Still fighting the good fight!

It’s been a few weeks since transmogrification was added to the World [of Warcraft] and Blizzard mysterious decision to restrict the transmogability of the level 60 pvp armour/weapons to those that have pvp ranks from the original Warcraft pvp system. I have read the “blue” posts on the subject and quite frankly the more I read, the more it all stinks of a piss poor PR spin job to pas off a bad job as something they meant to do!

A Trip back in time!

I’ll explain what I mean, pre Wrath of the Lich King launch Blizzard added an in game event that was to see the major cities and players have to face increased threat from the undead masses. Part of this event was that is was possible for a player to become infected with the Zombie plague and if not cured by a player or (eventually) NPC’s you turned into a zombie. This game the player the ability to try and transmit the plague and infect more players and NPC’s. Sounds quite fun in practice doesn’t it? Well truth be told it was, what Blizzard failed to take in to account (in my honest opinion) was the lengths some players will go to in the never ending search to be sizeable arseholes!

Some players, even groups of them saw this as an opportunity to have “their” fun and it wasn’t long before while innocently standing around in the AH or bank in Stormwind and you would hear the sound of zombies and corpses exploding in an attempt to spread the plague. Sometimes the NPC standing around the cities would cast a cleanse to remove the plague but it was never enough. The end result was that the NPCs running the auction house and bank, the trainers and vendors was repeatedly being infected and killed to the point unless you was in Exodar and Darnassus (where no one goes then or now anyway) getting anything down was impossible.

Strings of things.

This cause (some would say inevitably) a string of forum posts calling in to question the useful ness of this event or as I tried to point out, the logic of giving people, who if they can find a way become massive asshats they will, the ability to cause this level of mayhem amongst players who just wish to go about their daily business with out having important NPC, zombied and killed (not to forget themselves) every 5 minutes. Despite these complaints Blizzard remained a stony silence and allowed the thread/s to gather more and more players views against this event and the disruption that other players where causing using the mechanics of the zombie invasion.

Out of the Blue (pun intended). . .

. . . there was a Blizzard post offering some wishy washy statement claiming that the “zombie invasion had been beaten off, the plague countered and everything returning to normal dun dun DAAAAH! oh and the event was not stopped early because we was getting forums full of people voicing such a large volume of dissatisfaction with the abilities placed in the hands of players. Honest. We meant it to end now! No really we did!” Personally I didn’t buy it, I remember reading and making some posts myself about having my day disrupted to the point that it wasn’t even worth logging in. Overall the statement (why even make one on the ending of an event?) smell exactly like the current “we meant to do it” blue post regarding the PvP armour issue. This time how ever they have got it badly wrong!. (p.s. not a real blue post.)

The Facts (as I see it lol)

1) Blizzard announces the Transmogrification feature and lists a set of “rules” to govern what can and cannot be transmogged.
2) The feature goes live on the PTR and people begin to state that the PvP armour cannot be used. >Source< EU forums) & >Source< (US forums) Not one Blue reply!
3) No rules update or notification was given by Blizzard as to limiting the use of the pvp armour set or update the rules to clear this matter up.
4) Even now many days after 4.3 goes live the rules have not been updated. >Souce< (EU forums)
5) Customer dissatisfaction with not being able to use the armour sets starts to show up in the forums.
6) In the EU forums the blues are shamed by a player linking blue posts from the US forums. (poor show)
7) The much vaunted Bashiok make this post (note the only blue post in 26 pages of replies >Source< (US forums)

I would like to draw your attention to. . .

In Bashiok’s reply I would like to point out two things in particular.

“We do agree that the restriction to the specific characters that earned those titles kind of sucks. It’s the player that earned those items, really, not any specific character. If we had a way to make them account-wide right now, we would.”

So Blizzard are quite happy to (in the future) allow any number of characters on an account wear the transmogged pvp sets but still I get the finger!

“Lastly I want to apologize that this restriction was not communicated before the patch was released. As much we hope to be in front of messaging any changes before they’re implemented to ensure you’re well informed and can plan your play schedule with these things in mind, it doesn’t always happen. For that we are sorry if anyone was looking forward to using these items for transmogrification and is unable to do so.”

<sarcasm>Well he did say sorry that makes up for it.</sarcasm> What, really, these are not real HTML tags ? This is exactly what I was talking about in “facts” No.2, 3 and 4 even after 26 pages that’s it we are sorry we totally failed to point this out despite having months to do so! Cool Story Bro!

Well almost a 1000 word rant on the matter (now over 1000 lol) for me this weak, almost shrugged apology is another nail in the game for me. My subs run out exactly on the day the patch dropped but I thought I would pump another £8.99 in to the Blizzard machine to see as much of 4.3 as I can and this poor attitude towards subscribers is not really inspiring me to carry on playing. A sad day indeed.