The title is:
Blizzard/World of Warcraft lose 1.1 million subscribers

That is a news story.

If you look back at our history, you’ll see that World of Warcraft has gotten a little bit of hate from us here at FleshEatingZipper, both in written articles and in our podcast.

Statement

this isn’t because it is a bad game or because Blizzard’s a bad company or anything like that.

Declarative opinion

No, we aren’t so picky as all that.

It all boils down to direction…Read on for more.
Yes, it is all about direction – the direction the game has gone in
the last couple of years and the direction the devs seem obsessed in
forcing the player to go.

Statement

I’ve ranted before about Blizzard forcing gear score down people’s
throats and how they’ve dumbed the game down to the point where the back
tire of my motorcycle is just as capable of playing an end-game raider
as any person is, and how sad it is that they have ditched the entire
concept of community, the need for guilds and communication and
cooperation and teamwork and how they’ve turned the whole thing in to
one long grind, accentuated by the voices of young teens calling you a
n00bfaggot because your ever-precious gear score is 1 point below theirs
and you can’t crank out 1.21 jiggadamage per second like their 8 year
old sister can.

Statement

Reports have indicated that World of Warcraft had lost as many as 1.1
million subscribers in the six months after the release of Cataclysm –
that’s 10 percent of their total player-base – and that they continue to
hemorrhage players at a frightful rate, despite a limited “free to
play” model, free trials, and new content being pushed out to players on
a regular basis.

Statement

Did Blizzard’s own arrogance get the better of them? It is certainly
possible. 

Declarative opinion

It has never been a secret that many promises made by Blizzard
have been fulfilled, just as it is no secret that they favor certain
play-styles and character classes. Rather than allow players to play the
way they want, Blizzard has spent an inordinate amount of time forcing
players to play the way someone there envisioned it at some point.
I can’t help but wonder if some internal memo was sent out by a
big-wig at Blizzard, a few years ago – “I’m sick and tired of seeing
these players working together and devising strategies to get ahead in
raids while my button-mashing, anti-social nephew can’t get the best
gear in the game! From now on, every fight is a DPS race and every boss
drops epic gear and if you even dream about incorporating strategy into a
raid, you’d better wake up and hand in your resignation! Also, we are
doing away with the need for guilds because little Stevie can’t go 5
minutes without calling someone a pole-smoking douchebag and he keeps
getting gkicked. Make it so they can raid by just clicking a button or
you’re all fired!”.
Statement

That’s probably not what actually happened but it sure felt like it.

Declarative

When Blizzard decided to strip all of the individuality out of the game,
making it so both factions had access to the same classes and there was
no need for strategy or teamwork or leadership or communication, the
whole thing started to fall apart. They got some players back with talk
of Nefarian, in Cataclysm but that was a bust and pissed a lot of people
off and now they seek to placate users with yet another expansion,
“Mists of Pandaria” which will feature kung fu pandas and a couple more
raid bosses.

Statement

yay…

Declarative

Meanwhile, Bobby Kotick yammers on about how he isn’t even slightly concerned about losing players to EA/BioWare
and their very soon to be released MMO Star Wars : The Old Republic but
that’s already seen nearly a million pre-orders and the hype train
hasn’t even started rolling yet.You see, Bobby is too busy focusing on
how to double the price of games to think about anything as pedestrian as his golden goose losing all its eggs.

oops…

Declarative

One has to wonder when these people are going to learn…

Question

one also has
to hope that other companies won’t repeat Blizzard’s mistakes and end us
all up with nothing to do but watch television. Blah, television.

Declarative Opinion

There a difference when presenting a statement and an opinion.  For example:

The president is bad at his job.
or
I think, the president is bad at his job.

By adding the qualifier, I think  It turned the statement into my opinion.  I know FEZ is a little opinionated but this is a news story, not a review or critique.  You break traditional journalistic reporting by opinionating the story.  That why it is so much more important to add those qualifiers that it is your opinion, and not statements of facts.

As for defense, it is also funny that people think we have limitless time to debate our opinion vs. theirs. We have research to do, games to play, movies to watch, hardware to test, videos to compile, articles to write, advertisers to deal with, PR departments to talk to, broken code to clean up, graphics to create, emails to answer, a forum to administer, comments to moderate, a business to deal with and then, at some point, we have to sleep.

Forgive me for not writing a 15,000 word manifesto detailing why my personal opinion and the opinions of dozens of former WoW players I know in the real world are divergent from those of someone who got offended when they read my opinion.

You have yours, too. Everyone does. I’m sure you don’t have limitless time to defend yours to the internet, either.

Remember that it’s an opinion and just because someone disagrees doesn’t mean it stops being just that.

Gonna run along now…By all means keep reading, though. You may just find that you agree with some of my opinions.