Did TBC ever get any complaints in its time?

[rda]

I haven't been on this forum much during TBC so I must've missed out any complaint that this expansion had. And so far every other expansion has had plenty of them. Thinking back I don't think it received a lot of criticism from my POV, the only thing being all the lore changes like the draenei retcon and how poorly they've written WC3 characters. But TBC improved over a lot of things like the gameplay and more fluid questing, and I don't remember people craving to go back to vanilla WoW so badly.

So what more did I more did i miss during this period?

Yes. About space goats (felt really out of place), about wild colors with everybody looking like clowns at least initially, about short instances, about shaman / paladin being available for either faction, about locks / some others being OP in PVP, etc.

[Natylyaz]

BC had some big controversial changes:
- 40 > 25 was problematic for a lot of established guilds
- Flight for the opposite reason it is now
- Space cows didn't sit too well with some people
- "Welfare" gear (but that was at the tail end)

But most of those were minority things.
It was the golden age of small group content, unsurpassed since.
Class and role viability (not balance) was much improved without homogenizing everything into a soup.

No planned content obsolescence, insane power creep and content being made irrelevant mid-expac (or even worse later, every tier).

As evidenced by it continuing the meteoric rise in subs started in Vanilla, it was a great time for most the expanding playerbase.

Every expansion has people disliking parts of it, the good ones grow the game, the bad ones are "cyclical"

You have no elements to link active subscriptions and the quality of an expansion.
If you followed what Blizzard said in the last 10 years, you'd have read an interesting article about this (no idea how to find it today).
Basically, they said that they have always lost a lot of players (all the time, people quit for various reasons), but that since the game was still relatively new and fresh, it gained more people than it lost.
Cataclysm was the expansion when less players joined WoW than players quit WoW, so the total number began to drop.
A good phrase to keep in mind: "Correlation does not imply causation" (which obviously does not mean Cataclysm was a good expansion, you'll be the judge of that).

[Fourze]

That reminds me that I tanked that place as a warrior tank aswell, it was indeed a nightmare. Especially if you lacked CC. You had so many mobs to take their threats, and warrior tanks lacked proper AoE threat abilities.

Man, I remember learning to aoe tank as a prot warrior in there.

[Deleted]

Never has there been free epics like Molten core in vanilla

There i said it.

Anyway yes TBC was clsoe to worse in class balance then vanilla was.

Many classes had specs that where basicly unplayable above dungeon level content. Class stacking, max debuff count. So many things have gotten better today. People just forget it

At the beginning of Vanilla and that for months unless you were in a top guild, and even then, MC epics were very far from free, first due to the difficulty (new mmo, rf farming, tactics etc...) and later then due to the FEW epics drops / boss for a big 40 man sized raid.

[pewpmeiser]

Every entry in WoW has always had overwhelming amounts of complaints. It's just what people do, for everything, ever... in life.

[Deleted]

BC had some big controversial changes:
- 40 > 25 was problematic for a lot of established guilds
- Flight for the opposite reason it is now
- Space cows didn't sit too well with some people
- "Welfare" gear and the first iteration of dailies (but that was at the tail end)

But most of those were minority things.
It was the golden age of small group content, unsurpassed since.
Class and role viability (not balance) was much improved without homogenizing everything into a soup.

No planned content obsolescence, insane power creep and content being made irrelevant mid-expac (or even worse later, every tier).

As evidenced by it continuing the meteoric rise in subs started in Vanilla, it was a great time for most the expanding playerbase.

Every expansion has people disliking parts of it, the good ones grow the game, the bad ones are "cyclical"

wha..... what? I'm not following this logic

[Deleted]

I remember reading the old WoW forums back then and there was a LOT of criticism towards TBC.

Then, when WOTLK came, there were a lot of discontent voices which heralded TBC as the best thing ever and WOTLK as a failure.


Now WOTLK is consistently considered one of the best, if not the best, expansions in WoW, followed only by TBC, and nobody seems to remember that there was a time when both of them were relentlessly criticized.

[Azerox]

Not as much as today but people didnt hang arround on forums that much.

[Deleted]

It received many, yes. From profound hatred of Shadow Labyrinth, to the bizarre and seemingly endless attunement process for Karazhan and other raids, and reputation grinds that truly emphasized the word "grind."

So non of them were actualy legit. Just some casuals complained that they have to play game in order to progress right?

[Flurryfang]

I haven't been on this forum much during TBC so I must've missed out any complaint that this expansion had. And so far every other expansion has had plenty of them. Thinking back I don't think it received a lot of criticism from my POV, the only thing being all the lore changes like the draenei retcon and how poorly they've written WC3 characters. But TBC improved over a lot of things like the gameplay and more fluid questing, and I don't remember people craving to go back to vanilla WoW so badly.

So what more did I more did i miss during this period?

It proberly did not recieve the large amount as the current game does today, but many did complain indeed. I just think that since many of the current players were not active on any forums at that time, they did not really see or feel the complaints Many people were too busy with their guild/raid progression to really worry, so it was left to the very dedicated and/or high skilled players. Yet i do believe, that if you made a serview of all players then and now, the % of satisfied people are proberly close to the same The forums, twitter and places like MMO-Champion are just more well known now, so many more people are taking their troubles to the internet community.

[Akka]

I haven't been on this forum much during TBC so I must've missed out any complaint that this expansion had. And so far every other expansion has had plenty of them. Thinking back I don't think it received a lot of criticism from my POV, the only thing being all the lore changes like the draenei retcon and how poorly they've written WC3 characters. But TBC improved over a lot of things like the gameplay and more fluid questing, and I don't remember people craving to go back to vanilla WoW so badly.

So what more did I more did i miss during this period?

Yes, TBC received many complaints, like every single iterations of WoW.
These complaints, though, were quite a bit different, because the entire design and the population was very different. And yes, there was little craving to go back to Vanilla, because TBC was still largely the same paragdim, and the game hadn't devolved yet - these specific complaints about getting back to the better early design didn't happen until WotLK and the "new design" of extreme accessibility (don't get confused by people putting Vanilla, TBC and WotLK together, these are often people who did during WotLK).

[Dhrizzle]

Ones I remember;

Sci-fi theme with cyber-demons and crystal spaceships didn't fit a fantasy MMO.
Welfare epics from arenas (lose 10 matches a week for free loot!) and heroic 5-mans.
Change from 40-man to 25-man raids.
Alts having to go through long attunements.
Paid services, especially the name change had people worried about ninjas getting away.
Characters without CC and/or AoE found it hard getting in 5-man groups.
Mages were beaten by warlocks in both PvP and PvE, about 90% of the Blizzard warlock forum was threads from bitching mages.

[Dangg]

Hamstring spamming sword specced, crafted sword arms warriors calls BS on this

Which patch/content was that?

[Deleted]

At the beginning of Vanilla and that for months unless you were in a top guild, and even then, MC epics were very far from free, first due to the difficulty (new mmo, rf farming, tactics etc...) and later then due to the FEW epics drops / boss for a big 40 man sized raid.

If you had 40 people and you couldnt kill stuff in MC i'm actually suprised you managed to get to lvl 60.

MC is literally the easiest raid ever. Yes. It was easier then UBRS, LBRS. Maybe on par with Strat and scolo when they where 10 mannable.

In no world ever did you need to be in a top guild to clear MC. You just needed to have 40 people who could actually show up at the same time at lvl 60.

Fire resistance gear later made that raid basicly 5 man-able.

There is a reason the race in MC was who had the fastest clear time, not who could kill raggy first.

- - - Updated - - -

Which patch/content was that?

Pretty much the entire BC until the craftet swords wherent viable anymore. Especially pre the frenzy nerf.

[Akka]

Anyway yes TBC was clsoe to worse in class balance then vanilla was.

Many classes had specs that where basicly unplayable above dungeon level content. Class stacking, max debuff count. So many things have gotten better today. People just forget it

Ironic that you speak about "people forget" when overusing one of the legends about TBC.
Reality is, every single spec was actually viable at every type of content, and the gap between the worst ones and the best ones is actually not very different than the gap today.

[Baconeggcheese]

If its a thing that exists, someones complained about it at length.

[saeros]

Ironic that you speak about "people forget" when overusing one of the legends about TBC.
Reality is, every single spec was actually viable at every type of content, and the gap between the worst ones and the best ones is actually not very different than the gap today.

yeah, like retribution paladin.
very viable (they kinda fixed it a bit near the end of the expansion, but still not even a thing for more than half expansion)

don't you remember the "hybrid tax" drama?

[Akka]

BC had some big controversial changes:
- 40 > 25 was problematic for a lot of established guilds
- Flight for the opposite reason it is now
- Space cows didn't sit too well with some people
- "Welfare" gear and the first iteration of dailies (but that was at the tail end)

But most of those were minority things.
It was the golden age of small group content, unsurpassed since.
Class and role viability (not balance) was much improved without homogenizing everything into a soup.

No planned content obsolescence, insane power creep and content being made irrelevant mid-expac (or even worse later, every tier).

As evidenced by it continuing the meteoric rise in subs started in Vanilla, it was a great time for most the expanding playerbase.

Every expansion has people disliking parts of it, the good ones grow the game, the bad ones are "cyclical"

Yes. About space goats (felt really out of place), about wild colors with everybody looking like clowns at least initially, about short instances, about shaman / paladin being available for either faction, about locks / some others being OP in PVP, etc.

Half of the posts in this threads are simply full of shit. These are two of the few which looks like it was written by someone who actually played then and is not just repeating what he read on the forums about TBC.

[ruuBEN]

Stunherald would like a word.

But the 3 piece set (it was 3 piece wasn't it?) was pretty nice. I don't think it was better than the set bonuses from PvP gear, as none of the crafted shit had resilience, and resilience was godly in TBC.

Not to mention that top 2v2 arena teams were almost always a healer+warrior or healer+rogue. They either had stormherald and were mace specced. Or they had dual glaives.

Moving away from PvP, the cloth DPS crafted sets were BiS for a gigantic majority of the expansion. Iirc, the only helm that replaced the crafted helm for mages was the drop from Illidan (Illidari Cowl?), and most specs were expected to get their 4 piece from everything except that helm. I think there was one exception for a caster to get their arena gloves. (Lol, 2% crit on FoL for holy paladins, #1)

It was kind of ridiculous, dinging level 70 on my priest as shadow and expecting to craft all of that gear to be extremely deadly. Ooooh, the mana battery I was, and all the innervates and mana-tides I had on cooldown...

[Roadblock]

A good phrase to keep in mind: "Correlation does not imply causation"

People that confuse logical fallacy with false make me cringe.
Correlation doesn't prove causation but neither does it disprove causation, it literally just says "B following A doesn't on its own say anything about whether A causes B"

It might or it might not.
There is enough supporting evidence that not only is this not a statistical occurrence of unrelated events but an actual business plan bearing fruit.
ActiBlizz decided to refactor their game with the explicit knowledge that it could cost them subscribers (for a trade-off of increased ARPU)