There is a constant debate in the World of Warcraft fan space that you have no doubt seen at this point, but it is one that has been going for quite some time. It is an ongoing turf war between the people who exclusively play WoW Classic as the antediluvian, unsullied version of the game and basically everyone else, an ongoing battle to prove that WoW Classic is objectively the best version of the title and that it is single-handedly maintaining Blizzard’s fortunes.

Much of this battle rests upon trying to determine how many subscribers are there for WoW Classic, and that requires a great deal of effort because Blizzard does not release subscriber numbers and went to great lengths to obfuscate them both before and after Microsoft snurched it up. As such, this requires assumptions being made first about the total number of players in any version of the game and what percent of the playerbase is exclusively playing one version, and it devolves into a swamp really quickly. But it shouldn’t because I am going to reveal the exact subscriber number that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt right now. The number of people who are subscribed to WoW Classic is… zero.

Because that’s not a subscription option.

Let me be clear: The point I am making here is not that there is no one who is loading up the launcher and only playing WoW Classic. I am sure that there is some percentage of people who only play that version, just as I am sure that there is some percentage playing only the retail game, people who play both but tend to play one more than the other, so on and so forth. And I have no doubt that Blizzard itself has access to all of those data any time it wants to look that up, just as I have no doubt that Blizzard could separate subscription options if leadership wanted to.

But it does not want to. The people who are making the decisions about WoW on a franchise level are the same people for both branches of the game and have been for years. As far as Blizzard is concerned in terms of marketing and development, WoW and WoW Classic are not competing products; they’re the same product. Every single press release and outward statement backs this up. These are just split branches of the same game, not two different things. WoW Classic and its now-many iterations are effectively progression servers. The goal with WoW Classic is not some return to a mythical state of the past; it’s to get $15 every month from people who otherwise might stop subscribing.

And all of that is fine… until you pretend that’s not the case.

My target here is not Blizzard; it’s the players who have convinced themselves that there is not just daylight but a meaningful and deep-seated difference between what is very visibly the same thing on a corporate level. It’s not because it’s wrong for someone to say, “I don’t want to support the retail game.” I think that’s kind of ridiculous, but it’s not wrong to say it. But the right course of action then isn’t to subscribe and only play WoW Classic; it’s to not play the game at all.

I had a friend who was very vocally angry to me, many times, about the fact that Overwatch 2 abandoned the sequel’s PvE content, all while still logging into the game every night. And I pointed out to him that Blizzard did not care if he was mad about it because as far as he was concerned, the company’s decision to cut PvE on the basis of getting exactly the same number of players was correct. He was still playing the game just as much as ever.

Companies do not stop to see whether your subscription fee has a frowny face attached to it before cashing your check. It spends the same either way. And it was, as I said to him at the time, perfectly valid for him to keep playing the game, but it was kinda at odds with what he said he wanted to do. Either you stop playing and awarding the game time and money, or you admit that you care more about keeping the game around than you do about the thing you’re mad at.

And to be clear, I’m not excluding myself from this; I have talked about how you have to deal with being aware that people may have suffered to make a game and how that can affect your enjoyment. I really enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 when I actually played it, but I also recognize that means that I have to grapple with some of my opinions regarding CD Projekt Red and how it has handled both development and its public persona.

You know Gachapwned, the limited series I’m writing now and really enjoying working on? I started that off with two columns about how gacha mechanics are predatory, and I have more to write on that same topic. And several of these games are ones I really enjoy. At the time of this writing, I am excited to play more of Honkai Star Rail’s most recent update. I’m not saying that the predatory stuff is irrelevant; I’m saying that I have to be aware of the fact that I am clearly willing to still play the game.

We all have to be honest with ourselves about what we’re willing to support and what we aren’t.

One oft-repeated statement that’s accepted as a truism is that boycotts do not work. In the abstract, this is mostly true, but it also kind of misses that fact that a single attempt to get everyone to back away from something by drumming up a cause rarely works. But a longer-term process does tend to work.

And my point here is not to say that we should, say, boycott Overwatch 2 to force Blizzard to add the PvE components into the game. That ship has sailed. Rather, it’s to point out that if you are not all right with the omission, you should be cognizant of what your continued support of the game sends. You have to decide what you are willing to accept, what you see as negotiable or not.

But more than that, we have to stop creating divisions that don’t actually exist. We have to stop pretending that there are some grand, fundamental distinctions between products that the companies running them do not see. We have to stop acting as if we can offset material support by refusing to acknowledge the downsides of our favorite games, as if we can continue to support whatever we like without acknowledging the message our actions actually send.

It’s complicated, sure. It is complicated to look at a game you like with an aspect that really upsets you and try to figure out where the limits lie, how much of the game is totally fine by your standards and how much isn’t, and what you’re going to do about it – especially when the answer is potentially nothing. No one is claiming it’s not complicated.

Yet it doesn’t become not complicated if you insist that you’re subscribed to something that you aren’t and that you’re sending a message you aren’t to people who aren’t listening. Awareness and honesty are difficult, sure, but they’re way better than being an obvious stooge.

Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.