I haven’t gathered my thoughts on FT3, yet, but in the meantime there’s plenty to write about. For example, the absolute failure of Wargaming to reach out to its player base in a genuine way. I don’t want to beat on that war drum myself, but it’s clear that no matter how much WG claims to want to correct their past mistakes and build back the trust they lost, they’re not willing (or in the very base case, not allowed) to do it. It’s incredible how quickly all of this exploded.

As much as I enjoy the game (when it’s fun at least) I’m standing with the levelheaded and not make any more purchases from Wargaming until they get their act together. There was a collaboration coming up that I was excited for, but this just isn’t the time. Maybe Wargaming will get their act together sooner rather than later. If not, things are going to get a lot worse going forward. For them; not for me. I’ve got an enormous backlog I can look at and a ton of work to do. Not in that order.

EDIT:

I’m not surprised that WG’s response wasn’t over the target. No apology to LWM (even got her name wrong, interestingly enough), shifting the fiasco away from her to the Missouri drama, and implementing some minor updates relevant to that. There’s a little more to it, but it just goes to show how companies start to operate once they’re too big to effectively communicate and redress individuals anymore.

The toxicity in the WG community is self sustaining at this point. I honestly think that even if they came out with some otherworldly update that magically fixed everything in the game, that one voice in the crowd saying something akin to, “Why didn’t you do that sooner? WG let all that drama go on for years for no reason,” would in fact rekindle said drama. Even if you conjured up the perfect game, an entire community of alienated gamers is going to have more tempting things to do than just play it. More over, since praise is much, much harder to gain than criticism, that’s about all WG has coming in the future.

I’ll probably still play the game until it eventually fizzles out, but it’s more as an obligation to my clan than any strong desire to play. It can still be fun, but even in-game you run into this constant negativity on top of being burned alive by the HE shell mechanics so much of this game is ‘balanced’ around. I really hate that. I hate having to deal with my own gripes and everyone else’s at the same time. Like I said, the toxicity is self sustaining at this point, and I’m not interested in feeding into it. When I play this game, I’m only interested in playing it. I can always review something here on the blog if I really feel the need.