I can’t speak for everyone but I typically put WoD FAAAAAR above BfA. The reason for this comes down to the fact that I didn’t hate the story we got, I hated that so much of it was cut out.
I’ve said it elsewhere but WoD suffered the same problems (IMO) that GoT suffered. That is that I personally had no issue where it ended up but that it in no way earned that ending.
There’s also the small bit that WoD didn’t have devs insulting my intelligence by making my characters complicit in genocide then trying to tell me about moral parity.
WoD itself was boring and had next to no content, but I was still happy, even eager, to engage with the community and I have lots of good RP memories from that time.
BfA has content, sure, okay, but the miserable, awful story has alienated me a faction that I used to love and has made engaging with the community in any capacity a headache.
Which one am I going to consider the worst of the two, then.
It’s worth noting almost none of the content is all that new outside of raids.
The only things BfA has that are unique to it are Warfronts and Island Expeditions. Both of which are about as exciting as watching paint dry after a few times through.
I can’t believe how boring Darkshore still is. Literally every single time I’ve queued up for it, it has taken almost the exact same length of time because of how badly everything is bottlenecked by how slow the iron is to respawn. It doesn’t matter how fast you kill things or which areas you capture. Unless you get lucky with a bunch of people who’ve researched the “start with 80 iron and 20 wood” tier, you’re going to be stuck waiting for glaives every single time.
It’s not a huge deal by itself, but it feels so emblematic of the problem with BfA writ large. It’s a problem that flat-out shouldn’t exist, but for some reason, still does.
The lawyer thing doesn’t matter, no one is able to sue a company for telling a bad story. I can’t even imagine the hell that would be working on their marketing team but I can tell you that in almost any/every enterprise there’s always senior stakeholders who know better than both the SMEs AND hard data.
Most people tend to level via dungeons anyway so yeah, when it’s over and we’re hopefully in a better xpac it will just be distant.
Legion’s story got even sillier when Old Sargie literally stabbed the planet.
They obviously don’t have the expac rhythm down perfectly and we’d have been far better off with something crazy like a light hearted non-apocalyptic theme
Instead we get “how about Sarg stabs the planet and its blood is a coveted resource and WAR!”
so uh. huh. Seems like BFA is whack-a-mole with the story. It feels kind of like Classic in that way but none of the stories are good or coherent. Or feels nice to experience. I have no idea what is planned after 8.2.5. Did the expansion change development mid-way through like Warlords did? If this was always planned the question would be. WHY.
We’ve had coherent stories that span an entire expansion for most of the games lifespan now. Wrath, Cata, Mists, Legion. Even Warlords had some idea where the story was supposed to go to a degree. It just sucked and was rushed.
But this? We deal with a bit of titan stuff, trolls and azerite at the start. Azerite takes a back seat to the war plot where we raid Da’zar alor. Then it’s naga time with N’zoth. Now the war plot is going to abruptly end or at least it sounds like it, and what? We deal with N’zoth? One can hope a patch actually follows up on what was going on before. If we pull something else out now it’ll be even more muddled.
I think BfA’s development suffered from having too many cooks in the kitchen, and now the backlash has them panicking and they’re trying to course correct.
muffinus is usually okay but someone should ask him if the alliance will be allowed to participate this time or are the new mechagnomes building us a brand new robot cat
…what if, instead of island expeditions, you queued for those battles. Some of them sounded really good, like the Alliance sieging the Great Gate of Mulgore.
And it’d be a neat way to fold Old World content in without having to alter the zones.