^^^ This - WoD and the Garrison playstyle erased loads of casual/social/family guilds from WoW. About 6 months in, it was like someone just flipped a switch. Once those people left they never came back. People talk about Pathfinder and the way Blizzard botched flying. That was part of it, but the solo play Garrison did far more damage. In my opinion.
My take (from a prior thread): Is WoW out of touch with it's core audience? - #89 by Kholin-drakthul
I loved it the garrison mission table was the best. Honestly, everyone I knew in my two guilds loved the garrison.
Was it that they were wildly popular, or was it that there was no outside world content in WoD?
I have no clue, but if I were to venture a guess, people spending an inordinate amount of time tending their personal instanced gardens, mines, fishing holes, profession trainers/vendors, etc. means less time in expansion hub cities. Subsequently if Blizz wants a hub to “feel” highly populated, they can’t offer an incentive for people to hole up in their own private world.
Like I said no clue, but it’s a reasonable hypothesis. If true, it’s another reason we’ll never see player housing.
now its not even that. just a gold sink. they should have lowered costs when they lowered income.
Garrisons are a copy and paste version of player housing.
All garrisons look the same… do the same thing… fill the same role… with zero player ownership.
And Blizzard did little with that system to begin with. They threw it in our lap, and said “there’s your ‘player housing’, now s-t-f-u about it!”
Players rejected it, because it was bad then, and it’s still bad.
In Any expansion if you only do dungeons/raid this is your everyday. Sit in a city and wait.
My day was, collecting all the damn treasures and reps and exploration and questing needed for this new an glorious feature they added called “Pathfinding” Grrr…
Thing is that boat left the dock long ago with chromie time and conversion from pve or pvp servers to just server…warmode optional.
When I see a dude in chromie WOD on my lock draenei I tinker with it means 2 things.
They are wod chromie. and they are warmode on. Its the only way I can see them.
Legion chromie slumming it in wod lands but not on chromie time, I won’t see them.
Also if not my warmode setting, I won’t see them.
LOL no. Millions of people didn’t leave in the first 6 months of WoD because garrisons were popular.
That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen someone say all day.
Well you’re taking it out of context so that doesn’t help.
Then explain because your next post is doubling down on that (“that’s the reason why.”)
And btw, I’m not implying that millions of people left because of the garrisons, I’m saying if there was a feature in that horrid xpac that people considered “popular”, then why didn’t it keep them in WoW?
I remember the forums, nobody was singing the garrison’s praises past “lol gold.”
People hated them because they destroyed professions, especially gathering professions.
People hated them because of broken promises (“put your garrison any where!”)
People hated them because they had zero to no customization.
People hated them because their followers had more adventures than the players.
People hated them because they emptied out capital cities. I have no idea why Blizzard decided to give the garrison trade chat. Terrible move.
People hated them because they were mandatory.
ROFL absolutely not.
TL;DR - WoD had a lot of issues, and while garrisons weren’t all that bad, a lack of content saw folks staying in their garrisons and feeling craptastic about the state of the game.
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“All you do is sit in your garrison all day” was a common complaint back in the day. The problem is less that Garrisons were the issue and more that WoD had no content in the world, which is a VERY big component for the game feel that Draenor just didn’t have at all.
Draenor had so little to do in the world outside your garrison that outside of the quests you’d do to get from 90 to 100, once you hit the level cap, you were done. The only thing that would really put you in the world was an apexis daily you’d get as the one daily quest available, where you’d go to a zone, kill things to fill a bar, and you were finished. And this was right after Pandaria, which had LOADS of quests you could repeat from NPCs that had a variety of different quests, dialogues, objectives, all of which gave the world more personality. All Warlords had instead of this were one-time collectables treasures.
Ashran just wasn’t really all that great. There were a couple of fun events, but on release, some servers had it be absolutely unplayable with how some servers handled faction balancing, so for awhile some servers just had the enemy faction farming their gate and pushing back towards your own base.
Arguably it was decent if all you wanted to do was raidlog. Hot take: BRF wasn’t that great. There were a few amazing fights that felt way more dynamic, but the rest was just kind of ‘eh’. It felt better after Highmaul. HFC was pretty fun at least, and having the unique class trinkets at the end was neat, but no matter how good the raiding was, nothing can save you from a lack of other content.
6.1 was the biggest embarrassment of a patch Blizzard has ever put out. Ever. The Selfie Patch will never be lived down.
Tanaan jungle was a step in the right direction, but it was too little too late. It was a MAJOR step down from Pandaria, where every patch added a new set of activities to do in a region with Landfall, then the Thundering Isle in 5.2, the Battles of the Barrens in 5.3, and of course, 5.4’s Timeless Isle. There was SO much stuff.
And then WoD happened and we had nothing in the world. There was virtually no incentive or reason to go out into the world, so people didn’t bother. Folks got used to lingering in their garrisons real fast.
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Real talk? As much as people don’t like BfA and Shadowlands, I felt leagues better with those games than I did with WoD. SL may have made me facepalm hard and the final patch of BfA may have made me groan with how the corruption grind went, but I’ll take those over WoD any day.
once you have all the extras, the Garrison is a great home base.
if we cant have player housing, it certainly is good enough
Yep people hung out in the Garrison rather than cities and people complained about an emptiness.
That happened.
Why weren’t they popular?
You spent a lot of time running around recruiting followers, running them on missions, leveling them up to our level, and then what?
You had to constantly manage them, feed them, house them, keep them busy running mission after mission for rewards you couldn’t care less about.
In the end, you had trained an army of adventurers who, at a moments notice, could conspire to overthrow you and toss you in the cell in the basement.
So you could never turn your back on them or leave them alone for too long, lest you return and get usurped. Day after day, the paranoia grew.
Jeeze, I’m having flashbacks just writing this all out. Gonna have to call and schedule an appointment with my therapist.
/moo 
Then… they left. Never to come back. WoD was a guild killer unlike any expansion before or since. (My personal opinion.)
Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. If it weren’t for having friends that still played during that time, I would’ve quit. The only things I really ‘loved’ about WoD was stuff that was leading into Legion.
I mean it set the bar so low. EVERYTHING in Legion felt great by comparison.
Wasn’t a fan of garrisons for the most part. They were ok on the days, if you only felt like playing for a short time to mess around with professions. My opinion is that Wod could have been one of the better expansions, if it would have had a world quest type system, instead of just a couple dailies at the garrison table. Open world suffered overall because of the garrisons imo.
A favorite memory of mine is when folks would call out in chat that they were placing the Blingtron 5000 robot (whatever it was called) just outside the garrison, and you run out, see people just kind of appear out of the mist to click on it as they all ran out of their respective garrisons, and then turn around a fade away again like High Plains Drifter.
Just a kind of a neat, weird social moment.
Took players out of the world and thus out of the pool of available players for world content and raiding.
Took away in house resources to develop that were sorely needed elsewhere given the exodus of dev’s and/or those who were outright fired/laid off.
And my personal opinion: they were implemented poorly and thus not well received (which I suspect was intentional so they could say they tried and we just didn’t like them)