I wasn’t around for WoD and I hadn’t played WoD content on any of my other characters so this is my first experience with Garrisons, and I am not familiar with whatever issues they originally had.
Why were Garrisons disliked when WoD was current?
Hey Blizz, just have Khadgar and his homies teleport my Garrison to the middle of nowhere in Kalimdor please, thanks.
They promised a lot of features that didn’t make it to live, and it was bottled as a WoD feature that got no more updates.
What we got was a gold mill, and nothing more 
All of the profession related buildings and gathering just got tiresome after a couple months, let alone two years times however many alts. Invasions just weren’t that interesting. Aesthetically, they were snake bit because they had to be solely orc or human buildings, and customization was almost nonexistent. Those are what jump out of me, I’m sure I’ll think of more.
This was also the first expansion where they introduced pathfinder, which personally I didn’t care that much about no flying, but the forums were on fire about this topic throughout the entire expansion and a lot of the other features of WoD were caught in the no flying crossfire.
They weren’t optional at the time.
A lot of people stayed in their garrisons instead of flocking to a major city hub, since you could have every convenience.
It made gathering useless because you had the mine and garden.
Don’t get me wrong, I love mine, but at the time it was not always fun.
Also, now you have yours, be sure to go there daily during the Hallow’s End and Winter’s Veil holidays to do dailies to get cool decorations.
They did a great job at making the world feel dead.
Forsaken were right at home then.
The Invasions were awesome fun. IMHO.
Because “We want specialized player housing!” really meant “We want a place to decorate and then ERP in”
They were popular that’s why. No one in overworld
/s
That was a reason why. But to be fair, it’s not like they had content to go out and enjoy. So who knows if Garrison’s were really to blame or a scapegoat
Yeah, there is that, but I think the two are related.
Some part of me wants to believe that WoD was light on content because so much time and resources were dumped into the garrisons.
Kind of like how Cata was viewed as a bit… skimpy because so much time was dumped into the old world revamp (which I always thought was a bogus criticism of that expansion).
Nonetheless, if they’d canned garrisons would we have gotten, say, Farahlon? Doubt it. Would it even have made a difference in the dim view players took of that expansion. Also doubt.
I wish people would remember this when they think DF doesn’t have much. I’d rather an underpromise-overdeliver expansion.
Well the garrisons were a nice lil time-sink that provided tangible bonuses. I still make goblin gliders for my toons at my garrison.
the outposts had useful options as well.
Well, not so much now but at the time of WoD, I liked it.
That being said, once you upgraded one garrison to lvl 3 with all the bells and whistles it kinda lost its flavor when you had to do it all over again for EVERY character.
Oh and i never really got into the shipyard thing…
I enjoyed leveling up the garrison, choosing buildings, and the mission tables… ship yards were just okay. Wasn’t a big fan of gathering within the garrison. That never felt quite right.
I still go back to mine often. Have the Grizzly Hills theme playing.
Garrisons were wildly popular. That was part of the problem. The whole WoD meta was barely leaving your garrison.
I think they would have been fine as side content, but they were made into the big expansion feature. People had nothing else to do and it soured them on Garrisons. As old content they are fine imo.
Similar to islands in BfA I think. I actually kind of like running them now to level or get dubloons. But as a big expansion feature they were a bit of a flop.
That part honestly felt likes chores to do on the daily, to me. As someone who has, now, been a gold goblin, yeah it was a cash cow. Back then, as someone who just raided and liked to stock the guild bank? It got really stale after a while.
OP - I liked the garrison to an extent, but what I did not like was the devs pulling the their “SELFIE” camera bs. That was right up there with the ZM announcement of “wE cAn WaLk On WaTeR gUyZ!!!”
WoD just got abandoned half way through the entire expac, and it felt like it. Ashran, when run with the old mega groups back then, was a blast though.
Pitched as personalized cool bases to build with multiple build locations. Ended up being a template stuck in one specific place, and then largely optimized for mass producing gold, especially when people decided to run 3, 4, or 10+ of them.
They also caused people to stay in their garrison and not really venture out. Even if you weren’t looking to make actual gold with them you could still be extremely self sufficient them such as having a percectly viable source of herbs for flask/potions.
Invasions were also really lame content IMO. I don’t even remember how to trigger them, but don’t think they were very rewarding so the people who did them were just doing it for the achievements.
