I’ve been on the WoW forums for a bit now, trying to get a heads up on the Stormrage queues.  You know what keeps people from posting on forums?  A working game.  Cause once things are unplayable, or monotonous, then you get some very interesting posts.

Aside from the 3 hour queue times on Stormrage (which are apparently the players’ fault, since they rolled on a busy server over 10 years ago), there’s one particular theme that’s popping up a bit more.  And that’s entitlement from the rushers.

Apparently, 2 weeks after launch is an appropriate time to a) release raids, b) flying, c) maxed out artifacts, d) deep knowledge of every dungeon and skippable area, e) go-go runs on mythic, and f) have maxed out the Suramar rep.

Each of these items has been stated by the devs to take months, with various catch up mechanics along the way.  The people chomping at the bit are from a wide variety of places but they all have 1 thing in common – they rushed to end game and are more or less, maxed out.  They have the loremaster achievement (the one that will eventually unlock flying), which meant hours of grinding.  They are sitting at ilvl 850, which requires a fair chunk of dungeon grinding.  They’ve maxed Suramar rep and have a lot of points invested in a single artifact.  They immediately boot warlocks from any LFG group.  And they deserve better.

Why?

Entitlement is based on the concept of having something, and setting expectations to be the same in a separate environment.  Sort of like teens who never cooked/cleaned at home, end up in college and are totally lost and expect others to do the work.

In WoW (and the same thing happens in other MMOs when they launch, as compared to WoW), the content drought is so severe that people play for a year+ with the same set of rules.  MoP to WoD was disgustingly long, and people were loathed to give up flying after 10+ years of it.  Then WoD gave them flying, super powers, amazing gear, LFR pinatas and essentially made everyone a god.  Legion comes out and you hit like a wet noodle, lost all the perks you had before and are told you have to wait months to get them back, if at all.  Did I mention that Inscription was gutted since glyphs were almost completely removed from the game? And you’re paying a company to do this to you.

So yeah, I can understand why people feel entitled.  They paid their $60 for Legion, they paid their $210 (patch 6.2 was June 2015) to play from then on.  They were allowed to eat their fill from the trough for all that time, only to have it taken away.

Counterpoint, those people are not who the first 3 months of an expansion are for.  Blizzard isn’t so dumb to think that those hardcore players are going to leave, no matter the hardships.  They will post til their fingers bleed but they will still pay their monthly fees.  The expansion is for the group of people who were not playing in 2016.  It’s a spike in sales and Blizz wants that long tail to stretch as far as possible.

Because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters to Blizz is the amount of subscriptions.