Everyone freaking out about DF, calm down. We have a fantastic reason to be hopeful!

Community General Discussion
21

I didn’t say they were. I said players, and Alpha testing is where you test the systems that have been put in place. Granted, you could be correct and stuff, but I don’t think they’d be willing to actually change talents during beta, or spots in the tree, though again I could be wrong with that. Either way, the alpha or beta testing where you get to test out the systems of the game plus talents and everything else to go along with it.

People did test out Alphas for all 3 xpacs: SLands, Legion and BFA. They told them the Legion artifacts were cool, the BFA azerite stuff was meh and not fun, and then the Covenants systems in SLands was gonna be a big fail. Blizz did not listen to feedback for BFA nor SLands, and it flopped.

They need to suck it up and then come out with a very big winner, which would be DF, if they got everything correct or mostly correct.

I agree fully with you, it makes more sense to have a higher and better quality alpha and beta testing period, while also listening to the actual feedback you’re getting and implementing changes.

WoD wasn’t the worst expansion, in terms of anything except content drought. That’s mainly because there wasn’t mythic+ or anything to occupy peoples’ time with. You got on, and within an hour of each toon you had done your entire weeks worth of things to do except raiding or PvP. This is why everyone complained about the content drought and being bored.

Other than that, WoD was actually good. The raids were very good, especially Blackrock Foundry, as that is and has been one of the best raids to date, easily top 5 of all time.

PvP was actually in a pretty good spot for most classes and specs, and there wasn’t some upgrade gear 18 levels.

Dungeons were stale because the only thing you could do was regular mythic dungeons each week per toon. That’s where the hour of content per toon per week came in that everyone could be done on Tuesday and be finished for the rest of the week other than raiding.

As for story, Idk bout that so no comment there. I never pay attention to the story lines, only the rewards. If it’s good enough of a reward, I’ll camp my guild, even.

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22

Yet another person not understanding that Microsoft has no sway on anything Dragonflight related. That all expansions regardless of quality see massive initial growth followed by player loss. That WoW is still extremely profitable even in its worst state.

The Microsoft acquisition didn’t change squat. Not yet. All of this change with the team finally listening to the players again is directly attributed to the lawsuits. Direct correlation. The remaining team members are finally able to “breathe” a little from the hellscape that was their work life so the game is following that shift. The lawsuits also tanked the stock price allowing Microsoft the room to step in and buy ABK. Wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

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23

Clearly you didn’t play WoD.

Remember how Blizzard said that we’d get Bladespire Citadel and Karabor for faction capitals at Blizzcon? What happened to those… oh, yeah, we didn’t get them. They were cut because the expansion was rushed. Hmm, what about the Grimrail Line and the original version of Gorgrond which was supposed to be very industrial rather than a war between rock and plant minions? Oh, that was cut too?

Garrisons being able to be placed in any zone? Cut.
The Worgen quest chain that focused around the Botani? Cut.
Orgrim Doomhammer’s storyline that was going to be focal to the Horde? Cut.
Farahlon and the Ogre Continent? Cut.
The Shattrath raid and all its associated content? Cut.

All of these things were mentioned as being in the game at Blizzcon and some of them were even in the game in alpha testing (Gorgrond and the Grimrail Line, the Worgen quest chain and Farahlon were in alpha).

A decent end-game was also completely missing. Mists of Pandaria had multiple daily quests you could do per day, attached to various factions so you could easily get reputation and earn some decent rewards. Where as Warlords of Draenor added reputations as an afterthought, didn’t have large numbers of daily quests and the ones they did have required grinding a bar. Always grinding a bar. Never anything else. Go to location X, grind a bar, get apexis crystals, job done.

Oh and if you wanted to get reputation? Well I hope you like grinding for 5 reputation points per kill like in vanilla, because that type of reputation grinding returned when no one asked for it.

And who can forget the debacle with flying. Are we getting flying? Are we not? Yes, no, yes, no. Blizzard couldn’t make up their minds and when they finally did give it to us, it was attached to Pathfinder, which has improved in the expansions since then but the WoD version of it was almost universally despised, especially the forced treasure gathering portion of part 1 and the rep grinds.

The only redeemable parts of WoD was the PvP (although Ashran was constantly called Trashran for a reason) and the raiding, that’s it. Mythic difficulty dungeons were a breath of fresh air after constantly breathing in stale smoke for most of the expansion, but that was too little too late.

Now let’s compare that to Shadowlands.

Everything that Blizzard promised we’d get in Shadowlands at Blizzcon, we got. Torghast, while horrible at launch due to design iterations, was there, all the zones were there, conduits and covenants were fully implemented, even though players hated being forced to stay in one and being limited on how they could change conduits.

There was a very good amount of end-game content, almost too much as you could easily spend an entire day playing the game and still not have done all the available content. Reputations were easy to farm and had decent rewards, we got flying early in the expansion compared to previous expansions and overall the expansion was okay. It was not their best, but they delivered what they said they were going to.

Did we end up losing content? Yes, we did. But we were never told about what that content would be before we lost it and there was a very good reason for us not getting that content, what with the pandemic and the lawsuit wreaking havoc on the company. It still sucked to lose that content mind you, but it wasn’t a gamebreaker either.

And of course, just like in WoD the PvP and raiding was actually really good, as was M+. So SL was superior to WoD in every conceivable way.

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24

Yet still better than Dumpsterlands.

Amazing.

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25

Look i fixed that for you :slight_smile:

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26

How do you know the expansion is being rushed? They started developing it long before Shadowlands was even released, they mentioned that back in April. I would think that something similar that happened midway through the Warlords of Draenor developmental cycle happened during Shadowlands as well. There was definitely supposed to be a 9.3 patch. The story for Shadowlands was absolutely cut short, as much of it didn’t even make a lot of sense. Baine Bloodhoof’s story never came to fruition due to content being cut in Shadowlands, hence why he spent the entirety of the expansion sitting in Oribos doing absolutely nothing storyline wise.

There also aren’t any convoluted borrowed power systems that is taking up ample developmental resources this time around. Talent trees is something they’ve been working on for several years. They wanted to implement these types of changes for Shadowlands, but the Covenent systems were already developed and it was too late to take it back.

There also aren’t any major features besides Dragonflying that needs to be tested extensvely. No new Torghast, Islands type features. Just old school zones, questing, dungeons, talent trees, professions, back to the basics. They’re working on the foundation of changing things hopefully in the right direction.

Based on what they’ve told us and common sense, they’ve been working extensively on Dragonflight for several years now. Even moreso since they decided to cut content for Shadowlands and focused most of their developmental resources on Dragonflight.

Two a half months ago during the expansion reveal, they stated Alpha would be starting, “soon”. Well… it’s soon. If it’s mostly developed, then it needs to be actually tested internally and then on beta. Doesn’t mean it’s rushed, not by any stretch of the imagination. Not buying into that argument based on what I know so far. I could be wrong, but that’s okay, I’m still gonna state my opinions, right or wrong.

I guess we’ll see.

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If you want to be delusional, sure.

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28

Mostly based on facts but sure.

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29

The content WoD had was really good, and the class design was extremely good, it just had a huge content drought at the end and we missed out on world content with Farahlon and Thal’dranath. Most of the content SL has sucks, the class design is garbage compared to past iterations aside from maybe a few specs, and we’ve already had a content drought before 9.1, albiet not as long as wod. I’d say WoD was definitely more fun to play in pretty much all regards and also you didn’t have to do so much garbage to actually be able to do what you want to do.

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I literally gave a long list of facts of what was cut from WoD or was absolute garbage and you’d have to be delusional to look at that list and then say: “Shadowlands was worse.”

Missed out on a lot more than that. Scroll up a bit to the massive list of things that were cut, or complete garbage.

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I’ve watched the 2 hour video from Hirumaredx detailing every single piece of missed content in WoD. My point still stands, the content that WoD had including class design was far superior than what we have now. There’s more content in SL, sure, but most of it is garbage.

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32

Neat but that still doesn’t change the fact it was still better than Dumpsterlands lol. If you noticed, I never disagreed with the statement of cut content.

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The game is created in the Alpha testing phase. If we don’t have 6 months of Alpha to tell the Devs where they are wrong with their design or what is broken. They have no time to fix or change core designs before launch.

This is why there is a massive reason for worry. The Devs are supposed to create something then let us extensively test it to tell them where they are WRONG and what needs further iteration. The players are supposed to be as big as a part of creating the game as the Devs.

I’d feel better with a 6 month Alpha phase where we can test and tell the Devs what to change. Then 1 month for them to change it followed by 3 month Beta to fine tune before launch.

Dragonflight shouldn’t release before April 2023.

So there is no way the next expansion is ready because it can’t be ready till we test it extensively and give feedback helping them create the expansion. They instead are ignoring us and just going to release an unfinished game again like they have the last 2 expansions.

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Sounds great OP. How is MS going to rid the game of these new age gamers that want to ruin WoW and make it as in depth as a mobile game?

Blizzard may be a problem, but the community is a much bigger one.

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…

Then you’re as delusional as Sabbia, sorry. Anyone who can see how much content we were promised and then just didn’t get, not to mention all the other absolutely abyssmal features (or lack thereof) in WoD and then say “Oh but Shadowlands is worse.” has to be either delusional or smoking something that isn’t good for them.

Shadowlands is not a great expansion, at all. It’s one of their worst without a doubt, but any argument that it is better than WoD is absolute trash when you look at the actual facts and not through the rose-tinted goggles that you’ve smashed into your eyes so hard you’ve got glass shards sticking out.

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36

They would need to change a lot of people at the top, and a lot of their policies for me to even consider buying DF on release-- Let alone pre-ordering it.

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So because they said something about content and then didn’t have the content, that’s what makes the expansion bad? I mean it’s pretty clear Shadowlands has cut content as well considering anyone with a brain can see Anduin was supposed to be a final boss encounter. I guess by your own logic, Dumpsterlands remains the worse expansion lol.

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38

All they really have to worry about in DF is talent trees, dungeons, raids, pvp, professions, and world content. Compare that to the past 3 expansions which also had multiple complicated systems and multiple different ways to progress those different systems that also needed tuning. They also pretty much completely abandoned SL a while ago so they’re a lot farther along than normal. I still definitely think we need more time to test and I was honestly expecting a summer of next year release, but as long as they aren’t afraid to make changes in minor patches, or have a quick content cadence like in Legion I don’t see too big of an issue.

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They’re also forgetting the class design. Literally the most important part about the game and SL is a complete disappointment. We’re still on the BfA design, which is just heavily pruned Legion design. Legion definitely showed potential but they completely ruined every spec in BfA and didn’t fix anything in SL except giving us some flavor abilities back. Also forgetting covenants, probably the worst system ever introduced to wow which gave us abilities that don’t mesh well with the specs whatsoever and are basically just extra cds tacked on as a bandage to the horrible class design.

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If that was the only thing? No. It would still suck, but no. Especially if the content they did give us was actually good.

But the rest of the content wasn’t good either.

Remember the dailies in WoD up until the final patch of the game? They’re pretty hard to forget. You only got one (unless you paid garrison resources to get more) and the daily quest consisted of going to a specific end-game area in one of the WoD zones and grinding a bar until you completed it. And depending on which one you picked the grind was either slow or required a group.

Remember the reputations? They were fantastic in MoP, lots of different factions, easy to do daily quests that were varied, reputation tokens that you could easily earn that gave you a significant rep boost. MoP was the gold star of reputation grinds back then. All the developers had to do was replicate that system and they’d have done great, but what did we get instead? 5 rep per kill grinds with no daily quests or ways to speed up rep gains, especially for alts. 6.2 changed that somewhat by adding tokens that could give you a lot of rep quickly, but they were really rare and expensive if you wanted to buy them on the AH.

And who can forget the patch Blizzard lauded as the ‘biggest content patch in WoW’s history’ 6.1 which added no raid, no PvP season, no new dungeons… it’s major feature was Twitter intergration and the S.E.L.F.I.E Camera…

I could go on and on here listing every single thing that WoD screwed up, which is why people absolutely loved Legion, because it returned WoW to a form not seen since MoP.

Oh and do you want to know why we had such a large content drought in WoD? It was because we lost an entire content patch and a raid tier. We were supposed to get a Shattrath raid, in fact there was a lot of build up leading to that. Did we get it? No. Why? Because Blizzard thought we wouldn’t be able to handle another Orc raid…

In an expansion where Orcs were the primary enemy.

And what did we get in the next raid after that? More Orcs! Just demonized!