpha invitations have been extended, but for those of us who are viewing from afar, it’s easy to become jealous or jaded. Please just remember that this is, at the end of it all, a game, and it exists as such. So please be nice to one another, in game and out, and leave the savagery till when it’s needed =)
-C
LockandBolt 