BFA - it's really not that bad.

[Tertullian72]

I know, a heretical opinion these days. So, some background - I've been playing since 2004, raided extensively until 2009 and since have mostly been what's usually called "casual", though with a lot of hours played. I have 8 120s and at least that many 110s baking in the oven. I'm mostly on the PvE side of things.

Let's start with the negatives of BFA.

My main Alliance is a shadow priest and Horde is enhancement shaman. That right there should tell you I'm well aware of their class design failures. I had to finish my priest leveling as discipline, a spec I've always hated but which had so much more viability in the early days of the expansion. Shadow at least has been improved through successive patches, though it's still worse than Legion. With my enhancement shaman I had no such alternative, since elemental is even worse. In both cases I ended up leveling other characters while waiting for Blizzard to work on their design. Both are now in a place of comfortable mediocrity.

Azerite...sigh. As a precursor to artifact weapons it might have been okay. As as a successor, the flaws are glaring and it feels like a step back. It has less of an impact on me as I don't raid and only occasionally dip into Mythic+, but it's still an obvious design failure.

Warmode is a gimmick, another sop to a small but loud group of players, except instead of the Vanilla crowd it's the world PvP/ganker folks. Spending a lot of design resources on this system was a stupid move, those developers should have spent their time working to perfect class balance. The veteran PvPers were screwed by this change, ironically, since most of them were quite happy to play on PvP servers.

The biggest negative is that it's following up on Legion. Battle for Azeroth coming right after WoD would have felt much better, but now BFA feels like Legion 0.5. The demons are dead now and seriously, Old Gods again? They've exhausted all of the Warcraft lore, so they really need to take a step back and figure out where the game goes from here.

On the positive side - I like having separate Horde and Alliance stories. Legion was on the weaker side there, with only Stormheim having a small amount of faction-specific content. I like that there's still a fair amount to do at 120, certainly more than in pre-Legion expansions. The zone design is varied and less annoying than Legion was in the pre-flight times part of the xpac. I've enjoyed some of the classes I've played, like my fury warrior and my mage. I've kept going with it so far, though I think it's reaching the "wait for flying" point just like Legion eventually did. Future expansions actually have a lot of potential, though that's all it is right now.

But for now BFA is mediocre at best, with glaring design flaws. It's still much better than Cataclysm, where most of the design time went into the old world revamp, the plot was "a big dragon wrecked the place and then hung out, waiting for adventurers to come kill him" and the only zone content I remember is trying to bounce bear cubs into the right spot. It's better than WoD, where I ran out of things to do after six weeks and only checked back in to level up alts a few months before Legion. That puts it into the middling spot of WoW expansions, not what Blizzard was aiming for but not a total disaster.

So why is it treated as one? External reasons, the biggest being the colossal fiasco of Diablo: Immortal. That opened the floodgates for non-stop negative coverage of Blizzard and their seeming transformation from beloved game company into another soulless division of Activision, scrounging for mobile gamers in Asia while neglecting the games that we all spent so much time and money on. It made hating Blizzard cool, and created a feedback loop which magnified all of BFA's flaws many times over. Mediocrity became utter failure, almost an intentional "slap in the face" from greedy corporate executives. The recent job cut didn't help, though I mean really, that's life in the business world and particularly IT (which I work in, incidentally). It sucks for the people laid off, but the gaming industry is like that.

So the TL;DR - BFA is mediocre but better than some xpacs, hated because of what Activision Blizzard has done elsewhere.

[Aeula]

It’s alright. I’m having fun at the moment and it’s nice to have a reason to log on every day.

To me the most damning legacies of this expansion are the story and the eroding of faction uniqueness via the Void Elves and Nightborne. I’m not a fan of Warmode either.

[Xenonn]

it really is bad though

[Kuja]

PVP expansions (Alliance/Horde plot and lore) are inherently bad. Especially to people who don't enjoy PVP, which I think is the majority. But it should get better when N'zoth comes and hopefully spices the game up a bit!

[Omedon]

On paper, like gameplay wise, I have virtually no complaints. I think making the faction divide such a focus is a huge turnoff, to me anyway, so I have one main on each side doing the bare minimum to advance the story, and am building a 20+ alt army parked at 110 waiting for heirlooms, flight, catchups and a compelling level cap story. For me, it seems the level 120 game truly starts at 8.2, and I’ve been keeping busy and entertained until 8.1.5 where the alt army puts on heirlooms and lives in islands, which I enjoy, then uses timewalking vendors to gear for warfronts, which I enjoy, to then expand to world quests with flight... which I enjoy.

I don’t have any Azerite armor complaints, because all the content I care about is gated only by ilvl. My only complaints are about the no-win situation that is a faction war, which I can only enjoy in repeatable, role-agnostic and ultimately logistically motivated PVE content like warfronts and islands.

The good thing about the story being my only line of dislike, is that it will move past the dumb stuff, so I’m hanging in there and legitimately enjoying myself.

[MrCool]

Being "mediocre" is not good enough in gaming industry, you are either at least "good" or you'll be quickly forgotten.
Review scale is basically 10, 9, 8 or 0. So BFA is 0.

[Trumpcat]

The only good thing I can say is that it's starting to be less bad.

Art aside, because world design, music, cinematics, models, all art is great.

[Tertullian72]

I can see where the faction divide would turn a lot of people off if they stick to one faction. I used to be purely Alliance, but now I do both. There was no real difference with Legion but it's given me extra meat for BFA. I don't care about the PvP aspect though, I ignore that aside from sometimes using the leveling bonus.

[Nebron]

There is a full agreement when it comes to the zone design and especially music. It's a huge work from the artistic point of view.

There is also a flaw in your argument. Although it's true, that some expansions had more problems than the current one, it's all about the comparison to the precursor, as you said it yourself. You can't just pick up Cataclysm and simply compare it to today's expansion saying the latter is better. It's just incorrect. Although Cataclysm had massive droughts, the development of philosophy is what matters.

I also agree with the idea, that the negative reception of Battle for Azeroth intensified after the Diablo: Immortal great fiasco. But if you "zoom out" a bit, and take into the account all the actions that Activision Blizzard took recently, it's a bit worrying. And the bad news are coming one after another. I try to stay away from criticising the restructuring processes, since those might be a possitive change in the long term. But then I get the info that Ythisens got fired. And it blows my mind. Someone THAT close to the community; someone that respected by the said community gets fired in the process of restructuring.

Every bit of a features from the current expansions is just a hoary old chestnut. It would make a huge difference if the BfA was a WoD precursor. But it's not. There is nothing clever about Warfront, nor Islands Expeditions. They drew back from the Warfront idea, since there's none coming in 8.2. And make no mistake - heroic mode is going to be just tuned a little bit harder; nothing new is coming with that mode.

I clearly understand they had no time to reverse the mistakes. They have been developing theexpansion for years, so it's hard to remake everything ad hoc. But some things could have been reversed straight away, like GCDs. Soooo many players were against, yet Blizzard decided it's good for the game. And I agree. It's not always like the community knows better. It's good for developers to decide for the players - for the well-being of the game. But that particular decision was... well, weird at least.

Q&A's... one after another. What's the point? To prove the playerbase that they are truly connected with the community. But the effect is quite the opposite. They answer the same, boring and meaningless questions all the time. They cherry-pick those, that are easy to defend. And then comes the Q&A with the Vaninon.eu. Some uncomfortable questions and Ion Hazzikostas begins the well-known lawyertalk.

Some people say - "they they admitted they failed". Yes, they did. I can't imagine them not doing so up against the massive failure. It doesn't mean they understand the problem yet. But maybe it's not theirs fault. Just like Sea of Thieves is not only a Rares failure, but the Microsoft pushing them to release unfinished project. Some shit could have happened with Activision. So many people say also that there can be no profit without the quality, therefore Blizzard can't sabotage their own game, because it's irrational. Wrong again. Microtransactions proves the opposite. There doesn't need to be much of an effort put into development in order to make profit with the smart use of microtransactions. And it seems like Activision is preparing themselves for an immense profit from mobile games. It is quite possible they will withdraw a bit from WoW and cut the costs if WoW will stop giving them enough money.

That's what scares people a lot imo.

[vlange]

I know, a heretical opinion these days. So, some background - I've been playing since 2004, raided extensively until 2009 and since have mostly been what's usually called "casual", though with a lot of hours played. I have 8 120s and at least that many 110s baking in the oven. I'm mostly on the PvE side of things.

Let's start with the negatives of BFA.

My main Alliance is a shadow priest and Horde is enhancement shaman. That right there should tell you I'm well aware of their class design failures. I had to finish my priest leveling as discipline, a spec I've always hated but which had so much more viability in the early days of the expansion. Shadow at least has been improved through successive patches, though it's still worse than Legion. With my enhancement shaman I had no such alternative, since elemental is even worse. In both cases I ended up leveling other characters while waiting for Blizzard to work on their design. Both are now in a place of comfortable mediocrity.

Azerite...sigh. As a precursor to artifact weapons it might have been okay. As as a successor, the flaws are glaring and it feels like a step back. It has less of an impact on me as I don't raid and only occasionally dip into Mythic+, but it's still an obvious design failure.

Warmode is a gimmick, another sop to a small but loud group of players, except instead of the Vanilla crowd it's the world PvP/ganker folks. Spending a lot of design resources on this system was a stupid move, those developers should have spent their time working to perfect class balance. The veteran PvPers were screwed by this change, ironically, since most of them were quite happy to play on PvP servers.

The biggest negative is that it's following up on Legion. Battle for Azeroth coming right after WoD would have felt much better, but now BFA feels like Legion 0.5. The demons are dead now and seriously, Old Gods again? They've exhausted all of the Warcraft lore, so they really need to take a step back and figure out where the game goes from here.

On the positive side - I like having separate Horde and Alliance stories. Legion was on the weaker side there, with only Stormheim having a small amount of faction-specific content. I like that there's still a fair amount to do at 120, certainly more than in pre-Legion expansions. The zone design is varied and less annoying than Legion was in the pre-flight times part of the xpac. I've enjoyed some of the classes I've played, like my fury warrior and my mage. I've kept going with it so far, though I think it's reaching the "wait for flying" point just like Legion eventually did. Future expansions actually have a lot of potential, though that's all it is right now.

But for now BFA is mediocre at best, with glaring design flaws. It's still much better than Cataclysm, where most of the design time went into the old world revamp, the plot was "a big dragon wrecked the place and then hung out, waiting for adventurers to come kill him" and the only zone content I remember is trying to bounce bear cubs into the right spot. It's better than WoD, where I ran out of things to do after six weeks and only checked back in to level up alts a few months before Legion. That puts it into the middling spot of WoW expansions, not what Blizzard was aiming for but not a total disaster.

So why is it treated as one? External reasons, the biggest being the colossal fiasco of Diablo: Immortal. That opened the floodgates for non-stop negative coverage of Blizzard and their seeming transformation from beloved game company into another soulless division of Activision, scrounging for mobile gamers in Asia while neglecting the games that we all spent so much time and money on. It made hating Blizzard cool, and created a feedback loop which magnified all of BFA's flaws many times over. Mediocrity became utter failure, almost an intentional "slap in the face" from greedy corporate executives. The recent job cut didn't help, though I mean really, that's life in the business world and particularly IT (which I work in, incidentally). It sucks for the people laid off, but the gaming industry is like that.

So the TL;DR - BFA is mediocre but better than some xpacs, hated because of what Activision Blizzard has done elsewhere.

Nice post, I feel the same about BfA being quite good. I've been playing it way longer than WotLK, Cata, WoD and Legion. Can't say it's because BfA is superior to them, but it's a pretty good expansion in my opinion. The pirate and Inca temple themes do a lot for me. However... I do get triggered into responding to some of your dislikes since I still can't find any proper reasoning behind some ranting that's going on.

In my opinion the Azerite system isn't bad at all. Everybody on the forum keeps repeating it, but maybe you can finally give some good arguments? I actually went looking for some just now and can only find fallacies like "Only Blizzard fanboys with their head up in Blizzards *** think it's ok". The only argument I understand is that it's hard to get a specific set of traits, but isn't that system been there for ages? I can remember raiding Molten Core week after week to get another set piece item but every other mage, shadow priest and warlock was going after the same item. Guilds invented DKP systems just to sort loot without causing too much rage. Why is it a bad thing that it's hard to get the best item for a specific slot?

I also never get the lore issues. I like to follow the stories in the game, but I would never think the lore as being "exhausted". It's not Tolkien's Middle Earth which defines strict boundaries. At some point they made Warcraft 1 and from that moment on the lore kept being pushed forward since then. Somehow everybody agrees that this should have ended with the Warcraft 3 lore but I never understand why. I once read someone claiming that making Dreanei a playable race in The Burning Crusade was stupid and a sign that WoW was going downhill. All Draenei where evil in the story so far so why would Alliance accept them. The introduction of Death Knights did exactly the same.

To me it seems that everybody who states this game is in it's worst state ever simply got tired of playing it but somehow feel they can't quit so they turn to flaming about every detail they hate. It's actually very annoying to check WoW news on mmo-c and see every single topic about the game contain some complaint. It's completely the opposite from how it feels when I log in to play with friends and guildies.

[Zyrinx]

Legion had a gigantic amount of _class specific_ content in place of this bizarro _faction specific_ thing they're half trying to push (though, actively encouraging anyone that collects anything that you have to play both.... Pick your Side!!!!! indeed /s).

So yeah in short I disagree.

Even you disagree, you admit classes are bad and all of the features are bad. The PVP-ishness of this whole thing and the need to prop up warmode is the reason classes suck.

[dope_danny]

So the player drop off and decline mentioned in the shareholder call was a mass act of spite?

[Freshouttajail]

PVP expansions (Alliance/Horde plot and lore) are inherently bad. Especially to people who don't enjoy PVP, which I think is the majority. But it should get better when N'zoth comes and hopefully spices the game up a bit!

Yes it's the majority. People have this weird tendency to enjoy PLAYING their video games, so participating in a game mode that promotes the use of abilities that prevent players from playing the game is just not fun.

[Dhrizzle]

It’s alright. I’m having fun at the moment and it’s nice to have a reason to log on every day.

To me the most damning legacies of this expansion are the story and the eroding of faction uniqueness via the Void Elves and Nightborne. I’m not a fan of Warmode either.

I don't mind the "eroding of uniqueness" that's happening, I just think it's pretty naff that so many allied races have essentially turned on one faction when both were insturmental in bringing down the legion - in my opinion Nightborn, Highmountain Tauren and Lightforged Draenei should have remained neutral, or at least had a Pandaren system where the player can choose their faction if push comes to shove.

Overall though I think the story would have made more sense coming before Legion, Alliance and Horde came together (through the class halls) and beat the big bad, there's no way we should have lapsed back to petty territorial conflicts after that.

- - - Updated - - -

So the player drop off and decline mentioned in the shareholder call was a mass act of spite?

Just expected attrition after a new expansion, the same we saw with Cataclysm, MoP, WoD and probably Legion. Even if it had been a greater than expected drop it doesn't mean the game is necessarily that bad, just not to everyone's tastes.

BfA's biggest problem is the majority is just the same as Legion but less engaging, kinda how Cata related to WotLK.

[Lime]

I've never been so disappointed with the current state of the game. It easily trumps Cata and WoD as the worst expansion for me.

[Kasierith]

I started back in this expansion, stayed for about 3 months, and eventually just stopped logging in not because it was bad or because the azerite system killed my father or anything dramatic like that. I stopped logging in because.... well, I was just bored. When you get down to it, WoW is really just slowly creeping forward with numbers. And I know it's always been that way to an extent, but with the primary focus on gearing up shifting to mythic+ it's emphasized now more than ever. It's what I already had on and off 10 years of. And ultimately, why would I want to put so much time and energy in a game about slowly increasing your numbers to match the dungeons numbers so that my numbers can be slowly increased further to match even more inflated dungeon numbers?

This matches with the experiences of a lot of my friends who poked their heads back in for bfa, but then left. There's just better games out there in the world, and the time commitment involved in WoW just doesn't give the satisfaction that it used to. I'm halfway through baldur's gate 2 EE, have planescape in my back pocket to continue the isometric part, anthem is coming soon and division 2 behind that if I don't like it, heroes of the storm is my go to pvp game but I still league with friends, battle tech is a brilliant tactics game that will easily hold me over until phoenix point comes out.... on and on like that.

[Tertullian72]

I don't deny there's grounds for concern. I don't see WoW on the chopping block though. Aside from its Blizzard IPs, Activision basically has Call of Duty and some mobile games. There's only so much juice they can squeeze out of CoD, so they need Blizzard games like WoW to have long-term viability. They're well aware that the best way to keep subscription numbers up is to pump out quality content on a regular basis, so my guess is that's what their internal refocus will try to do.

I'm more concerned about their other franchises. I could see Hearthstone cut loose just as HotS was if the numbers start to decline, and I don't hold out much hope for future Starcraft games. Diablo 4 will need to score immediate success or be left to die, no revamp like they did with 3. I also think WoW Classic will be left to wither on the vine if it doesn't keep its numbers up after the first few months. I think the new corporate direction means there will be a lot less toleration for that kind of experiment.

Some people say - "they they admitted they failed". Yes, they did. I can't imagine them not doing so up against the massive failure. It doesn't mean they understand the problem yet. But maybe it's not theirs fault. Just like Sea of Thieves is not only a Rares failure, but the Microsoft pushing them to release unfinished project. Some shit could have happened with Activision. So many people say also that there can be no profit without the quality, therefore Blizzard can't sabotage their own game, because it's irrational. Wrong again. Microtransactions proves the opposite. There doesn't need to be much of an effort put into development in order to make profit with the smart use of microtransactions. And it seems like Activision is preparing themselves for an immense profit from mobile games. It is quite possible they will withdraw a bit from WoW and cut the costs if WoW will stop giving them enough money.

That's what scares people a lot imo.

[Magnagarde]

To me the most damning legacies of this expansion are the story and the eroding of faction uniqueness via the Void Elves and Nightborne.

Faction uniqueness was already erroded the moment the night elves and blood elves were thrown into the two playable factions. In the case of the night elves, it also largely erroded the racial uniqueness.

Those two allied races are just a byproduct and an afterthought of said errosion which took place more than a decade ago.

[Tertullian72]

Legion had a gigantic amount of _class specific_ content in place of this bizarro _faction specific_ thing they're half trying to push (though, actively encouraging anyone that collects anything that you have to play both.... Pick your Side!!!!! indeed /s).

So yeah in short I disagree.

Even you disagree, you admit classes are bad and all of the features are bad. The PVP-ishness of this whole thing and the need to prop up warmode is the reason classes suck.

I never said BFA was better than Legion. I played all the class campaigns through, and only really had issues with Argus (which they seemed to be trying to make as annoying as possible as an end zone). Great expansion, great times. And yes, the PvP-centric design was a mistake for BFA. I just don't think it's a total disaster, and I have some hope they'll improve things with later patches.

[Mercane]

"Guys I haven't raided in 10 years, but let me tell you about how this expansion isn't THAT bad..."

Nah fam, it really is that bad.