Blizzard advocating toxicity is something that sounds quite surprising for many of us. Blizzard Entertainment is well known in the gaming scene for their stance against the ever-looming dangers of toxicity in their gaming communities. Aka – people being “mean” to other players or not very welcoming to newer players.

In fact, they have one of the best customer-service friendly approaches out there with many of their games, especially Overwatch and how they run that whole league. Yet, with the upcoming release of World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth – Blizzard seems to have taken a slightly different approach.

Blizzard has been running commercials to advertise Battle for Azeroth, and in them they are emphasizing the faction split between the player base like never seen before. Although the commercials are quite entertaining, they are definitely emphasizing faction pride to the player base.

Blizzard advocating toxicity isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it comes to a game relating to war since we have seen that in previous commercials such as with the mountain dew gamer fuel promotion. Why is the community in such an uproar over this expansion and the marketing involved compared with others?

Simple. Players are far more emotionally invested in these advertisements as a result of the most recent patches that made players directly involved in the defense or assault on a civilian population using extreme warfare methods. This has brought out a moral conundrum for many players who have seen both factions as being good/evil. Let’s look at what started this fun.

Blizzard Advocating Toxicity – Patch 8.0 – What Went Down

Players were greeted with an epic intro earlier this year that had gotten the fan base quite hyped for the upcoming Battle for Azeroth expansion. Players knew some crazy stuff would be going down near the end of Legion, but were hardly prepared for what Blizzard seemed to have in store.

There has been a lot of debate as to the causes, reasons, different motivations and so on relating to these events within the World of Warcraft. There have even been books written around these events to give players further insight. That insight just added more fuel to the fire, no pun intended on that one.

The long-awaited “Pre-Expansion Patch” that came out with 8.0 was the start of something very interesting in the world of Azeroth because it was unlike anything we have seen before. Aside from adding massive game-changing aspects to almost every class, stat squishes, some nerfs, pvp changes, war mode, and other usual pre-expansion stuff, it began an important quest line. A quest line that would lead into the Battle for Azeroth itself.

This quest line involves helping Warchief Sylvanas Windrunner and results in the destroying of an entire city, killing innocents, and so on, for the Horde faction anyway. The Alliance faction of the community sees themselves as the good guys. If the Alpha and Beta are any indications, things are only going to ramp up more in the upcoming weeks.

The result of that quest line has driven a huge wedge into the World of Warcraft community and has flooded into the social media realms as well. Within hours of the burning of Teldrassil, forums were on fire with Alliance players calling those of the Horde faction monsters if they still supported their faction after these atrocities.

The concept of morality, honor, and what-not that we live by in our actual lives is being thrown around at over 50% or more of the player population, for simply enjoying a quality storyline. It is unlike any other expansion release that we have previously seen for World of Warcraft since the main theme behind this expansion is fighting against the other faction.

If Blizzard’s goal is to stoke the fires of the rivalry between factions, they have done an amazing job so far. There is even a factional split amongst the Horde community itself where they support a different racial leader, Saurfang because the actions that were taken by Sylvanas Windrunner were not deemed honorable.

Blizzard Advocating Toxicity Conclusion

This marketing campaign has definitely been interesting and may have been intensified because of the 2017/2018 presidential elections in the USA – but much of the same speech we saw on social media surrounding that event has now transferred into the WoW universe.

Whether that was the intention of Blizzard or not is unknown, but one thing for sure is people are amped. The enthusiasm for Battle for Azeroth is electric and regardless of the community drama – people are very excited.

Blizzard advocating toxicity is strange for a company who has embraced an overall welcoming gaming community for many of its titles, but it is also potentially genius, especially for esports. People are more invested in this expansion than ever before, and Player vs Player has had dwindling numbers for years.

With the increase in excitement and the faction war feud bubbling over – this could be the sign we have been waiting for to see World of Warcraft PvP make a glorious return to the esports competitive scene. Only time will tell and it will definitely be worth keeping an eye on World of Warcraft in the next few weeks. It will get interesting!