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!

This is a direct sequel to Corruption and Betrayal in a WoW Guild.

In 2012, I and Stormchick started the guild Stormchasers in World of Warcraft. Then the following year, Stormchick’s owner left the game and turned the guild over to me as Bichorak. I worked very hard over several years to build it up until it had hundreds of characters and had gained many guild achievements. One of the members that joined it later was named Rolltowin, a monk. He also worked very hard to help me and the others, so I generously rewarded him with promotions, until finally he was a high-ranking officer second only to me in authority over the guild. But it seems that was not enough for him. Not content to offer me helpful advice and suggestions to improve the guild, he often issued harsh personal criticism of my leadership decisions. Over time, these attacks eroded my self-confidence, and also by the fall of 2015 my work schedule was actually hindering my ability to manage the guild properly. Of course, the guild HAD grown too big for one person to handle, hence my appointing officers like Rolltowin and several others. I finally decided I needed a break from handling the guild so much, so I agreed to make Rolltowin the new guild master. I instead became HIS second in command.

Later, I quit the real life job I had been doing, but because things seemed to be going smoothly with the guild under Rolltowin’s leadership, I was content to leave him in charge. But everyone still knew I was a co-founder and earlier leader of the guild. Rolltowin seemed to resent that, because he continued to criticize me on many occasions whenever I did something he did not like, claiming I was breaking guild rules and abusing my power. But in fact he often did not clarify rules when he made them and so I was caught off guard when I did things the way I was used to doing them when I was guild leader. It was very frustrating!

Things came to a head on August 30 of this year, the same day the new WoW expansion Legion was launched. Nerevar, another officer of Stormchasers, abruptly left the guild saying he wanted to join some friends in another guild. Rolltowin was not online at the time, but I was, so in his absence, I did two things I thought would be done normally:

1. I removed Nerevar’s alts from the guild as well.
2. I scheduled a new guild officer election to replace him and even made a couple of nominations to help the process along. With the Legion expansion in full swing, I felt we needed to do this ASAP.

I assumed that if Rolltowin did not agree with my actions, he would simply countermand them later and tell us to wait. Instead, when he came online later he actually DEMOTED me from my officer status and made an issue of that in open guild chat, much to my shock and anger. He did allow the officer election to go forward, however.

It was incomprehensible to me that I as a co-founder and former guild master would be treated so badly by someone I considered a friend and loyal to the guild. After a final discussion with Rolltowin in which he stated that my demotion might be only temporary, but refused to clarify under what conditions I would regain my officer status, I concluded that he actually had no intention whatsoever of restoring that status and really wanted me out of the guild completely. So on September 14, I left Stormchasers and pulled all my alts from it too.Then I, along with others from Stormchasers and some strangers, formed a new guild, originally named Freedom Raiders but now titled Guardians of Lore.

After another member of Stormchasers moved from that guild to my new one, Rolltowin attacked me over it. I then put him on ignore.

A couple of nights later, Rolltowin denounced me in my former guild, proving he was NOT ignoring me at all and was out to ruin me.

I admit that I am far from perfect and have made some mistakes, but it seems to me the biggest mistake I ever made was listening to Rolltowin so much and allowing him to take over Stormchasers. From now on, I will never allow someone to take over a guild of mine unless I know I am leaving WoW completely, just as Stormchick did for me. I was naive and was taken advantage of and now I know better! If people do not like my leadership, they can just leave and form their own guild! I have done that twice so far in my WoW career and it is not as hard as it might seem at first glace.