Uh Oh

I don't typically pay much attention to the Retail side of WoW, particularly after I grew tired of the post-Wrath emphasis on the faction leaders being both the driver of the action and the central figures in the expacs from Cataclysm onwards.*

However, when I asked a friend whom I knew played both Retail and Classic his opinion of the 9.1 update, Chains of Domination, he said "I've played Horde, and what they did with Sylvanas was nothing short of character assassination."**

That's when I knew something had gone down on Retail.

Then my YouTube feed showed vlog commentary from Bellular Clips about a PC Gamer article, and so I hopped on over to PC Gamer to find this:

Hoo boy.

This goes far beyond the normal complaints that you see from people about this or that part of the expac, but strikes at the heart of Blizzard's cash cow.

As Bellular pointed out in his clip on this article, this isn't a more niche site, but something the general public is more apt to see, which becomes harder to sweep under the rug or just dismiss it as trolling.

This sort of thing is also likely to perk up the ears of the institutional investors of Activision-Blizzard, causing them to wonder what is going wrong with the Blizzard side of the house.

And really, I believe this can be laid directly at the feet of J. Allen Brack and Ion Hazzikostas. Brack, because he's in charge overall, and Hazzikostas, because he's the one in charge of WoW. The snark in me says that when the person in charge of WoW is most well known for his participation in Elitist Jerks prior to being hired by Blizz, this is what you get when you let a theorycrafter and raid encounter designer without real narrative experience run the show. I'm certain you get a lot of nicely designed raids, but narrative is gonna suffer if you hand wave a lot of stuff (or offload it into books because.... it's not important or something? I guess we'll never know for sure.)

And, apparently, suffer it has.

*And that includes having a significant portion of the action tucked away in books and other media, not in-game. I personally like the authors that Blizz employs --I've encountered some of them in social media and I can speak rather highly about their likability and thoughtfulness-- but in the end Blizz' management drives the show and they just interpret the direction management wants to go. Just like in the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, the decision to kill off Chewbacca wasn't the decision of the author, but management.

**My opinion, which I expressed to my friend, was that Blizz had been doing that ever since Wrath. There were quests in game that showed her humanity behind the bravado, especially one memorable quest where you find a piece of jewelry given to her by one of her sisters. (It's a drop from a Scourge near Windrunner Spire, naturally.) However, Blizzard chose to ignore those overtones and instead sent Sylvanas down the path she's been on from Cata onwards.

EtA: Corrected an issue with the "*". The author, R.A. Salvatore, came up with the idea as he wasn't happy that he was going to have to kill off Chewie, so he created the death scene so that Chewie went out with a bang.