I don’t want people to be quiet, I don’t want people to slink silently into the night, I DO want people to talk about the problems they see and how they would love to see them fixed. Been doing that for years.

I thought I said it clearly, but maybe it got lost in the post, but what I want to see DIE are people who hate the game, come out and bitch about the game, have nothing but negative things to say about how the game sucks… and yet, they keep playing. bitching and playing, oh it sucks but still playing. And in the process, talk about how it’s the gamke that sucks, the game thats terrible, rather than consider the possibility that it’s the player who has stayed the same while the game changed around them in ways they don’t like. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that the game sucks or is bad, just that for that one person, the game no longer supplies what that person wanted or enjoyed.

But the alternative is to suggest that the game must stay exactly the same to please the person who liked it the way it was… and after what, six years, is that really a sane approach?

By all means, talk about issues and irritations aplenty.

As far as loyal… well, I don’t know if I can be called a loyal head in the sand mindless yesman when I constantly try all the new MMOs looking for something new and fresh to get into. And I’m really looking forward to trying on SWTOR for size.

First off, thanks for the link love. I’ve been a long time reader of yours, so to see you plugging something I wrote is a huge honor. Not to sound too grovel-ly or anything. It means a lot, so thanks again.

I’m actually working on a response to the “clip across the ear” posts, but I basically agree with what you’re saying. It does seem like a double standard, where they can say what they love about something and we can’t say what we don’t love about it. I think that attitude is more oppressive than those of us who have been critical of World of Warcraft and still might be.

I just think the metaphorical clip round the ear reads to me like “shut up, you whiny brats” and my kneejerk reaction is “Just don’t read those blogs if you don’t like them.” I also think that individuals do need to experience the emotional turmoil of burnout for themselves and blogging about it is one of the ways in which bloggers do that, so it’s just mean minded to try to shut that conversation down.

But it does annoy me massively when a newly released game that I like gets bitchslapped all over the blogosphere by idiots who should never have been playing it anyway because it obviously wasn’t aimed at them so what do I know?

While it is sometimes nice to see an analysis of why people decided to quit, often people will dwell on things that the rest of us still playing do not want changed.

I’d hate to have GC et al decide to make unnecessary changes, in the vain hope of accommodating folks that have simply burned out, or just need to move on. I quit playing myself for about 10 months between March of 2010 and January of this year; my aborted “why I’m quitting” blog post honestly was better left unwritten.

At the time I needed to stop playing, because that was the best choice for me. I had some relationship problems with the girl I had been dating, and I was staring a new job. On top of that I was burnt from nearly constant raiding since early 2007.

A lot of the “Here’s why I quit” posts I’ve read honestly boil down to the same thing when you read between the lines. The person posting has spent too much time focusing on the game, and they need to take a break.

It is rare for people posting to clearly recognize this in themselves, and often they will fill a number of paragraphs with the inner dialog that they’ve created to justify quitting to their guild, etc. When those reasons can easily be traced to “I just need to take a break” they probably are best kept to oneself. Especially if their potential audience is the folks that make this game, and change this game.

Additionally a lot of those posts boil down to “things are not the way they were a few years ago.”

To those people all I can say is 1) If you want to play the game the way it was, find (or build) a private server and 2) Things in life change, learning to adapt to those changes is a pretty important skill.

Just my two cents….

I mean, to be honest, if you listend to the ‘I quit’ posts during Wrath, you’d remember the huge outcry, frankly louder than anything we’ve got not now, that Wrath was too easy and raiding was to accessible and so on and so forth and ‘I quit’. And now that the raids have changed again, it’s suddenly too hard and they’re catering to the hardcore and here’s our long, over emotive I quit post. And then when it got nerfed you had people making their long, overly emotive I quit post. So I’m at kind of a point where I think, yeah, these people do deserve a bit of a verbal clip across the ear along the lines of BBB’s. Because people who are enjoying themselves don’t often speak up about it.

I think there is a feel amongst a lot of fans (this is in general, not picking on BBB in particular) that negative vibes can be a self fulfilling prophecy, and that if too many people read about others not having fun, it will infect them too.

But given that I’m fascinated by the community, I LOVE it when people post thoughtful, emotive posts about why something that had been a huge part of their life doesn’t seem so fun or meaningful any more. Obv I hope they can be happy too, but that kind of analysis is pure gold.

I hear you on the chaos orb thing though. I can’t make myself do any more heroics, even though Spinks is a blacksmith and I could totally sell those ilvl 365 weapons as fast as I could churn them out.