I get it. Any time somebody asks “Am I the only one”- No, no you’re not. But I am curious if I’m in the minority on this, so I’m gonna share it.
My beef starts with the grind. I returned to this game after some time off and decided to start a new character. Even with the 100% increase in experience, the experience was unfriendly to the point of hostility - being a new or returning player blows. The leveling process is too brief to learn anything if you’re new, but too long to serve as anything other than a frustrating buffer for end game content for returning players. Once you make it to end game, you have to churn through a series of pointless quests just to catch your necklace up - which, in turn, sees you ready to begin doing normal and heroic dungeons so that you may have the privilege of trying to do Mythic 0s with your buddies. After a week or two, depending on time spent, success! You’re finally ready to experience the game at the very lowest of levels. If you’re paying one month at a time, this cost you anywhere between $3.75-7.50. Just, you know, in case you want to measure your experience playing what is essentially a tutorial in dollars rather than time.
Once you’re at 120 and have your mitts on some decent gear, you’ve earned the privilege of doing a mess of daily and weekly quests seemingly engineered solely to keep you logging in day to day for fear of missing out on the arms race that is gear and ever-less-valuable gold.
However, there is a tragic and worse part of this. If you wish to play the game with an Allied race, you must farm reputation and grind through quests. This is an additional time wall placed between you and the game at its most basic - the literal level one experience of what you’re paying for - for no real reason other than to keep you playing. This was something I found incredibly frustrating, because even completing all the quests in a region only brings you up to Revered.
In addition to this repetitive grind for reputations, experience, and gear, I was stuck dealing with the fact that, without grinding reputations in the past, you’re hosed as far as flying in various expansions go. Getting your flight in a current expansion doesn’t matter; you have to go back and get it for content that has no relevance if you want to expedite the leveling of future characters. So that was a fun discovery.
Tying off my rant on the grind, it’s gated behind RNG. No longer can I farm honor or gold and buy myself some decent gear - no, now, even in BGs, I must hope like some kind of slack jawed idiot with a lottery ticket that I’m going to get a decent item at the end of it.
To recap this section: It’s a bland, featureless grind to get the allied races. It’s a grind to get to 120, then another to get gear, and then another just to stay current.
Next up, we’ve got the story. The story has been on a bit of a slide for some time, but it’s recently really just hit valley lows. I’d say peak, but peak kinda infers a high. Anyways, let’s jump all the way back in time to Cataclysm.
Garrosh enters the political scene as a hotheaded youth who is a fit enough commander, but really a capable big-time leader. This was established in Wrath of the Lich King. Okay, great. In Cataclysm, he gets his big break: He’s forced to be Warchief. And he does an okay job, besides his overzealous pro-Horde tendencies.
Enter our next scene and, very abruptly, he becomes Orc Hitler. I mean, the parallel could not have been drawn more clearly. He even starts gassing folks. Apparently, the quest writers in Cataclysm weren’t told where this story was going, so when MoP came around it was a much less cohesive tale than it could’ve been. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.
Fast forward to Warlords of Draenor, and suddenly Frostwolves go from noble savages of a warrior culture to being held to a 21st century Western human morality standard. What was that? I mean, it directly contradicted how they acted in Rise of the Horde, so it’s not like this was always the plan.
Then we spend Legion building Bolvar as DKs, and Sylvanas (notoriously bad at 1v1 combat) comes along and wastes him in about a second. This ties into a trend of wasting characters: either by killing them almost immediately (Vol’jin) or by hamfistedly rushing their progression into villains (Zul, Rastakhan). Other characters get introduced and killed off almost immediately (Rezan). So why grow any level of attachment to any character?
To go with that, the power creep’s gotten out of hand. We’re slaughtering dragon aspects and demons; we’re basically demigods at this point. Better than that, really, since even the demigods didn’t do so hot against the Burning Legion, and we came along and battered the Legion pillar to post. That doesn’t stop us from being delegated absolutely idiotic tasks like “go find food for these people”. Get bent, I kill gods. YOU find food for these people.
The scaling of our opponents is equally ridiculous. In Vanilla WoW, we had a few faction level threats. At best, they’d have been problematic forces in the future; worst case scenario, they could have killed off a faction with great effort and losses. World domination was not a threat. In TBC, we invaded another planet and took some preventative measures against potential future dangers. In Wrath of the Lich King we saved the world from the Lich King and an Old God. In Cataclysm, a world-shattering foe was introduced and threatened not just one, but two dimensions. In Mists of Pandaria, another world level threat was introduced. In Warlords of Draenor, we had to time travel and the threat was on a fourth dimensional scale. In Legion, we jumped to a Thanos-style universal danger. Now we’re back to squabbling with swords made out of metal after we went through space. Neat twist.
Final notes on the weak story: Why are almost all of our major villains corrupted heroes or Old Gods? Why have none been built up over a series of expansions as a growing threat? Even Garrosh started off a good guy before he got very abruptly turned evil. Also, if the story’s gonna be so weak, why do you force me to endure it by giving me a million cutscenes and quests that send me across the room to get expository dialogue from another NPC for no experience?
Finally, the solo experience has been dismal. LFD® and BGs have been dismal, silent affairs where people just keep their head down and try to get through it as quickly as possible. And why wouldn’t they? There’s not only no need to communicate, we’re never gonna see each other again. There’s no sense of community.
Quests are repetitive and boring. You’ve only got the four types: kill, gather, travel, and escort - 120 levels later, I’ve done them all twenty times over minimum and I’m not in a hurry to do them again.
The reward system is bland. Beneath level 120, you get checkpoint bonuses that only serve to show you how far away you are from actually playing the game. At 120, it’s a game of roulette designed seemingly solely to keep you farming the same linear, unexciting dungeons day in and day out.
Now, like any good consumer, I’m voting with my dollar. I bought a month to see if the game was worth coming back to, this was what I left with. I have to wonder how many more people feel this way. I noticed that, a while back, Blizzard stopped posting their subscription numbers. They’d been trending down for a while. I can’t imagine this ceased because WoW was doing so well that they didn’t want to make other companies feel bad.