I’m running island expeditions to get the cosmetics (pets, mounts, toys) and the upgrade tokens (for alts that are 111).
I’ve run the warfronts a few times. I’m mostly doing it for heirlooms (which may be worthless after the next patch). Not sure what other gains there are. Still will probably do them, as they seem to occur only once every week or two.
Failure for sure.
Boring easy content, made no lasting impact on the game, over rewarded players forcing them to do it whenever it was available.
Having it actual PvP would have been a huge benefit to it, otherwise even just having all the npcs use the island AI instead of just being trash mobs with no abilities that just ran at you would have made it a little better.
People don’t do them because they enjoy them. Even in your rush to be contrarian here you still said you were grinding them out to get a mount.
Good tip though. Was wondering how we were supposed to get that flying cat mount ever since invasions got nerfed.
Despite it being easy 460 loot for the Darkshore one, I always dread the process to get it. It’s just so boring. Doesn’t even take long. And then all of the stuns from some of the bosses. Great times.
Arathi isn’t even worth doing at all anymore.
I liked Arathi a lot, Dark shore was kind of bleh. The horde side transmogs were pretty sweet though.
I only do these because of the excellent racial themed transmog of which there is not nearly enough in game.
I found it somewhat interesting the first few times, and it was a pure transmog grind after that. Ran one on heroic and found it very tedious, not hard just drawn out. Will have to sit through heroic Darkshore once for the mount.
This and the expeditions were meant to be futures but ended up pretty dull.
I liked them and thought that they were fun the first few times. I didn’t find them to have much replayability.
I would have enjoyed the island expeditions more if they were quest zones you visited with your friends. I didn’t like that they felt like a race.
I liked them… I even didn’t mind the resource part in the warfront. The resource donations outside the warfront and the overall time gate was stupid…
Failure since it was assumed there was going to be a PvP version & they also scrapped like 2 or 3 warfronts. One of which was suppose to be in the Barrens.
I found them interesting and still don’t mind doing them because of how easy they are, but only having 2 is just…boring.
I didn’t mind doing it like…once every cycle.
They could have made it a lot more interesting though. I think people got burnt out super fast on them because they were spamable and gave gear. Which is a design failure imo.
They should have never been something that gave gear.
Cosmetics/Transmogs would have been a better alternative.
edit:
My point being that because they gave gear, the people who min/max and play the game in a “go go go” fashion felt obligated to do it. And because they felt obligated to do it and it was easy and sometimes a bit boring they hated it.
If it was more geared towards your casual cosmetics/mount/pet/toys farmers it would have been received a little better.
I hope they learned their lesson and don’t put gear in every aspect of their content.
If the gear would of scaled it might have done better
Along with Islands, utterly boring.
Failure. Keeping gear pieces locked behind RNG was a mistake. They could’ve used WoD’s Blackrock method where you get a token and can redeem it for a piece of THE PLAYER’S CHOICE! But instead they purposefully locked it behind RNG drops to appease the most toxic of human beings: Shareholders.
The Islands biggest problem was the pathetically low coin rewards for the effort put in.
Failure.
It never grew, it never developed, it never got interesting and while it sounded really cool in theory…in actuality it was tiresome and dull from start to finish. The finish came early, as a lot of bad things do, before quicking being irrelevant for the rest of the expansion.
I’d have at least tried to make them PVP mode so they’d fill in as new and interesting battlegrounds but it never happened so here we are. Would probably have sucked and gotten boring real fast and been a waste of time but since that was what happened anyway, such is life.
It really didn’t offer WC3 playstyle at all though.
Having a few units as pets isn’t really WC3 gameplay
Blizzard mistakenly thought lore was enough incentive for people to play the game. They quickly learned that what we pirates actually require is phat loots
It would have been nice and fun if they were PvP scenarios rather than PvP but…lets be real here. With how PvP was at the start of the expansion? Horde would have dominated every single warfront and it would have just snowballed from there.
As boring and tedious as they are, making them PvE was the correct call.
Both Warfronts and Island Expeditions can be summed up by Rule of Acquisition #19: “Satisfaction is not Guaranteed.”
It’s the wow gd forum. You know where everyone hates everything lol. If I don’t like it, then you are not supposed to like it either hahaha.
These folks are busy playing the game doing the things they enjoy doing(warfronts, assaults, etc), and not here on the forum spewing I hate it, so it’s a failure 
I like the warfronts. Do agree with the pvp folks though, in that there should of been a pvp version warfront also. Would of been hilarious seeing those folks come to the forum griping about I don’t have time to collect the resources blizz, because someone keeps killing me lol. I just hope they keep going with Legion invasion, and BFA assault type of stuff, because those are more fun imo.
Abysmal failure. The rewards were poor, the play was boring, they did very little to contribute to the story, the up-once-every-two-weeks was annoying, horde getting (predictably) first crack at them was yet more blizz pro-horde bias, and they didn’t scale with anything so there was no reason to keep doing them unless people wanted the token items.
The “people did them so they were a success” argument is an absolute fallacy. People abandoned them in droves as soon as they got what they wanted/needed. What does that tell you about how much people actually liked them?
The sad thing is, like so much more in this expansion, WFs were a good idea that were poorly implemented. They could have been a lot of fun, but they were poorly designed on so many levels that they were DOA. Just like Azerite Gear. Just like the 3rd version of Pathfinder. Just like the Legion artifact abilities that we were told would get rolled into our classes and never were.
BfA has been the expansion of poor implementation and broken promises.