I want to, because I sense that they have a lot more coming and it could be great but what we have right now feels so unfinished and yet we’ve gone through all the story they have and built up the covenants to their max renown and then… months before anything new?
Its hard to have any kind of passion or patience with that, given how many other games are out there.
WoD happens on another planet
In a different time
My personal tinfoil hat theory is that WoD is when they first brought in the gaming shrinks/theorists to start taking the game in a different direction. If you look back, a number of the systems we currently have in game were born in WoD:
Resources
Rental Power (via zone only abilities)
Misson Tables
They have since doubled down.
100% Guarantee it was because of how many people abandoned the game.
There’s never been a bigger exodus of players than when they announced Flying would not be coming back.
They backtracked, obviously, but in the announcement that they would bring flying to Draenor with Pathfinder, they announced 6.2 would be the last patch of WoD, and that they would prefer to focus on getting the next xpac out faster than continue WoD.
Ashran, ability pruning, the ‘self healing buffs’, removal of reforging meaning you had to stick to the stats on the gear and they added items with combinations with every single stat combo making gearing feel more like D3 and winnming a loot lottery finding something that had what you needed, valor/justice points removal, stat squish, removal of main stat double up (agil/int giving crit chance aswell) - WoD made significant changes to how the game had played in the past from a foundational level and then was the kick in the face that was 6.1 ‘major content patch’, Twitter, garrison and ashran changes - so many players left wow in that time it never fully recovered.
There wasn’t an official story as to why… IIRC…
However, it basically came down to Blizzard pulling resources from WoD development to put more resources towards Legion development.
What this led to is Blizzard cutting planned content such as the Ogre Empire and Faranaar (or whatever the plant island was called) which was planned to break up the ‘Orc’ content so they didn’t have so many orc raids back to back.
Going on the assumptions that there would be ‘Orc Fatigue’ because of the removal of this content, Blizzard apparently made the ‘Burning Legion’ a much bigger deal in the later half of WoD… this is also why the ‘end boss’ was changed from Grommosh (costing us a chance at that sweet sweet updated Gorehowl…).
Eh… Yeah, there was a lot of backlash due to this but you have to remember that the initial release of WoD was a big boost to the population… and I’d honestly say the biggest detrement to maintaining this boost was the fact that there wasn’t much follow on content after so much of the planned content was sacrificed on the alter of Legion.
IMO, the initial release of WoD was one of the better successes (after getting over the expected release day woes) of the game but there wasn’t any follow up to keep the momentum, which caused a major crash in interest and player count… Consider that the first ‘major’ content patch after release consisted of the Selfie camera… yeah.
WHat’s funny is during MoP they were all sitting in the shrines at max level and during Cata sitting in SW and Org doing the same thing they did in the garrisons.
Queueing for dungeons/lfr and spamming trade chat for pug groups for normal and heroic but they hated sitting in the Garrisons doing the same thing they did over 4 years for the previous 2 expansions.
WOD was better than Shadowlands at least. I’d rather have too many Orcs than not enough Orcs.
Shadowlands just feels like I’m playing a different game, it’s too disconnected from Azeroth and the core races.
SL will only be a 2 major patch expansions. the 9.2 patch will most likely be the jailer raid. Anything after that and we are getting too close to the 10.0 pre patch .
It certainly would have benefited from being able to mount, but if that’s the only reason to dislike it, I can’t agree. On reason the garrisons were bad was because they added the function of banks and auction house, so players hardly needed to leave them. If you had to go back to your hub location at least it would have got people out into the world a bit more.
That would have been fine. But as a hub location, Warspear was a hundred times superior to Bladespire.
I guess. Would have been interesting to see if anything interesting or unusual was going to be added to the two faction hubs. I have no idea what, and maybe nothing. I guess in the end they decided that no, it wasn’t worth the time. If so, probably would have been good to decide that before announcing it.
I didn’t play WoD, so I don’t have the memories of the xpac clouding up my perception here so maybe I can give a more unbiased opinion on why they scraped it.
It was Garrisons. If you look back at the Blizzcon announcement Garrisons were supposed to be huge. Everything from them moving through the game with you to raid level invasions and PvP etc. And I can bet you dollars to doughnuts that wasn’t even half their plans for it.
They built the entire xpac around the Garrison.
But by the time they had to launch the game because we had been sitting in a holding pattern for a year+ they weren’t able to deliver. They cut down the Garrison to bare essentials just to get the game out, with promises that they would built and add to it as they went.
And then we happened. We hated the Garrison. All the plans they had for the game that weren’t raiding were tied to the Garrison and they realised that there was no way to save it even if they gave us everything they had planned. We just did not like the core of what the Garrison was and they couldn’t deliver on what they had initially planned it to be.
So what do you do when the one key lynchpin that you built the entire xpac around disappears? You cut your losses and put your time and resources on the next one.
Well, every expansion they over promise and underdeliver. Burning Crusade they promised huge battles to conquer cities (and we got Halaa), flying combat (we got a few vehicle style quests), etc.
I don’t know if the marketing team is just making crap up, the developers lie to the marketers, or what is going on but they always sell this huge thing and give meh.
as someone that was in the late Alpha/ all of beta testing, i can only speak from my perspective, as i have many time’s in similar threads.
but it was simply they had to much planned and not enough time to Develop it. what WoD could have been though!
i Loved WoD for what it was! it lacked Content but what content there was, especially raids was some of the best they have ever done… least in my Opinion.
that explains a lot
I suspect that Draenor was a chance for some people who wanted that corner office to make a huge power struggle and dump the ones who brought us stuff like Northrend so they could implement their ideas.
I would like railroads and other new things in my Garrison even right now. I still use my garrison everyday.
Shoulda been the Arms Warrior legendary instead of some stupid Titan weapon with no lore behind it at all.