On the RMT pet store

As Gundersson pointed out in the comments here, two posts ago, Blizzard earlier this month opened an RMT store selling minipets.

Gundersson mentioned having finally cancelled his account in response to this; that it was the last straw. So how do I feel about it?

I've never cared about minipets in this game; I view them as being almost entirely pointless. One or two of them (the Booty Bay parrots, primarily) might add what I would consider aesthetic flavour, perhaps, but very few of them.

More generally, it is also no particular secret that the bean counters are firmly in charge of the direction of World of Warcraft, these days. That probably became true at the time of the release of TBC, which is when the merger with Vivendi happened from memory, and is also when the original live team left the game.

That was also, I suspect, the point when Tom Chilton really took over, and we had the Arena as a consequence. There are a few people left who are possibly naive enough to believe that Ghostcrawler has some genuine control of things, but as Brigwyn has pointed out, in reality, GC isn't much more than a mouthpiece for Chilton, who became sufficiently hated by players that it was no longer really prudent for him to visit the forums directly. During TBC, I can actually remember Chilton having been issued with death threats on his answering machine, according to a forum post.

To be honest though, I'm at the point where I'm past caring about the suits running the game into the ground, myself. Yes, I know they're doing it, and yes, I know eventually they will probably succeed at finishing the job entirely; but for the time being, it is still possible for me to viably find things within the game that I enjoy doing, so I'm proceeding on that basis. The RMT pet store, then, is not going to cause me to quit.

Truth be told, though, it's felt as though the ground has been shrinking beneath my feet for a while now; 2.3 was when the rot truly started to set in.

I've very largely abandoned the Hunter as a class, at this point, but am, as I've written, in the process of discovering tanking and healing, and I suspect those two activities will keep me busy for some time yet.

I will likely only truly consider leaving when a) tanking is sufficiently damaged as to become inviable, and/or b) a substantially better alternative to WoW comes along, although I probably wouldn't move to that unless I knew a few of my readers at least (Rilgon, Pike, possibly Gundersson, Efri) were moving to it as well. There has always been a very vague, remote outside possibility of me moving to EverQuest, but that grows increasingly less likely as time goes by.