My only complaint about the story is that they built up nzoth for years and years across several expansions. And then once he is fully released we kill him after a short questline and a raid.
Not doing stuff like that would go a long way
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Continuity of character, motivation and environment
Proper pacing and pace of reveals, and plot points.
Characters acting as they should/would.
Show don’t tell.
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I just see bad storytelling thrown around a lot so I was curious what people had to say 
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Good storytelling means you aren’t retconning something every other day.
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Consistency. WoWs lore isn’t bad it’s just inconsistent.
The Chronicles was suppose to be our end all be all guide to Warcraft lore, this was Metzens intention, something we could turn to.
But now the writers have said it’s a biased perspective on the lore, the “Titans perspective.” So they can do their whole cosmic war storyline.
It’s crap like that, that ruins the lore.
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fair enough.
edit: on the spirit of the thread ill give my two cents, the most important are pacing and consistency , i believe the main problem wow has is that it misses its fanbase, if you see on how they do what they do.
Thats a quote from Kevin Martens you push too far, the fanbase doesnt like it then you spend the rest of the expansion retconning or fixing whatever you broke.
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Also as you can see most people here are saying consistency is the problem.
So just let that sink in.
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MMO storytelling is really hard, because ultimately the story isn’t being driven by differing personalities and motives, but rather the story is driven by creating conflict for the player character to resolve. This makes everything feel contrived; because it is.
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I, for one, am glad for the Warcraft Chronicles series, as this is Blizzard’s most recent attempt to join most of the lore cohesively. Also, I really did enjoy the series and how they used this as a launching point for future expansions. I really hope to see more in that series to make sense of a lot of the lore gaps in WoD, Legion, BfA and I’m sure in SL
The problem is the Chronicles is no longer cohesive. It has been retconned to be a biased and white washed take on the universe by The Titans.
Blizzard wants to do a cosmic war storyline where none of the forces are inherently “good” so The Titans are on the villain bat list.
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Whata wrong with that? The fact it got retconned, or the titans are “evil”
Because The Chronicles was sold to us as a guide to the lore. It cleaned up all the previous inconsistencies and it bridged the gap of all the stories.
It was our WoW encyclopedia, now its unreliable information. That sucks.
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Consistency. We were alright up until returning to Darkshore and encountering… the night elf dark rangers. I’ll be happy to understand that more in Shadowlands.
Besides that, WoW has given me great moments to cry-- or perhaps I can easily cry. 
For me, it’s a care for the character and their motivations and writing that character in such a way thay makes sense.
Let’s use Sylvanas as an example. Blizzard said Sylv was going to be portrayed as “morally gray” but did nothing to demonstrate that. If, going into Shadowlands, she was meant to be “morally gray”, the best time and way to demonstrate that would’ve been during the end of the Orgrimmar scenario.
Saurfang steps forward to confront her and Sylvanas does her established schtick. And (here’s where I would’ve changed things a bit) when she mortally wounds Saurfanfg, she grabs him and leans in close so no one but Saurfang (and us, as observers) can hear and whispers, “You died well, Old Soldier. I’m truly sorry but it has to be this way…for the Horde. For the Alliance. For Azeroth!”
And as Saurfang dies, an oddly out of place smile onnhis face, Sylvanas does her evil villain schtick and ghosts off.
In the Loyallist follow-up, she then knocks out the player and kills Nathanos saying, he never understood her or her cause and became corrupted because of it.
And as the Loyalist passes out, the last thing they see is Sylvanas going north to Icecrown, a tear leaking from one eye down a determined grimace painted on her face.
But that’s how I would’ve done it.
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So it’s notthe story itself, but the retconning to continue the story that most people have a gripe about instead of adding on to it?
A good story told well draws you into its narrative world. So you are now in the story, thinking like someone inside the story would. There is no outside world, just the story world.
The story world is self-consistent; in other words, it explains itself without having to resort to external references. But Blizzard (and WoW in particular) use a lot of pop culture references in their games - fans appear to love that, so that’s not going to change, but it is still an unsatisfactory way to tell a story.
Blizzard frequently retcons the lore, so major aspects of the story often don’t make sense in the story world. Frequently their major plots and characterizations are inconsistent and self-contradictory in unnatural ways that wouldn’t happen in the story world. This is a disservice to the reader, who Blizzard apparently expects to adjust to whatever Blizz says the story is at that moment in time.
This makes you an observer of the story, not a participant, and as an observer looking from the outside in, you see all the cracks and the flaws in the narrative.
Nothing appeases the MMORPG community. Especially the WOW one.
Toxicity and basement keyboard warriors all, nothing appeases them, they are full of bitterness and bile and spew it everywhwere they go, nothing is good enough for them.
Yes. I’m sure there are some people out there who don’t like the writing in general, but I feel for most it’s just the inconsistency that brings out these feelings.
The writers aren’t bad, it’s just hard to care about their story when characters and the world are so inconsistent.
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Yeah cause chronicle feels like fan fiction now. I bought the books because I wanted books on the actual lore & now I feel like I wasted money. You can easily add to a story without retconning previous information.
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I agree that this is their goal, but it’s funny how they’ve turned the faction war into a good-vs-evil struggle while “greying up” the cosmic forces.
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