What did go wrong with WoD?

[Tojara]

Not enough content.

Personally the zones were fantastic and I actually did like the garrisons at least at the start. All the dungeons were fantastic, and the raids were actually good. I could even get behind the story if they actually decided to elaborate on it more, but like my opening statement, there just wasn't enough there.

The expansion itself, even down to concept really wasn't that bad, and nobody can ever really know why it turned out why it did. If people care to remember, there was a pretty giant gap between the end of MoP and the actual announcement of WoD, and the initial announcement of WoD was incredibly bare bones at Blizzcon. I remember being told we would be getting a beta fairly soon after that Blizzcon, only to be waiting for a really long time.

I like to think they weren't completely sold on the expansion itself, but due to how this game operates, and how expansions are launched, they had to throw out something. It's pretty obvious to me there were missteps in the development process and/or certain concepts just absorbed a shitload of development time (I believe it was hinted at that Garrisons in general took a colossal amount of time). I'll never know, but I think part of the problem might have been how they allocated to their resources too. To elaborate, one of the major problems they might have had is looking way too far in the future instead of worrying about the current expansion. Basically looking forward to the next expansion (I remember they had goals of having really short ONE YEAR expansion cycles) without really cementing the one they are about to release.

If those apexis areas were actually fleshed out to be more interesting, and there was something to bridge the expansion story/content between BRF and Tanaan, it likely would have been seen as a pretty good expansion IMO. WoD wasn't bad because of features or the actual content it had, it was just missing the chunk in the middle.

Put it this way. It would be like if Vanilla didn't have BWL/AQ40, TBC didn't have BT/Hyjal, WoTLK didn't have Ulduar/ToGC, Cataclysm didn't have Firelands, MoP didn't have Throne of Thunder, or if Legion didn't have Broken Shore and ToS. To me I didn't really feel WoD deviated too much from nearly ever other expansion, it was just missing the middle part of it, which if you comb through responses in various threads (this one included, and dozens before it) will basically point to that. Even if you hated the story, most people didn't like it because it went from A to Z, without any letters between.

[TheVaryag]

As I've mentioned on another thread, I quit WoW during Dragon Soul (yuck) and have returned only recently. There seems to be a general consensus on these boards about WoD being the lowest point in the game's history. I can understand the hatred towards Garrisons (I definitely loathe that Facebook-like stuff) but I honestly can't understand 1) why there was so much cut content, which must have upset PvE'ers and RP'ers alike, and 2) how something like Ashran could make it past beta, which I am sure many PvP'ers hated.

Besides, as convoluted (and unconvincing imo) as the whole AU Draenor story was, I think that it could have made a nice, if heterodox, episode. To learn in detail about the Orc and Draenei leaderships before Ner'zhul took over, to know what the Iron Horde was like seen from the inside, to see more about the demon-held Shattrath and the arrival of the Naaru... There were lots of possible stories imo, but for some reason Blizzard completely and utterly missed the opportunity. The question is, of course, why? I honestly don't get it

As mentioned above, lots of cut content to focus on Legion and In the end that didn't give us anything better to be honest. Legion to me Is the worst expansion we've had, toppling even WoD for many reasons that I could spend hours explaining here.

But to answer you simply, yes they just cut support for It and there was a 14 month content draught, the largest WoW has ever had, and Legion might have a similar one, since an expansion Is surely at least a year away, and we've only had a year of Legion so far, with 7.3 releasing 30th august which is when Legion released as well In 2016, so there's predictions of a year draught at least which to be fair, Is kind of okay to catch up on things, but not a year.. that's kinda too long.

[My User Name]

Tons of shit got scrapped and patches were weak as fuck.

[un_known]

As I've mentioned on another thread, I quit WoW during Dragon Soul (yuck) and have returned only recently. There seems to be a general consensus on these boards about WoD being the lowest point in the game's history. I can understand the hatred towards Garrisons (I definitely loathe that Facebook-like stuff) but I honestly can't understand 1) why there was so much cut content, which must have upset PvE'ers and RP'ers alike, and 2) how something like Ashran could make it past beta, which I am sure many PvP'ers hated.

Besides, as convoluted (and unconvincing imo) as the whole AU Draenor story was, I think that it could have made a nice, if heterodox, episode. To learn in detail about the Orc and Draenei leaderships before Ner'zhul took over, to know what the Iron Horde was like seen from the inside, to see more about the demon-held Shattrath and the arrival of the Naaru... There were lots of possible stories imo, but for some reason Blizzard completely and utterly missed the opportunity. The question is, of course, why? I honestly don't get it

As far as I'm aware, WoD started off as a massive patch idea for MoP going into Legion before ideas got too big and thus had to settle for an expansion instead. Major lore figures being killed off wouldn't be enough for just 5 man content wise so killing hem in raids would've been better

[RobertMugabe]

That's more of a speculation, but they have delayed the beta release multiple times for months and A LOT of the features they've announced didn't happen, so I assume that they've simply messed up something during development or something turned out to be far more challenging to implement then they thought it was.

That being said, WoD wasn't all that bad. It's just that overall it offered far less content than any xpac so far and the little content that did exist besides raiding wasn't properly utilizied/rewarding.

IMHO, Garrisons also weren't as bad. It's really that 1 facebook game which was unnecessary, but that isn't what made the xpac bad. The problem is that at some point it was the ONLY content to do.

[MoanaLisa]

From a system design standpoint it felt like Warlords was meant to be a 12-month expansion that got extended out well beyond that.

People ran out of things to do. Garrisons were popular at first but when you had finished building them they were boring (but profitable if you never left them).

Raiding was OK. Which brought up another issue: the expansion PVE pathing really seemed to be: leveling (which was good but too short) ---> dungeons ----> raiding. Period. After a few months raiding was pretty much it for progression. That's happened before to some extent but world content was just non-existent. People couldn't improve their characters for months without going full-on into raiding. So non-raider people left. That's a lot of people.

If it was some grand experiment to see if raiding alone could carry an expansion, well, now they know. It can't. Legion world content is pretty much a direct response by the developers to everything that went wrong in Warlords. There are multiple ways to progress (although repetitive which is more a problem with the genre than anything) and so far they've managed to keep up a decent patch schedule.

And yeah, like garrisons, Ashran was a decent idea that was just a mess. They were messing with Ashran at a very basic level for most of the expansion trying to make it what they originally conceived.

Frankly they would have been better off to turn the whole area into a PVE zone on PVE servers, toss some dailies and a few world bosses in there and given people a little more to do.

People have made a lot out of cut content but that was Blizzard's fault. They talked way too much about their plans early on and that was taken as gospel that it was going to happen. They were much cagier about Legion and the impression is that they've delivered for the most part. If they had plans for much of anything we haven't seen they didn't talk about it so no one is the wiser.

It's also apparent now that Chilton was on the way out as game director and Hazzikostas on the way in. That's disruptive too along with their increasing their team size which apparently caused all kinds of problems getting everyone settled in and trained up.

[Stormspark]

Basically, as soon as it came out and they saw subs hit 10 million again, they went on a 6 month long bender and didn't do any work on the game after that. Patch 6.1, by their own admission, took 1 programmer and 1 designer a couple of weekends to make. 6.2 was a raid, along with a pretty (but empty) zone that was supposed to be in at launch. Aside from the art for the new zone and the raid, there is no way in hell they spent more than 2 weeks making 6.2 The art team did a great job with WOD, and the raid team (which Ion was in charge of during WOD - he wasn't game director then) did as well.

[Craaazyyy]

everything

legion isnt better tho

[Deleted]

The way pvp gear was handled in Wod was the best Wow's ever had, though. Wish they'd bring the same system back.

[Deleted]

The lack of content and the knowledge of everything that was cut is def a huge issue wod had, but I think the biggest issue was focus. They chose the wrong stories to focus on. Draenor had so much to offer, Shattrath, The ogre empire, Arakkoa and Botani for instance, but instead of delving into that blizz chose to focus on the iron horde.. the most boring and repetitive theme during all of the expansion. I feel like if they had released shattrath as a raid instead of blackrock foundry, the entire expansion would have been MUCH better. And Tanaan was also a mistake in my opinion, it was just iron horde AGAIN but now with some fel.

There was so much potential, so many interesting adversaries and themes, and yet blizz put all their effort on the iron horde, and that bored people very quickly because there wasn't much to it, even the legion has TONS of more diversity.
So I think it's really a mix between lack of content and boring content, having other raids/zones wouldn't have completely saved it, but it would've made it better and more interesting overall. (And I'm never gonna stop being upset by the fact that shattrath just became nothing, seriously.. shattrath should have been the end raid instead of hellfire citadel)

[Sliske]

Shit plot, shit writing, shit launch, mostly shit content, shit balance, shit gameplay (thanks to the prune), shit ending.

And then all of the really dumb shit they did.

- Not resetting challenge mode ladders after nerfing all of the skips in there.
- Moving capitals to Ashran.
- Kargath dying instantly.
- Nerzhul dying instantly.
- Orgrim dying instantly.
- Grom having an instant redemption arc, despite being Orc-Hitler.
- Yrel going from slave, prisoner, defenseless, weak, worthless to slaying Archimonde in less than a half dozen pieces of dialogue.
- Apexis fucking crystals
- 'Fill the bar' gameplay
- Having certain items be only available from vendors in Ashran, then making you wait 2 hours to enter that area. Seriously. You have enough honor to buy an item? Well, too bad. You have to wait TWO HOURS to enter, buy it and then immediately leave
- Speaking of Ashran, the fucking Artifact. Lets give one player the ability to wipe raids. Yeah, that'll be fun.
- LARPing as if their games content is hard, by giving LFR players worse-than-pvp-gear-tier loot from sitting through the experience that is LFR.
- The nerf-buff-nerf schizophrenia. We want warriors to love their execute button again! Wait, its doing too much dmg! Never mind we're reverting that change! Nevermind we're keeping it.
- The sheer amount of 'reverted hotfixes' showing that they weren't using data or logic to balance their game, but knee jerking.

[Deleted]

I'm one of the few that enjoyed WoD, mainly because of Garrisons because they made me filthy rich for very little effort. I also enjoyed Ashran as a Balance Druid with the Artifact.

I'm glass half full guy I guess.

[Deleted]

WoD's two main problems was its story and length.

The story because one, it was fucking ridicolous. Time travling, dimension jumping orcs. Two, they kept changing the story mid expansion. Thats why it's beginning is so different from the end, it wasn't suppose to end in demons.

And then it's length, it was basically short just so they could release Legion. Which, in my opinion, is the worst expansion we have ever had.

[Niroshi]

Near 0 support after launch. The expansion had promise and a good start, but dungeons had a severe lack of incentive and it took an incredibly long time for a small bit of new content to come out then a massive amount of no content until Legion.

[Marrilaife]

Too little content, simple as.

It should have had at least 1 more raid tier, at least 2 more "casual content / outdoor content" patches, things like Farahlon or Shattrath raid should've never been scrapped and if they really really had to, they should have released some different content patch instead, and not nothing and "selfie cam" patches.

Tons of stuff was cut or bare-bones including reps, professions, garrison customization and capital cities (copy pasta Ashran buildings instead of unique Karabor / Bladespire). To this day I can't believe the factions of Laughing Skull / Sha'ttari Defense were tucked into garrison building with 0 lore, quests or interaction and the whole rep was diminished to "farm mobs for no reason at all except that you want to buy a recoloured mount".

It had potential but it was ruined by neglect and laziness.

[Cheze]

I think they probably realized relatively early on that the garrison-centric model they went with wasn't a great one for a variety of reasons, and then just kinda stopped developing it in favor of working on future things (like, wtf was the shipyard? Who decided that was something interesting?)

Stretching HFC out for a year was another problem, but one that they've had at the end of expansions before

it's too bad because I actually thought the story in WoD was kinda neat; it would have been fun to see more of the non-fel orcs. But they never felt threatening really and then largely got abandoned to do legion-related stuff.

I feel like Yrel shoulda come and joined the army of light though

[Wries]

WoD's two main problems was its story and length.

The story because one, it was fucking ridicolous. Time travling, dimension jumping orcs. Two, they kept changing the story mid expansion. Thats why it's beginning is so different from the end, it wasn't suppose to end in demons.

And then it's length, it was basically short just so they could release Legion. Which, in my opinion, is the worst expansion we have ever had.

The very blizzcon where WoD was announced they disclosed that the last raid would be fel influenced. Details probably different but that the Legion would still be present wasn’t really a change of heart. The breadcrumbs for this (Gul’dan, their heavy presence in Talador) was in the launch content.

[Tomana]

No open world content besides small stuff like invasions. Basically "raid or die" all over again like in early Cata. With predictable results.
Now the good question is "why": I think this expansion was never meant to happen and was only introduced because of the delay in the WoW movie release. This is, however, 100% tinfoil.

[Romanthony]

Alot of things, False promises, cut content, lack of contant, I mean we only had 1 patch (not counting Selfie as a patch) The biggest thing which pissed off people was the Garrisons they promised "You can build it anywhere and make it your home" CUT "You can customise your garrison" CUT Garrisons are just a side quest and wont be a major impact on gameplay CUT

[AwkwardSquirtle]

I think too much devtime went in to making the Garrisons work, which made sense in theory since it was meant to be a key expansion feature.
Their mistake was making so much of it non-interactive. You spent 5 minutes sending out followers and then there wasn't a whole lot else worth doing on a main character. Dailies only granted catch-up raid gear for alts or non-raiders, along with a couple of mount recolours.
Reputations were never planned to be a part of the game, and this got a lot of backlash so they were quickly cobbled together, and as a result were pretty worthless and boring to do.
Dungeons were pointless after a few weeks. Mythic was later introduced but didn't offer anything worthwhile to mains. Challenge modes were fine, but not for everyone. There was of course a difficulty associated with them that many players just couldn't manage.
The raids were pretty good honestly, but you can't spend all of your time in-game raiding.
And the biggest problem was that they gave up. They realised too late that there wasn't enough to do on mains, but rather than make something they instead put all focus on making Legion as good as possible, and rushed out an ending in 6.2, leading to the "Draenor is free!" nonsense.