Originally Posted by
Azerate
It seems that with Shadowlands we will see one of the most varied gameplay ever in the history of WoW. Thanks to the covenant system, not only will your character have different special abilities depending on your choice, but will also be able to bring unique buffs to certain dungeons. An average player will look at those things and think to themselves "how cool - I can do all those things based on the way I built my character". Unfortunately, all of this entertainment is potentially in jeopardy. Why? Because once again, a small albeit vocal subset of players is campaigning against all those things. They want to diminish the impact of our decisions, make everything uniform and meaningless. Some are downright asking for removal of half the new features. To what end? Supposedly to "level the playing field". To make "high end" mythic+ "fair", to make "mythic raiding at the top end" fair. Many other buzzwords related to competitiveness in the game are being used to excuse the gutting of the very interactive and immersive game feature. Will the game be eroded once again, because of dreams of the vocal minority? Will covenants turn into a cosmetic choice just because Johnny Bravo and his friend want to do a +30 key in SL and don't want to feel they are forced into a certain covenant?
It is very sad, because in a way it reflects the situation in real life. A lot of people ignore elections and can't, or don't want to engage in politics for various reasons. What often ends up happening is a clique of people fighting only for their own interests raises to power and just keeps making the life shit for everyone else. The worst part about it is they usually manage to convince a portion of regular people that the interests of these assholes somehow align with the interests of regular people. The same thing has been happening for a couple years in the WoW community. Blizzard listens too much to "content creators" who like to flip flop in their opinions just to increase viewer counts. Even the more "positive" content creators are afraid to be too outspoken about enjoying the new features because they fear ostracism, trolling and bullying. Content creators don't exist in a vacuum, and if they want to be relevant, they have to cooperate with others to an extent. The "positive" content creators are only as positive as the "community overlords" allow them to usually.
Can the regular players do nothing against all that? Can we try to rally the casual players to voice their positive opinions on the forums? I know I will be encouraging people who usually lay low to speak up. As players of WoW, we can't let the game be hijacked by top50 raiding guilds and top10 mythic+ teams. Let's not let them destroy our fun.