2013 was the year in which I lost a lot of respect for Blizzard personally. I'd always defended them, I loved Blizzard games and still do, but in one swift action they showed themselves up and I tend to view everything they do with a little suspicion ever since.

What happened was they announced a big discount in character services in World of Warcraft, 50% off everything. Realm transfers, faction changes, etc. It was during a period where there were lots of dying realms as the playerbase population dwindled and people were rerolling or going to higher population servers en masse. People were crying out for some kind of solution.

I know people which took them up on the discount as an opportunity to get off their dead realm, people which couldn't afford to do it at full price and to be honest who instantly regretted it anyway - the price was still ridiculous if you had multiple characters.

Some people were suspicious something was up from the start, as it was very rare to see discounts to services like that let alone such deep discounts. One week later they announced new tech to merge servers in order to bring life back to dead realms, the connected realms which we see in the game today.

They'd been hinting at looking into the problem for a while to be fair, but many people thought the discounted realm transfers were linked to what they were talking about.

Connected realms were a great idea which overall vastly improved the quality of the game for many players but I'll still always remember that one week before they announced it. That final cashgrab was disgusting and in my mind the point at which Blizzard showed how much they respect the users of their products.