There is very little evidence that the majority didn’t like the game. The forums are a terrible way to judge the overall population. They tend to be biased toward people that have something to complain about. As for a number of the CCs, their bread and butter is producing rage bait which draws angry players and ups their ad rates.
Even a declining population based could be for various reasons. The game is getting old. There is more competition. It’s not designed for mobile devices, the list goes on.
The only way you could really tell if Shadowlands itself was unpopular with the majority would be to do an unbiased poll of a representative sample of the player base. No one is doing that.
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nothing i played it for 1 month. then went into mount farm mode
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I think Shadowlands is overall a good expansion, better than Cata (of course ), WoD and BfA.
As usual in WoW, that “overall” is reached with a mix of the very good, the meh and the very bad.
The very good is the art, ambience and music. The four covenant zones and Zereth are gorgeous, the Maw is dutifully spooky and I like even the dishevelled Korthia. Oribos is nice again, now that it has its original skybox.
I like the Shadowlands denizens, all of them.
The meh is the main story and some of the questing (some is good).
The very bad is the usuall useless and cumbersome systems & rewards, some episodes in the story and, this time, the instanced content.
While by now I take the systems & rewards as a more or less conscious attempt to sabotage the sublime work of the art and sound departments, the bad quality of the instanced content surprises me. It’s probably the result of catering too much to M plus, esports and all that trash.
Ah, I was forgetting Torghast. It’s negligible.
Not much, tbh.
Covenants were a bust.
Leggos were boring reused effects from previous xpacs.
Tier sets just ended up being unbalanced and forced unreasonable gearing issues.
“Alt-friendly” turned out to be “alt-unfriendly.”
RNG, yes that includes the vault, just keeps getting worse. “More choices” just = more changes to get gear you don’t want and only get to choose one anyways.
Mage Tower was a bust for 95% of the community.
MT showed how absolutely horrific the base specs are without borrowed power. They haven’t been maintained in years.
Blizz shows they still can’t balance specs. The entire xpac there was at least a handful of specs more then 15% off the top dps. And no, that doesn’t make them viable.
Mounts and gear continue to just be recolored copy/pasted models over and over again.
Anesthetics from tier sets were garbo.
Blizz went full out #timeplayed, completely timegating everything and putting huge timers on things. Not to mention the korthia grind shudders.
Blizz still doesn’t get that players want full in account wide things. Yes this includes currency.
Etc… etc… etc…
Pfft. This isn’t true at all.
Probably the look of the zones themselves. Honestly think the art team really outdid themselves in Shadowlands.
Some of the mogs are neat
Excellent observations.
According to the forums, Vanilla killed WoW, so did BC etc.
I can’t say what I think, overall, of the “influencers” because that would grant me a ban.
The population IS declining, though, and the age of the game (and of us players), the competiton and mobile gaming are all important factors.
I’d add, though, the lawsuits, the terrible PR and the stubbornness of the devs in doubling down on their lousy systems, and ignoring the real player base to chase the esports nonsense.
Not a chance in h-e-double hockey sticks did lawsuits drive anyone away. People don’t care about that crap when they log into a video game.
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If by bust you mean only 5% actually put in the effort to complete it, and the rest sat crying on the forums after it was released that it was too hard after 10 attempts?
Mage tower was absolutely slammed with people, and plenty walked away finally beating the boss forever. They never, ever have to do the particular encounter again.
And now it is up forever. Every single specialization has had the opportunity to beat it since day 1. And they made minor tweaks every couple of days until it was in a pretty good spot for everyone.
10 attempts? Bahahahaha. Z.o.m.g. lol, you are a funny guy.
There are countless numbers of people who put in over 500 attempt, on one boss fight, during the first period it was open. That’s not accounting since they reopened it. But the numbers are low af after the reopen bc blizz left it and didn’t balance anything.
If you had 500 attempts on any given encounter on any class or specialization you simply were not geared properly, or did not understand the encounter.
There is no other explanation.
If we’re both pulling things out of our rump, I’d guess numbers are low now because most people who were interested in tower got it done when it was released.
I liked the expansion, not my favorite but not the worst. I thought the premise was pretty unique and the art team delivered big time.
I liked the covenant quests and storylines but didn’t care for the imbalances. Some classes really got great stuff with the covenant abilities while others not so much.
All told, I’ve enjoyed the expansion and am still having fun.
Art/ design, more races to play and more character customization and the fae faction. That’s about it.
Even avoiding outright dislikes it’s probably my most lukewarm expansion yet. Ardenwield was pretty and Bastion would’ve been if it weren’t so danged bright, but the rest? Meh. Even WoD left a stronger impression.
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all 3 raids have been extremely solid. In terms of player engagement, and the ambient. Raiding has been top quality. Best sustained quality of any expansion.
Lol w.e u say white knighter.
I resonate with this.
Coming to this expansion I really loved the idea of every zone, and particularly covenants I think in hope that they’d feel a little more akin to class halls.
But the soul of the game feels pretty absent.