@WintryLemon
@lemmy.worldThen there was the issue of isolation.
Garrisons worked much like the farm from Mists of Pandaria. When you approached, you were ‘phased’ into a kind of pocket dimension exclusive to you. You could be standing in the same spot as someone else, but you wouldn’t see them. They would see their garrison, and you would see yours.
You may recall the ‘never leave the city’ problem of Cataclysm. That had been bad, but at least the players had been visible. This was so much worse. Once everyone had finished levelling through Draenor, the entire playerbase simply disappeared. Ironically, you had millions of players crammed within a few feet of each other, but none of them knew the others were there. And that’s how it stayed for the whole expansion.
"A couple of months into the expansion pretty much everyone was already in the "logging, afk in garrison, raid, logout" routine."
[…]
"…they allowed the community to get too isolated, which I’m afraid Blizzard is going to use as an eternal example of why it should never try to do housing in the future. And that wouldn’t be fair, because real housing is inviting and social, whereas there’s almost no point to ever visiting someone else’s keep here."
What’s more, people quickly realised that the real ‘core system’ of garrisons was effectively a facebook mini game – one which got rapidly boring.
"Even before the game’s general release people were making jokes about the fact that we were sending other characters out to do things instead of going out and doing things. That was always kind of ridiculous."
On top of that, there were complaints about the aesthetic. Every race in WoW has its own architecture, but most of them tend to get overlooked in favour of Human and Orc architecture for everything. The latter was starting to feel particularly unwelcoming and harsh.
"We have tremendous levels of power but we always live in mud huts. I thought I was a General in a power that controls half of a world. Why is the garrison from which I lead my campaign a timber shack that the Swiss Family Robinson would find primitive? Why do we have all of this power and technology but I'm walking around in mud? Maybe we could stop living like filthy hobos and put our engineers on inventing the road.The Alliance figured out the cobblestone walkway. Why can't we?
I get it. The Horde is brutal and savage. But, one, I'm fucking tired of every single building everywhere being in the Orc style. That's so fucking boring seeing the same aesthetic everywhere."
[…]
"The horde one (LINKS TO REDDIT) is just... like their entire design brief was "SPIKES AND HUTS AND PUT SPIKES ON THE SPIKES"."
[…]
"I realy dislike the orc themed buildings so goddamn much. The arctic location looks more apeasing to me but those huts with tusks are so old and boring now."
[..]
"God that looks lame (LINKS TO REDDIT), all those ugly orc huts, I would kill for some undead, troll, Tauren, belf or goblin buildings."
Professions were totally overhauled to integrate them completely into garrisons, and became extremely grindy and slow in the process.
"Have you ever spent a month gathering the materials for a new bag, or an epic item upgrade? Until Warlords of Draenor, neither had I."
You had to take primary materials to a building in your garrison, where an NPC would turn them into secondary materials at a crushingly slow pace. These systems were designed to limit what you could do in a single sitting, and force you to log in regularly to make progress.
"If you were anything like me, you found yourself feeling that all you were doing in Warlords of Draenor was sitting in your garrison setting up work orders and waiting for cooldowns.
You asked yourself if this was what you had to look forward to for the entire expansion. Was this really all there is to gold-making in Warlords?"
Luckily, Blizzard was aware of this problem. Toward the release of Patch 6.2, they said:
"We are actively trying to shift rewards back our into the world (gearing, professions, etc.) Felblight, for example, you'll need to get out in the world.
The Garrison-centric profession system and daily cooldown of professions took away from the image of being a craftsperson vs. a player collecting daily materials."
When asked about whether garrisons would be carried forward into the next expansion, Blizzard insisted they would be left behind in Draenor, but various systems from the garrisons would be cherry-picked and integrated into new content.
"From the outset, we have said Garrisons as you know it in Draenor are rooted/tied to Draenor. You won't be bringing those things back to Azeroth. But the core gameplay of followers/army/base gameplay? We like the system. Is it likely to take the same format as WOD? Probably not."
Most of the community celebrated this announcement, but not all. There were those who saw potential in garrisons – they just needed to be refined.
"Soon enough, garrisons will be a thing of the past, an interesting idea that didn’t quite pan out the way anyone had hoped — developers or players. Personally, I think it’s a shame and slightly aggravating that Blizzard spent so much time working on garrisons only to throw its hands up and walk away from them now."
These players had nothing to worry about. Garrisons would show up again, but in a very different form.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)
Only two months after MoP released, the first patch dropped. ‘Landfall’ was heavily story-based, and mostly followed the Horde and Alliance as they built up fortifications on the southern coast of Pandaria. As players progressed through the story, the defences got bigger and stronger, which made it feel rewarding. Even though it was mostly more daily quests and reputations, it went down well.
Only a few months after Landfall came ‘The Thunder King’, widely considered to be one of the best patches in Warcraft history, with a new zone containing a really interesting story, and one of the best raids in the game. It had an awesome Chinese/Aztek theme.
It would have been enough to satisfy players for up to six months, but they only had to wait two. The third patch, ‘Escalation’ took players to the zones surrounding the Horde capital of Orgrimmar. It was mercifully short on dailies, and continued to tell the story of Garrosh’s turn to Tyranny.
Just four months passed before the final patch dropped. Less than a year after Mists began, it had ended. ‘The Siege of Orgrimmar’ was another incredible patch. Its raid was colossal and had a number of creatively designed fights. Garrosh Hellscream, Chad of Chads, took seven phases to kill. The Vale of Eternal Blossoms was redesigned and given a totally new story.
Blizzard brought in the Timeless Isle, a new form of end-game content which eschewed dailies in favour of treasure chests, puzzles, mini games and dozens of bosses, some of which were very creatively designed. For example, there was Evermaw, a giant whale that circled the island, which players had to chase down using water-walking spells.
The Timeless Isle was incredibly addictive and got a positive response from players.
Following the release of MoP, subscribers continued to fall. At first, quite rapidly. Then slowly. Then, to everyone’s collective shock, they began to go up again. 200,000 subscribers came back during Quarter 4 of 2013. And it’s not hard to see why. Blizzard were releasing excellent content at a rapid pace. There were talks of Mists being a new renaissance for Warcraft.
But it came at a steep cost.
After the Siege of Orgrimmar, players waited eagerly to see what would come next. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen. Nothing went on happening for several months, in fact. If you celebrated the release of Siege of Orgrimmar by having unprotected sex, your baby would be transitioning from milk to solid food by the time the next major patch came out. Or crawling, if it were particularly smart. Which it wouldn’t be, because its parents played World of Warcraft.
You may remember Hour of Twilight, Cataclysm’s infamously long patch from the last write-up: that one had been 301 days long. Siege of Orgrimmar lasted 460. To this day, it is the longest pause in the game’s history.
”Does Blizz just expect us to keep killing the same bosses week after week for this length of time? It seems really ridiculous. The game is getting so boring when it's just the same thing week after week for months on end.”
As you can imagine, the attitude among fans went from jubilant, to bored, to downright furious. And all the while, they followed the next expansion with ever-more critical eyes, but we’ll get to that absolute disaster next post.
The love players had for Siege of Orgrimmar gradually turned to hatred. They started to hate its length – it made it time consuming to finish for the hundredth time. They hated its focus on story – it was just a distraction. They hated its complicated fights, because they just wanted to get them over with so they could get to the loot. The freedom that made the Timeless Isle great started to feel like a lack of direction. The bosses, which could only be taken down when entire communities worked together, became unwinnable because no one wanted to be there anymore.
“All that time yet I only killed Garrosh once”
Oh, and by the way, the ending of the raid was… inconclusive. The only way to learn of Garrosh’s fate was to read the novel War Crimes. I won’t go into the whole ‘Faction Bias’ issue yet, because I’ll have much more material a couple of posts down the road. But these are the basics: The Horde had effectively nuked an Alliance city, committed heinous atrocities, split apart, revolted, and deposed its leader. After years of fighting on-and-off, a (mainly Alliance) force had taken the Horde’s capital city and cut off its leadership. They finally had the power to break up the Horde for good, or turn it into a vassal, or at the very least prevent it from arming again. They could have done whatever they wanted.
And what did they choose to do?
They wagged a very imposing finger in the faces of Horde leaders, told them not to do it again, let them choose a new ruler, and left. And no one questioned this decision. Well, pretty much all the fans did, but no one within WoW’s world. Garrosh wasn’t even killed, or taken into Alliance custody, he was sent to an ‘international’ court and freed, to terrorise another day. Cataclysm had experienced its fair share of writing flops, but this was one of the first real deep cuts to the faith fans held in their writers. And it would not be the last.
Anyway. The WoW renaissance had ended as quickly as it started. The Subscribers started falling again. Mists had started at 10 million subscribers and hit lows of roughly 7 million. It had been, for the most part, an excellent expansion, but its ideas were just too much for some people, and its content release schedule was far too ambitious.
Mists of Pandaria still divides fans today, but its public perception has changed dramatically. It gradually developed a sort of ‘cult classic’ status, which has grown more and more common over the years. Most of the community looks back on it fondly. It’s not uncommon to hear it described as the best expansion, World of Warcraft at its absolute zenith.
”…it was a consistently good expansion that defied its early reviews to deliver a great experience. I do wish we hadn’t been subjected to the lull of 14 months of no content…”
[…]
”I came into padaria wanting to hate it. (LINKS TO REDDIT) But honestly it was one of my favourite expansions.”
[…]
”Mists of Pandaria, despite any dispersions people have for the aesthetic of that expansion, was a great example of the game could be when the WoW team had a complete vision for the story and plenty of content for the players to experience.”
But there are still those who see it as a disappointment. If Cataclysm was the downward turn, Mists of Pandaria was the cliff.
”An expansion where Blizzard wanted money and weren't afraid to degrade itself as a company along with the Warcraft franchise in the process. Have they done it before? Yes. Was it more apparent this time? Indubitably.”
[…]
”Terrible, made me leave. Leveled to 90, looked around and say "nope, not gonna jerk off the panda folk for dailies ad nauseam" and unsubbed for a year.”
[…]
”The dreadful leveling experience, the lackluster dungeons, the unbearable shitfest that is LFR, and the isle of a thousand chests can all go fuck themselves.”
[…]
”for me it was the worst expansion yet, the theme has been my big issue and I can't get over it : /” Said the user ‘Horizon’.
You don’t tend to hear from those people as much anymore, perhaps because they quit the game and left its community. Personally, I loved MoP.
But I’m a massive weeb, which probably helps.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)
While this isn't one of the biggest dramas in Mists, it's one of the strangest.
Anduin was the son of the Alliance leader, Varian Wrynn. It was clear he was one of the main characters Blizzard had singled out to become important later on. He was a recurring figure throughout almost every zone in Pandaria, and every patch too.
Wrathion was a black dragon – the last ‘uncorrupted’ one (all the others fell under Deathwing’s spell). When he took a human form, he appeared as a dark-skinned young man with red eyes, a beard, and a turban. Anduin and Wrathion had an story which proceeded through the game’s main patches, in which they had an enemies-to-friends relationship.
It had a powerful effect on the community. In the history of World of Warcraft, no pairing, before or since, has ever provoked such an astronomical amount of smut.
The problems here were manifold. Not only was Anduin a teenager, Wrathion was a baby. He had been born during one of Cataclysm’s quests. There was a lot of criticism of this ship, considering neither member was technically ‘legal’.
https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1825617-Wrathduin-(Anduin-Wrathion)
”it's a 16 dating a 3 YEAR OLD. thats a toddler. unless you want to have it be bestiality your talking pedophilia pick your poison. it doesn't matter what fantasy terms you use to dress it up the fact of it still remains that he's DATING A TODDLER.” Said user ‘breadisfunny’.
There was some debate on this point.
”Paedophilia between this ship would be if Wrathion could not give consent as he does not have the mental maturity or physical capacity to do so. However, because he's a dragon, he's able to do so. Because they age much more quickly.”
[…]
”People love pushing fictional kids together. It's really weird.”
Some members of the community were quick to disclaim that they didn’t want to portray Anduin and Wrathion having sex, only enjoying a wholesome romantic relationship. Here’s a little taste of that discourse.
”Are you kidding? They're adorable.”
[…]
”it's pedophile territory and you know it.”
[…]
”Seriously the most interesting relationship dynamic in WoW. Who even cares about genders at that point?
It's basically the best. <3”
[…]
”Nice try but homosexuals do not and will not exist in the WOW universe.
Whats your next fetish, a gay relationship between a Walrus man and an Arakoa?”
World of Warcraft had dozens of main characters, and none of them were LGBT, so they couldn’t be blamed for latching on to the next closest thing, right? That’s what they thought. And in their defence, Anduin was very twinky.
“why does WoW need a homosexual character?” said one user.
Indeed, often the problem was not the ages of the characters, but the fact that they were gay. We’ve already covered how the average player sees ‘gay’ things in this post, so I don’t need to elaborate there. Homophobia was, and still is, rife in the playerbase.
”Because people do not understand what a platonic relationship is and are quick to jump into the LGBT agenda bandwagon”
Don’t worry though, this has a happy ending.
”This looks like some weird anime shipping shit”
This ship would simmer down for a while, and Wrathion would largely disappear from the scene. This is pretty common. Blizzard picks up new focal characters every expansion, and then tends to drop them straight after. But Blizzard continued refreshing Anduin’s model over the expansions to show him aging. And three expansions later, he was officially Anduin the Manduin, and had gone from twink to twunk to full on hunk. When Wrathion made his unexpected return after a glow up of his own, the shippers reawakened from their slumber.
”Anduin-kun..." "Nan deska, Wrathion-senpai?"
An almost industrial amount of fanart was churned out, with adult characters this time. I took the liberty of collecting some of it, for the good of the academic community. You may be wondering whether I really needed to assemble such homosexual multitudes, such a bevy of boy-love, just to prove my point, and to that I say you can get the hell out of my thread.
”Varian will be so proud of his son, sucking some dragon's dick.
First Jaina, now you, what is happening to this world”
For context, Jaina was a character who also had a reputation for puffing the magic dragon - that was actually her least controversial boyfriend.
Indeed, Wrathion x Anduin the ship is so popular that there has been a lot of push for them to be canon. Considering Blizzard’s recent obsession with proving they’re definitely not evil, I can see them doing it. But we won’t get to all that for a while yet.
”With Wrathion returning at the end of WoD and with Anduin's heavy heart of his betrayal do you think Blizzard will cave and let them be an official couple?”
Only time will tell. At any rate, this was a vast improvement over the situation during Cataclysm, when Anduin had been shipped with a cow
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)
Another major feature was the ‘Sungsong Ranch’, a little farm players could own in the Valley of the Four Winds as part of the ‘tillers’ guild. Each player would only ever see their own farm upon entering the area, but could visit other peoples’ farms by grouping up. It worked similarly to Stardew Valley. Next to the farm was a market, where players could sell their vegetables or give them as gifts to the locals in order to improve their relationships, and gradually unlock more parts of the farm.
Despite the inevitable Farmville comparisons, it was well received overall, which was a massive problem, because Blizzard only ever works in extremes. A far more elaborate version of this mechanic would rear its head in the following expansion, with terrible results, but that’s a drama for another post.
The most eye-catching addition to MoP was ‘pet battles’. Pets had existed for years, and were just little animated creatures that followed the player around. But now a system had been created to track and collect pets, name them, trade them, level them up, and fight them in matches against NPCs or other players. It was almost identical to Pokemon, a similarity lost on absolutely no one, and yet everyone felt the need to point out. Indeed, Blizzard had to reassure the community that it was not, in fact, a joke.
“This is like a comedy reel. Everyone's laughing cuz it's exactly like Pokemon in every way...he mentions feature after feature and they're all taken from Pokemon. I'm surprised he kept a straight face for the most part.”
Youtuber ‘King Beaver’ had this to say:
”I thought this was gonna be really gay at first but then i realized i loved pokemon as a kid and you know what =/ i honestly wanna give this a try”
I suppose his intentions were good?
At any other time, pet battles probably wouldn’t have raised any eye-brows. But in a time of ‘Farmville knock-offs’, simplified talents, and cuddly pandas, when the community was already freaking out about MoP being aimed at girls, children, and casuals, it only poured fuel on the fire.
In his thread titled ‘Mists of Pandaria – Made for Children?’, one user writes:
Who honestly plays World of Warcraft and says "I've got to log in to duel my pet!"? Who gets a kick of these things? Go play tamagotchi or Pokemon if you wanna play a game like that. AND FARMS?! GO PLAY FARMVILLE OR SOMETHING!
Of course, when they actually got into the game, these people realised that the pet battles system wasn’t even noticeable unless you actually took an interest in it. And those who did take an interest usually loved it. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that development time had been spent on it. WoW players have always had a toxic relationship with the finite nature of development. Whenever they see a feature they didn’t want, they immediately imagine the things they did want, which had to be sacrificed (usually a raid), because Blizzard could only create so much content.
”Blizzard need to focus on the bloody gameplay and not waste their time on these childish things. They have dug the grave for this game with cataclysm and now they are just sh*ttin on it”
Fortunately, there were some sane responses, such as this one by the user ‘Tziva’.
Everyone I know who is looking forward to the pet battles is well into adulthood. I'm not sure why they cross the line into childish more than, say, having a pet in general. Or transmogging to play dress-up. Or riding a giant kitty. Or getting your hair style changed. Or any of the other aspects of the game one could single out and proclaim "for children."
Standing alongside this whole drama was another one, relating to ethics. Pokemon has always managed to sidestep the ‘animal cruelty’ aspect of making creatures fight each other through heavy worldbuilding. Pokemon are treated well, given the utmost medical care, and are shown actively choosing to participate Particularly in the show, Pokemon are treated less like slaves and more like fully independent characters who just happen to live in balls.
WoW never really tried to do this. And in many cases, the pets were literally just normal cats, rats, dogs, and birds. For example, the baby ape or Whomper, whose description is “When Whomper wants to play, he'll let you know with a playful headbutt.”. WoW had hundreds of pets, and a lot of them didn’t really fit the whole ‘pokemon’ aesthetic. Players criticised the ethics of making them fight.
There were also literal children who could be used as pets, but Blizzard prevented them from being used against each other. This decision upset some people.
”I can’t have my own little humanling running around, punching squirrels in the face!”
[…]
If the Hunger Games taught us anything, we love to see children fight it out to the death. I hereby propose letting the little orc and human children join the pet battles. Add the little Christmas orc slaves too.
Aside from the jokes, there were some users who pointed out that many pets were just as sapient as humanoid children, so Blizzard was sort of making a statement by choosing which ones to allow. This drama didn’t really go anywhere, but it’s fun to talk about.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)
Blizzard’s game development operates like a pendulum. They swing one way, fans complain, so they go to the exact opposite extreme. If you know that, and you know what happened in Cataclysm, you can guess how Mists went.
Cataclysm hadn’t had enough daily quests or reputations, so Mists of Pandaria was absolutely stacked with them. Each day, you would complete quests for the Golden Lotus, the Order of the Cloud Serpent, the Shadow-Pan, the Anglers, the Tillers, the Klaxxi, and the August Celestials. There had always been a daily cap on the number of daily quests a person could complete, which was 25. Blizzard removed that when MoP released, so that players could complete Pandaria’s 48 daily quests unimpeded.
“…it looks like there will be approximately 1300 quests in Mists of Pandaria. Right this moment we don't have the numbers off-hand to show how that that compares exactly to the previous expansions, but the quest count seems to more closely mirror Wrath of the Lich King, however with a much greater emphasis on dailies. Mists of Pandaria is actually the expansion where we have emphasized dailies the most... ever!”
And don’t worry, the first and second patches both brought yet more dailies.
It didn't take long for daily-fatigue to creep in. Unfortunately, high level gear was locked behind faction reputation requirements, so many players felt forced to do every daily, every day, in order to stay competitive. I recall it would take me several hours. Here are some experiences from other players.
”I think what turned a lot of people off was the huge emphasis on doing dailies for literally every faction every day in order to get rep and gear upgrades. If you missed a day, it felt like you were ages behind everyone else.”
Players often cited the sheer avalanche of daily quests as the reason why they quit – they just burned out.
”The MOP dailies were so time consuming that I was unable to do all dailies for all factions in one day. It took me 3 months to get ambassador. I came tired physically from work and then got tired mentally from endless grind to get exalted in wow.”
[…]
”The rep grind was so bad it actually made me unsub. It wasn't fun anymore when I'd spend 3 hours a day doing what felt like a tedious chore, knowing that the amount of rep I could get in one day was capped so to get exalted would take a month of daily quests. Really sucked the fun out of the game.”
[…]
[…]
”Dailies are the worst form of content, ever.”
There were, of course, critics. Dailies weren’t mandatory, at least not technically. And according to the user ‘Styil’, what could possibly be wrong with more content?
I will never understand this mentality. How can you have "too much" content, let alone see it as a problem?
[…]
There weren't too many dailies. People just have zero self-control.
One of the most heavily marketed additions in Mists was that of ‘Scenarios’. These were like dungeons, only more story-based. Rather than a team of five people with three damage dealers, a tank, and a healer, scenarios were made to be completed by anyone. This was done in the hope of avoiding the lengthy dungeon queues, but as a result, they were extremely easy. There were 29 scenarios in Mists of Pandaria, and while some players (like me) loved them, they proved unpopular with others.
In order to cater to players who wanted more of a challenge, harder ‘Heroic’ scenarios were released, with such massive rewards that everyone was pretty much forced to do them.
Unfortunately, scenarios came at the cost of dungeons – a cornerstone of the game. Vanilla had 26 dungeons, Burning Crusade and Wrath had 16 and Cataclysm had 14. Mists of Pandaria had 6, and they were all rather simple, with no real variation from ‘Normal’ to ‘Heroic’ modes. Players found them far too easy.
The raids, at least, were fine. The ‘Looking for Raid’ feature added in Cataclysm continued to become more and more toxic and hated, but there’s nothing I can say about it which hasn’t already been covered.
After the content drought of Cataclysm, Blizzard took pains to create plenty of things to do.
There had always been world bosses – extremely powerful enemies roaming questing areas, which players could group up to kill – but MoP turned them into a real feature. World bosses had a tiny chance of dropping mounts.
Speaking of which, MoP introduced systems for players to conveniently track mounts across their characters, as well as toys and gadgets. ‘Elite Enemies’ were scattered across the world in their dozens. There was also the ‘Lorewalkers’, a unique faction which rewarded players for examining monuments, reading scrolls, and hearing folk tales across Pandaria. The Brawler’s Guild allowed players to take part in an underground fighting ring. Warlocks got a long requested questline to turn their fire demonic green. Professions were re-worked, gameplay was drastically changed across the board, and the talent system was totally remade.
This last change was quite controversial. The ‘talent tree’ had always offered players a number of small stat boosts which they could buy with points. Blizzard didn’t think the system felt very rewarding, and was too easily ‘optimised’, which they were kind of right about. But many players were attached to it.
”Sure, people still used cookie cutter builds, and there were plenty of worthless talents, but I enjoyed it. Getting a point to spend every level made it feel like I was actually getting stronger,” said Reddit user ‘PB-Toast’.
Others disagreed.
”Dont let nostalgia hide that a good portion of these talents were increase chance to hit 1/5% and incredibly boring.”
The replacement was this. Every fifteen levels, players had the option of choosing between three abilities. Usually, they were of similar types – they might all be damaging spells, or movement-related, or healing powers. The intention was to free players from the need to do whatever the internet said was best. But that didn’t work, and the internet quickly figured out which choices were the most efficient.
Players saw it as a departure from the classic RPG elements, and yet another appeal toward casuals.
”It's not even about nostalgia, it's about making it an RPG. Levelling up was rewarding, you got talents, got stronger levels of spells and had a general sense of progression. Wow is a MMO. Its been long since it lost the RPG.”
Players argue to this day over which system was better.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)
Norwegian gamers responded that Jens Stotenberg, leader of NATO and ex-Prime Minister of Norway, had played online games too, and even used his KGB codename Steklov as a username.
The topic rippled out across the game’s servers, its forums, and public discourse too. Studies had already been done on video game violence and found that they had no real impact on behaviour. Time Magazine weighed in, saying that Breivik’s relationship with WoW probably meant nothing at all.
Blame video games — that’s the watch phrase these days when something tragic happens. The non-gaming media seem to enjoy zeroing in on video games that are highlighted in horrifying crimes, invoking the rhetorical question: Do video games screw people up?
When horrible things happen, we look for simple answers, for easy rationalizations — ways to essentially say, Oh, this is why so-and-so did such-and-such. We want the “why” right now, when the spotlight’s on.
Reality, of course, is far more complex, and the answers we’re after require patience and careful research. Preliminary studies that attempted to link violent video games with increased aggressive behavior failed to control for critical variables like family history, mental-health issues and gender (they also failed to contextualize increased aggression levels, e.g., more than aggression upticks caused by playing football, say, or drinking a cup of coffee?).
The most up-to-date research, according to academic and TIME contributor Christopher Ferguson, “has not found that children who play VVG [violent video games] are more violent than other kids, nor harmed in any other identifiable fashion.” In Ferguson’s own longitudinal studies, recently published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, he found “no long-term link between VVG and youth aggression or dating violence.” And Ferguson references another recent longitudinal study involving German children, published in Media Psychology, which similarly found no links between increased aggression and violent video games.
But to many players (and parents of players), none of that mattered. Shortly after all of this came to light, a lot of people left the game for good. Being associated with World of Warcraft had never been a grand thing, but in the wake of Breivik it became a black mark.
The WoW community was quick to defend their game. Some commentators were more reasonable, such as Reddit user /u/Saltybabe
While I personally don't think all video games in all contexts are 100% harmless, they are usually only harmful when adults don't supervise or explain to young kids what is ok and what's not. We have an 8 year old here who loves castle crashers, one of the moves is to throw a guy down and jump on him... this was tried once at the play ground. It's not a violent game and we told him that's not ok people could get hurt, and problem solved.
WoW isn't even a violent game, it's cartoonish and fanciful. This isn't really any gore to speak of and for the most part unless a person has a 2 handed axe or a huge mace there aren't any weapons in the game short of a gun/bow and arrow, and lets face it none of the guns in WoW look even remotely realistic that one could link to real life violence.
I let our 6 year old run around the blood elf starting zone and smite things on her priest, she loves using the map and counting how many bad guys we have to get and it's challenging to her to use the mouse and keyboard. She's supervised and it's not like she's going to go to school and conjure up some magic and kill people... WoW is an insane target for this whole "video games cause violence" because really, if even young kids can easily be guided into understanding there is no excuse an adult could not understand this, short of mental illness.
Others treated the whole conversation with derision.
I heard he also drank milk!
As one pundit pointed out:
If video games had anything to do with what people did in real life, more than half of the US population would be farmers by now.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)
The worst things about WoW during these years happened off screen. Some of them got pretty grim. I felt the need to include them.
World of Warcraft made headlines in July 2012 when an argument over the game in an Ontario neighbourhood ended with one man being stabbed in the chest. You can view the wound here (NSFW). The attacker, Justin Williams, was having an enraged argument with guildies over his headset. Jordan Osborne visited to see what was going on, and tried to de-escalate the situation.
“I was telling him, there is no need for you to be freaking out about 'World of Warcraft.' It’s just a game,” Osborne told QMI.
Williams responded, “It’s not just a game, it’s my life.” He then assaulted Osborne, grabbing him by the throat, punching him in the face, and stabbing him in his sternum.
'I was sitting in my house today thinking I could be dead - and it's all over a World of Warcraft game. It's true, it takes over your life.'
Osborne was taken for treatment and made a full recovery. He later told the ‘Peterborough Examiner’, “'The doctor said he could fit his whole finger in my chest.”. Williams faced arrest and was charged with ‘aggravated assault with a weapon’.
This wasn’t the first instance of violence attributed to WoW. There was the 2006 suicide of Zhang Xiaoyi (read Part 1 for more on this), the 2010 rape and murder of Kimberly Proctor, and another instance that same year in which a man choked out his mother, threw his son, and was shot in the head by his grandfather during a drunken World of Warcraft marathon.
The game had already earned its reputation for inspiring extreme and sometimes violent behaviour. But it wasn’t until 2012 that the global media began to question the effects of World of Warcraft in greater depth. Not because of the stabbing of Jordan Osbourne, though that didn’t help. But because of something much more severe.
On 22 July, just a week after the Ontario incident, a Norwegian man named Anders Behring Breivik detonated a van bomb in Oslo, right next to the Regjeringskvartalet - a collection of government buildings. 8 people were killed. By the time the dust settled, he was halfway to the island of Utoya, where a summer camp was taking place for the Worker’s Youth League, a political group associated with the Norwegian Labour Party. Breivik proceeded to hunt down and kill 69 participants, most of whom were children. 318 people were injured. It paralysed Norway. The deadliest lone-wolf attack in history would come as a shock to any country, but Norway was one of the most peaceful, prosperous nations in the world. This was unimaginable.
As more information surfaced, the world scrambled to draw a profile of the perpetrator. Breivik had them covered. He had taken a leaf out of the Unabomber’s book and distributed a number of texts called ‘2083: A European Declaration of Independence’. Long story short, he was your standard far-right fascist wannabe. His shitty little book would inspire murderers for years to come.
Among other things, he attributed his success to World of Warcraft.
Breivik said in court, "Some people dream about sailing around the world, some dream of playing golf. I dreamt of playing World of Warcraft."
Breivik professed to playing the game non-stop (as much as 16 hours a day at points), describing it as a ‘martyr’s gift’ to himself, and using it as a smokescreen to mislead his mother while he planned his attack. Researchers found he had led three guilds, all of which focused on hardcore raiding. He played a human female mage named ‘Conservativism’ and a tauren female druid named ‘Conservative’, though his main was called ‘Andersnordic’. When the prosecution displayed a picture of his character in court, Breivik smiled.
He made multiple attempts to distance himself from the game, perhaps because he felt it damaged the ‘legitimacy’ of his message, but it was gradually becoming clear how core World of Warcraft had been to his identity.
"I know it is important to you and the media that I played this for a year," he told the court in response to Mr. Holden's questions. "But it has nothing to do with July 22. It is not a world you are engulfed by. It is quite simply a hobby."
Breivik would occasionally post on the forums. In one reply, he defended a Scandinavian cyberbully who he said ‘works against the Islamisation of Sweden’. The news shook the WoW community to its core, especially on the servers he had played (Silvermoon-EU and Nordrassil-EU). Players reacted with horror and disgust.
Some of his past guildies discussed their relationships with Breivik, which gave an insight into what he was like as a person.
My memories of Anders are very good, and the atrocity was so incredible that I suppose I simply refused to see the pictures as Anders at first.
One of the replies was from a fellow Norwegian.
This is surrealistic, as an Norwegian it is hard to even comprehend what he has done and even harder to fathom his motives. The killer portraited in our news papers and on television seems so far out that it is easiest to judge him as a rabbit psychotic. To know that i have been guilded and chated with him for over a year in Virtue, at least back then he seemed pretty normal, makes this even more uncomprehensible.
The general consensus was that while Breivik had been unpleasant at times, it was difficult to imagine him doing something so evil.
Yes offler I do indeed remember him. He an I had quiet a public barney. I did think he was a jerk and a petty control freak but not true evil as he has shown himself to be. Although I did think of him from time to time in a very negative way, I really did dislike that man.
It has really affected me these last few days how I had contact with someone who was truley a monster. He is a true coward, parking a car bomb, attacking children with a automatic riffle. I do hope he suffers in prison.
In a tragic twist of fate, one of the teenagers who had escaped Breivik on the island had once played World of Warcraft with him. Løtuft had survived by hiding behind a tree for an hour and a half.
“It was a sickening feeling when I realized I had played for two or three hours with the man who tried to kill me,” Fred Ove Løtuft told local newspaper Bergens Tidende. “I’ve played a lot of shooting games where you have to get away and hide,” he said.
Passing himself off as a Finn, Breivik led a clan in World of Warcraft called the Knights Templar, Løtuft said. In his manifesto, Breivik claimed he belonged to an “anti-Jihad” terrorist organization of the same name. Chatting to Breivik at the time, Løtuft said he had formed a positive impression of his fellow player. “We only talked about the game. He didn’t seem like a guy who would run amok and gun down young people, to put it mildly,” Løtuft told Bergens Tidende.
The debate over whether video game violence caused real-world violence had played out dozens of times, usually in response to the revelation that some American shooter played Call of Duty or Battlefield or something like that. I’m not American so correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it has something to do with gun lobbies looking for scapegoats so that they don’t have to ban guns.
But this time, the conversation focused entirely on World of Warcraft. The media, both in Norway and throughout the world, questioned whether WoW was a safe place for children. All of the game’s past incidents came back with a vengeance, and were held up to the light as examples of its danger.
Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen claimed that Breivik was unable to distinguish between World of Warcraft and reality. It was part of the fictional world he had created around himself, in which he was a knight defending Europe from invaders, and not an unsuccessful Norwegian neckbeard.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)