Now that the dust has settled, why did shadowlands fail?

Community General Discussion
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I think this is half-right. You are dead on with the classes, but the world matters too. At least to casuals who spend a lot of time in it.

Making tiny, rocky, pita zones that sucked to navigate and then slowly tightening the noose (less flight paths from Legion to BFA to SL, removal of the flight whistle, smaller zones in general, more isolation and removal of the ‘seamless’ aspect entirely by SL) makes for an overall less enjoyable day to day experience for those who notice. And once you do, it’s impossible not to.

To this day, even with flight on, Nazjatar and Highmountain are fundamentally less enjoyable to go back to because they were so unpleasant at their zones’ respective launches.

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305

To me it was the overall sensation that they didn’t expand on soooo many things that they could’ve had, just to focus on a making their own brand of Thanos. We’re visiting the afterlife after all and we could’ve seen so many characters … soooo many… and even the ones we did turned out to be a let down in the end (i.e. look at what they did to Arthas)

That and artificially prolonged content (i.e. WQ that they wanted to take longer to complete) just so folks had to spend more time on the expansion in general.

Couple that with the fact i mostly play a warlock so being trash on M+ at phase 1 is usually pretty disheartening (as M+ is one of my preferred play styles.)

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306

Well if everything else was a complete failure, why did I love the story and have a blast playing the quests?

Also, do you have evidence that it was a failure? Activision Blizzard is a for profit company so a failure would mean they lost money on the expansion. Have you seen P&L statements that back up your conclusion?

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Overall boredom. I spent the last 1.5y of this xpac twinking lvl 35-39 characters in mop raid gear, pvping until they got to level 40, deleting them, and restarting. I played through the campaigns to see what they did with the lore, and then never logged onto my main unless I was gearing a new twink and needed to make gold.

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308

For me, personally, shadowlands had a few failure points:

  • Covenants

This system was never going to work. Exactly what the player base said would happen, happened. Look no further than Holy paladin Venthyr to see that grossly breaking one covenant ability will see 95+ percent of that class will choose that covenant. Despite Blizzard claiming this wouldn’t happen, we all know it would.

  • AP grind

Stop making these. Seems they are finally moving on from it. Bad system was bad in Legion, bad in BFA, and it was destined to fail in SL.

  • Not enough world content

Seriously. Make more world events that are worth doing. This WOD style world is pointless beyond world quests needs addressed. You’re Blizzard, come up with something.

  • Butchered the story

I WILL NEVER SERVE. So all big bads are Automa and Arthas is now 35 anima. Neat. You basically unveiled the man behind the curtain with this expansion. NEVER unveil the man behind the curtain. Death means nothing in WoW now.

  • Sylvanas was done dirty

No explanation necessary. Don’t wreck your own iconic characters maybe?

I could go on, so many other reasons. From terrible balance of classes to not enough dungeons. Broken PvP. Terrible city hub. One-Note crafting. Boreghast. Not allowing us to play alts without needing TO DO REDO THE WHOLE DANG STORY.

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309

So just because it can’t be proven satisfactory to you, you will sit here and say SL content didn’t push people away? Ridiculous.

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1- “Meaningful” choices.
We were asked to blindly choose a covenant, and we were punished for changing our minds, basically forcing people to either play the PTR or follow whatever guide was published on wowhead or icyveins. God forbid you wanted to do more than one type of content or swap soulbinds. Oh you are trying a pvp build on your raiding/m+ toon? Shame on you, you’ll need to wait a day for the conduit energy to restore, I hope you don’t have to raid tonight :dracthyr_shrug:

2- How scarce the gear was.
3 hours raiding and all you got was anima, and maybe one piece of loot. You were lucky if your key of the week got you anything at all, let alone an upgrade. How many runs did it take for someone to get a piece of gear they needed? I haven’t run them myself, but I’ve seen guildies and friends complaining about it.
1 hour of Torghast for a handful of ashes not even enough to craft a legendary. World Quest gear was just laughable. World Bosses gave loot maybe once a month.
And the vault, laughing at your face with 3 of the same waistband where you’re wearing your very expensive rank 7 legendary .
It all felt like a huge waste of time. At least in BFA we had bonus loot tokens. They gave mostly artifact power, but at least it felt like you were doing something to fight bad RNG.

3- Torghast.
It took too much time, you couldn’t even take a bio break without dying, and dying was penalized.
It was gear dependant but it didn’t reward gear, so there was a halt on your progression unless you participated in other activities. Remember how m+ people complained about doing pvp for gear? this is like that.
They added a minimum score you needed to progress to the next floor, but they didn’t include current score or a progress bar anywhere. You think you did ok? HA! Bad luck noob, you missed ONE urn hiding behind a stone on top of a cliff only accessible by a combination of grapple points. GOOD LUCK NEXT TIME.

4-The Legendary System.
People who got on it early enough became millionaires. They were able to sell their items as soon as they crafted them for a profit, because we were all in need of even the lowest ilvl legos.
However, if you were late to the party, you were stuck with spending millions, yes MILLIONS of gold just to try to unlock the ones with the right rank, and without any chance to sell the lower level crafted items if not at a terrible loss, way under their crafting cost.
And then, they added tier sets. Crafters who only unlocked one or two pieces because it was too expensive, were screwed over by a piece of gear that overlapped with it. Bad luck, go spend another million trying to unlock something they didn’t use.
On the other side of the system, raiders, keystone pushers and pvpers needing a ton of gold just to buy one piece of gear that they would need to replace the next season. Trying to craft them yourself was a no-no. Even with high prices, it was a lot cheaper to buy them.

5- Cut content.
Not just the whole patch that didn’t happen. Not just the poor development on The Jailer.
There was no Brawler’s Guild. No new Blingtron for engineers. The holidays didn’t get anything new. No new battlegrounds. Only one arena. No new pet dungeons. No new brawls.

But the most important reason that it failed, is that The Pig and Whistle tavern is not playing tavern music when you walk into it. Outrageous.

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311

It’s ridiculous to ask for proof when someone makes a claim and you disagree?

Why do you think we have courts where people who are arrested are given a trial? Do you think it’s ridiculous that we can’t just throw people in jail without proving it to a jury?

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312

Then what exactly drove people away from SL?

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No one knows. Well maybe the people at Blizzard, they can pull various stats from the game to see what’s popular and what is not.

That is exactly my point. This topic claims that shadowlands failed and that it drove people away but that’s just speculation. No one outside the game knows for sure how bad the sub decrease may be, what drove them away and no one knows if SL was a failure (i.e. it lost money).

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There’s literally no other explanation.

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Ok then, let’s see your evidence. Show that none of the following can be responsible.

  • When WOW was first created it was one of the only D&D like MMOs around. Now there are hundreds of new ones each year.
  • In an industry where 5 years is middle aged and 10 years is an antique, WOW is an 18 year old game competing with tons of new technology.
  • The trend these days is toward social media and mobile where WOW doesn’t play well.
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316

Yes, all of the above plus the covenants. Zones, story, maw, boregahst, covenants, legendaries, crafting and the ever pain in the butt mission table all seemed to rub me the wrong way. Still, if I think of one thing I hated the most, it was the initial covenant I selected, just getting around that silly tree was a chore and the characters I had to interact with were the worst voice acting I’ve had to endure. If they set out to make the most annoying release ever, they succeeded.

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So instead of SL content being bad and driving people away you choose to believe it was either more mmo options, wow’s too old, or “not playing well on social media”?

What a joke. Absolute joke. SL drove people away because it was a bad expansion and the devs were actively antagonistic with it’s players.

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No, now you are claiming I said things I didn’t say. My point is that we have no idea if people are leaving, if they are how many or why they might be leaving. No one has any proof of any of that.

So if they are leaving it could be for a number of reasons. It could be SL content. Some have said it’s everything since Legion. It could be one of the reasons I gave or it could be a combination of reasons.

Fact is, no one has any proof to offer as to why people are leaving. It’s just speculation.

But if you disagree, let’s see your proof. I’m particularly interesting in knowing why any company would deliberately drive away customers because they were angry at them.

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Sexual predators who don’t understand that no means no were in charge of all decisions.

Turns out you can’t just put something in the drinks of millions of subs who tell you that your game sucks.

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I asked you a question and you gave me a list. Do you want to rephrase your answer?

I’d love to know that as well. I don’t know why Blizzard was antagonistic toward players. I don’t know why they arrogantly pushed unpopular ideas through (covenant tied to player power). I don’t know why the put a needless time gate like conduit power into the game. All massively unpopular decisions.

Believe what you want. I’ll believe what I see.

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321

THIS. This is the only expac ever where I couldn’t find more than a smidgen of charm (looking at you, friendly fishing NPC who made me laugh). There have been patches I hated, but SL was the first expac I disliked from day one.

It’s honestly baffling. Who okayed The Jailer as a big bad? He was an utter joke. Who decided to make the whimsical fairy zone muted and murky? Who thought naïve blue angels would have great appeal? Is this the same company that designed amazing zones and cool NPCs for over a decade? Ugh.

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322

Too many hurdles to jump over to get into any of the action. Legendaries, renown, torghast, soulbinds, conduits, etc…

Slow AND reduced content cycle.

Way too many currencies

Raiding difficulty curve way harsher than it had ever been.

Covenants being player power and not just mostly cosmetic. Exacerbated in season 3 with Unity.

Culmination of three expansions worth of Sylvanas-centric writing.

The jailer was perhaps the most forgettable, two-dimensional villain ever. Never had character development, and barely any interaction with the player. What’s worse is they made him responsible for everything as some sort of diabolical, manipulative mastermind.

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I didn’t want to play 4 characters to get all the content. Every patch also seemed list the same thing, just in a different zone.

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