The weekend before World of Warcraft: The War Within‘s global launch was not the same as past launches. In the lead up to the past nine expansions, the entire community would be holding vigil together until the doors opened to let us all in at once. But this time was different. This time, people who paid $40 or more extra for their expansion got to start all the way last Thursday, leaving the rest of us to fidget and fume.
What could have been a unifying experience for the whole playerbase ended up being a case of Have and Have Nots, some enjoying an early Christmas while others nurturing resentment. While this particular situation will be in the past by the time you read this, it’s an important example of the community magic studios are willing to trade away to get that extra revenue bump.
I really didn’t think that missing out on The War Within’s headstart would get to me. After all, it’s not the first time that I’ve had to sit on my hands while seeing other players get into a new MMO or expansion a few days early. I’m a patient guy, and I try not to spend money frivolously, so that’s an extra $40 I get to keep for, say, Janthir Wilds and one-and-a-half Chicken McNuggets (curse you, inflation!).
But this is perhaps one of the more egregious headstarts I’ve experienced, and watching the community react this past weekend tells me that I’m not the only one who ultimately went into this expansion with a sour taste in my mouth.
There are three big problems with this model. The first is that this isn’t “early access” whatsoever. Last Thursday evening was the actual expansion launch, and the rest of us were effectively being penalized with a “poor fee” to come in at a later date. Blizzard’s marketing team might try to spin this positively, but… no. That’s exactly what it is.
As a Redditor put it, “For the first time in WoW history, paying your monthly subscription and buying the expansion box does not give you access to the game in its current state.”
The second problem that arose is that everyone who got in last Thursday quickly started spoiling major story details all over the place — world chat, Reddit, Twitter, fan sites, streamers, etc. Even Blizzard gleefully posted an intensely spoiler-heavy video the next day.
I did my best to stay out of the game, ignore social media, and mind my own business, and still I got spoiled on a big plot point that I would’ve rather enjoyed in context, not as some loudmouth outside a movie theater in 1980 yelling to people in line, “DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER!”
And the third problem is that this staggered release separated communities. My guild immediately broke into two segments, with a big hunk cheerfully going through the early access and the remainder sitting in sullen silence feeling left out of the party while watching guild chat scroll by.
Another Redditor echoed this feeling: “This is the first expansion my guild hasn’t done group photos, leveling contests, etc. while piling into discord together hyping each other up because of how fragmented everyone is. Its been a massive buzz kill for the whole group.”
As new players came in on Monday evening, it felt even worse seeing all of those level 80s zipping around as we played catch-up rather than mutually exploring this fresh world together. (Never mind the extra salt in the wound of Blizzard nerfing leveling today now that the early access players have long since taken advantage of it.)
It also truly annoyed me to hear anyone who got into early access dismiss the problems of this situation and the feelings of the Have Not crowd. It showed a staggering lack of compassion for the Haves to lecture us about how this will make for a better Day One (well, Day Five) experience and lessen crowds and yadda yadda yadda. My thought is that if they felt it was so beneficial, then they’d have no problem swapping places… right?
On top of that is the fact that all of these fansites and streamers got comped early access copies to lay on that peer pressure even more. Whatever pushback and complaints there was over this got completely overshadowed in the news, forums, and social media by the actual game launch and those playing it.
Again, all of this will blow over, probably within a week, which is the exact calculation that the marketing team at Blizzard made when deciding that it was going to sell a $40 headstart and count on FOMO to make it work. I have no doubt that so many people bought into this that it’ll be the de facto standard model for every future expansion, and if I or you complain about it, we’ll be told — as happened over this weekend in numerous places — that we’re being unnecessarily salty about something that “doesn’t matter.”
Yet it does matter. It’s a dubious monetization practice that reduced the launch experience for a whole lot of people and forever changed the fun factor of going into a World of Warcraft expansion. Blizzard could’ve kept a shred of its integrity and put the whole community’s needs first, but hey… $40 is $40. What wouldn’t it trade for that?
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