My personal opinions
I really think Shadowlands is worse than WoD, and I played WoD almost in its entirety.
Some Current payers may be ironing out goals.
My case for example I did resub for 6 months.
To close out alts. While BFA and then SL did leave me going sighā¦hope is there 10.0 hits it out the park. An optimist is buried beneath this jaded skin I bear lol.
And I need 2 sides mains and alts ready for that.
soā¦alts get 210 to 220. I catch enough 9.2ā¦chip away at +10 or 20, whatever its giving.
has them sitting better for a lapse then restart in 10. If its worthy to come back. I donāt see me on impulse preordering 10. It can have a mog set. and that mog set can join the other sets I can never ever have to be 100%, ever.
when all I can be is 99%, 89%, 79%, etc complete works too lol.
game is sneaky like that. the newā¦needs the old. saw that on my illidan experiment. My main servers had gear conversions from bfa. Walked in 100 on down the line. So in SL as it was time to hit lfd for some dungeon assist to xp I dropped right in.
My illidan char had none of this. fresh and new. gear from even lfd leveling will not clear ilevel for normal. greens from questing to 55ā¦nope. THey donāt clear either. and as the last of my mail levelingsā¦I wasntā gonna upgrade the looms. at this pointā¦a close to 40K money pit.
and since I canāt transfer goldā¦I cnaāt buy boes. Well I could. like 2. and thusā¦5000 gold is zapped. Broke butt char on all lonely on a server that sees none of gold.
So a lesson learned from the illidari char. Upgrade in current since the new new game is going to much better for it. since yeah its jsut a bit jacked up an almost pure leveling in dungeon to 50 and greens given to level 55 is not good enough for even normal dungeon in current expac.
so this issue will be avoided if possible on chars going into 10.0.
I could never get over why we were even there in the first place. Why go through the rift at all. Nothing dead can come back to azeroth side as they are dead. Not possible.
Will will add to your list -
They put this currency in solely as a time sink. Someone at Blizz HQ with their flow chart and slide rule realized people might unlock cosmetics more quickly than anticipated. So they decided to add another currency to slow people down.
Making everything a chore.
They didnāt listen to player feedback in beta, they consistently screw u from playing ur alts.
Which is weird cause they would get more play time if players could play the content they like with their alts without having to drudge through the same boring nonsense over and over
SL objectively DOES have some improvements over BFA, but it fails at a lot of things as well.
Basically every single system and story point they added went terribly wrong and completely flopped.
Thereās no Azerite grind, but there is an anima grind.
Thereās no Islands to progress, but you need torghast to progress.
etc etcā¦
I can go on, but itās nothing that I and many others havenāt said in feedback which was promptly ignored, back when the game had 2-3 times as many players as it does now.
Looking back itās pretty obvious that SL is a failure, not for any one particular reason, but for a great many.
If you enjoy it, thatās great! I hope you continue to do so! I guess thereās always some chance that they can salvage itā¦ somehow.
If not, FF14 is currently out of lifeboats for WoW refugees, but we hope you reapply for your new immigration status as a sprout soon!
S.L. is players against bosses ( Ion , Bobby etc )
It failed somewhere around ācovenantsā
Iād say it was because it was made more tedious/punishing than it needed to be.
āNo bad luck protection or bonus rolls.
āLoss of stygia upon death in the Maw and no mounting initially.
āThe crafting system for legendaries, specifically how tedious it was to rank them up.
That being said, there are things I like (obviously, or I wouldnāt still be playing). Iām not a min-maxer (never progress beyond heroic in raids), so it was easy for me to throw myself into the covenant system, and I really enjoyed the extra flavor they added to gameplay and the world. The raids are still as good as theyāve always been, and Denathrius was a great villian (who should have been the xpac overarching villian, as heās much more interesting than the jailer).
Overall Iād say Iāve enjoyed it more than Cata and WoD. Iād put it below BFA though (unpopular opinion, but I think 8.3 was one of the greatest patches in WoWās history, especially after the corruption vendor was put in).
I think the story would be better if we got more of it more often. Them relying on raid patches to tell pieces of the story is really hurting it.
Not that itās a great story to begin with, but I know Iād enjoy it more if chunks werenāt so small and infrequent. If they want to tell this big of a story with this massive investment, it needs its own patches or something.
I do agree with Torghast being a flop. All of these years and they still havenāt figured out why the Garrison flopped when it was current, or Island Expeditions. I hope they can eventually learn to create features for fun and understand that cosmetic rewards are more than enough to garner investment.
I mean, look at the mage tower right now. The rewards for that thing are the laziest thing they couldāve come up with and people are still banging their heads against walls to get it.
I think the biggest issue with SL is the leadership for the game. The game director has not made very many good decisions in his tenure, IMO.
To me, it was when they literally undid so much already established lore by having a dollar store looking villain be ābehind it allā Like iām supposed to believe heās just as powerful as Sargeras, who was established for YEARS as āthe big badā, while the only thing thatās interesting about the jailer are his nipples . He couldnāt even afford shoes wtf
Iām trying to think of some redeeming aspect of SL but itās tough. At least the mission tables are a big step up from bfaā¦
Iāll add BORING leveling zones. the only one I can stomach is the vampire clan.
Every single thing about it failed. It failed when it was just on the concept board. It epic failed in development. It should have been delayed and re-worked.
Itās not even so much that itās āuninteresting.ā
Certainly: death and the afterlife is INTERESTING.
But itās utterly STUPID to think weāre going to the AFTERLIFE ā¦ and then in 24.4 months ā¦ just go back to the ānormalā world chasing the next set of purplz.
Itās like if America discovered a way to harness nuclear fusion for power tomorrow, you then went on a trip to Europe, and had to pretend that nothing happened. That you DIDNāT know the most fundamental shift in how HUMAN BEINGS AS A WHOLE live ā¦ and it was no big deal.
And as MASSIVE as nuclear fusion would be to power, itās NOTHING compared to what VISITING THE AFTERLIFE WOULD BE!!!
And weāre just supposed to pretend that thereās a portal to the AFTERLIFE at the bottom of Orgrimmarā¦ and itās no big deal??
THIS IS FREAKING STUPID.
Itās a fantasy game. I get it. But there are limits. Even in FANTASY, stuff has to make sense at some level. Otherwise, why donāt we have lasers?? Will WoW 10.0 finally give us access to the phase plasma rifle in the 40 watt range?
There are myriad problems with SL in terms of gameplay. But it all falls under the weight of pretending we went to the AFTERLIFE ā¦ and itās somehow ājust another island we visit.ā
The entire premise of this expac is beneath contempt.
Nah, I loved that stuff. The Maw has become soulless/flavorless after the removal of those elements when it became just another patch island.
Not everything in this game is for everyone. You would think after Blizzard just released the Mage Tower tuned how it was that casual players would understand that not everything in the game is made for them and reflect backwards and realize the Maw was not made for them.
Oh well. GD gonna be GD I guess.
Design philosophy #1: Make your design instinctive.
When was the last time anything in this game felt as if it had been designed to be instinctive to the players? Most players seem to recall that time frame being around the end of wrath and the beginning of cataclysm. This game hasnāt really felt like something most players can relate to anymore due to the fact the social aspect has almost collapsed entirely. They can blame their conveniences like LFG and LFR as part of the problem. More to the point, they made it cross server and that was something they never should have done. That system should have been designed to match players on the same server.
Design philosophy #2: Make things to last, donāt replace them.
Look at each new expansion. Do things last even from a relative context? No. They keep using borrowed power systems that they then have to replace in the next expansion. This should be a no-brainer but apparently their dev team isnāt capable of independent thought anymore.
Design philosophy #3: Designers are not users
Theyāve been failing at this for longer than most players realize. Again, something that should be a no-brainer. But nope, they decided at some point around the development of Cataclysm that they were designing the game for themselves rather than for their customers.
Design philosophy #4: Function over form.
Do the systems they keep forcing on the player base with each new expansion seem functional? No. Theyāre repeatedly complete failures right out of the door at launch every time. They know this during development even before the alpha stage and when they get to beta stage they ignore just about any and all feedback. Itās only after they lose subs months in that they scramble to start fixing anything thatās broken. By the time they actually polish everything up where itās remotely functional, theyāre already leading into the next expansion. Thus, the players canāt really enjoy the game because it comes off as a chore in most aspects but for some reason, we keep coming back thinking theyāre going to learn.
Design philosophy #5: Good design should be experienced and not seen.
All we ever see from blizzard anymore with this game is what they want us to. Upon release, we experience bad design due to all of the above going so terribly wrong on their team. I donāt believe this is going to change. I would hope it does but that hope has been dwindling for years. Legion proved theyāre still capable of good design to a relative extent. Iām curious as to why they havenāt maintained that standard upon achieving it again since the last time this game was that successful was all the way back during wrath.
In short, their design philosophy is whatās broken and why their expansions continually keep failing.
Shadowlands failed by design with all the power systems they introduced. It basically just vomited the illusion of content onto the players but what it did was break balance to the point where they canāt even fix it.
It failed with continuing the stupid scaling crap. That should be something up to the player (if you want that garbage, toggle it on. If you donāt toggle it off).
The stupidity of multiple islands and long flights to get there just to suck up game time was an a-hole move.
I absolutely agree with your first point of Blizz not listening to Alpha and Beta players.
Blizzard care more about making money off their shop than they do about making the game āfunā for everyone.
The story is garbage.
except the maw was pretty much mandatory, mage tower isnt. not even close to the same thing. The maw is a zone, with objectives that need to be done to progress your renown, and it SUCKED going there.
optional things not being for everyone is one thing. a zone needed for progressing your character is another and stupid game design.