My Life As A Gamer: You're Some Game That I Used To Know

This past week the World of Warcraft devs did the rounds with key streamers as the Alpha period for the upcoming expansion comes to its close and the Beta phase begins. One of the best and most consistently accurate commentors, Preach, cut a video that dispensed with the sophistry of the dev interviews--especially by the lead--and cut to the chase: they are doubling-down on the disastrous, degenerate design decisions yet again.

This is not a team of noobs. This isn't Mark Kern's team. This isn't 2004. It's 16 years later, and they keep repeating all of the mistakes that long-timers like Preach warned them about years ago. They have access to uncountable terrabytes of data, gathered in real time, showing the specific and exact effects of their decisions upon users on top of all of the archives of gameplay footage from livestreams and videos. They have no excuse for not knowing what they've done.

They know that whatever the top 1% of players figures out is necessary to get shit done becomes the norms that everyone else has to conform to in order to participate while a given piece of content is relevant, and yet they continue to abuse this leadership cadre like children on Epstein's private pedo palace. They know that they can't balance vital gameplay elements, but they keep lying about it and throwing false choices anyway. They keep lying--and given their years of demonstrated incompetence, it is lying--about how they know what they're doing, when it's crystal clear that they're cargo cultists who're so far gone that they don't even know why they keep doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

There is a point where incompetence in and of itself crosses over into malice, and I think that line passed a few years ago. Me being a stubborn son of a bitch, I don't want to quit when I should. Well, this is me saying that I've had enough. This game wasn't fun for the last two years. It isn't looking to be fun anytime soon. I'm not renewing my game time when it expires; I'm quitting, uninstalling both Retail and Classic, and I won't be back unless and until the game becomes fun again- and that's not happening so long as the current regime, both at Blizzard and its parent company, are in place. I may pop up with D3, but that's all you'll see of me in Battlenet so long as this is the case. Yes, this also means I've abandoning WOW streams/channels; if I quit, it's all or nothing.

I don't give money to people who hate me. I won't give my time either. And, as with incompetence becoming malice, so does contempt become hatred- and I've felt that contempt for a long time now. My Steam backlog will get that attention instead.