I think WoW is running a skeleton crew atm and will rely on initial sales and less on subs from now on.
They will just try their best to hype it up before people commit to buying it and and a couple months sub here and there and expansions will be developed as cheaply as possible.
what does this even mean?
??
There’s a general consensus that the Maw is unfinished end-game content that is very bland and the pre-patch is borderline not going to be a pre-patch. I’m not sure if that’s a strong indicator to the state of the game, but from a player perspective it is very odd to say the least and not what I’d like to see.
OP also called out major bugs still being in place (albeit I’m not as aware of this kind of stuff so I’m not able to back him on it). Then you have major complaints about the covenant/conduits/soulbind system. That whole system is largely controversial, but I will say that it does run the risk of being azerite traits all over again.
ROFL
/ten char
WoW at least needs to be Breakout.
The OP isn’t wrong, though. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a class as broken as monks are on the beta this close to the launch date. A large list of the bugs had been reposted multiple times on the monk beta thread, and said list hasn’t really changed much between alpha and now.
Accounting for all the other bugs and inevitable sledgehammer nerfs to covenants, I’m expecting a very rough expansion launch.
This is probably the truest statement posted today. Your arguing with ppl that have such a strong sense of buyers anxiety that they’ll just assert that you don’t know what your talking about because you don’t have proof(not that it would matter), or that all of your problems would be solved if you played classic. They don’t want anyone else in their mmo who might see in flaws in the mmo because then they might have to admit to themselves that pouring hundreds of dollars and hours into a bad game might not have been worth it. Such hubris.
The best immediate thing Blizzard could do is delete the forums.
These forums are the garbage can of World of Warcraft. People come here to complain, and some people LOVE complaining. They will look for things to complain about just to get their fix.
Lol no shadowlands will probably be a disaster and sub counts will still be in the millions.
Agreed. The OP is being dramatic and speculative. Shadowlands looks excellent. Mythic+ looks better than it’s ever been. Torghast is an extremely interesting rogue-like progression pathway that WoW, specifically, has been missing for years. Castle Nathria is a super interesting first raid tier. PvP vendors are back with Versatility being fashioned into a PvP-stat. Craftable legendaries.
The list is freaking endless. And what’s best about Shadowlands? Unpruning. Here’s the NINE buttons I’m getting just off the top of my head:
Curse of Exhaustion
Curse of Recklessness
Curse of Weakness
Curse of Tongues
Lock Portal Placement
Lock Teleport
Malefic Rapture
Impending Catastrophe (if I go Venthyr)
Door of Shadows (^)
Shadowlands looks like the best expansion since Wrath of the Lich King. Is it rushed due to no fault of Blizzard’s? Sure. But I have faith. And even if it’s messy, it’s better than the garbage fire that is BFA.
Just up Ideasman.
What kind of response is this, exactly? Expansions usually take two years.
What a bizarre take.
This is gonna be the most broken expansion yet, kind of humorous really.
It’s what happens when money is your priority instead of quality.
Wait till you guys see 10.0! What a mess!
Exactly 
The amazing thing is they will stay subbed to this “unfinished failure”, making you question their thought process.
It’s almost like this crap is posted to farm likes.
Shadowlands has content. It already is better than WOD.
What is defined as imbalanced? 5% delta? 3% delta? 1% delta?
Doesn’t matter how long it’s been in development. Beta and ptr say it’s nowhere near ready.
You only get one chance to make a first impression, and a lot of players are losing faith.
WOD’s problem was always the lack of content, nothing more. Multiple game play stubs- Shaatrath was supposed to be a raid zone, and the Ogrim Doomhammer plot line just… stops- and Blizzard freely admitted that on release the expansion was 90% done since all that remained was essentially cleaning up Tanaan.
And then of course, what were people sitting in all day? Their garrison.
Sick burn dawg.