Wrath, in my honest opinion, was peak WoW. It had everything I could have wanted from the game at the time. Does it hold up as well today? Well… honestly, somewhat. I still get the itch to go play it here and there, and I’m often lamenting about losing my account with my original Wrath toons on it (AOL account, have tried to recover)
I don’t think many of the expansions have been as bad as people say. Shadowlands has so far been the weakest in my view, but even that had some fun in it for me. However short lived. Loved the first and final raids aesthetically and mechanically. BfA’s world content was a blast, even if its dungeons and raids kinda blew chunks. (And the systems tied to that world content were annoying to say the least)
Imho, SL, Bfa, WoD and Cata were WAY worst (with SL being the worst of all time, including on a poll that was done on the forums). I can’t say DF is perfect, because it’s far from it, but SL was just so bad, that I am actually having fun on this one. Not sure for how long, tho…
But the metacritic scores for Dragonflight are way higher than Shadowlands and BFA. So if we pretend like metacritic ratings mean anything (LOL) then I guess Dragonflight is pretty great…
People judge these things on very different scales. I see a lot of people saying this is their favorite expansion, I can’t really understand why since I would have to agree it is literally my least favorite and I’ve been around at the start of all of them, but the way I play is not the same as the way other people play so I can get that they would have a different opinion. For me, I don’t like the entirely random and haphazard plot on top of the total disconnect from from most things that make the game “Warcraft.” I had a similar issue with Shadowlands, but that at least did a deep dive into the history of some iconic characters. I would also agree that I enjoyed the dragon flying mechanics, for a few hours, and then it lost the novelty and now I’m just upset all of my mounts are useless for 6+ months.
Dragonflight to me feels like an expansion of side quests and unimportant characters. Shadowlands had a bad plot, with “twists” everyone saw coming years in advance, but it had a plot. BFA, Legion, and WoD all did it a lot better and felt a lot more like Warcraft.
From what I can tell the things people tend to complain about in these other expansions were the update cadence and the endgame “grind.” It was 8 months until the first major update in SL, I don’t think people have caught on yet that the first major update for DF is scheduled for ~7 months after release. The “borrowed power” grind is also one of the few things I’ve found interesting for the past few expansions, my only complaint is that they were nullified for the next expansion, the fact there is no such alternate power progression at all in DF seems terrible at this point, but I think many people are happy with that and would rather be able to play 20 alts without worrying about falling 5% behind in power.
Only if you filter out the “Preach quitting” first. That is, cry babies who want to attract attention to themselves by dramatically “quitting the game” when they have no real intention to do so.
Wild swings in difficulty from Wrath to Cata, and from early Cata to mid-Cata as they tried catering to a vocal hard core base but alienated millions of casual players who had joined in Wrath:
Tuning dungeons way higher than Wrath, even regular ones, which turned off a lot of casual players. Then instead of adjusting things so regular dungeons were less challenging and heroics were very challenging, they nerfed them all to the ground, which upset the more competitive players. In the middle of it all a senior developer puts out a condescending blog post that dismissed the complaints.
An unbalance in the amount of effort put into each faction that was backed by tons of real evidence that was of course dismissed.
Goblins got: A visually stunning starting zone, long intro quest, after which they had a quest chain with Thrall, the main protagonist of the expansion. At the completion of this they had an entire section of the main Horde capital, which exited onto a new levelling area for them, that had been reshaped to replicate the Horde symbol. To navigate this new zone they got a rocket tramway.
Worgen got: A visually stunning starting zone, and an intro quest that abruptly ends and the Worgen are deposited under a tree in an out of the way city that later burns down. No levelling zone, no rocket trains.
Horde get a long intro quest to the Twilight Highlands. Alliance get literally flung into TH and that’s it.
A dev posts during the uproar that they had started work on the Goblins first and run out of time. This is quickly removed. Another Dev makes a gaslighting blog post that more or less said that they were imagining the imbalance paid to one faction.
Cata marked the turning point where Dev to Player communication changed from creator to player, to corporation to consumer, and that’s taken away much of what used to make WoW successful. Where they could have been up front and admitted errors they chose to tell us we were imagining things. It cost them a lot.
