I like how you can find dozens of videos on youtube where players like Max, Preach and Dorki state multiple times that they don’t think the game should at all be balanced around the very niche high - end population.
Not sure why players like you project this so much. Toxic casual syndrome.
My point is that people are wrong when you say “the community” or “the players” didn’t like Shadowlands. Now if they said “Some players” didn’t like Shadowlands then fine. But to say that the players in general didn’t like it is just a guess.
For them it may have been a miss because like any company they want to maximize revenue. So any loss in subscriptions would be concerning. But that doesn’t mean that it was a miss for the entire player community as so many people have claimed.
And they did leave open that the fall in numbers could have included losses from China which did happen, according to their graph, before DF.
It really isn’t though
Outside of this particular forum - which has a disproportionate amount of fanboy/white knight types - the perception of Shadowlands is overwhelmingly negative in the “WoW universe”
Reddit, MMO-C, Youtube, etc were all dumping on SL continuously
Once the honeymoon phase of the first few months was over the content drought became readily apparent and the playerbase started to get restless
Credit where credit is due though; they obviously “over-corrected” hard judging by the much more frequent content drips in Dragonflight. And them changing their design philosophy so abruptly in response to Shadowland’s poor reception is basically evidence that even the devs know SL was bad 
Yup. Shadowlands really was a weird one in terms of reception.
Shadowlands was a case where the beginning of the expansion was awful, and it didn’t really get better until it was too late, and players had just decided that it was always going to be bad.
Post 9.1.5, it was starting to be ok, and cross faction in 9.2.5 is easily top 3 changes they’ve made to the game in a long time.
Some like me opted to go from classic tourist to permanent resident in sl.
Damage control came too late. TBC wasn’t even a top 5 expac for me from retail leveling after I started in legion.
But it was better than sl.
Df didn’t turn that around, I was a retail tourist for maybe a month lol
You are almost completely correct. Most wow players are sheep and just listen to their favorite youtuber/streamer and that forms the basis of their opinion. They cant fathom critically thinking for themselves and its so obvious when i talk to anyone on the forums. They tend to be really close minded to actually having a real chat about it. I expect your post to get alt spmed into an oblivion
People apologize for things all the time that they shouldnt. Its just a pr move lol
I don’t do stream watching. The glimpses I’ve seen I’d deem most idiots really. Well paid idiots. I mean can’t deny they work the system well.
Sl for me had us not just suspend belief to move the plot.
It asked us to drag belief out back, Make it dig its own 1000 foot grave, We execute belief in the grave then covered it up with 1000 feet of concrete.
Just to be sure it’s never found again.
The afterlife was really better left a mystery.
Eh i disagree. But i mean really from a gameplay perspective. When it comes to story and plot and development everyone is a critic and has an opinion whether i agree with it or not.
WoW lost subs pretty consistently for over ten years. Not once did Blizzard have to come out and say “Yeah man, we screwed up real bad with that one, didn’t we?”
Maybe not everyone disliked Shadowlands, but enough did for Blizzard to take action, and I think relegating that discontent to “top level players” is wholly disingenuous.
Why would Blizzard have to do a PR stunt if Shadowlands was largely favored by the community?
Could it be because the majority of the community didn’t like it?
My other post clearly states that the op is correct in stating that most of it is influence-driven hate and not natural hate for SL based on individual thoughts or feelings. Most of SL was pretty good.
Due to they masses being massively influenced against it, they felt the need to apologize just to try and clear the air. But honestly, it should never have been required, and apologizing to the player base even if it was the worst expansion ever makes no sense. Obviously, it’s just to sate the ego of many of the narcissists on here that thinks everything blizzard does must appease them or their influencer overlords.
Chris Metzen: World of Warcraft: Chronicle (or simply the Warcraft Chronicle ) is a series that attempts to codify, tighten up and clarify the history of Warcraft.
Steve Danuser: Chronicle is written from the point of view of the titans and their servants.
Influence-driven hate has nothing to do with it, and this argument is irrelevant because it assumes that Shadowlands is some isolated incident in the WoW timeline. Influencers have regularly drilled and ragged on WoW regardless of the expansion. Before influencers were even a thing, there were swathes of haters on public forums decrying the fall of the game.
If influence-driven hate was a thing that actually convinced people to hate the game, then WoW would have died long ago because this game is consistently dumpstered by everyone. Dragonflight would have failed in player retention instead of growing because you have people like Asmongold and Bellular whining about the state of the game every other week.
The fact is that influencers are just a scapegoat people use to avoid confronting the possibility that the expansion they liked was actually dog water. It’s much easier to counter claims of Shadowlands being a bad expansion by stating “Nah, it’s just because influencers are annoying and whine about everything” rather than actually addressing the many issues the expansion did have.
It’s pretty bold to say this when Reolt took the time to quote at least a half dozen times when you did this (or pretty close to it) yourself not 48 hours ago…
Citation needed.
Your view that most of SL is pretty good is purely subjective. You’re welcome to your opinion, of course. But I can also reach the conclusion that SL was awful without being influenced by any outside force. Locked covenants and retconning my favorite Warcraft villain to be a bloody puppet made me enjoy SL far less than I would have were those things not the case. And that has nothing to do with whatever some YouTube personality that I probably don’t watch (pretty much the only WoW YouTube content I consume is a guide to the next boss or dungeon I need to learn) said about SL.
Have they really cut back to just every other week?!
How many WoW players do you think enter notes on forums like Reddit or our forum? There are about seven million people playing WoW. About seven million of them never entire notes into our forum, reddit, etc.
Now are internet forums a unbiased representative sample of the general population of anything? Not likely. That’s why polling companies like Gallup and Harris never use internet forums to collect data.
As for YouTube, it depends on who you watch. Obviously there are some CCs who like fan the flames to up their click counts and ad rates but others like Breezy and Kelini are more “how to”. You never hear them throwing temper tantrums or making funny faces followed by anti Blizzard rants.
As for the seven million who never entre notes in forums? We have no idea how they feel.
Let me ask you this: Let’s assume you’re right in that the broader WoW community was actually okay with Shadowlands, and the real issue was more or less the vocal minority/top level players on YouTube, the forums, etc. etc.
Even if we are to assume the above to be true, what exactly do you expect Blizzard to do in that situation? Ignore the feedback? Part of Blizzard’s responsibility as a game developer is to take in feedback and make the appropriate adjustments/changes to the game. If they are constantly being barraged with “This expansion is terrible,” then why wouldn’t they do something about it?
They can’t just assume that those who are silent are actually content with the game, thus overriding any feedback given. That is illogical and would surely lead to disaster for the game’s health. From Blizzard’s perspective, they had actionable feedback and their game was bleeding subscriptions, so there was really only one direction for them to take, at that point.
If the broader community didn’t actually dislike Shadowlands, they should have expressed as much by coming to the forums and speaking about it. It’s not the responsibility of anyone here to consider other people’s feelings when designating feedback to Blizzard. Their responsibility is to express their opinion on something and explain why, and if people disagree, then they can voice their opinion in opposition. That is the point of the forum: To generate discourse between players that Blizzard can then review and integrate into their game.
But that didn’t happen. Feedback was overwhelmingly negative with most people in agreement, so there wasn’t anything for Blizzard to do except completely move away from the Shadowlands mode of content.
So, you know, if you don’t like the direction WoW is going and would prefer that we go back to something like Shadowlands, then it’s on you to explain why and provide a valid argument that supports your position. Give Blizzard something to chew on besides “Most players were actually okay with Shadowlands!” because everything that we can observe would suggest otherwise.
I dunno man, I would say that reddit (2 million+ subscribers just in the WoW reddit alone) and Youtube (…millions and millions of viewers spread out across the various WoW channels) are a fairly “good” sample size
…certainly a much bigger sample size than the relatively few players that frequent this board (hundreds or thousands compared to millions on other platforms?)
Blizzard was pounded by massive negative advertising from certain mega subscription YouTube CCs and others who were feeding the people who hated Shadowlands what they wanted to hear to farm their clicks. It was harming the product.
Now maybe it was what the entire community felt and maybe not, that didn’t matter. The beating they were taking had to stop so they pulled the plug a season eary. That’s probably why we didn’t get an Arthas story.
That’s my guess but it’s as good or bad as anyone else’s guess. Fact is, contrary to what the forum echo chambers tell us, we just have no idea how the millions of people who play this game feel.
This doesn’t answer my question. My question was: What do you expect Blizzard to do in that situation? Even if we are to assume what you’re saying is correct, then what is Blizzard to do when the only feedback they’re getting is negative?