Them trying to take away flying lead to the massive sub loss which in turn forced them to change direction.
On the bright side Legion ended up being pretty good. It is really sad that the game had to get to that point for them to do right by the playerbase.
This is what happens when a company is driven by finance. Not by people with domain experience in the realm where the company operates. The money guys wanted 1 year expansions! Think of the revenue flow if everything else stayed the same and Blizzard could get their suckers customers to pony up for a “New Expansion” every year!
They should have released Plains of Farahlon, it could have been like Timeless Isle or something. Gold making was great in Warlords. I always thought the jump into Legion was a few months too quick, and a lot of people enjoyed 40v40 Classic Ashran with events. You could gear up an alt very quickly in there.
Was my favorite expansion, I tapped out in WoD, and was so done with the game I didn’t come back to Legion until the 1st patch and was happy with how that worked out.
I was soloing Mythics on this toon, we were so OP at the end of that expansion, it was glorious for sure! Oh and Mage Tower, easily the most fun and most challenging single player scenario with some of the best rewards this game has ever offered.
Rushed development and losing subs very fast.
it was a number of factor relating to blizz slashing the original teams that worked on expansions and hired cheaper devs that had to learn the coding, so it was left half finished
Imo, it had everything to do with no pathway to flight. So the ‘players’ sat in their garrisons and spammed instances. I for one enjoyed it immensely as I could quest and not have my questing areas bombarded by those with wings ninjaing mobs.
On July 25, 2013, Activision Blizzard announced the purchase of 429 million shares from majority owner Vivendi. As a result, Activision Blizzard became a completely independent company.
Shortly after after wod was released…guessing 10-12 months not looking .
activision most likely cancelled out ANYTHING that had to do with spending money…unless it was a raise for good ole bobby
Not sure I’ll ever agree with “raid or die” especially in an expansion that literally gave you access to mission table adventures that grant gear straight out of the raid.
I think you had to defeat X bosses or something to unlock the next level of gear you could get from it.
No Flight was a contributing factor, for sure.
Yearly, smaller expansions would be great, but very unrealistic as a goal for a game this size and with as many features it has.
Not that I’m aware of, I never raided in WoD and always had access to them.
Unless maybe I did them on LFR once? But even then if the requirements were unlockable through LFR then they are still accessible to everyone.
I think it was X LFR boss kills unlocks Normal, X Normal unlocks Heroic, and X heroic unlocks Mythic. I got my Mythic 2hded hammer from Blackrock Citadel on my first week of receiving mythic rewards… the next week I got the trinket lol.
Haha true. They were definitely pretty damm generous rewards.
Definitely not raid or die like was suggested above though.
You also have to keep in mind how long it takes before an expansion releases for the content to be planned out and implemented. Right now, almost six months into Shadowlands, they’re well into planning out the next expansion. They have the broad strokes of the shape of the rest of Shadowlands done, set to be filled out by 3D modelers, musicians, artists, etc. but for the most part, the core development team is working on the new expansion by now.
So this is all my conjecture. Cataclysm launched in 2010. But in 2009, the recession hit Blizzard hard. Luxuries like a monthly game subscription were the first things to get cut out of people’s budget, and they didn’t have time to play anyway because they were scrambling to make ends meet with two part-time jobs instead of one full-time one. Between 2009 and 2012, Blizzard laid off at least a thousand employees, many of them on teams that supported development.
They would’ve had the launch state of WoD planned out and nailed down by the time Cataclysm was in full swing, but trying to move ahead with a much, much leaner staff would’ve been a lot more difficult when they didn’t have as many people to spread out to have a team on implementing and tweaking late Cataclysm content, a team polishing WoD launch content, and a team planning out late WoD content.
By the time WoD launched they were worried enough about late WoD making it in at all on the artificially imposed one-year expansion cycle that they panicked and tried to scuttle having to make the world flight-ready and have people speed through the content at all by canceling flight forever going forward, in the hopes that it could slow players down enough and take the pressure off their designers enough that they could make a solid landing of WoD last for the whole expansion cycle. When that went over like a lead balloon, they had to look at reality and start making cuts to late WoD so that they could focus on Legion, which was already looking like it would take an extra year to get even the launch state put together.
So…basically the same thing happened at Blizzard as happens at most big companies. Decisions made by beancounters had repercussions in their ability to deliver on their promises.
Noted. Perhaps some explanation is in order.
For a lot of casual/social types I ran with, the WoD experience centered around the “solo” play Garrison. WoD really killed the play style of a lot of the profession/crafter/old content folks I ran with. So if you weren’t into PvP or current raiding… People felt that the Blizzard WoD play style funneled you into a solo type of play. Which is not what they wanted to do.
On top of that, the decision to remove (later rescinded) flying, and then gate it… drove out a lot of people that flew around gathering mats, talking to friends and just hanging around in game.[1]
[1] You may laugh at this, but I had no idea, until WoD erased them, how many of my guild members were farming ore. As their primary game activity. 10s of thousands of pieces of ore were being gathered by guild members and shipped to our guild jewel crafters. Who were in turn paying them top gold and flooding the AH with gems. There were lots of little side gigs like that going on in the social/casual guilds I was a part of. Those all died off in WoD. Why gather/craft anything when it was all in your or your friends solo play Garrison?
The no flying thing almost killed the game, they put a ton of resources into the zones reinstating it.
That’s fair, and truth it that is very much a gameplay design that has prevailed the past few expansions.
It’s not that the content that casuals engaged in was removed, nor worse than it was in previous expansions. It was simply that things like garrisons and similarly WQs in Legion/BfA (more so BfA) were far more rewarding for the amount of effort required.
Why run around and collect herbs and ore when you could just have 10 characters parked in their garrison collecting them each day?
Why farm gold when you can just do gold missions on the adventure table?
Why do heroics and other content when you can get better gear from mission tables and WQs?
I refer to this as the ironic degradation of casual content through development designed at increasing casual rewards and accessibility.
It’s honestly been the bane of WoW for years for now and it never seems to be addressed.
Covenant armour sets are currently the big culprit for it this expansion.
I think they realized pretty early in the development process after they announced it that things weren’t coming together but they’d already committed to that direction and people were complaining about how long we were on the Siege of Orgrimmar patch (and unsubbing). So they decided at some point pretty early on that Warlords was a lost cause and got what they had in a shippable condition and did what they could to fix it in patches. The difference in how they were talking about Warlords when it was announced versus at the Blizzcon right before launch was pretty telling.
Doing the ship mission got me my heroic cloak from Iskar at the time which was nice because I was able to skip him for my aotc back then