I mean technically it was kind like Classic+ right? New mechanics, classes got a few tweaks, etc.
And if SoM failed, why is SoD going to work this time? Even more if unknown than before (or maybe that’s the reason why it will work?).
I personally am going to play SoD by sheer fact it’s craziness can’t be untried. SoM I didn’t have time for at the time. From what I remember also, it came out at a bad time.
Just curious
Bad timing. Also, I agree with Asmongold that Classic players arent looking for more difficult raids. Most of us are dads. We enjoy raiding but we like to get in, get out. Thats why world buffs are so appreciated. The Classic team weren’t on the right wave when they made SoM.
Yep. Most of us are past 30, gotten through college, and aren’t interest in raid difficulties that require five addons and all the information you have to put on a job resume plus a degree.
Make sense, but lets say none of the encounters are known yet. What is the best comp at level 25 nay not be the next level band. Things will change. It’s going to be interesting when people realize raiding twice a week for 3 hours might not be enough. For me personally, I don’t know how much time I can invest in this. But, I hope it’s fun.
Best comp at 25 doesn’t matter when braindead squirrels should be capable of getting through things.
Most people just want to play, do stuff, and have fun. Not do calculus homework.
Sure, some people are there for that, but majority of people are just looking for whatever works.
Hmmm strange. I finished all content on 2 characters in 2 guilds only using dbm. No weak auras, nada.
Some people are just incapable of learning new things or dont want to.
SoM raids were dope and a fun challenge.
Congratulations on your achievement.
As per SoD, it doesn’t seem like people are opposed to new things.
I’m just not interested in difficulty for the sake of difficulty.
In real life, if I go for a mile jog, I can go, “Woo, I finished this jog.”
Someone running up beside me and saying, “Yeah, but you should do five miles with iron shoes to be a real runner,” just makes me dislike them.
Timing was a really big factor, but I think the other was that a lot of MMORPG players aren’t interested in seasons, they want longevity in their world and characters.
I don’t think the difficulty turned many people off. Could be wrong, as that’s purely anecdotal from the people I know. Everyone I know enjoyed the challenge, I mean it’s a 20 year old game that isn’t hard, and still wasn’t in SoM but the added bit of challenge was appreciated by many.
Because it was seasonal? For me it is no fun levelling up a character, knowing you can only play it for a limited time.
For me it ended very fast. The levelling was speeded, we could only go to a limited amount of Era servers (not mine), and everything was PvP or end-.game oriented.
I love the levelling, and I love the official HC servers. That’s where I play now.
I am going to try out SoD, but my expectations are so low that SoD is really hard put not to exceed them 
I think one of the biggest issue with SoM is that they released all 1.12 pvp gear right from the start. So pvp blues were about as strong as tier 1 / 2 and pvp epics were good until AQ40.
Basically all the players whether pve or pvp players just rushed to pvp and burnt themselves out, and it was a ghost town by AQ. (I quit when I couldn’t buy goblin rocket fuel on the AH anymore).
If they had done progressive itemization for pvp gear (only release the old school lvl 58 blues) or time gated the gear in some other way, I think it would probably have lasted a bit longer.
But I can’t deny SoM pvp was plenty of fun for a while during release.
The other issue was the experience boost. You would completely outlevel every zone before actually finishing the interesting quests.
If they had left exp the same it would probably have also lasted longer and been a better overall experience.
They made mc too hard/require too many consumes. The casual playerbase couldn’t deal with the hours required to farm naxx amounts of consumes just for MC every week and then on top of that with ranking in on release everyone was trying to rank to get the gear for Mc too. It just burnt out players way too quickly and killed off a lot of guilds very quickly.
Then as guilds started dying because the game was too hard, servers started dying and people didn’t want to reroll as there was no longer and guilds left to raid with on their servers so more people just quit.
They didn’t open up transfers off dead realms until well after the majority of the playerbase had quit the game and didnt implement the changes for easier and cheaper consumables either until way too late. Blizzard needs to be more proactive than they were with som, they basically set and forget it and it suffered massively because of this. If they adjusted things on the fly and as problems arose I reckon it could of been a fun season but everything just came too late.
We had all just did 2 years of classic. People were hyped for TBC. It’s now been a few years removed for vanilla, wotlk is ending and many never cata-ers are looking for something new. SoD should do significantly better.
SoM was released too soon to classic ending and people thought they did but really didnt.
It’s still seasonal, and a sad replacement for Wrath Era. I think most will just stay in Era or HC - after having tested out SoD of course.
I personally think 90% of it is that they were pitting two products together:
Product 1: TBC which hadn’t been experienced in its official form since the original TBC.
Product 2: Vanilla again, after having just had vanilla.
There were hardly any changes to SOM so it felt exactly like vanilla. The ranking system changed and yet felt the exact same. Leveling speed was increased which, as a diehard vanilla fan, I have to say is one of their better decisions. Boosting was killed. The most notable changes were raid changes, but were mostly unseen by the population because they’d already quit by that point.
No change on loot (half of MC loot is worse than dungeon blues), same amount of loot for 40 people, same class problems (warlocks without hit for a long time: 5 casts of reck to start casting shadow bolt, cant have more than 2 resto druids on the same raid because the hots dont stack, and some other things).
It’s not really a replacement for Wrath Era, it is its own thing. Blizz should 100% make Wrath Era otherwise the forever WOTLK players will simply go to Warmane.
It’s already been said but timing was for sure the biggest factor.
They released SoM 2 seconds after TBC launched.
SoD has multiple things working in it’s favor that SoM didn’t.
Being released at the end of Wrath is one of them.
70% of it was timing. 20% pvp changes. 10% world buffs
People will say difficulty but that’s a wrong answer. The raids didn’t get wild until way later, and by then people were already not playing.
The raids being harder had nothing to do with it lol.
We literally just finished classic, and they launched the servers… idk about y’all but I’m okay with never doing MC again in my life. It’s so boring at this point.
Pvp ranking tuned a ton of ppl out. It was double the CR, which was crazy lame. Made raids useless until naxx. Everyone was 14.
World buffs not being allowed was super dumb. They learned their lesson with SoD and are allowing them thank god.
People don’t want harder raids…