My opinion was that their workplace was already on a skeleton crew when the legal issues hit the fan, due to waves of layoffs intended to boost short term profits.
Remember how they were already behind long before the expansion already hit, and couldn’t even decide on realistic release date? I figure work absolutely ground to a halt as they lost employees and have been having increasing difficulty hiring new ones, not to mention the extended training period before those new employees would reach full productivity.
That’s why there has been so little real content released. And now they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to remove annoyances people have been saying were going to be problematic since the beta, while being unable to change the major problems with the expansion because they intentionally designed it so they couldn’t be changed. Ion wasn’t kidding when he later admitted there was no ripcord.
Agreed, I won’t redo any covenant campaigns. I have an alt I’m leveling to 60 now with Threads of Fate, and I’ll just put ilvl 200 Korthia gear on him and park him until skips are available.
It’s that, but it’s also just re-doing stuff from expansion to expansion.
Like I’d posted earlier, I’m relatively new to WoW. Started in Legion. Thought it was incredibly cool. Huge world, all sorts of side things to do. I thought, here’s a game I can play forever and never get bored.
And here I am, bored.
I didn’t realize that each expansion is really just a retread of the one before. Legion: Hey! Here’s a cool artifact weapon to focus on! BfA: Ok, your artifact weapon crapped out, but Hey! Here’s a cool necklace thing to focus on! Shadowlands: Ok, your necklace thing crapped out, but Hey! Here’s a hodgepodge of trinket-y things to focus on!
And the currency… Azerite is now Anima. Manapearls are now Catalogued Research.
It’s all so shallow and pointless.
Is that how WoW has always been? Was Wrath of the Lich King just a retread of Burning Crusade? With a new name for currency and a new shiny thing to distract you from the old shiny thing?
I think the questing is going down in quality, or in relevance to the player experience. The pattern wod-BfA was that players would gush about the leveling experience, then look for all kinds of ways to avoid repeating it on their alts.
But in the forums when Shadowlands was released, the complaints about the questing started immediately. It makes sense that less interesting questing would make players try to avoid it even more.
And I say this as a player who started at the end of MoP. I marvel at all the questing I did to level my army of alts. I repeated favorite zones many times. And now I avoid it like the plague. All sense of progression is gone.
I understand that. While I did enjoy bastion and revendreth… I did not want to go through ardenweald and maldraxxus because it was all just… not worthy of a repeat. They weren’t bad, but just wasn’t up to where I consider the quests in bastion and revendreth to be. Even the maw was only a 1 time thing for me. The first time was cool. The second time I did it to see if I missed anything note worthy anywhere in the environment. After that… I didn’t want to bother with it.
It doesn’t give me the same intrigue or interest that I still have with legions intro quest on the broken shore. Or the hyjal starting zone in cataclysm. I would even gladly do the individual zone quests in zuldazar again because they were all great, but I refuse to do the war campaign.
Tbh, even I can’t even put my finger on why I just don’t care anymore. I do enjoy the Kyrian and venthyr campaign a lot, but find necrolords and to some extent the night fae kind of not up to par.
No, in my experience it was not always this way. The game has always had gear and rep grinds, but generally each expansion added something new and unique. It’s only been BfA and Shadowlands that have basically been complete rehashes with nothing really innovative. Hopefully the next expansion will introduce something new.
This is precisely why I’m so happy they’re making the cov swap much easier for next patch. I did Revendreth, Mal, and NF already on 3 different characters… and I Just don’t have the drive to level another alt to get through the Kyrian line.
Happy I can just swap my main to it (and so I can get those neat dark wings).
Ardenweald is my favorite of the 4 zones. On the other hand, I can’t stand Revendreth.
I don’t bring this up to pick a fight with you - it’s OK that we disagree. But the point I’m raising is that in Shadowlands, the level up experience literally makes you do all 4 zones (unless you do threads of fate). At least in Legion and BfA, you could pick one or two zones and mostly ignore the rest. I hated being funneled into such a linear questing experience, and interacting with people I can’t stand to be around.
“At least in Legion and BfA, you could pick one or two zones and mostly ignore the rest. I hated being funneled into such a linear questing experience, and interacting with people I can’t stand to be around.”
Totally agree - I missed having a choice of which zone to level in. I only did the regular questing on one character and did threads of fate on all the rest. It’s no fun having to do the exact same zones in the same order every time.
