Judging on their actions, what parts of the game do you think the devs regret most? In my mind:
Adding new professions. Inscription, and archeology could vanish tomorrow and few would mourn their loss.
Garrisons. Not that they existed, but that they went too far (shipyards) at the cost of the rest of the game.
Flying. I think this is something a few influential peoplehate, and that’s why we see petty attempts to stifle it, like in Zereth Mortis, but most aren’t that troubled by it.
So many lore characters killed off in Legion. They’ve shown an inability to move on from the death of major lore characters and keep awkwardly bringing them back.
The Warlords intro. It was fun to play through, but from a story perspective we ended the threat to Azeroth and killed half of these WoW legends in the first hour or so, and totally deflated any sense of threat to our homes.
Pandaria content drought. I never saw so many people leave and not come back.
To an extent, I think the powers that be regret opening the door to the classic craze. Although quite a few people have enjoyed it, I don’t get the feeling that they expected it to work.
It’s a nice side feature to do in between the usual treadmill but it also requires upkeep. Given it’s absence, I think they regret it being in the game.
I actually think this was their best decision to date. The amount of people playing classic like crazy is amazing for the health or retail, because they can compare metrics for different classes, specs, dungeons, raids, pvp, professions etc and find exactly how and why people are populating aspects of classic and then improve that area in retail.
It really is win/win for everyone. Hopefully we can get retail to feel more like classic did but with modern creature comforts and find a happy balance of rewarding gameplay and challenge.
There’s a reason people started over on Vanilla, TBC and Woltk private servers for nearly a decade.
I don’t think so. I think the real purpose of classic was to prove that if only there hadn’t been all those qol changes, if only they hadn’t catered to casuals to get more people playing (which was the reason the game really took off), that the game would have been bigger and better, that it should have been the most hardcore game right from the start. That making cata dungeons harder and healers weaker was exactly what was needed to teach those fun-loving casuals a lesson in humility.
When you decide to teach your customer base a lesson in humility, you have already lost.
Killing Voljin at the beginning of legion. Give him this arc in the previous expansion just to basically throw him away. Okay maybe I’m still salty. Sue me lol
I would say screwing with the player base during WOD and the flying debacle little did they expect such a backlash from players over flight along with many quitting never to return I bet it stings everytime why we never got flight the way it was before.
I’ve noticed a lot of the devs’ regrets mentioned by the OP and in comments coincide with systems the devs just completely gave up on. Tough to tell if those are things they regret introducing (not sure many of the staff would even have been around for the introduction of flying, archaeology, inscription, etc) or might regret they’re not allowed to improve on.
I mean, I really do wonder what was cut due to time restraints and costs or cut because it was something the devs truly believed had run its course or no longer worked. Garrisons are a regret, I would think, because they bit off more than they could chew; they announced buildings for all types of races and settled for Human and Orc and the option to racially change guards. Doesn’t seem like what we got is what they envisioned.