My Life As A Gamer: No, They Really Are Doing It To Screw A Competitor

After months of nothing, World of Warcraft finally announces its next Retail game patch will go live on the 29th of this month.

This would not be worth me putting up a post if there wasn't some fuckery about, and there is. This announcement comes after a few weeks of top-tier influencers based in the global WOW scene being very visible and very friendly towards Final Fantasy XIV, chief among them being the Literal Neckbeard himself: Asmongold (he of the 50K average viewership, for a site and game that is lucky to get 1K+ for other channels).

Not only have they been talking positive about the game, and comparing it favorabily to WOW, they've been playing it--some subscribing--and enjoying it in public. The PR damage to WOW is palpalble, and so WOW did what WOW always does when a threat to their dominance is detected: RELEASE THE CONTENT (even if it's not ready, which it rarely is these days)!

They've been sitting on this for months. I don't want to hear the excuses; they've had remote working and asynchronus workflow operating for months now, so there is no excuse for this being ready, especially since the Public Test Realm was up for zone/quest and raid/dungeon testing (and attendent datamining). However, despite this, the content isn't ready and all of the past behaviorial tells reveal this: a panicked release date annoncement, a short time between announcement and release, and therefore sweet fuck-all warning for the leading players--the raiders--to finish up current affairs and refresh/restock/reorganize.

The patch will release with quests that don't work, bugs that force disconnections, a raid that isn't properly tuned, and a dungeon that isn't either. They will be wasting the rest of the summer glad-handing the customers they despise to fix paid content that had no business being released in anything but a finely-polished state that works out of the box- which is exacly how FF14 does things.

The WOW devs hate and despise their customers. The FF14 devs love and appreciate their customers. The results are apparent in their practices and product releases. This is why Blizzard gets no money from me, while 14 will when I exhaust the free trial. "Don't give money to people who hate you" isn't just about books, comics, and movies/TV; it's about all of it, as best as can be practiced. Proper stewardship recognizes proper stewardship.