Remember that Ghostcrawler also "did" Wrath of the Lich King.
People blame GC like if he was the worse that happened to WoW yet they praise WotLK. Foul logic.

GC is just the scapegoat for disgruntled players, nothing more. I remember another name being used as scapegoat here before GC, with the same "hatred" in the posts from the same posters. Was it Chilton? Or another one? I don't remember exactly.
Scapegoats are a convenient way to avoid admitting that a big part of the problem comes from yourself. You being burned out of a game you played for 6+ years doesn't make that game worse than before... and doesn't make you a bad person either, by the way.

 

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I didn't quit because of GC. I don't quit because of developers. Did I quit because of things GC spearheaded/implemented? Perhaps, I don't know. I quit because it used to be fun and now it is no longer fun. Easy. I am hoping I read that they made some changes and I might come back, but right now- WoW is nothing short of completely broken for the way I want to play the game.

 

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I think whoever the face of the game is, is going to get a lot of heat. More so if they are a dev.


But I think GC gets even more because as someone said, he's kind of a jack*ss, and his stated philosophies are not agreeable to many. Sometimes it's nice to know the thought process, and transparency can be good, but many times it looks like they don't have a good handle on things, adding to the negative image.


I think (my guess) that when people talk about players quitting because of GC, they mean they quit because of the state of the game, which GC is at least in part responsible for.


I loved WOTLK, CAT, hmm, the redone leveling is kind of cool, but the redone zones, mixed feelings. Really dislike the heavy (over)use of phasing. Dislike that a lot. But I understand what they were trying to accomplish, and it is in some ways cool but just for a MMORPG logistically, it made it a non-open world.

 

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There's no false dichotomy in praising any work the man did previously, while criticizing what has been done more recently.

It is fallacious (special pleading, really), however, to project all of those theoretical reasons of why someone may not like the new changes - burn out, as you say, scapegoating, blaming the players themselves, whatever else was in there.

The negative reactions to Cataclysm are the result of things that the developer of the game has done. There's no magic at work here.

 

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Glad you said it with a smiley, I was gonna use words

 

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Just because he's a scapegoat doesn't mean he isn't a jackass or that he isn't wrong about the state of things post-Cata. Considering the (arguably limited) evidence that we're now back below pre-Cata population activity (note: ACTIVITY != SUBS, for the super-dense technicality snipers out there), I'd say there's something going on besides just burnout, especially if there's all this "new blood" that the low-level revamp is bringing in. There's some foul logic here, to be sure, though I think it's not where you think it is.

 

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Words were overkill.

 

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If the general theme in Wrath actually worked, basically making the game EASIER so that the "casual" (aka "bad player" could do content, then there would have been no reason to change it up in Cata to make it more difficult. Early on Blizz bragged about having 11 million accounts. Then AFTER the China release of Wrath they said they had 12 million accounts. 1 million accounts extra after a release in a densely populated country full of gamers? And now months after release Blizz hasn't posted any numbers over 12 million? Would you like to know why the subscriptions seem to be fluctuating? Would you like to know why there's no real shortage of tanks but nobody wants to tank randoms? Would you like to know why in 4.1 you can trade honor for justice points to buy PvE gear? Because the "wrath baby" players that want god-mode turned back on can't handle anything that resembles a challenge. "GOGOGO PULL FASTER STUPID TANK!!!" is the /macro of the people who are driving away subscribers. In the nightelf starting area, as well as many others, there's a quest mob that kills things for you so it's not so "challenging". But if they make the game harder it'll bring back the players who want a challenge right? Not so long as the game is stull full of wrath babies acting like screeching primates. There is no way to "fix" the game by changing the code. The real issue is with the players. So no matter what they do, what they change, whether GC is exalted as a diety or condemned as the "death of WoW", the players that left won't come back because of the "bad players" still there. Will the "bad players" leave? Not so long as they can generally have the game rewritten around the joke that is PvP there... AFK in BGs, carebear unflagging when people show up to stop them ganking lowbies / questgivers, rogues that can heal, etc etc The game survives on it's reputation, and that reputation is quickly being destroyed.

So, you honestly expect all 12 million subscribers to be "Hardcore" gamers?.....


Kinda like saying that all of the problems with the world we live in are because of the people who aren't millionaires....


Foul Logic.

 

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