It’s hard to say what happened. People point to the massive subloss and flying debacle, but honestly, the expansion seemed abandoned already by that point.
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Time restraints caused its initial content cycle to be all out of wack, which due to the development issues led to tons of cut content to the point that it became basically an “in over your head” scenario, and moved on to direct resources to legion as a priority to avoid making that mistake again.
Yeah, this is what I am talking about. I am curious as to what the change was mid development.
I almost wonder if the lack of flying was a by-product of the “new team’s” lack of expertise at developing for WoW?
Only problem with that theory is they started cutting stuff in beta before the expansion was even released. Movable Garrisons, Bladespire/Karabor capitals, Tanaan at launch, Faralohn, Ogre continent, Talador raid, etc. All of that vanished before launch day and they even had a chance to lose subs.
I am the sub lose contributed but it seems the trigger was pulled before that even happened.
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I definitely had Orc fatigue. And wolf recolor mount fatigue. And bad guy for some reason is cheered for saving us from his own mess confusion. And selfie cam major patch fatigue. And cut content fatigue. And pacing fatigue. And…you get the point.
The leveling experience was pretty great though.
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Dont forget Zangar Sea!
WoD was one of the most complained expansion and many horde players weren’t thrilled to fight against our own kind.
Blizzard already find a way to makes us fight against trolls every dam xpack and now orc. it was ridiculous.
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I just put the obvious things together there and honestly did not know about the staff cutting thing.
That’s why we have you around here Rogmarr, keep us forum peasants straight, you can always trust a short guy with a massive beard, right?! 
Seriously, thanks for the insight.
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This.
Previously, expansions all had 3 major content patches and were released approximately once every 2 years.
With WoD, Blizzard decided to try for a smaller expansion with 2/3 the content released on a shorter cycle, but selling for the same price as prior expansions.
In theory this sounded like a good idea:
- Players would benefit from having access to a larger quantity of content more rapidly.
- Blizzard would benefit from increased sales from new expansions being released more often.
In reality, their strategy completely bombed.
- WoD failed because Blizzard found they couldn’t actually speed up their expansion cycle timeline.
- What players ended up with was an expansion with 2/3 of the content of other expansions… but with the same 2-year release cycle.
- The gap between the release of WoD’s final major content patch and the next expansion was 13 months long … over half of the entire expansion cycle!!!
Other than this lack of content there was nothing particularly bad about WoD. WoD’s content patches were ok. Nothing exceptional, but no obvious screwups like in early BFA.
However, this lack of content was unforgivable and is why WoD is widely considered the worst WoW expansion ever.
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The last of the Sub data showed that literally half or more of the entire active player base dropped in a single quarter, representing the biggest loss of subs at that point. I am sure that triggered several emergency meetings where start fresh came out ahead rather than salvage the disaster.
The Flying War began, and that first battle was NOT good. This was Blizzard against a player base that sat MORE THAN A YEAR on Siege of Ogrimmar.
Hindsight is always 20/20. Now the raids, transmog, zones and stuff looks cool.
But if you try to go for loremaster for example, you immediately see how starkly different that expansion was. Things don’t make quite a lot of sense, many stories are left incomplete, and everything was annoyingly attached to the Garrison progress. The social game, forced you to be anti-social in order to gain progression. That quickly added up.
There was also a huge internal struggle at Blizzard. There is a podcast some years ago with Metzen, where he talks about how at that time project Titan had crashed and burned HARD, and everyone got demoralized, even teams that didn’t work in it. (Those assets later became Overwatch)
They had been non-stop blowing everything out of the water since Vanilla released, and then hit the wall hard.
WoD was also if I believe the absolute end of Metzen’s ongoing story. There wasn’t much else written or planned ahead. What followed was a two-year stretch of about 10-15 main dev. names leaving the company.
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First ive ever heard of orc fatigue. For me it was just an xpac that didnt live up to the expectations. They made to many promises that they backed out off, the world was never finished, We had all these great locations that we experienced in TBC that were just sealed off or not implemented. Shattrath, black temple, faralon. The raids were boring, the dungeons while many were great were too few, the focus on garrisons that kept players away from other players, when players asked for player houses we didnt want a solo city, we wanted a place where we could show off our trophies and have a little of our flair in the game.
You sir are correct. The idea at the time was 1 expac per year.
Interesting at how much was just scrapped before launch:
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Always felt it was suppose to coincide with the movie release but with delays and all concerning all that. The very beginning of WoD when you are introduced to the villianous orcs with a big cut scene and musical pomp, seemed like product placement with action figures for example to me.
Orc Fatigue was just BS, never even heard that before.
As others have said, it was a long time without any new content added, not very many raids and basically once you leveled up your alts and finished your garrison there wasn’t muchto do.
This. I remember rumblings among my social group starting about 3 months after launch and then at the 6 month mark people and guilds just started to evaporate. Guild chat was full of people stating they had cancelled their subs. Lots were old timers that had been around since the start.
A common theme was that the magic was gone for them.
Maybe 10% of the people that were around at the start of WoD have popped back in for a week or so here and there, but the majority left for good and never came back.
This was my experience. Your experience may be completely different. 
A bunch of my guild vanished around that time as well. I see them once in a while show up but not for long. Another bunch left around the end of Legion, incensed that all their time and work to build up the artifact was erased.
Because it was a rushed job due to negative feedback. Nobody really liked Garrisonville microgame.
A lot had to do with this .
This is from shortly after the WoD announcement nearly 9 months before launch.
THis is from 2 months before Legion Launched.
Ion has to come up with a mea culpa as they admit live, on Twitch, that there was such a post-Warlords of Draenor drought because they thought WoW Legion was going to be out a lot sooner. They admit that, in hindsight, with five expansions worth of experience behind them, that they probably should of known this wasn’t a viable plan.
You know all those systems (artifact weapons/artifact power) people said were put in because of WoD were actually the reason WoD sunk .