They are Coming for Me

Apparently the only WoW player to actively avoid every single piece of information or hype about WoWF has been found by Blizzard.

Apparently I like playing with a cat. Isn't that right, Twinkle?

Yes, I received an email by Blizzard asking me to participate in a survey.

(Sorry, I agreed to not share screenshots as part of the agreement to take said survey.)

In case you're wondering, yes, the survey mainly focused on WoW Forever. Courtesy of said NDA, I can't speak beyond that, but I made sure I wrote a book in the "Do you have any additional comments?" section at the end of the survey. I'm sure that Copilot looked at my screed and said "Oh shit, not THIS GUY again," before placing it in a virtual wastebasket.

If I were a betting man, I'd wager I'm very much the outlier in their survey. I can't see any real value in what I provided, given that I don't play WoWF and I'm very much in "The Emperor Has No Clothes" mode as far as video games are concerned*, but I will say that I was completely surprised that both I was reached out to in the first place for my opinion and that WoWF ended up being a thing.

Jason Schreier (above) has a good take on how WoWF came about, given that he interviewed people on the WoWF team at Blizzard. After watching the video, I have to admit that not only was I wrong in that Blizzard did bring out WoWF in the first place, but that the WoWF team actually convinced Blizzard management to develop the game. In the day and age when companies taking risks are few and far between (just look at the number of movies that are sequels or reboots or forks off of already existing intellectual property) that Holly Longdale and Co. actually agreed to let WoWF see the light of day is a minor miracle in itself. 

Sure, you could argue quite strongly that WoWF is a fork off of an existing IP --it is, after all-- but creating a third major version of WoW is quite a risk given that Retail could use some shoring up and Classic seems to be stuck with Warlords of Draenor Classic looming on the horizon. There's no given it will succeed in the long term, as my Questing Buddy has informed me there's some stressful aspects to Retail players coming into WoWF and not realizing the intricacies of how things worked in the old days (such as only the first person to hit a mob gets credit for that mob's kill). I'm fully expecting that by Christmas the crowd will have thinned out enough that I could start poking my nose into the game, so we'll see if the WoW community does what they typically do, along with all of the associated bad actor behavior, or whether they'll actually be better than that.

*Okay, I'm like that about a LOT of things these days. What, you were actually surprised? It's pretty right out in front on the blog, you know. The only thing I will say is that my belief in that "The Emperor has no clothes" runs a lot deeper in a lot more topics than I typically let on.