Why Legion seems to be better received than WoD

[brbshower]

Nobody really left because legion was "bad". They left for a variety of reasons(running out of things to do, etc), it only seems like ppl left over it being bad because those are the outspoken voices. Anyone who leaves for a perfectly understandable reason isn't going to go to 15 different wow forums and QQ endlessly. Those who quit b/c they think it's bad do. Anyways, the reason Legion was better received than WOD is b/c WoD was absolute trash.
- Horrible ass raids
- Garrisons became the focus of EVERYTHING in the game
- The wow economy went to absolute crap directly due to the fact that it was raining gold from the garrisons and everyone became a millionaire almost instantly
- The constant back peddle on flying (no flying, maybe flying, no flying, ehhh, yes flying, lulz not until the end of the expansion)
- Shipyards were poorly implemented
- The gear was beyond ugly. Show me 100 different weapon/armor models and maybe 5% per 100 are half decent looking

What it got right:
- I could level alts from 90-100 in less than 2 hours once flying was implemented thanks to the exp potions and bonus objectives. Managed to get every class to cap, feltgood.edu

[Rogalicus]

Raids - WoD: 3 Legion: 5.

WoD: 30 bosses, Legion: 40 bosses.

Dungeons added in patches - WoD: 0 Legion:4.

Legion: Karazhan, Cathedral and the Argus one. By the way, I've never seen anyone praising the latter two.

Additional Zones added after launch - WoD: 1 Legion:2.

WoD: Tanaan, Legion: Argus. Broken Shore was already in game since launch.

new quest chains/cinematics, new holidays, etc that was also added after launch in Legion, compared with WoD which had zero additions to the base game

Harrison Jones questline, Tanaan campaign, weekly bonuses, mythic dungeons, timewalking.

[Deleted]

I mean you are objectively wrong. It is not a question of opinion in this case. Legion has had WAY more content than WoD..

Legion tried to copy some of the ideas from warlords, e.g the class halls from the garrisons. But it just didn't work out very well and it felt like a worse version than warlords in pretty much every single aspect of the game. The boring and repetitive gameplay in legion didn't make it better either.

They gave you everything... Except things to do.

They gave you lots of things to do with warlords, but if you are just going to sit and complain then how are the developers going to satisfy you?

Legion at least gives you some reason to log in to play the game.

That really depends if you want to log in just to do the same mindless and reptitive grinding that legion offers.

If you like grinding just for the sake of grinding then it makes sense why you enjoy legion, but any normal person is going to get burned from doing the same mindless grinding sooner or later.

[Lightbull]

I actually can't believe that objective facts are being shot down just because someone doesn't like the game. What the fuck? Is this what MMO Champion is coming to? I hope this doesn't spill over into the other forums.

If you don't like the game, doesn't mean it's bad. I don't like Overwatch, but it's one of the most successful games today. My opinion doesn't mean anything.

Legion is well received because it's a good game. If it wasn't good it wouldn't be well received. This isn't rocket science.

[Deleted]

I actually can't believe that objective facts are being shot down just because someone doesn't like the game. What the fuck? Is this what MMO Champion is coming to? I hope this doesn't spill over into the other forums.

If you don't like the game, doesn't mean it's bad. I don't like Overwatch, but it's one of the most successful games today. My opinion doesn't mean anything.

Legion is well received because it's a good game. If it wasn't good it wouldn't be well received. This isn't rocket science.

Legion wasn't well recived on the official forums, see this.

Legion was mostly well recived on MMO champion where theres an overwhelming amount of praise for the game, even if the arguments are not always good. Some of the praise legion gets here is honestly a bit deluded.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

Why Legion seems to be better received than WoD:

• Creative team is producing some of the best art in franchise history, e.g., Suramar, new wing of Karazhan, amazing cinematics...
• Great new features like M+ have kept the game interesting even when we aren't raiding.
• Content release has been better paced and more consistent than ever.
• Whether you prefer grinding your rewards (artifacts), RNG (legendaries), or skill-based challenges (Chromie, mage tower), there was something to do for everyone.

So no, I don't agree the game was better received because of player bias;
imho Legion was better received because - despite its flaws - it was better.

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Legion wasn't well recived on the official forums, see this.

Legion was mostly well recived on MMO champion where theres an overwhelming amount of praise for the game, even if the arguments are not always good. Some of the praise legion gets here is honestly a bit deluded.

Seriously? You google "Legion sucks" and paint that as representing all of the "official forums"? How about this instead?

[Paetolus]

I hated WoD with a burning passion, it was the first expansion I actually quit for the full duration. Once I finished leveling, I felt so bored and didn't enjoy the endgame content whatsoever. Which is a shame considering I've heard the raids were pretty good. Legion on the other hand, I felt like I never ran out of things to do, mainly due to world quests and mythic dungeons, and the story was much better than WoDs. (Though it's still lacking the quality that Vanilla, BC, Wrath, and MoP had in my opinion.) It is better received because it is a better expansion in most people's eyes.

[Kudos]

There was literally no quality in WoD..
Levelling zones as bad as Northerend.
Bad to mediocre raids.
Lore that was raped.
Zerg-dungeons, WotLK style.
Class ability purge.

I disagree. The raids were fantastic. The leveling was really enjoyable.

There just wasn't anything to do once you hit level 100, except for raid.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

WoD: 30 bosses, Legion: 40 bosses.

I didn't check your math, but we agree Legion had more raiding.

Legion: Karazhan, Cathedral and the Argus one. By the way, I've never seen anyone praising the latter two.

Cathedral is great, good punishing mechanics but very doable if your team knows what to do. Seat of the Triumvirate ("the Argus one") is easily the most challenging atm, but the boss fights are solid. Main thing people don't like is the chaotic feel of the place, and I would argue that is thematic. How better to represent the chaos that is Void?

WoD: Tanaan, Legion: Argus. Broken Shore was already in game since launch.

But you couldn't do anything much on Broken Shore at launch, except puzzle out how to get your Fathom Dweller mount. Those great puzzle games leading to mounts were better than anything WoD offered. Legion absolutely paced content release better than WoD; that's not even debatable.

Harrison Jones questline, Tanaan campaign, weekly bonuses, mythic dungeons, timewalking.

Chromie, Mage Tower, Timewalking + Timewalk RAIDS, and M+ kept dungeons relevant the whole xpac (something WoD mythics could not do).

On top of that we got best cinematics ever, best dungeon ever (Return to Karazhan was Blizz's "love letter to 5 mans"), best city ever (Suramar)...
The two expansions just aren't even close.

[Sixy]

WoD: 30 bosses, Legion: 40 bosses.

10 more bosses = a huge step back in the amount of content?

Legion: Karazhan, Cathedral and the Argus one. By the way, I've never seen anyone praising the latter two.

Karazhan is the size of 2 dungeons and is treated by blizzard as 2 dungeons for both heroic and mythic +, Lower Karazhan and Upper Karazhan. Also while cathedral is meh, it is still better than some wod dungeons. Seat of the Triumvirate on the other hand is pretty good actually, the only complaints anyone had about it was it's difficulty due to the mechanics on trash etc.
Also going by your above metric: Wod-33 Dungeon bosses. Legion-59 Dungeon bosses.

WoD: Tanaan, Legion: Argus. Broken Shore was already in game since launch.

LOL. You are trying to compare Tanaan already being in the game to Broken Shore in the game? Really?? Tanaan was a launch zone that got removed at the very last minute so that they could reuse it as a patch zone. Tanaan was quite literally "in the game" from the launch. Broken Shore on the other hand was just a mostly empty island which was fleshed out and made into a playable zone later.

Harrison Jones questline, Tanaan campaign, weekly bonuses, mythic dungeons, timewalking.

Ok that is your WoD content that was added?? It sure isn't much.. Suramar Campaign alone is almost equivalent to Tanaan campaign and it was in from launch. Timewalking is in legion, and was improved upon with tons of new available timewalking Dungeons and Raids. Mythic dungeon were improved upon with Mythic Plus. Weekly bonuses still exist.
Here is some of the legion content that was added post launch:
Constant Questline updates for the Illidan Storyline. Helya Questline. Dr. Weevil on Alcatraz Quest. Falcosaur Invasion with mounts/pets. New Brawlers Guild. Micro-Holidays. Mage Tower Solo Content. 12 New Class Campaigns each culminating with a new Class Mount. PvP Brawls. Chromie Scenario/Faction Solo Content. Broken Shore Campaign. Argus Storyline/Campaign. Legion Invasions on the Broken Isles + Invasion Portals to legion worlds. Silithus Questline. Plus plenty of QoL changes in the patches such as the addition of transmog sets or updated animations.



Bottom line is that Legion OBJECTIVELY has a lot more content than WoD.
Subjectively I also consider that content to be superior in the majority of cases. You are welcome to disagree about the quality of the content for you personally, but you cannot argue facts.

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I hated WoD with a burning passion, it was the first expansion I actually quit for the full duration. Once I finished leveling, I felt so bored and didn't enjoy the endgame content whatsoever. Which is a shame considering I've heard the raids were pretty good. Legion on the other hand, I felt like I never ran out of things to do, mainly due to world quests and mythic dungeons, and the story was much better than WoDs. (Though it's still lacking the quality that Vanilla, BC, Wrath, and MoP had in my opinion.) It is better received because it is a better expansion in most people's eyes.

I agree with you. WoD was the first and only expansion that I actually quit the game shortly after launch and never came back.

[kamuimac]

5. Dungeons added in patches - WoD: 0 Legion:4. .

you deliberately forget to add that all of those 4 are actively avoided by 99% of playerbase so they could be as well never implemented and people wouldnt care/notice.

so what if they are in when nobody wants to run them due to how overtuned they are compared to others ? people just never bothered to learn/d them making them dead keys if not made in guild groups.

[korijenkins]

You are making 2 big assumptions:

1) Legion didn't also have 10 million subs at launch;
2) Current subscriber base is not higher than late WoD subscriber base.

You are unable to prove or confirm either of them, and any semblance of evidence points the other way (player activity is significantly higher in Legion than WoD).


Either way, a lot of the people in the forum are part of that group that will likely play no matter what, and from what I've seen most people generally agree that Legion is simply objectively better overall, although it has its issues ofc.

As someone who played a lot more during WoD, and honestly thinks it wasn't as bad as some people paint it, and although I had more fun and was a lot more involved with the game during WoD (mostly because of RL and overall being tired of WoW by now), I can still see that Legion is overall a better expansion.

If Legion had brought the subscriber numbers up from WoD, they likely would've reported it.

Them not reporting sub numbers anymore is indicative of the total, even if we don't know the exact number. I can tell just by standing in Dalaran during primetime, or checking my bnet friends that the sub count is massively down. People I've seen playing the game for 5-8 years non-stop are suddenly unsubbing.

As for why I think Legion is better received, its frequency of patches and nothing more. The content of Legion was not better by much, and in some cases worse (7.2, 7.3.5). WoD was a total bust because patches like 6.1 that added nothing were considered major updates, and the game went through almost a year of no content, with 6.3 being poorly received in virtually every manner.

Legion to me has been a lot of failed experimentation. A lot of systems were tried, and failed. They attempted to copy the exotic system of Destiny with the legiondaries, and it was a disaster. They tried to implement a mastery system for max level experience gains, and it became a hated boring grind that was measured in Maw of Souls runs. They added titanforging to the game, and in turn created a system that encourages endless runs of the same content as if its some kind of crappy generic Japanese MMO. They tried to make gear a non-factor in PvP, and it has the lowest player participation ever, despite new rewards being added.

Thats not to say I thought it was all bad. Return to Karazhan was maybe the best dungeon ever created. Lorewise the story was a significant improvement over the storytelling that had been occurring since patch 5.3. Gear design was probably the best its ever been. New animations improved the game quite a bit as well visually.

With those positives, you might think "he said Legion was only better because of frequency of patches" and thats right, as WoD also had similar positives and negatives, but roughly the same amount. If there had been no 7.2, and the same content drought we saw in WoD happened in Legion, people would call it the worst expansion.

[Deleted]

Legion is polarizing. Those who like it, really love it, and those who dont just left quickly. Irs still making blizz money, thats it. Level boost etc is a goldmine.
That ofc doesnt tell much about the overall quality and how many play. For every 6 players, you have now 1 player who pays 6 times for shop items and stuff.
If you look at the earning calls youll see that wow is only mentioned in a little sentence. Which is wierd if it was soooo successful.
But the discussion isnt going anywhere. Whiteknights vs people who quit. Makes no sense.

[Deleted]

I played all the way through WoD. First expansion I ever levelled every class to level cap, because I was just that fucking bored. Outside of raids there was absolutely nothing to do. Sure you had challenge modes, but that was honestly it and the rewards weren't that great. At least in MoP you got some amazing transmog sets for doing the CMs.

Mythic+ and world quests alone have made Legion a vast improvement over WoD. World quests give you an excuse to fly out of Dalaran and do something. Garrisons are more interesting in the form of class order halls and I don't mind having followers/missions if it's accompanied by actual content. For levelling, being able to choose which zone you wanna do first is also nice. Adds a bit of variety. I also think the raids in Legion are better than WoD, though Blackrock Foundry was pretty great. Hellfire Citadel was great as well, but after 12 months of running it, it sorta lost its charm. Only other thing you could really try and do is kill every rare in Tanaan jungle for an achievement.

Suramar was a great zone to play through with an entire city in it, and Blizzard also added 2 new zones, Argus and Broken Shore which came with the Mage Tower, another thing players can choose to focus on completing. They may yet add more and the expansion isn't over yet. Legion feels a lot more complete than WoD did and I don't even want BFA to come out yet, I feel like there's still a bunch of things I still wanna do in Legion.. haha. Just my 2c anyway.

[Kolvarg]

*snip*

Maybe, or maybe not. The fact is they stated clearly they wouldn't be stating sub numbers anymore. It's also very unlikely that the numbers haven't gone up with Legion launch, since it's been happening (and increasing the peak each time) every expansion launch since MoP. Of course, chances are that subscriber peak dissipated and numbers went back to the normal and expected slow decay, and right now they probably are below WoD numbers - again, because that has been the trend since Cataclysm. It's completely normal and expected, especially on what is now an almost 14 year old game.

Google trends seems to support this (for what it's worth):
https://trends.google.pt/trends/expl...=%2Fm%2F021dvx



Yes, Legion was better received by its frequency of patches and content amount. Because that's exactly what was wrong with WoD. WoD content was actually pretty good for the most part (I know I had overall a lot of fun with it), it was just very little, with very little replayability, and an unsatisfying reward system. That's what Legion (for the most part) fixed, and that's why it's better received.

Legion does have its share of flaws, but objectively speaking WoD's flaws were a lot more serious for a MMORPG, imho.

[Sixy]

you deliberately forget to add that all of those 4 are actively avoided by 99% of playerbase so they could be as well never implemented and people wouldnt care/notice.

so what if they are in when nobody wants to run them due to how overtuned they are compared to others ? people just never bothered to learn/d them making them dead keys if not made in guild groups.

Overtuned? The only difficult one at this point is Seat of the Triumvirate, and that is the only one that some people avoid.

[Thagrynor]

Three simple things:

1. Being better than WoD does not take much. WoD was abandoned mid-way through development, this is seen with a naked eye. They left big parts of what they started unfinished.

2. Legion is worse than WoD on a fairly big thing: PVP. PVP was half of the end-game and Legion managed to be *undisputably* worse than WoD in that respect and managed to kill it effing dead. Legion PVP was so completely terrible, the number of players in it got slashed to a quarter of what it was and the main PVP guy had to quit.

3. Legion's only thing was adding a couple of infinite grinds which provide you with things to do. Unfortunately, this is very repetitive and while you get your +5 ilvl or +one more roll at mounts and similar things every now and then, this gets old quite fast, it is way too repetitive. Legion was pretty terrible at adding actual new gameplay and it has been pretty mediocre at developing its content base - it kept returning to grinds built on a small base of existing instances / zones, and that base was growing very little.

Legion is perhaps better than WoD, but it was pretty mediocre. Legion will likely be better than BFA, though. The game is continuing to go down.

In response:

1) Well, yes, very much so. WoD set the bar for expectation at pretty much floor level. WoD was a disaster through and through and, like you say, felt vastly unfinished. However, Legion was still a much more solid expansion. There was more to do outside of raiding, there wasn't an individualized instanced hole in the world that you could sit in and play the entirety of the game while avoiding literally everyone, it didn't put most of its focus on essentially a Facebook game, etc. This isn't to say everything was great ....

2) Honestly, I don't personally PvP much at all. So I cannot speak to how PvP was in Legion. I will take your word that PvP was worse in Legion. While it sucks, the only thing I can really say is that, while for some PvP is "end game", WoW was never really designed as a PvP game. That doesn't mean they shouldn't do everything they can to make PvP awesome, but I think it just results in them not really knowing HOW to make it awesome, causing them to iterate in an attempt to correct the previous expansion's problems, leading to over correction and making it bad in another way. I would like to think they learned from Legion PvP and will improve PvP in BfA. Sadly, only time will tell with that. From the stand point of what they have shown though, there seems to be some promise with regards to PvP-centered "PvE" type content, like the PvP islands and Warfronts (assuming the Warfronts allow for a PvP mode at some point, as has been suggested they could, with no confirmation they will).

3) I think Legion succeeded in a number of important areas, namely getting people into the world, giving non-raiders something to do, removing the focus on the Facebook style gaming of follower missions (or at least relegating them in a way that you don't have to mess with that in game and can deal with it from a phone app before you log in or something), as well as providing more "end game" options for PvE aside from raiding. M+ for some is end game. They don't want to raid (or raid very little) so M+ is a viable end game option for them. Yes, it is repetitive, but so are games like D3 and those keep pretty good player numbers for a reason. They had missteps too, obviously. The Legendary system has been broken nearly all of Legion (I personally think they should have added the current system of buying a Legendary token for 1000 of a currency in back in like .... 7.1 or something, allowing them to potentially tweak the currency drop rate to control how fast people get them, while also allowing them to drop as they did), the rep grinds got a little cumbersome at times, the Titanforging system was ... annoying and frustrating.

In terms of the repetitive part though, I think that the dynamic nature of the island system will allow for it to at least feel a lot less grindy, depending on how large the option space is for pulling different changes for the dynamic generation. If they allow for Normal, Heroic and Mythic versions of these that can become a lot more difficult and interesting as end game content is concerned, especially if coupled with normal Mythic+ dungeons. I think, while it would require some scaling and a bit of work on old stuff, that applying a system to include potentially ALL dungeons (or maybe add in one expansion's worth of old dungeons) into the Mythic+ system could be a nice way to add variety. Maybe go to Vanilla and add like ... 50% of the Vanilla dungeons as scaleable to M+ levels. Or all the WotLK dungeons or something. Think like a reverse Timewalking situation. I think that might make it feel less repetitive.

[Kryptoon]

From the way toons interact with the environment, aka gameplay, Legion was far worse than any other expansion on pve but mostly pvp.
New "class fantasy" at least for me destroyed the feeling I use to have when questing, riding, pvping, having an enjoyable flow of abilities that could be used in various ways, with plenty of customization.
The depth of classes was reduced so much that I cannot keep joy in using same class for more than 1-2 months and becomes dead boring.

And the thing beyond worst is that "class fantasy" reloaded will come with BFA, which will prune even further (yeah, is possible) leaving us with a game which seems designed for ppl with low desire to experiment and build themselves better toons.
Cannot stop thinking to McMurphy in One flew over cuckoo's nest after "treatment", that would make a perfect player in BfA.

[Berndorf]

If WoW subscribers were high blizzard would release the numbers again. Theres a reason they hide it now

I'm not sure they would because then it leads to rampant speculation the minute they stop reporting them. At this point they don't need to bother considering that Bliz has expanded their portfolio of games to the point that wow isn't their main cash cow. They'll just report on the amount of units the expansions sell and let people speculate about the number of subs being retained after that.

[rda]

2) ... PvP ... I would like to think they learned from Legion PvP and will improve PvP in BfA. Sadly, only time will tell with that.

Very quickly, it doesn't seem like they are doing anything relevant. We can talk about this in detail, but, shortly, from all interviews and all Q&As, both those that talk about PVP and those that don't talk about it and talk about other things, it seems that they will not do shit to undo the damage they did to PVP in Legion and won't do anything interesting or relevant to it either. It looks like they wrote that part of the game off. Which is pretty sad, because, as I say, it used to be half of the end game before, as in, it was the mainstay of *half* of the players at max level. This is from their own stats and yes, this is real. It is popular to think about PVP as something small, but it *really* was 50% of the game in terms of player preference, it is just that WoW devs constantly underspent on it.

Anyway, more importantly:

3) I think Legion succeeded in a number of important areas, namely getting people into the world, giving non-raiders something to do, removing the focus on the Facebook style gaming of follower missions (or at least relegating them in a way that you don't have to mess with that in game and can deal with it from a phone app before you log in or something), as well as providing more "end game" options for PvE aside from raiding. M+ for some is end game. They don't want to raid (or raid very little) so M+ is a viable end game option for them. Yes, it is repetitive, but so are games like D3 and those keep pretty good player numbers for a reason. ...

Consider what we have in Legion as content, apart from traditional raids:

1. World quests with scaling rewards.
2. Mythic+ with scaling rewards.
3. Artifact power to fill.
4. Legendaries to get.

That's more or less all reasons to log in regularly. There's some flavor from class halls and world quests being organized into packs with extra rewards, we can add them to the relevant items above, and the above things are mostly what Legion is.

Now observe that 3 and 4 don't add any gameplay at all. With artifact power, you just play, well, something - perhaps world quests - and you automatically get rewards on one extra dimension. Same with legendaries. Now, I don't want to talk about RNG, etc, I am talking about something much simpler: 3 and 4 aren't gameplay in and of themselves, they are *reasons* for you to keep repeating some other gameplay.

Now let's look at 1 and 2. Observe that both are long / infinite grinds that build upon a small set of original content. One week, you do world quests and get rewards of ilvl X. Next week, you do the exact same world quests and get rewards of ilvl X+Y. Same with mythic+ instances.

And now the main point: the repetitive things, as in, a lot of reasons to repeat the same (relatively small) content is all Legion offers. And it was NOT like that before. For example, MoP added pet battles. WotLK added achievements. Cata, however bad it was, added transmog. And actually each expansion added multiple such things, some more, some less. New things produce variety and novelty. That's how games grow - while obviously not all new things appeal to everyone / are similarly successful, when you keep adding them, some end up being stars that add new dimensions to the game and refuel it, bringing new players and new life. And what the hell did Legion add here? Nothing. All it did was created a couple of grinds on top of a relatively unimpressive amount of bog-standard traditional content. And why? Because it takes much less development effort. That's what Legion's problem is and that's what is meant when people say that the game stagnates.

And it looks even worse for BFA because BFA also doesn't add nearly anything and creates almost the exact same grinds on a similarly unimpressive amount of bog-standard content. In fact, BFA seems to be even smaller in terms of effort than Legion was. I don't think it will be successful. Obviously, if you are just looking for dungeon #94 to farm weekly and get ilvl 1050 today and 1055 next week and maybe 1060 after a month, we will have that. But other than that, nah. This is just boring.