That is the worse version of wow. Nobody wants to play that trash. What in the world is going on at the blizzmicrosolve headquarters?
Just terrible overall
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hope your life gets better buddy.
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I honestly think that was the start of WoWs downward trend.
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I love the Wotlk/Cata/MoP era of WoW the best, personally. Peak World of Warcraft! I’m absolutely stoked for cata, been waiting for cata since they first announced the classic project in 2018/2019.
At least we both have versions we like available to us - to each his own.
Mostly began in MoP. That’s when you really began to see Activisions garbo policies take hold.
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It was definitely the start of WoW’s downfall, though the idea that it’s the worst expansion ever seems a little misplaced. Or maybe the people who think that just never played Warlords of Draenor, lol. Now THAT is the worst expansion ever.
I played the most from vanilla up to MOP.
I always loved leveling, so CATA was refreshing with the world revamp and the new quests. And I could lvl with 2 new races with their own story.
Cant say it was a terrible expansion.
Cata started off very strong.
Dungeons were hard again and had fun mechanics.
Questing was great and seeing the old world redone might have been polarizing but for someone like me who had leveled dozens of times through through the old zones it was fun too have something new.
BWD, BoT and Firelands were great Raids with a nice difficulty spike for Heroic compared to Wrath.
I feel like Cata gets a bad wrap because of the last phase. Dragon Soul was pretty bad and lasted far too long.
WoD has its problems for sure, but it didn’t ruin the world like Cata, and Blackrock Foundry was great. Hellfire Citadel was at least superior to the travesty of Dragon Soul.
Plus it had Gladiator build for warrior which was some of the most fun I had playing one.
I’ll likely roll up a character with my friends, but unless there is some concrete evidence that Dragon Soul will receive substantial changes, I don’t plan to invest much time.
This is a really tough this or sets of things to pinpoint and say, “here’s the problem,” or even “these things lead to those things,” even after having just gone through it together again with WoW Classic 2019 → TBC Classic → Wrath Classic and now on the verge of Cata Classic, which even back in 2019 people would have thought was never going to happen.
I’d say that server transfers was one of the earliest, if not the earliest big thing that damaged WoW noticeably, and that “seemed” obvious to me going through WoW Classic 2019.
Of course even though we have large(ish) numbers of players to look at, potentially a somewhat meaningful data set (well we don’t but Blizzard might), there relatively small numbers of servers, and small numbers of large migrations or population shifts might not paint a very meaningful picture anyway. And, we don’t have much (or anything really) to compare that to.
Phase 2 on PVP servers in WoW Classic was a rude awakening for a lot of people that thought they did, and I suspect that some people may have been turned off of the game, or at least off from PVP servers from that experience, though I wouldn’t say it was a significant contributor to any downward trend.
During original TBC, I feel as though many Horde players hated Paladins, Paladins being on the Horde, and even Blood Elves in general, thinking they had no place on the Horde.
Flying, and an off-Azeroth world were also relatively big points of contention, and at least among people I knew then and knew of, a lot of people who loved WoW did not love TBC, and quit as a result. Of course back then, WoW’s population was still trending up, and so the community was also growing and changing.
There were some external cultural shifts.
Then the iPhone was introduced and world culture was forever changed to be constantly connected to the internet, and access to online screens became practically universal. Not to mention Internet access was starting to get a lot better, and would continue to such that some people would even move away from Desktops and Laptops in favor of using mobile devices.
According to some sources, Call of Duty Mobile has roughly 50-60 Million Players each month vs 75-150 thousand on PC.
It’s hard to say what changed within WoW. Cata seemed to have some mixed reception. I really enjoyed the dungeons and first phase of raid content. There seemed to be a lot to do, and it was fun, but iirc a lot of people went to play Skyrim. I didn’t really understand why they’d want to play it over playing a game with other people, but…
Anyway, I’m having a blast with SoD, and I think if they hype up Arenas/RBGs in Cata and encourage more people to participate in that content, I’ll probably really enjoy it as well. I met some great people and had some great times in Arenas in Wrath, and would love to see that community grow, whereas it felt like it was continually shrinking instead.
