War Within launched with 4 fully developed zones and for the first few weeks they were alive, full of people completing world content and grouping for world bosses. Of course as the season starts and these rewards become obsolete participation in these events drops.
But in 11.0.7 there was a chance to bring a little bit of that back. Instead we get Siren Isle and it just doesn’t make sense to me. Why not put the new weeklies in alternating hubs across the 4 WW zones? Why intentionally make the core zones obsolete and funnel everyone into a tiny little island that didnt receive 5% of the development attention?
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they do add stuff to zones like in DF they added time rifts to thaldraszus
they also upgrade the reward for the old cotent in a new season
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Game is no longer about expansion content but seasonal content. Those zones are season one. Season one is ending and with it those zones
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Honestly its a great question, a continuation of those zones /fleshing them out more between main story would sound great to me. Fill in some of the more emptier spots with things and without making a whole new zone map ect ect, that time could be spent on really making yhe content sing. Additive stuff is something blizz doesnt seem to like to do though, never really has. Of course i still like a new zone from time to time but id be totally ecstatic if some of the new content sent us to old places more often. They say they want a living world, well, lets see it grow and change.
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I suspect it’s more attractive to reveal a new location. Even teased a new powerful piece of equipment. 
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I kinda get it for major patches. New Zone attracts more attention.
But micropatches should 100% exist in the already-made zones.
I think it would be cool for them to show the story development by adjusting areas within the zones, similar to Fyrakk I guess? But maybe less… annoying NPC and more actual environment changes. Nothing crazy, just something.
Shhhhhhhh. You’re encouraging them to continue to do stupid things. Be quiet!
Because then other people would complain that there’s nothing new and they’re stuck in the same zones an entire season.
When you’re making a game that millions of people play, no matter what you do you can’t cater to everyone.
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If dragonflight is anything to go by you will go back to the old zones because the gear gets scaled up with each new season, all of the season 1 events (general pact, spreading the light, theatre troupe, awakening the machine and the special assignements) will give season 2 item level gear.
Also dragonflight had the fyrakk assaults and the dream event that rotated in the old zones
Hope so. Was nice actually seeing bunches of people out in the zones doing time rifts, dreamsurges, and the suffusion camp killing the dragon boss stuff, instead of being shoehorned into instanced content constantly. Why they wait until mid, or towards the end of an expansion to add that kind of stuff for open world players idk.
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Didn’t DF do exactly this with dream surges, fyrakk invasions and that one infinite event they added?
Oh and elemental storms.
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human psychology. new things are more attractive than reusing old ones.
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I don’t really think zones are a big draw to wow players. In vanilla maybe but even since tbc instances have been the games main drive.
The zones function more as a lobby while being in queue. I think people would miss them if they didn’t add new ones but I don’t think they are the backbone of wow either.
Done this since tbc.
Isle of qd that moved everyone put of outland
This! Since BFA/SL the game is no longer an MMORPG. It’s now an ARPG hub game. They can’t monetize open world content. It’s all about M+, mogs and gimmicks to keep players subbed. Blizzard just leaves all the old content to rot and then either makes it obsolete or adds it to Chromie time.
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It’s the same company that couldn’t figure out how to properly fix Zaralek Cavern even though they created a fix for it with Dreamsurges.
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Devil’s advocate: Online safety considerations may mean the era of open world gaming is drawing to a close, possibly forever. Instances with an extremely limited token overworld might be the only future depending on how it plays out.
Harassment considerations already severely crimp open world setups (see the dire issues FFXIV is having because they tried to implement a functional modern block feature - it’s literally enabling instead of mitigating harassment behaviors …), especially ones related to stalking where there isn’t sufficient activity going on within the actual game to allow a ban to be issued.
Then there are matters like the step up on the kids safety front - in particular, worst-case scenario is virtually that PC gaming may actually be limited to what is considered safe for a 13 year old - which more or less means no open player mingling at all may be in the cards - without literally requiring a webcam as minimum specs: US courts have been majorly shifting in their stance on age verification mandates, and evidently the trash solutions like “take a selfie while holding your ID!” and “show your face to the camera to show you’re an adult!” are actually now considered legitimate ones … did someone forget that desktop PCs don’t generally come with a selfie camera and those are what online games are normally played on?
I hope raids and M+ don’t end up becoming not just the main game but the only game but at the same time I can see it happening, and not necessarily by choice for Blizzard either.
Mind you, that’s assuming you even hit endgame staying sane. There’s a couple nasty glitches with TWW (which have come to hit my DK that I was hoping to actually PLAY this expac on) and the only really sure-fire way out of them seems to be to give up, toss all your stuff in the warbank & reroll, so … LOL!
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You make some interesting points. Is it an overreaction though? Does it say something about society and how we define harrassment? Uncomfortable conversations and differing opinions are often being blanketed as harrassment nowadays. With kids being isolated during COVID and face to face communication skills at an all time low, leaning further into antisocial gameloops and trying to protect people from hearing something that upsets them will only create the very scars they are trying to prevent. What we need to do is build resilience in young people. Instead of avoiding triggers, give kids the tools to be able to self regulate and manage their reaction to triggers. God knows, the real world is filled with them.
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That zone is so throw away that they didn’t even bother to put resource nodes on it. So no mining or herb gathering allowed. I try to get in and out of there as fast as I can because once you have finished the limited content, there is no point in staying.