It “failed” because people can never accept and be happy with something anymore. This is our society now, people will find flaw in everything and refuse to enjoy themselves because they are entitled and need to feel important. Games, movies, TV shows, the anonymity of the internet has caused the breakdown of our culture to people demanding things to be their way instead of just enjoying the way it is presented. It starts with participation trophies and just snowballs from there.
Not to mention no one has a mind of their own anymore and when one person, like a streamer, says something negative, people just agree without really considering the source, and terms like systemland are born and take on an identity of its own
I repeat the list because no one can answer my simple question. How do you know it’s not items on that list or something else entirely that is causing people to leave.
In another note someone is complaining that it’s the toxic culture of the players that’s causing people to leave. Other people will point to specific abilities that have been taken away.
My point, which no one can challenge, is that we just don’t know why people leave. We can see examples where people tell us they left for one reason or another but we have no statistics to show which reason, if any, is predominant.
That’s not a circular argument. It’s the same argument I keep putting forward to give more people a chance to be the 1st person to prove their reason is the only reason people leave.
As someone who came back to WoW late in the expansion I had things easier and better than most but I still really disliked the forced order of the zones to the storyline, mainly because they all felt as if they should have been more equal. I think having them level adjusted and simply all needing to be done to progress would have made more sense, and I’m speaking of the covenant zones not like the maw and stuff.
I missed most of the relevance of Korthia but did do it and didn’t really enjoy it, it just wasn’t a fun zone for me geographically. Neither was the maw for that matter.
I hated Oribos as a hub, too much wasted space to have to run around in to get anywhere, which I felt could have been filled up better. And it just felt so generic. And bland.
Honestly most of the zones felt that way. Bastion everyone is whiny, ardenweald everyone is mean and annoying, vampire town is like a telenovella, and don’t get me started on undead Heavy Metal.
I think I would have much preferred if all of the zones were connected rather than flight loading zone paths, that way you could just ride out to each. I know we had space goats but I don’t play wow to be in outer space or what have you, it’s fantasy.
ZM felt like an outdoor Oribos, which isn’t a compliment. But it also felt like a bone thrown to casuals like myself in terms of gear, although honestly it’s easier to just pvp by then for as good or better gear for most slots.
I’ll give credit to the zone designers for making pretty zones to look at, but they weren’t fun to be in.
Too much gatekeeping and time gated quests. It was just too much having to be forced to do Choreghast when people just wanted to gear up and play the game.
Bad writing, bad zones, bad capital city. Bad class design, bad raids, no innovation in PvE or PvP. Garbage quests, garbage characters. Bad development, no communication, bad borrowed power, bad everything. The team deserved firings and cutbacks, new leadership, and rolled heads for releasing such trash and calling it content.
I said i would never come back, but i came back to fill a spot in my old WoW friend group’s raid. It wasnt for WoW, it was for the friends. WoW is on thin ice and i wont take the crap theyve been shoveling my way.
Same question as before. Maybe that’s why you guys didn’t like Shadowlands but what evidence do you have that it failed, which is a prerequisite for the question in the title of this topic?
They are not asking you if you liked Shadowlands or not, they are assuming that it was a failure (i.e. it lost more money than it cost to make) then asking you why?
Without knowing if it made money the question is like asking someone “When will you stop kicking my dog” when it’s not even clear if you own a dog.
Of course it made money. But again, that’s setting the bar so low a caterpillar could crawl over it.
Here’s my question to you: do you think Blizzard is in a better position after Shadowlands than before it?
If it isn’t, then Shadowlands was a failure. Not an absolute failure, not a catastrophic one, but one where the game and company are weaker because of it.
Oribos was just a hub, is the problem. It wasn’t a city that served as a hub, it was just a location to go to one of the zones from, to pick up some quests, to transmog if you don’t have the mount. It’s soulless, pun intended.
How could it not have failed? I struggle to think of good things to say about shadowlands that aren’t art related and there are some major issues even there.
Shadowlands was so bad it actively ruined 20+ years of warcraft history and the ones responsible for that are still in charge. The best thing that can happen now is for it to be made non canon.
On top of that the gameplay was literally hell. The maw was miserable and unfun. Torghast was made less and less fun as the beta rolled on seemingly as an intentional choice and launched as an unfinished grey paste. Covenants were shallow and timegated and unforgiving when it came to currencies for the fun stuff like mogs and pets. Legendaries were a huge hassle in every way. One path for leveling was kinda lame and the fate system was some form of opt in torture made out of tedious fill the bar quests that were SLOWER than leveling through the story again.
Then it was incredibly slowly paced as far as patches were concerned and we even had a cut patch in an expansion with one of the longest content droughts of all time. Just terrible.
I think the biggest things were
A) content drought.the best material in the world gets stale when its done over and over and a lot of SL was in this vein. Just running iver the same ground as we waited for new content
B) little love for casuals.
Pvp was pvp, the content is mostly generated by the players and thats an advantage it has. The raids were good but the best raids lose something in lfr level and normal level and the heroic ans mythic raiding crowd dont slot into the casual crowd as easily they are more tryhard by definition. M+ is guilty of this as wll but to a lesser extent. World content is stale and largely unthreatening and boring by comparison. Casuals log in. Run maybe a normal or lfr a week, a handful of +5s maybe and log out. There just isnt much content for the vast majorty of players and there are long stretches inbetween new content that still isnt much.
Activision Blizzard is a business. Wow is a product/service offered by that business. If it takes in more through revenue than they paid to create and run it then it was a success.
As for the rest of what you said, that’s your opinion. You are stating it as if it is fact which it is not.
First, your statement about having fun is an opinion, not fact. I had fun and so didn’t a lot of other people who have said as much in this forum.
Second, of the hundred or so new MMOs that come out each year, on average they do NOT flourish. Most fail. And even if subs are off it can be for other reasons. Wow is an old technology game. It has a lot more competition than it once had. It was never built for mobile which is a trend.
And finally your last point, the fallacy of ad homimen. Your first two arguments fell flat on their face so if you can’t attack the message, spew out an ugly insult against the messenger.
Blizzard would do well to learn from the mistakes of the last several expansions with DF. It already seems like the hype around DF is less than that surrounding SL. People are coming in suspicious and wary. I haven’t tried the Evoker class, but reviews have been mixed.
Agree that the zones and afterlife story killed SL.