Warlords of Draenor‘s launch hasn’t exactly been ideal for Blizzard, as today is now day 4 of server issues, failed log-in attempts, and agonizing wait times for many of their paid subscribers worldwide. Some have decided to protest with their wallets, flooding the official forums with proof of their cancellations, but Reddit mod nitesmoke sent a message in an entirely different way–by taking down the official WoW subreddit until he was able to log-in to the game.
The r/WoW subreddit lands thousands of hits per day, and going dark captured the attention of Warcraft Community Rep Jonathan Brown, who disagreed with nitesmoke and felt this was akin to holding an entire community hostage. It also didn’t win him many friends over on Twitter, as the general consensus was that he was being a “whiny little shit” with a “take my ball and go home” mentality.
I can understand being upset with the game, especially as someone who’s had the Digital Deluxe version of Warlords of Draenor paid in full since early August. I’ve had 4 miserable days of waiting in queue, and the only way to vent my frustration has been to link screenshots of my ridiculous wait times on my Twitter account, but I do agree with Jonathan Brown on this one. The community shouldn’t be the ones to suffer.
Going dark did draw the attention of Blizzard though, and it was a ballsy thing for nitesmoke to do, but the subreddit was eventually brought back online with the following message from another mod, aphoenix:
“Blizzard was having issues allowing people to play the game that they have payed to play. As a form of consumer advocacy and protest, the subreddit was taken offline as a way to send a message to Blizzard that this wasn’t acceptable. The idea is simple: if one has no faith in a product, one of the simplest ways to show that is via protest. Protest is most useful if it has some kind of financial context to it. Being that we typically log a million hits per day, /r/wow has a significant claim as a fan website. “Going dark” in protest has worked for a variety of other protests, and it could work for this as well.”
However, in an odd turn of events, fans seemed to have lost faith in r/WoW and have instead rallied behind the newly created r/RealWoW in hopes that it’ll become its new official home.
Bradley Keene is the Executive Editor here at What’s Your Tag?, generally handling news, reviews, public relations, and our social media communications on Facebook and Twitter. He’s an aspiring video game journalist, Baltimore native, and an on again/off again FFXIV/WoW player that blasphemously favors consoles over PC. As a Marylander, he naturally puts Old Bay on everything, loves the Orioles, drives aggressively, and says “son” too much. Contact him by e-mail at the address above, or follow him on Twitter.
