It’s really obvious by now that Shadowlands is really lacking on content. Take world quests, for instance. It seems like there are only like 8 or so world quests per zone. Every day, I see the same quests on the map. Blizzard made them take longer to complete relative to their Legion/BFA counterparts because there are so few of them.
Same thing with the Maw’s time-gating. There’s really barely any content in there, so Blizz implemented the Eye of the Jailer mechanic to stretch that tiny amount of content out more.
This. The only expansion I can genuinely say I didn’t really like much of anything was WoD, and even then I could say ‘well this zone is pretty’ ‘that quest-line was cool’. There’s good and bad in each expansion so while it might feel edgy and hip to declare ‘this expansion is garbage!’ that doesn’t make it true.
Granted I’m a pretty casual player but the questing/character options/new zones makes SL already several notches above BFA already.
I think it’s less about deliberately pushing out a bad expansion and more a function of profitability and return on investment, how much effort they put into expansions is a function of a series of calculations, it’s all about how little resources they can spend just do enough for a D-. The Blizzard that we loved, the one that would strive for A+ is long dead, striving for excellence is just too expensive and anyone that cared about the health and reputation of the brand is long gone.
Now that loot is scarce people are resorting to carries and boe purchases. Pvp 2’s arena is full of pve people being carried for loot because it’s so scarce. Before they didn’t have to resort to such because loot was plentiful. Blizzard just released their quarterly report saying most of their revenue came from gold sales…
If you want to believe it’s incompetence then fair enough go ahead.
They gutted crafting so much and I still don’t know why.
I did so much crafting back in MoP. So much. Now it’s just there to make transmog to sell, and it’s boring as hell. Literally just “buy x and y, craft it, zzz” and it’s on the cusp of automation.
I’ve been begging for player housing because at least that could reingite crafting heavily, but WoW is the only game I’ve ever seen where people throw temper-tantrums if you suggest basic core features every other MMORPG on the market has.
It honestly feels like Shadowlands brought nothing actually new outside customization, which was heavily overdue and still lacking in tons of cases.
It’s the same M+ spam since Legion, but now we have a limited time mount we have to chase. Woo. Same do your world quests we’ve had since Legion. Same of same raid for 4 difficulties. Same old battlegrounds. Same old prestige rewards that are boring to grind for because you get almost nothing out of it after a point.
At least we got a new arena, but the MMR and rewards system is still outdated and nothing more than frustrating to deal with.
We really need a soft reboot.
Praying next expansion is that.
So you’re saying it couldn’t have been intentionally designed because we’ve had tokens for years? Sounds about the same argument as saying the brutosaur mount couldn’t have been earmarked for artificial scarcity because we have had mounts for years too. What if they just worked it out recently on how to boost profits, companies do it all the time.
I can agree more can be done for this expansion. At this point we got more Activision developers working on WoW than WoW developers.
Considering what was lost during Wotlk I can agree to this. It was a slow death after this expansion though many may refuse Burning Crusade wasn’t the golden age of WoW.