Lost a lot of people to other games though
lmao…heres what I know…factually. I saw at least as many players running around in DF as I did every other expansion.
so we can rail on about reviews and corruption all we want,…what I know is in SL we were all on lockdown and I saw no more players in the game world then than I did thru DF when we werent locked in our homes bored out of our minds begging for something to do lmao.
DF managed to keep players playing WITHOUT being coerced into it by lockdowns.
As for your claims about bad reviews…never saw them out there in the ether when DF was live…sorry…
I dont really understand how does that cancel out how terrible covenants were as a borrowed power system.
Their implementation was very far from well and the idea of balancing 4 covenants for all the specs on the class to be equally viable was laughable at best.
Had the covenant choice been entirely independent of the borrowed powers, it would have been perfectly fine, but it was not.
Even in 9.1.5, the only change was that you did not had to atone for weeks for your terrible crime of trying to switch covenant when you switched spec.
Simple example DH:
Vengeance needed Kyrian, could be played with others as well, but Kyrian felt far better than anything else.
Havoc needed NF or Necro and was terrible with Kyrian.
So you either accept that you will have one of your specs gimped, or make a different character just to play another spec of the same class.
How can something be worse than this?
That person shut up real fast when I refuted them lol
I haven’t even played DF and I know it was better than Shadowlands.
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To me it’s because DF was more of a return to the roots expansion. SL was overhyped, sold off as some surreal experience in WoW as the players travel beyond the threshold of death only to find out it was more of the same. It was underwhelming. The features were boring, covenants not being as cracked up as they were being sold on the presentation stage.
Actually the only things good about SL were the art, as usual and the mogs. Otherwise I can’t think of anything I liked about SL.
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I stopped after the first phase, but I thought that those first dungeons and raid were pretty fun. I managed to get the first piece of gear in my guild on the heroic raid so that may have been a part of it.
I’d rate SL in the garbage bin with literal trash. It was truly that bad.
Eh, bfa was worse
Don’t get me wrong BFA was terrible but I have to disagree, SL is the worst wow has ever been.
The changes already happened after the desastrous Korthia patch in patch 9.1.5, after the players had left. The devs grasped at every straw and took all the feedback they’d gotten until that point to heart, finally.
They pulled the ripcord (after denying it previously). They unlocked free covenant switch and removed Conduit energy and made Soulbinds easier for alts. There were massive improvements to Covenant hall features and accessibility for alts. Big improvements to cosmetics and legacy content to make it more solo-friendly. Less grind in Torghast. Massive increase in profession materials to make them more accessible to players. Much more QoL improvements of all kinds.
And 9.2 was the first step into a new era with a new open world progress system and the Catalyst, so that casual players were able to get tier sets.
DF was finally the direct result of the newfound design philosophy.
No grindy and RNG-heavy borrowed power systems, more focus on open world activities and gear progression for non-raiders, no annoying chores for progression. Things that already started in mid/late SL and DF.
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Solid raids and dungeons for one. A good form of flying finally. Dragons.
Because it removed a lot of problems BFA and SL caused. Essentially DF is the Obama meme of him giving himself a medal, Blizz is giving themselves a medal for removing all the extra systems they thought players would love
Story still sucked though
Cell phones weren’t the cause of the drop in subs. The main complaint at beginning of Cataclysm were dungeons and raids being too hard, and the expansion had very few things to do outside of that. There was a precipitous decline in subs until Dragon Soul. DS was one of the worst raids ever (at the time) which led to an exponential decline in players.
Many players, including myself, were duped into buying a 1-year subscription in exchange for Diablo 3 and that barely stemmed the bleeding. The largest drop offs in player subs/the graph you mentioned are from beginning of WoD to the end of WoD (shoutout to the selfie patch) and the beginning of SL to Korthia.
Smart phones aren’t the reason young people don’t play WoW. Just look at Gamescom. WoW was an afterthought to anyone who wasn’t middle aged. Kids are into Minecraft, Roblox and teens are into Call of Duty, Madden and Fortnight. Even LoL is getting aged out.
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The people who rate Dragonflight highly liked it.
Cause it was fun. You had a new way to see the world via dragon flying. You had fun activities, like the walrus people soup event. DF did a lot of things right as far as I’m concerned.
I disagree. You thought it was fun, and these are the primary features you thought were fun. A lot of people agreed. But many did not think so. And some of those who thought it was fantastic barely play the game and have never seen an expansion they did not think was worth defending loudly.
The fact that you were having fun does not mean everybody enjoys world events that are obsolete within weeks.
The graphs from back then are even showing that MoP as well as WoD managed to gain back the 10 mil sub count at expansion launch with the numbers slowly dropping off over time (except WoD where the numbers plummeted extremely at one point, but we all know why).
For many people the end of Arthas was the end of WoW and they got put off by the new story direction, the more fast-paced and difficult dungeon content and the destruction of their old beloved world. On top of that, many players I knew back then quit over time because of RL responsibilities. Some started to work and had to focus on their career, many others built a family, others had to join the military training and others just didn’t find it appealing anymore to waste away in a game, it just wasn’t fun anymore. People grow up and their lives change.
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Gameplay of DF was good and that is what people ultimately play WoW for to begin with.
Story wasn’t good (it was decent), but that’s par the course.
If I were to worry about stuff becoming obsolete in time, I wouldn’t bother playing at all cause everything becomes obsolete eventually. But I enjoyed the stuff we got in DF, as briefly as it was relevant and that is worth something to me and probably to Blizzard when it comes to creating future content.