I don't understand why WoD was a complete failure.

[TheVaryag]

Here's some things which could have been improved:*

1) The garrison was thinking too big for one person. They should have found a way so it would have been the guild's Garrison while still providing for everyone in the guild in terms of craft. "Numbers" would have to be adjusted to make sure the Garrison rewards did not get out of hand. I don't care about pretty much anyone not in my guild. SO, it would be cool seeing them more often and not random strangers.... stranger danger....

2) The Twitter/facebook patch was stupid. It was insulting.

3) The follower ideas needed to be scaled back at the start. And, the followers should have been limited to those "named followers" not just random followers who were not significant. SO, essentially copying what Legion did.... there were some minions and that was fine.

4) Ashran was retarded. It did not live up to even the other two open world pvp zones such as Wintergrasp. There's nothing else to say other than it did not work out at all at least for me.

The Good:

1) The zones and the quests were amazing.
2) The cinematic were amazing.

3) I loved all the dungeons and the achievements.

4) I enjoyed the raids.

5) The idea of rares popping up and having to find little treasures was cool.

6) The legendary quest line was very awesome.


For those positive reasons, I really enjoyed WoD.

You're right, It had those positives. And WoD wasn't that bad at first and was enjoyable... It was mostly when It got abandoned, left with a 14 month content draught to make and polish Legion that people just automaticly dumped their collective negative thoughts on the entire expansion, forgetting some of the FEW good things It did, and few they were surely.

To your good points first:

1) Zones and quests were good -enough- they had a cohesive storyline, linearly going from zone to zone and the zones connected eachother unlike Legion's bad zone design which makes legion zones feel unconnected and without purpose to the rest of the Legion's zones.

2) Cinematics were great great, no doubt Blizzard always outdo themselves there.

3) The Dungeons and achivements weren't bad, I just hated the fact they basically took what was early Mythic + but with cosmetic rewards and made It Into today's Mythic + with gear rewards and doing It a thousand times. I enjoyed the other version more from WoD, run a timed dungeon If you're that kind of time pressure loving guy and get a cosmetic weapon or thing, good! But then Legion turning It Into a "Way to progress other than raiding" was utterly and shamefully BAD design.

4) The raids were good really, and ontop of that gear progression was too, you naturally went from normal to heroic dungeons, to LFR level gear from raid to raid, unless you did real raiding then you just had good gear no matter what, you just progressed better than the rest. On that note, Legion's design was aphorant, bad I say. Some might not remember this In their drunken fanboyish haze, but when we did the first LFR in Legion, that being the Emerald Nightmare raid, the gear that dropped for you was worse than what you already had... because, like any other person you were doing World Quests which gave you gear left right and center, and It also gave you a gambling chance to Improve that gear by a few ilevels If you were the lucky one! It's just bad design, bad pacing with gear in Legion, and the rest of what legion did with gear didn't help either, as they're trying to make gear less significant to aquire and Artifact Power/now Azerite more fun to put time Into rather than gear... that was a lenghty one, but I feel every subject needs some explenation or people won't get the point of your criticism.

5) The Idea Is good... but again, they do It poorly. They're not -rares- essentially, they spawn every 5 minutes like any normal mob spawns, even quicker than some normal mobs, only rare thing about them Is they have the wrongly given "Rare" Icon next to their portrait and drop good gear. Rares used to be In older expansions that you saw once a few hours, sometimes days (Which was a bad Idea, hours are fine, not DAYS) and then you maybe got that epic helmet of troll voodoo. Treasure finding Is also too easy, It just shows up on the mini map "I'm here, get me, wohoo.. come here boy get me you..." just flaunting It's loot filled chest like a vixen, not even trying to be subtle, not even trying to hide from the minimap, stuffed away In some hole you'd have to EXPLORE on your own Incentive to find rather than It be shown easily on the minimap and then put on a silver platter in the middle of a giant room essentially Is how you find most treasures In Legion (And In WoD). It makes the treasure and rare finding so trivial It doesn't feel rare or Interesting. This Is criticism for both WoD and Legion as they do It essentially the same, and the rewards Inside aren't even that good, useless artifact power, a piece of string and a golden nugget you sell for a few coppers...

I'm sorry, but even VANILLA through TBC and arguably Wrath WoW had more Interesting treasure finding moments, pretty much every chest back then had like, a proffesion recipe, a few copper ores, a bunch of cloth, a weapon possibly, food and water and some extra things sometimes, or less... and yes that's things people used back then. If you had no use for any of those, sell them on the AH (Yes they got SOLD on the AH back then) and If not there, your guilds will need them to grow their char and help you raiding or PvPing... anything you discovered you disected among your alts, your guilds or the AH. And back then It wasn't as easy as gathering up 10 guys, giving a few cleaves and done. You had to pull mobs carefully one by one, cause you were a noob, some level 21 scrub with a wooden shield and a sword you got from a boar's gut next mountain range over and you need that chest hidden behind 6 regular mobs... but when you fight through to get It, you feel great... unless someone stole It from you, then you ignore him for life. Point Is... much more Interesting to loot chests in WoW In the original game 13 years back than the current version, what kinda Innovation Is that?

6) Legendary quest was... an odd one, I'm conflicted on that still, on one hand It gave you Incentive to run LFR beyond just gear and encourages people to keep playing It, hence learning tactics, hence learning team work and cooperation... hopefully. Which Is good. But then on the other hand, It's basically we are Sauron, we need our super powerful ring. It gave a good story, I'll give you that, so I'll just leave It as It was good enough to keep me Interested In doing dungeons and raids, so I was okay with It. Didn't feel cheated doing the quest.


And now your negatives about WoD:

1) Garrisons were the abolute worst feature for WoD... no wait, It was the BESt feature for WoD, yet they've screwed It up, as It could've essentially been housing for WoW players and not only on Dreanor If It succeded. They should've added customization to your garrison, to personalize and make It your own, removing table missions as well, or at the very least limit It's usefullness back then and put fewer chars to be your companions... which is essentially what you said and I agree with that part. But I think It should've been a personalized housing for players, that was to be worked on properly and more by Blizz, like they promised, bigger more customization and beyond that Is what we were to be given but then just got a generic smaller garrison with -some- buildings...

Now don't get me wrong, It provided many opportunities for this small section of the populace called Roleplayers to play In the garrisons privately, wink nudge hint. Make their own little towns and communities for a few players to live In and that's a good but minor reason garrisons are still even used today.

I think they missed alot by not going far and beyond with the Garrisons, even the Shipyard didn't help although It gave another nice little addition, I kinda wished we could've had our garrison and shipyard next to eachother more closely.. but with our garrison positions being as they are that'd be Impossible to do ofc.

2) One of the two only patches In WoD, and that one was the worst. With 7.1 Selfie camera patch basically, It gave us nothing significant which was sad. 7.2 On the other hand just to point out.. also gave nothing of significance, that's not even mentioning how they 360'ed the story where Grom is the goodie In the end and Gul'dan's the bigger baddie than him. They admited this by the way so stop writing that Into your post.

3) Basically explained In number 1 ^

4) Ashran wasn't the best way to immitate Alterac Valley's success among the people, It failed to be an Alterac and It failed to even be a proper Battleground, but It did well with grinding free Honor and Conquest.. so hooray there. Still wish I could've gotten all the achivements before blizzard fudged me over, but hey, life right.


Lastly as I pointed out above, It was mostly the major content draught that had people go "WoD sucks" despite some good features, some even better than what Legion has now or BfA will have. So I'm sad to say WoD might just be better than BfA also, and Legion will stay on the worst expansion's list forever, at least until we get a good look at BfA... can't wait!

[Venziir]

...what?

It offered dailies you could choose how you completed, A new currency. Garrison raid bosses, mythic plus, A host of rare spawns and items to collect.

Problem was bads don't want game play they want rewards and once they tasted epics mailed to them via garrison... well what hope did wod have?

It offered one daily which was a bonus objective grind for wortless crystals, sure with Tanaan that increased to 3 dailies that offered crystals. The garrison raid bosses required insanely rare items to summon, which meant that no one ever did them. Rare Spawns and items, yeah sure but all that was a one time thing. Oh and Mythic plus is a legion thing....

[Kyriani]

Here's what I think of when I think of WoD's failings:

Blizzard doubled down on what they did in MoP by making heroic dungeons irrelevant from the get go.
Trying to funnel everyone into LFR as the "endgame content" for people who aren't interested in organized raiding but making sure LFR loot was worthless.
Focusing too much on the garrison and especially allowing it to make us too self sufficient to the point of almost never needing to leave.
Doubling down on the garrison focus by adding the ship yard.
Stringing players along with flight only to try and outright remove it.
Lack of content, particularly content patches, but hey we got a selfie cam - woo.
Swinging the pendulum from mop's glut of dailies to near zero dailies... Blizzard has problems trying to do anything in moderation.
Reputations were an after thought and mostly mob grinding with shitty rewards for the effort.
Ashran

Ultimately WoD was the only xpac that made me walk away form WoW thinking I might never come back. While definitely not perfect, Legion was a redemption story for WoW in my opinion. What WoD did do is destroy my faith and trust in Blizzard. Now I don't get hyped, now I don't blindly pre-order, now I wait, see, read the fine print, and keep my expectations low so I won't be disappointed but hopefully pleasantly surprised.

That's why -I think- WoD was a complete failure.

[valax]

WoD was fairly decent expac if you were Mythic raider.
The content outside the raid releases wasn't enough to keep people interested though, so it probably sucked bad if you weren't a raider.

Sucked as a raider too tbh , after the apexis farming was done there was absolutely nothing to look out for outside of your garrison , A game that I used to play for hours every day basically became a mobile phone game routine . Yes there were mounts and stuff to collect around but
A) hate with all myself being grounded in draenor zones (seriously fuck the shattered hand guys with the gripping hooks) .
B) Mounts and cosmetics weren't enough of an incentive for me to really bother.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Very poor content planning and roll out. Most of the content that came out in WoD was content that was suppose to be in at launch or first tier. But since they had nothing they just split and piece mealed it out for the exntent of a whole expansion for the most part.

I am a firm believer that release was suppose to be Legion then WoD but since WoD went along with the movie better they pushed it up and thus it lacked the assets (also explains why they just had so much stuff so quickly and ready to go in Legion). I know we will never know.. but thats just how I feel it.. either that or they just rapidly thought up an expansion that tagged along with the movie last minute and thus it just lacked staying power.

[Nutrition]

It offered one daily which was a bonus objective grind for wortless crystals, sure with Tanaan that increased to 3 dailies that offered crystals. The garrison raid bosses required insanely rare items to summon, which meant that no one ever did them. Rare Spawns and items, yeah sure but all that was a one time thing. Oh and Mythic plus is a legion thing....

How were the crystals worthless they offered gear on par with heroic raids....

The bosses also where not that hard to summon... The problem is bad players don't want content they want rewards. WoD was a failure because it gave out powerful rewards for just sitting in a garrison. Now to a raider that isn't going to make a difference but a helpless bad? They are going to just gonna sit in their garrison waiting for more and more items to trickle in as they complain about not doing any of the content they are drowning in.

[Venziir]

How were the crystals worthless they offered gear on par with heroic raids....

The bosses also where not that hard to summon... The problem is bad players don't want content they want rewards. WoD was a failure because it gave out powerful rewards for just sitting in a garrison. Now to a raider that isn't going to make a difference but a helpless bad? They are going to just gonna sit in their garrison waiting for more and more items to trickle in as they complain about not doing any of the content they are drowning in.

Bla fucking bla, honestly dude, keep on defending WoD; you are the only one. And no, that doesn't mean you are a misunderstood genius and the rest are idiots, Quite the contrary.

[Coconut]

How were the crystals worthless they offered gear on par with heroic raids....

The bosses also where not that hard to summon... The problem is bad players don't want content they want rewards. WoD was a failure because it gave out powerful rewards for just sitting in a garrison. Now to a raider that isn't going to make a difference but a helpless bad? They are going to just gonna sit in their garrison waiting for more and more items to trickle in as they complain about not doing any of the content they are drowning in.

What are you even talking about?

First of all, iirc you had to kill a number of bosses on a certain difficulty in order to get the mission table boxes. Second, casuals don't really give a fuck about gear except to collect a set of mogs if it looks pwetty. Unless you are actively progressing (which non-raiders by definition are not), you only need a decent enough item level to handle yourself in the open world, LFR and the odd random BG. In my experience as a casual, by the time I was somewhat catching up with the ilvl in Normal, the next patch would come out with catch up mechanics, so my "gear" was pointless anyway (not that I complained).

"Content" means something that actually stays with you beyond the hamster wheel, like mounts, mogs, achievements, interesting quest lines, hard to get recipes, pets, toys, places to explore. A higher power level is not real content, it's just a means to access some of it (or make it easier for you).

[Dormie]

WoD wasn't that bad, it's just an easy target for the crybaby know-nothings to jump on since they know the rest of the crybaby know-nothings have their back. Learn to enjoy a game without having your hand held. It wasn't the best expansion but it was still better than Cata and an objectively good game.

[Kallisto]

Here's some things which could have been improved:

1) The garrison was thinking too big for one person. They should have found a way so it would have been the guild's Garrison while still providing for everyone in the guild in terms of craft. "Numbers" would have to be adjusted to make sure the Garrison rewards did not get out of hand. I don't care about pretty much anyone not in my guild. SO, it would be cool seeing them more often and not random strangers.... stranger danger....

2) The Twitter/facebook patch was stupid. It was insulting.

3) The follower ideas needed to be scaled back at the start. And, the followers should have been limited to those "named followers" not just random followers who were not significant. SO, essentially copying what Legion did.... there were some minions and that was fine.

4) Ashran was retarded. It did not live up to even the other two open world pvp zones such as Wintergrasp. There's nothing else to say other than it did not work out at all at least for me.

The Good:

1) The zones and the quests were amazing.
2) The cinematic were amazing.

3) I loved all the dungeons and the achievements.

4) I enjoyed the raids.

5) The idea of rares popping up and having to find little treasures was cool.

6) The legendary quest line was very awesome.


For those positive reasons, I really enjoyed WoD.

Honestly the answer to this thread can be shown by looking at the crying people did in MoP.

The demand for NO daileys (which when WoD was announced got the biggest cheer at Blizzcon.), the demand to just go straight to end game, the demand for player housing. Everything in WoD was what people bitched for in MoP.

Blizzard have an issue in which they are trying to cater to the biggest complainers of the expansion and it backfires a lot. Legion was good but that was mostly due to a unified hatred of WoD. Legion issues come out and people whined again. Things we are mostly seeing now came about cause of the loudest bitching from early legion. (By bitching I mean people who post whiney threads and post over and over. Not saying things weren't wrong but people making decent threads with constructive criticism were being drowned out and down voted like hell because not ragey enough).

Also the twitter patch was data the largest they did because it did a lot of behind the scenes stuff. It's just NO ONE RIGHTFULLY GIVES A FUCK. If a patch is 200GB then yes it is still the biggest patch ever. But if it is just behind the scenes why mention it. (Although I am not against them adding Twitter/FB it should have been as a "Also we did this on the side if you want." not as a key feature)

[Kathranis]

I don't think it's any mystery why it failed as an expansion. The launch content was solid, the raid content it had was solid. People were into it when it came out. Really into it. The problem was a lack of post-launch support. It had basically no post-launch content outside of Tanaan and Hellfire Citadel. Systemic problems like the role of Garrisons and Mission Tables could have been corrected if they had continued iterating on the systems after release.

Essentially it boils down to a massive gamble that Blizzard took with the development cycle of the game. They tried to make good on the idea of yearly expansions, which was something they had touted for years and years as a goal, and it did not work out. They expanded the team, they devoted all of their resources toward getting out the next expansion faster, and they found that there were development timeline bottlenecks that couldn't be overcome by throwing more people at the problem.


So for all the time, money, and effort they put into trying to shorten the turnaroud from Walords to Legion, they found that it still took them about as long to develop as any other expansion, and they had sacrificed the longevity of Warlords to learn that lesson. The content drought wasn't averted; it was exacerbated. And the expansion as a whole suffered.

I believe it was during the Blizzcon 2016 Legion What's Next panel that Ion talked at length about the mistakes and issues with the development cycle, and that's when he said that they had scratched the idea of yearly expansions and commited to the current content release cadence, which is essentially a new expansion every two years, with three major content patches over the lifecycle and smaller "dot-fives" in between. I believe they've announced that they plan to follow the same rough schedule with BFA, apart from maybe delaying the first patch slightly (and by shifting everything a month or two down the pipeline, it should shorten the gap between BFA and 9.0).

[Gadzooks]

1) The zones and the quests were amazing.

I'm glad you enjoyed WOD, but i have to take issue with this. They were not "amazing", and the questing was too short and poorly done. It was all on rails, there was no sense of exploration, you just went from point a to point b killing [mob type x], with no sense of story or immersion. You know what would have been "amazing"? Actually exploring Skettis. Not just one dungeon, or farting around in the valleys below, doing stuff for goblins that had no real place in the story. Parts of it were good, because the talent at Blizz still shines through, despite the ham handedness of the rest, but the writing and questing in WOD was significantly subpar to what they'd done in vanilla, TBC, and Wrath. Questing in Wrath deserves to be called "amazing", because from start to finish it was deep, dark, and took effort to go the whole way - which I did, on several toons, the story was so good I did it multiple times, and saw news things each time. WOD was a series of small vignettes that had nothing tying them together, and failed to instill any connection with the player. I call it the Warlords of Missed Opportunities, for the plotlines and opportunities to explore cool places and stories they glossed over or ignored. The capital cities fiasco was blatant, they went to all that time and effort to build legit "amazing" cities...and they're ghost towns. An "amazing" city IN THE SKY gets one dungeon, that takes place indoors. We're on an alien planet...to grind shards. The guy who started the war, gets the victory lap at the end.

There were bright spots. Shadowmoon Valley was well done, but it fell apart quickly after that. The fake missions in the Garrison, which your followers pretended to do, were far more interesting than the actual quests you had to do.

I finished leveling in WOD in like a week, not trying very hard, and my reaction was "That's IT?" I lost all interest in WoW at that exact moment, and haven't returned since. Amazing? This word you use, I do not think you understand what it means.

- - - Updated - - -

Very poor content planning and roll out. Most of the content that came out in WoD was content that was suppose to be in at launch or first tier. But since they had nothing they just split and piece mealed it out for the exntent of a whole expansion for the most part.

I am a firm believer that release was suppose to be Legion then WoD but since WoD went along with the movie better they pushed it up and thus it lacked the assets (also explains why they just had so much stuff so quickly and ready to go in Legion). I know we will never know.. but thats just how I feel it.. either that or they just rapidly thought up an expansion that tagged along with the movie last minute and thus it just lacked staying power.

One of them Brack or Chilton, said at some point before WOD was announced, that they had two potential expansions ready to go, but they didn't know which one they wanted to do first. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the movie influenced their choice. They failed on WOD, but even I can see that Legion was a success, and I didn't play it. Would it have been as big a success if they'd done Legion first? Don't know, but i think the backlash over WOD influenced the care and effort and goals of Legion.

[Flurryfang]

I don't think it's any mystery why it failed as an expansion. The launch content was solid, the raid content it had was solid. People were into it when it came out. Really into it. The problem was a lack of post-launch support. It had basically no post-launch content outside of Tanaan and Hellfire Citadel. Systemic problems like the role of Garrisons and Mission Tables could have been corrected if they had continued iterating on the systems after release.

Essentially it boils down to a massive gamble that Blizzard took with the development cycle of the game. They tried to make good on the idea of yearly expansions, which was something they had touted for years and years as a goal, and it did not work out. They expanded the team, they devoted all of their resources toward getting out the next expansion faster, and they found that there were development timeline bottlenecks that couldn't be overcome by throwing more people at the problem.


So for all the time, money, and effort they put into trying to shorten the turnaroud from Walords to Legion, they found that it still took them about as long to develop as any other expansion, and they had sacrificed the longevity of Warlords to learn that lesson. The content drought wasn't averted; it was exacerbated. And the expansion as a whole suffered.

I believe it was during the Blizzcon 2016 Legion What's Next panel that Ion talked at length about the mistakes and issues with the development cycle, and that's when he said that they had scratched the idea of yearly expansions and commited to the current content release cadence, which is essentially a new expansion every two years, with three major content patches over the lifecycle and smaller "dot-fives" in between. I believe they've announced that they plan to follow the same rough schedule with BFA, apart from maybe delaying the first patch slightly (and by shifting everything a month or two down the pipeline, it should shorten the gap between BFA and 9.0).

It seems like Blizzard found out, that just because 1 woman can be produce a child in 9 months, does not mean you can have 9 women create a child in 1 month xD

But yeah, completly agree. While alot of the features in WoD were full of problems and some even game breaking, the thing that made the game bad, was that it did not have enough content to fill its run-time, which gave the playerbase more than enough time to completly exhaust the expansion.

[Korru]

There weren't three tiers in WoD

that's the joke

[Venziir]

that's the joke

... Oh... "ha ha" then

[Nutrition]

What are you even talking about?

First of all, iirc you had to kill a number of bosses on a certain difficulty in order to get the mission table boxes. Second, casuals don't really give a fuck about gear except to collect a set of mogs if it looks pwetty. Unless you are actively progressing (which non-raiders by definition are not), you only need a decent enough item level to handle yourself in the open world, LFR and the odd random BG. In my experience as a casual, by the time I was somewhat catching up with the ilvl in Normal, the next patch would come out with catch up mechanics, so my "gear" was pointless anyway (not that I complained).

"Content" means something that actually stays with you beyond the hamster wheel, like mounts, mogs, achievements, interesting quest lines, hard to get recipes, pets, toys, places to explore. A higher power level is not real content, it's just a means to access some of it (or make it easier for you).

You keep saying casuals when you mean bads... why interchange the two? Casuals where fine they had a host of things to do. Now bads... that was a different story.

[Mirishka]

It wasn't a complete failure. The story was interesting, the content that worked was engaging, and it allowed blizzard to reset their story in a way they wanted after burning through it early on without a real 'plan'.

Most people say 'complete failure' referencing the content droughts, the fact that garrisons made your 'world quests' feel like a FB game, and that Ashran not being great... because this is MMO-C and if one thing is bad, it's all bad. It had some positives, and some negatives.

Well said. WoD had some things it did very well, and some things that were not done well. And I maintain to this day that WoD's version of SMV is one of the best zones they've ever done, out of any expansion.

[Coconut]

You keep saying casuals when you mean bads... why interchange the two? Casuals where fine they had a host of things to do. Now bads... that was a different story.

I see you have no interest in intelligent discussion. Well, no skin off my back, carry on doing your thing.

[Boricha]

Leveling and BRF were good. The other raids, garrisons, shipyard (what a tease that was), main story, Ashran, and world content sucked. The dungeons were mediocre imo, I liked Grimrail Depo. All the reps were just mob grinds. I also wasn't a fan of a lot of the class design decisions. The selfie patch was flat out insulting. It triggered me really hard when I found out there was a side quest hub in Boralus that makes you go around taking selfies... I certainly hold WoD as the worst expansion by miles.

[Enfilade]

I preferred WoD to Legion.