My Life As A Gamer: Azeroth's Blundering In Action

From the "I Told You So" department: "Have Legendary Cloak Equipped on N'Zoth Raid Encounters or Be Mind Controlled"

This is the sort of cynical bullshit I ranted about yesterday in action. You have to use a Borrowed Power mechanic to participate in the new raid, or you gimp your raid team into the ground. As per the article, this matters only on the last two bosses, but those two bosses (a) drop the best loot and (b) are requirements for raid-specific Achievements and their own rewards. You can't cheese it either; your man get instantly mind-controlled into a hostile and murderous NPC the second you start the fight, so the raid has to kill your man and you don't quality for loot or Achievements because you were--for all intents and purposes--a trash mob NPC and not a player-character.

So what do you have to do to get that cloak? Getting the cloak itself is just tedious bitchwork; do the series of quests and unlocks the new patch content and you get the new cloak as a reward. However, the gotcha here is why you need the cloak: the Sanity mechanic on the boss fights. This works just like the new Horrific Visions and Lesser Visions scenarios, meaning that running these two--especially the former--not only powers-up your cloak, but also increases your cloak's resistance to Corruption and Sanity loss; the more you do this not-raid stuff, the less of a boat anchor you are to your team.

And that extends your active time online playing, since you need to do daily quest bitchwork to get the currency you need to do the Horrific Vision scenarios to upgrade the cloak. This is in addition to sopping up Magic Planet Blood to upgrade your Magic Planet Blood Sponge so that you can slot in Yet Another Essence to further enhance your man's ability to use broken-as-can-be Corrupted gear without taking crippling penalties as well as ensure that your man can actually use the new Azerite Armors that drop.

Do you see the issue here? The dev team--pressured by the bean-counters--are taking away the players' autonomy regarding how to approach the game. The gutting of crafting, the psuedo-esport shift in attitude towards content, and the hard-leaning into the metagame element (such as encouraging next week's livestreaming of the World First Race on multple levels) all point towards running the game with an eye to maximizing those quarterly numbers and not on long-term stewardship of a corporate IP and its brand identity.

If this were a Battle Royale game, which is ground-up designed for such a business model, I'd not complain about it. It's not. The MMORPG, be it a sandbox or a themepark--the latter is World of Warcraft--is meant to be a medium where the player has real autonomy over how he approaches playing the game. The way WOW is run now, a player's approach is routinely dictated to him such that he does not have that autonomy or it is severely restricted and this is one such layered method of doing so.

If I wanted this sort of linear approach, I'd play something else, because it's likely to be better than this simply by being purpose built for it- and here's a Russian Badger video showing off DOOM Eternal to show you what I mean.

That's how do you this sort of thing right.