There’s always been complaints before each expansion, but most of the time there was more hype.
Shadowlands however seems dead on arrival. There’s some excitement around about seeing new things, but it seems like the majority is dreading it.
It seems like more borrowed power, long global cool downs, and dead specs are really starting to annoy the majority of players.
Mists of Pandaria. Between completely killing old talent trees, people hating pandas, and people thinking the expansion was just one giant pander to China, a very large percentage of the population were hating on it before it was released.
Ironically, I think it turned out to be one of the better expansions.
I think people want to enjoy the next expansion and they are just voicing their concerns now while it’s still in beta so that it can live up to their expectations.
I can vouch that at this moment it is pretty lackluster. at face value even on beta, it is simply just a rehashed BFA with new skins.
I played overwhelmingly in pandaria expansion and it wasn’t as bad as this. There was hype due to pandas and MONKS.
Shadowlands has nothing new to add. No new classes, etc. It is literally BFA reskinned
I remember when WoD was announced, time travel threads.
What a waste to go over something already done and make it even more meaningless.
I can tell you that everyone I talk to outside of the forums is actually looking forward to it. I certainly can’t claim my anecdotal experience is more right than yours, but it is enough for me to make me wonder if “Loudly Hated” might be begging the question a bit.
I think a lot of it is players just don’t want a repeat of the start of Legion and all of BfA. I mean, it did take Legion quite a while to become a “decent” expansion. Also, BfA had a horrible Alpha and Beta. Probably the worst I have ever been a part of.
Yeah, I remember the dum-dums who were making all the dum-dum comments “wtf, why are you adding pandas to warcraft?” …while we had them in warcraft before it was world of warcraft. 
Nah, same old drivel. Just more avenues for drool to accumulate.
Mop got a ton of hate.
I’m hyped to meet the small moonkin.
A lich king 2 story would have built hype. Instead we get sylvanas part 4. If there’s decent gameplay it can overcome bad story. If we get both bad then it truly is doomed before it begins.
MoP got an enormous amount of hate with only a small amount of people excited for monks and pandaren.
I can’t really remember any others that were just dumped on before the gates were even opened.
I think it has more to do with how horrid BfA was put together than anything else.
I for one, am beyond excited for SL.
Meh, I don’t think there is a lot of “hate”
More so a concern that people don’t want BFA part 2…so they are expressing ones concerns thru some constructive criticism and not so constructive…
Then you have some you tubers that for a lack of a better term Stoke the flames…
But like others have said mop has extremely talked about in negativity some justified some not…before it went live
Yeah, and I think, personally they didn’t add anything new~ per se, just, I feel like a bunch of rehashed, reskinned content.
I don’t think only a small amount were excited about Monk. There were many who were excited about Brewmaster. The whole “Kung Fu Panda” movie comparison thing is what stirred a lot of the trolling and created the fake stigma it had.
They removed Azerite armor, brought back a lot of utility via unpruning, and removed rng-styled gear.
They removed new features that are universally hated (barring the mission table) and didn’t really replace them, which is good.
Now if we could just get rid of this awful gcd change they made in BfA, it’d be a really good expansion, just on a glance.
Azerite armor didn’t get removed. just transferred.
How do you figure?
Borrowed power, replaced by another borrowed power type system.