The Twitch streamer Asmongold has many complaints about World of Warcraft. He recognizes patterns from Blizzard to bully players and is fed up with it.
The biggest WoW streamer Asmongold currently has a lot to criticize about World of Warcraft. Again and again, he explains in his streams what is currently going wrong or which systems in the MMORPG urgently need improvement. Now he has organized his thoughts and compiled them in a longer post. He finds little good in Blizzard and justifies his thoughts by recognizing annoying patterns.
Who is speaking? Asmongold is considered the ultimate WoW streamer. Whether on Twitch or YouTube, his videos are viewed by many players and fans, which gives his words a wide reach. He has been playing World of Warcraft for nearly 15 years and is a huge fan, but he also repeatedly criticizes the MMORPG.
He recently wrote a long Twitter post on “Twitlonger” addressing World of Warcraft: Shadowlands and WoW: Classic, discussing the current state of both games and urging the community not to accept everything anymore.
World of Warcraft is wasting its players’ time
Asmongold begins by pointing out that there have always been doomsayers in WoW. According to them, if you listen to such people, Burning Crusade killed WoW or WotLK equipped everything with a “casual easy mode”.
However, the nature of the criticism has changed over the years. Instead of long 2000-word posts explaining why a system is not good or harmful, WoW fans are now left with only short, disappointed tweets.
Asmongold primarily criticizes mechanics such as Soul Ash or Conduit Power – two systems that players have long complained about and which, in his view, serve no reasonable purpose other than to artificially extend WoW. He concludes this with a strong statement:
World of Warcraft was a game where you wanted to waste your time. Now it is just a game that wastes your time.
Systems are only there to artificially extend playtime
One of Asmongold’s biggest criticisms is the playtime extension through systems that are designed to slow down players. Despite massive criticism of the systems during Alpha, Blizzard insists on the “time sinks”.
Asmongold finds it particularly critical that the solutions to these problems, which players have been demanding for months, are then packaged as new content in a patch:
To put it simply: Stop creating systems with obvious flaws. Stop waiting until the X.2 or X.3 patch to bring improvements that were already suggested in the Alpha. It is just ridiculous that you keep presenting us with dysfunctional systems only to then entice us to come back later and pay more money so we can finally use the systems properly. (…)
Humans have evolved to recognize patterns, and I think everyone sees the pattern here.
Blizzard: Incompetent or deliberately flawed
Afterward, Asmongold also attacks the developers and Blizzard as a whole. According to him, there are actually only two possible explanations for the state of the systems.
The first possibility is that the developers are seriously incompetent. They actually have no idea how players interact with their systems and really need 6 months full of errors to reach the same conclusions that players have already reached during Alpha.
The second possibility is that they are doing it deliberately, that they are deliberately withholding improvements to artificially extend playtime and improve company figures without having to create new content and instead just prolong existing content.
The truth is, I don’t think it’s either of the first or the second. I think it is both.
He continues to complain that there are far too many repetitions. He asks how many variations of the Gorm mount there should still be or why one has to complete the same quest 20 times for an achievement.
Asmongold also directly answers these questions with another suspicion. Blizzard is so overloaded with micromanaging these many systems that finding a perfect balance is nearly impossible.
Moreover, Asmongold is annoyed that Blizzard brings significant innovations with each expansion that end up being discarded.
Blizzard wants to reinvent the wheel with each expansion, and they do. But they don’t make a wheel; instead, they build a hoverboard. Then we spend the whole expansion asking: How will it fly? What fuel does the hoverboard use? Can we have a seatbelt on the hoverboard? We waste our time creating the perfect hoverboard in every expansion.
We reach it halfway, and in the end, we throw the hoverboard away and work on a new one. Meanwhile, the player base just wants a new wheel all the time.
Asmongold continues to play despite severe criticism
Despite all this criticism, Asmongold continues to play World of Warcraft instead of throwing in the towel. He is often criticized for this, and many voices say that one should simply cancel the subscription; otherwise, Blizzard would never understand the criticism. Bare numbers are the only thing that could ever lead to a change in thinking. However, Asmongold explains his continued play like this:
The reason I am sitting here writing this after midnight is not because I think poorly of the game. But because I love the game damn it. That’s why I care so much, and I want the game to improve. This game has been a big part of my life for the past 15 years, and I’ll be damned if I let it sink without a fight. I WANT to play this game for the next 15 years, even now in the content drought of Shadowlands. I still log in every day and do the little activities I enjoy. (…)
We had a taste of WoW’s potential with Legion, and now imagine if that level of inspiration and innovation had carried over through BFA and now into Shadowlands. I would never leave the house again, and I would be proud of it!
Do you agree with Asmongold and his views? Or do you have a different perspective on the entire development?
