#0 - Feb. 17, 2009, 1:54 a.m.
Blizzard Entertainment produced a game called World of Warcraft, which I'm sure you have heard of since they have over 11 million subscribers and is the most populous online game in existence by far.
Recently the company released an achievement based system which required players to complete quests and storylines in order to receive special rare items in the game. Failing any of these achievements requires you to wait an entire year before you can reaccomplish them.
One of the recent achievement storylines had to do with what they call "Love is in the Air" which is a direct marketing ploy based off the recent Valentines Day holiday.
World of Warcraft and every online forum which deals with it are abuzz with problems with the achievement system and Blizzard Entertainments attempts to string out players in endless quests and storylines by manipulating the quests with Random Number Generators which require them to log on hour after hour in order to complete each achievement.
This achievement called "Be Mine" is utterly simplistic in nature but completely annoying to a majority of its player base who were unable to complete it because of implied problems with the Randomness in which the candies which you had to get dropped.
In order to complete the achievement you had to log in once every hour in order to get a random chance to get the bag when you completed the quest. Also included in that random chance were supposedly "rare" items which would also drop in place of the bag of candy. Many players complained in the forums about getting more "rare" items than the "common" bags of candy which Blizzard stated was "working as intended"
In order to shut up the player base and attempt to protect their "image" they have been censoring the multitude of complaints on their forums by deleting the posts instead of responding to them. The few responses they have given were always saying that the drop rates were fair, that it was initially kind of low so they fixed it and everything should be working as intended now. Well there have been numerous posts indicating this isn't true as rare items were still dropping on greater occasion than the common bags of candy.
It may seem sort of stupid to you, not sure how much of a fan you might be of the online gaming community but this is a huge hit for the World of Warcraft player base, and we are talking 11 million people worldwide.
Would it be possible for you to have someone do some investigating into the facts behind this story and possibly print something up? I'm sure Blizzard Entertainment would find it kinda hard to censor the mainstream news media like they have been their own forums.
Thankyou for your time.
Starting off with the Chicago Sun-Times...and will keep going till we see some actual customer service from Blizzard Entertainment fixing this fiasco of an achievement.
Bliz needs to realize the customer is always right, especially when it costs them very little to fix the problem.
