Blizzard and World of Warcraft in 2023

Somebody asked me if I’m still playing World of Warcraft (kinda, just not at max-level) and if my opinion on Blizzard and their flagship game, World of Warcraft, changed in 2023, considering a new expansion just launched few months ago.

Well, it’s not good; actually, it’s a “What killed the fireman?"-sort of situation where there’s a lot of shit happening all at once and it’s hard to discern exactly what’s going wrong; you have the Business side and you have the Game-itself side.

Business

Blizzard is not doing well at all, it’s obvious that there’s an extreme Rotating Door syndrome when it comes to employees, not to mention they’re in California, so price of living and everything else is ungodly high. The company has money but it’s in investments, not in an actual bank account with a comedic pile of bills that they just horde up and sit on. Good ol’ Bobby Kotick also pulled no punches with slashing costs, Blizzard’s Customer Service Department is basically nonexistent and virtually all tickets are now handled by a Kenyan worker in a warehouse somewhere. Public perception is also extremely poor, with lawsuits and cubicle crawls and most of the actual leadership jumping overboard lest they get wrapped up in the Cosby Suite.

I could go on, but you get the idea. No bueno, senor.

Game

World of Warcraft just plain isn’t fun. Getting gear feels like a slog instead of a journey, not to mention the game is actively throttling your ability to progress by having this “RNG on RNG on RNG” crap. The game world has shrunk, all old content is irrelevant to the extreme, woke-ist messages are sprinkled in every 3rd quest, the new class is so fucking bare-bones I’m amazed it’s not just one spec, dailies are broken, dragon riding competitions are broken, only a handful of classes are even viable (let alone “good”), the game runs like shit even on good hardware.

It’s just …
… blah.