This month, I ended my subscription to World of Warcraft (WoW), the MMORPG I’d been playing for nearly seven years (I started my playing back in August of 2011). There were several reasons for this critical decision.

1. The toxic nature of the WoW community.  I have already documented how I was humiliated and betrayed by people I trusted in guilds I was a member of. The first story is HERE and the second is HERE. In addition to that, I was swindled out of a lot of money by a female WoW player I was in love with and after she got the money I sent her (she claimed she needed it to go to school so she could get better employment), she turned on me and broke my heart with lies and incredible trickery. Her name is Heather Schneider and she lives in San Antonio, Texas.
2. My dislike for the Warlords of Draenor (WoD) expansion.  Compared to the Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria expansions, which I loved, WoD was a disappointment, with not nearly as much content as any of the previous expansions had. Because of this, I considered leaving WoW then. My critical review and commentary of WoD is here on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifyBH7SYZjQ
3. My falling in love with Overwatch.  It is the height of irony that instead of an MMORPG by a rival company, it was a completely different game by the SAME company, Blizzard, that killed my obsession with playing WoW! In fact, before I started with Overwatch, I HATED most First Person Shooter games because they seemed to be all about blowing away nameless enemy targets with no regard for them as people. By contrast, Overwatch features battles between characters that seem to have real personalities, and the lore of the game actually makes you care about what happens to some of them, while hating some of the others. I even fell in love with one character in particular: Mei! Watch this video to get an idea of why:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tjcm_kI0n0
4. Hearing about the WoW expansion to come, Battle for Azeroth (BfA).  Legion, the expansion that came after WoD, more than made up for that last expansion’s deficiencies. I really wanted Legion to be the final expansion, so the WoW storyline would end on a high note. As soon as I heard that instead we were going to have an expansion after Legion focused once again on all out war between the Alliance and the Horde, I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had already decided that if Blizzard ever put out another expansion that made me feel as bad as WoD did, I’d quit WoW. I just never imagined I’d feel so bad about one before it was to even be released!
5. Trying the new expansion on beta. This was the final straw for me! I was one of the players selected to do beta testing on BfA, and it seemed like a great honor. Imagine my profound disappointment when I started playing it and found the content not only extremely buggy, but actually UNFINISHED! It felt more like an ALPHA build rather than a beta that was almost ready for release. I felt even worse when I learned that Blizzard had already set a date for the expansion’s release: August 14, 2018, only a few months away! What were they thinking?!

And so, I made the decision in May of this year to cancel my subscription in WoW and just walk away rather than endure what I feel will be a disaster waiting to happen.

Thankfully, Overwatch does not have a subscription; I just had to make a single payment to unlock everything I needed to play the game. There is no “pay to win with microtransactions” scam that some video games are known for (I’m looking at you, EA!). There are no expansions to buy; all players automatically get new maps and characters as they are released. And there are an incredible variety of characters, game modes, and other options one can choose freely from and you constantly get more from loot boxes the more you play. Even the drops from those loot boxes are strictly cosmetic; you never need to add anything to be a winner at the game. So I know now which game I will be playing for years to come!