I know if I get any response to this it will most likely be a lot of backfire because I am basically attacking a portion of the community, however this has starting to get very frustrating. I have been thinking a lot on this subject lately and I first thought it would come nothing good out of adressing it, but increasingly I feel the need to push back against this sillyness. I love this game so much and I would love to come on here to talk about awesome things, but I find myself very distracted by negativity which doesn't hold any water, most of the time.
So what am I really talking about? Well first of I need to mention that have high-functioning autism and that is somewhat relevant because I despise people as a collective (not in their individual components of course, I love spending time with certain people). Watching people from a distance behaving in groups is very interesting to me and something that always worries me. People have a tendency to rally behind negativity, not just in gaming but in general. Thats why we have riots and people march. Though some marches have good intentions and outcomes.
There is also this concept of content creators and the fact that negativity and controversy attract more attention. This feeds into this feedback loop which is very addicting to content creators. This is a huge factor of what is driving this negativity and the complaining and its speaks against its validity. Also, coming with negativity or critisism in general, not just regarding to World of Warcraft, have a tendency to make you appear as a more intelligent and sophisticated person. If you are complaining about something, you show that you have put effort into things, analyzed and made up your intelligent conclusion. Though this is hardly the case. On the other hand, if you are positive about something, you are just this somewhat ignorant gullable person who accepts anything at face value and probably is very forgiving and naive. I would say that is most often not the case at all.
So back to my autism thingy and how I don't like people in groups. When I see people even in a minority behave in a certain way I have a tendency to go the opposite direction and wonder why they are behaving in such a way. What is the reason behind it.
Evaluating the common complaints recently I find that 90% of the time they have no real proper reasoned arguments behind them and frankly if I might be so bold, say that they seem coming from posters that haven't made up their own arguments, but following a script. The sentences are formulated the same way and if there are more arguments behind it, it sounds equally the same. Now, that itself doesn't make an argument wrong. People could be posting from a script like mindless bots and come with accurate information. This just doesn't seem to be the case about issues related to recent issues people discuss.
Now, I know its provoking for me to reduce most opinions down to people just parroting others statements or like posting from a script, however that is how it appears to me and I am still open to a nuanced discussion around critisism from people who have put a lot of thought into their own arguments. However that is not what I see most of the time, though it happens from time to time.
Also I can watch a youtube or streamer with a lot of followers, and lo and behold, the next day I see people write exactly the same complaint, word for word in comment section on youtube and even here. I even saw many comments yesterday on Youtube to a specific video adressing class balance and people were writing "Oh I was so hyped for Shadowlands, but after watching this, I can't play this expansion after all" People will ACTUALLY accept a youtubers subjective opinion on something as gospel instead of trying the game for themselves.
I am going to adress the most recent complaint, but there are many of them like "BFA was garbage", "Covenants will fail". I would say both these statements are exaggurated and false. And the reality is far more nuanced. So I will only adress the most recent one for now.
The newest thing to complain about now is what has been refered to as "borrowed power". This has always existed, though at a lesser extent. We used to borrow legendaries and set bonuses from tier sets, leaving them behind as we went into new content. The argument is that Blizzard should stop making these systems and move them into talents and abilities and even spend more time working on balance.
These systems are a solution to a problem which was rightly complained about. Introducing new talents and abilities over several expansions gave us so many abilities that Blizzard decided to prune them. And we know how that was recieved. Making new abilities based on the theme of the expansion is a way to solve this issue. When it comes to balance then I think according to looking at warcraftlogs, the game has never been more balanced. But people are so obsessed with being optimal in every situation and never being at an disadvantage that even the 3% difference is unbearable to some people.
Another argument is that Blizzard should keep the systems going into new expansions. If that was a good idea then in Shadowlands we would spend 90% of our time in our garrisons, with legendary ring from MoP, having artifact weapons with 2000 Concordance of Legionfall, Azerite Armor with 6 rings, 20 legendary essences, 8 corruption effects, legendary cloak, covenant abilities, souldbinds, crafted legendaries having 90 different passive effects and procs going of all the time and you become this death machine with 140% haste all the time.
I am exaggurating a bit, but you have to see that this is not a good solution. Borrowed power is the best annoying solution compared to the alternatives.
Also I feel more and more sympathy for the developers of the game. They spend 10 hours a day or so, underpaid under bad conditions working on systems they now they must change in the future anyway because feedback from the usual suspects dictates so, just to come home and trying to connect with the community and they read posts that they should be fired and don't care about the game. It's a miracle we even have a game to log into at this point.
I will stop there for now and apologize this was a bit long. I have a lot more to say about this and since I have basically offended half of the people that post here, I guess I will have the opportunity to adress more issues if this is turning out something people are willing to discuss.