I am, therefore I deserve.

If you’re a gamer, and are on Twitter, then you may have seen that a certain company by the name of “Blizzard” have started their closed beta for a certain game called “Overwatch”. Once again this has flagged up some “interesting” and unfortunately, unsavoury behaviours in the community.

Whenever the mighty Blizzard (and whatever your opinion of their games are, there’s no arguments that they are a behemoth), release a new game people go crazy, and rightly so. Nobody does polish better than the boys and girls in blue, even their beta’s are of a higher standard to other companies. As mentioned earlier, a few days ago they started their closed beta for their upcoming FPS game “Overwatch”. The best description I can give it after watching it for a little bit is that it’s Team Fortress 2 after about 15 espresso. It does look awesome!

Now I have nothing to base this on, but I do believe that Blizzard have a certain “technique” for who they choose in the first wave of beta invites. Firstly there’s the genuine testers who have a track record of reporting issues to Blizzard and secondly there are the more well-known blog posters and Twitch/YouTube streamers. For both sections you can understand why they choose these, with the first being pretty self-explanatory. For the second one it’s a mixture of reward for those streamers and easy/cheap publicity for Blizzard. The reason why I think their products are so “smooth” by the time they reach beta is that they realise the value of free publicity and increasing the demand before the supply is released just starts a snowball effect they can only be good for them.

Unfortunately this can breed the wrong behaviours and can also attract the wrong sort of people.

Chances are that the above person has been told that they would get into the Beta but not told when. Said person has taken it upon themselves to presume they will be given the right to be in the first wave. Here’s a message, just because you post gameplay videos on YouTube doesn’t mean that Blizzard will either want you in their first wave or, and here’s a novel thought, they are doing them in waves to make sure their servers can handle the load. Unfortunately this sense of entitlement in the gaming world is seen far too often nowadays and will only rise in my opinion. I also think that this sort of person is the type who will auto DM you on Twitter the second you follow them back (that’s for another rant though!)

Here’s the other type of “self-entitled gamers” that you see. The ones who pretend to speak for everyone when what they are trying to say is “I have more salt in my tears then the Dead Sea as I haven’t had an invite yet!”

It’s all me, me, me; and what people need to realise is that not one person is more entitled to early access then the next person, regardless of whether you stream, blog or send a carrier pigeon to Blizz HQ with a note written in emu blood. They will pick the people they need for their game at times when they need them, not when you want them too.