Something I’ve been seeing more of is people going back and lvling in warlords and going “you know what this expansion wasn’t so bad”
It’s like everyone forgot that what made that expansion bad was a huuuuuge content drought.
The lvling experience in every WoW expansion is good. There’s really little to hate. But plz remember content droughts takes points off how good an expansion was.
It’s like ordering a three course meal and only getting the appetizer. Sure if that appetizer is amazing you would say it was a good restaurant but without the other two meals it was still a bad experience.
WoD was bad and so is shadowlands, tbh nothing they do will revert this long drought. This doesn’t mean the game wasn’t fun when the first patch came out. It doesn’t mean all the cool customization stuff and transmog and mounts don’t give some people more to do. It just means they let the game go on too long in between patches that people became upset and either left or stopped playing as much. This is bad.
I blame the systems that reward us for playing less. Like the eye of the jailer nonsense. And if the vault rewarded us all the pieces we unlocked and not just one of them, I’d be playing more on each character and I’d be playing more characters.
WoD took a hit so we could have artifact power and randomized legendaries. Shadowlands took a hit for seemingly no reason and Blizzard used the kungflu as an excuse.
What a lot of people don’t realize is a lot of the systems we get now like Artifact Weapons and such were being developed early on and in some cases before WoD launched .
People keep saying we got all of this stuff because WoD lacked content . When in reality it was more likely that WoD lacked content because Blizz was to focused on creating these systems then on the content of WoD itself.
From purely the perspective of leveling, WoD was amazing. It was after that things fell apart quickly.
Easy to see how people who only passed through could think it wasn’t so bad.
Isn’t the thing about these borrowed power systems that they are really problems created by Blizz so that they can provide the solution - which only comes by playing a substantial amount.
I shouldn’t single out Blizz as isn’t this just a part of modern game design? Silly us, we think they are there to make a fun game, but aren’t they there to maximize shareholder value?
I tend to believe this. I imagine the pitch to the shareholders was something like:
“Hey guys, all we gotta do is starve 1 expansion while we get these systems off the ground, and after that we’ll have infinite grinds in place that can be reskinned over and over again forever which means infinite sub money!!1!!1!”
For the guilds I was in, at the time, it wasn’t the leveling content or the content “drought” that killed WoD. People actually loved leveling. The Garrison was meh - I want to see people, but I’m stuck here doing Garrison stuff because it is what it is…
People checked out because about 6 months in they were at level cap and they were kinda done fiddling with their Garrison… Then they realized the path forward was to get into the current raid or go hardcore solo with Garrison stuff. If you were social and traded prof stuff and did casual old content with your guild mates there wasn’t much for you in WoTLK.
That was when the casual social people starting leaving in droves. At least from my experience. These were the glue people that hung out in voice comms while traveling around the world farming mats and doing dailies. Well, no need to travel and farm mats, everything was in your Garrison! Why bother to go out in the world? No one was there, they were all in their Garrisons.
WoD was the expansion that poured acid all over the ties that bind for social/casual WoW players…