Why did WoD fail so hard even though Siege of Orgrimmar lasted for 2 years?

[Kaleredar]

If I recall the development of WoD correctly, it was actually quite tumultuous.

The story, from the getgo, shifted a lot. First there was going to be Garrosh assembling a mongrel horde. Then it was going to be on Draenor, and we'd be entering Draenor through a chronal spire, then it was the Iron horde invasion and we'd go through the dark portal, etc. Then bladespire and Karabor were supposed to be the main cities, then it was shifted to the little hubs outside Ashran. I also get the impression that Garrisons became a larger and larger focus of the expansion as time went on.

I think people get the incorrect impression that "not a lot of work" was put into WoD. I get the impression, rather, that a TON of work WAS put into WoD... but that most of it was ultimately in the wrong places.

Developing ALL of the Garrison buildings and all of its various trappings with entirely new and iterative models, as well as designing all of the garrison systems as well? Allowing players to build buildings, invite in other players, recruit and manage followers, etc, etc? ALL of that stuff was brand-spanking-new in WoD, and, like it or hate it, was probably a tremendous amount of work from the art and programming departments. Same with Ashran. It's clear from the structure of the Battleground that a LOT of work went into it. I've always had the suspicion that blizzard intentionally axed Karabor and Bladespire as the capitals to incentivize participation in Ashran.

As I said though, most of this effort was ultimately misplaced. Garrisons weren't very engaging in the end. Ashran only appealed to PvPers, and only the PvPers that... well, basically just wanted to kill things without ever winning anything. Your character's involvement in the story, due to the very bare "go here and do vague things until you get 100% on the bar" nature of the dailies, basically ended once you finished the leveling up quests. And of course, players were stuck on the ground the entire time, due to Pathfinder, making everything a colossal time sink and disincentivizing casual travel. Why, for instance, would you ever go to Arakk? You'd have to run your ass down there and get harangued by NPCs the entire way. Alliance players would never really ever venture to Frostfire, and vis-versa with horde and Shadowmoon. They were simply too far out of the way. Meaning that players that only played alliance or horde were basically out an entire zone.

And while Blizzard was working on all of those,what I would call misplaced, efforts, they were STILL doing a lot of other things. Draenor is in no way a "barren" landscape. It's incredibly detailed. Shattrath city, for example, is very intricately themed, down to even tiny details inside the buildings. Moreover, you had Blizzard undertaking the update of the player models and, again, like them or dislike them, that was an extremely time-intensive process.

But like I said, a lot of that great theming and detail work ultimately went to waste. I'd wager most players never really bothered with Shattrath. After reaching max level, most players would just go sit in their garrisons, and none of the vague, storyless dailies were really incentivizing enough to take the time to go out into the world on your slow-ass ground mount.


So in summary, you have a TON of work going into WoD, plagued by large design shifts, with an ultimate focus of priorities in systems that didn't end up paying off. Meaning that those gaps in time that were necessitated by the front-end workload of the expansion taking so long were very conspicuous as they worked to complete subsequent pieces.

[Greyvax]

They gutted the expansion of key features (shattrath raid, farahlon).

Exchanged the should-have-been final boss (grommash) with recycled archimonde. Then we become friends with grommash in the end which literally makes no sense.

The 6.1 selfie patch, literally the worst patch in the history of wow.

Garrisoncraft removing people from the world.

Lack of dailies or any meaningful content to do out in the world.

Last but not least, the fact that it only had 2 raid tiers.

[RoKPaNda]

WoD was a massive clusterfuck because Blizzard made the same mistake they made in Cata, but worse, appealing to nostalgia and forgetting who actually keeps their game afloat. WoD was great for players like me that raid Mythic, it was complete and total shit for the casuals that actually keep this game running. The casuals' endgame was obsolete before it was even accessible thanks to the garrison and random world gear thanks to there being no usable trinkets or sets thanks to the crying of mythic/heroic raiders in the previous expansion.

With no content for casuals, and a major patch that was essentially just twitter integration, it's no surprise that subs dropped hard. Even for a player like myself I just logged in for raids and logged out until the next week. It was a pretty shit expansion. Not sure what that has to do with SoO being a long tier though.

[Gimlix]

Because MoP was a good expansion, WoD was pure shit.

[Oakshana]

Like how does that work?

What does the duration of SoO being relevant content have to do with the success of WoD? Not even the same expansion.

And it didn't last two years. SoO was released one year into MoP on Sept 10, 2013. WoD was released Nov 8, 2014. So... I will let you do the math on that yourself.

In WoD, HFC also lasted 1 year 1 month, but there was no content before HFC for about a year also. 6.1's "Content Patch" was Twitter Integration and no content.

Didn't ICC also last roughly a year?

[arkanon]

Why is the sky blue even though fire is hot?

If lemons taste sour, why are bricks hard? Explain that one for me.

[Relapses]

Warlords was a terrible expansion because of the sheer amount that was cut from it, as well as so little to do outside or raid, pvp, and your garrison.
I honestly would've rather stayed in SoO for maybe another 2 or 3 months if it meant WoD could've been much better.

"A delayed game can be good, but a rushed game will always be bad." - Shigeru Myamoto

What the fuck? WoD was hardly rushed and almost all of its early reviews were overwhelmingly positive. The issue with WoD was the lack of content at max level. Blizzard obviously over-estimated the appeal of Garrisons and Apexis dailies but I doubt an extra two months of development would have saved them from that realization.

[Enthusiastic Steward]

-snip-

What was cut was a big enough issue on its own, but how they dealt with it only magnified the problems. I was thinking of Tanaan. At the announcement it was on the world map, and that was where they said Farahlon would be coming in a later patch. The announcement that Tanaan would not be in-game at launch came months later, and then they tried to turn around and say that had always been the plan. Ok... so why didn't you say so in the same conversation where you revealed the map and told us Farahlon was coming in a later patch? If you knew Tanaan would ALSO be coming in a later patch wasn't that the exact time to say so? Or did you mess up, and hope in all the uproar about Farahlon getting cut, faction hubs changing to Ashran, Garrisons no longer being able to be placed in any zone, and so on that nobody would notice being deliberately dishonest about Tanaan?

I mean in the grand scheme of the expansion this is a minor thing, but it's a great example of the dishonest/misleading communication an unhappy playerbase was getting on top of features getting cut left and right.

[Relapses]

If lemons taste sour, why are bricks hard? Explain that one for me.

Isn't a volcano just an angry hill?

[Kaleredar]

WoD was a massive clusterfuck because Blizzard made the same mistake they made in Cata, but worse, appealing to nostalgia and forgetting who actually keeps their game afloat. WoD was great for players like me that raid Mythic, it was complete and total shit for the casuals that actually keep this game running. The casuals' endgame was obsolete before it was even accessible thanks to the garrison and random world gear thanks to there being no usable trinkets or sets thanks to the crying of mythic/heroic raiders in the previous expansion.

With no content for casuals, and a major patch that was essentially just twitter integration, it's no surprise that subs dropped hard. Even for a player like myself I just logged in for raids and logged out until the next week. It was a pretty shit expansion. Not sure what that has to do with SoO being a long tier though.

What does the duration of SoO being relevant content have to do with the success of WoD? Not even the same expansion.

And it didn't last two years. SoO was released one year into MoP on Sept 10, 2013. WoD was released Nov 8, 2014. So... I will let you do the math on that yourself.

I think their implication is that the SoO being out for so long should have meant that WoD should have had more work done on it.

As I said in my post above (refer to it for more detail,) a lot of work WAS done on WoD. It's just that a lot of that work was ultimately for naught.

[Sondrelk]

As many people here have mentioned, WoD failed because of the sheer lack of content in it.
What was there was great, teh zones looked amazing, the raids were some of the best we have gotten and i have yet to see a dungeon i enjoy running as much as i enjoyed running Grimrail depot.

My guess on what happened is thus:
Blizzard always talked up this mythic idea of making yearly expansions and looking at the patch schedule of MoP you can see they might have either had horrible content release schedules, or they grossly underestimated how long it takes to make even a basic expansion.

So MoP releases SoO and Blizzard realizes to their horror that the yearly expansion cycle is not really going ot work, since they are not yet even close to finished with WoD, so they start cutting corners, but even the most avid cornercutting cannot hide the fact that they are only barely scraping by, and that insisting on making WoD a full quality expansion means they will be stuck in crunchtime forever.

So instead of risking their entire business model they decide that WoD will have to be mostly scrapped. They figure they can scrap a raid tier and possibly Farahlon, and even an entire endgame zone with Tanaan and double down on finishing WoD with the honestly quite fantastic 6.2 patch and instead put all their effort into making Legion, which as time showed benefited them in the end.



tl;dr: WoD was behind schedule, so instead of cutting corners in various places over the next 2-3 expansion they decided to just scrap most of WoD and cut their losses, hoping focusing on Legion and getting back on track would be a better choice.

[Kaver]

Like how does that work?

WoD was an Unfinished product. They cut so much content and lore out of the game. They removed a whole raid tier that should have explained a lot of the lore in WoD, but instead they just jumped over it and what came after suddenly made no sense.

WoD was unacceptable because it was not a finished product. It was not ready to be sold. I was a car without the wheels.

[Littleraven]

They clearly put too much into the garrison system not knowing wtf they wanted to do with it. It seems like when they realized they had bitten off more than they could chew everything else fell by the wayside. They had a similar issue with BfA in Islands and Warfronts. It is never a good thing when any of the major systems of an expansion fall flat. This is why I really wish they would stop focusing so hard on reinventing the wheel each expansion and finding systems that work and just expanding on them. We do not need to get some new "gimmick" every expansion imo.

[Eggroll]

The problem with WoD was, that somewhere during Mists the majority of the developer A team who were responsible for WoW were moved to develop what was then published as Overwatch.

The WoW team in turn got a lot of devs from the failed Diablo3, which explains the increased "Diablofication" of WoW. The new devs were more or less just thown into the cold water, thus couldn't deliver the usual amount and quality of content a seasoned WoW dev could.

This explains the crappiness of WoD. Why they are still bad at delivering polished quality content remains a mystery.

[Tabrotar]

They cut corners left and right, who knows why, official excuse was "we hired a lot of people and had to train them" but they could you know... train them by making them do some job?

WOD had tons of scrapped content like Bladespire / Karabor capitals, Farahlon, Southern Ogre Continent, Kargath mini-raid and he was lumped into Highmaul, Shattrath raid, Yrel story arc, Doomhammer proper story arc, Tess Greymane story, reps were an afterthought, apexis gear was way too overpriced trying to mask lack of content with extended grind (a theme we will see time and time again afterwards), ability to put your Garrison in any zone of your choice was removed and put into static spot, promised ideas of decorating Garrisons with trophies from slain rares and raid bosses removed and replaced with 3 monuments, racial customization in buildings and followers never happened all we got was a handful of guards, Blood Elf models were delayed until 6.1 and a lot of other ones had to be tweaked, from female Draenei faces to female Orc and Troll animations, Goblins & Worgens delayed until BFA lol...

I could go for ages.

The suspected reason why WOD was abandoned was that they tried to develop WOD & Legion parallelly to transition into "yearly expansions" (cashing in on box sales when subs jump to 10 mil on launch only to drop to 3-5 mil after was a lucrative perspective if you could double the frequency), but failed so hard that they finally realized best they can do is keep the 2-year expac cycle we had since basically tbc / wotlk.

Didn´t they said that the yhad to "reinclude" the team from titan? At least that´s what i remembe rthem said, and that these 2 teams then literally had the to many cooks problem.

[LordVargK]

Nobody gonna talk about the removal of flying?

I mean, even if there was something to do outside the garrison, how would I get there without building a workshop in my garrison (though the feather toy was awesome)? Leveling without it was fine, but at some point you had seen everything. And riding around Arakk wasn't particulary fun.

That brings me to my next point: The lack of Zones at the start and even later on. You had 5 Zones per faction, as you really had little business in the other factions hub zone. Arakk was not very accessable (very 3D and tedious to travel in with a ground mount), this is true for Gorgrond as well, but to a lesser degree. Which gives 3-4 fun zones to play in. Compared with MoP, which had 7 zones right from the start, this is a downgrade.
And it hardly got better with the patches, but we got *drumroll*:

The Twitter integration! I feel that Twitter is not as popular outside the US and even in the US Twitter should not be a feature in WoW. I mean, what. the. hell.? Who thought this was even a remotely good idea? And this was the selling point of a major patch. No new raid, no dungeon, no Arena, nothing but a few cosmetic changes, balancing and the Selfie Camera. I feel someone who is obsessed with taking selfies would not play WoW. But maybe that's just me. The Cameraquests in Nordwinson bug me to the day, just remove cameras from WoW...

So my Theory why WoD failed even though SoO lasted 14 months:
The devs overestimated their ability to create zones. Many good designers left and maybe also quite a few good story writers, considering the premise of WoD. Much time was wasted by creating Outlands 2.0, which limited the creative freedom of the artdesign team. Also many classes got partially reworked and that was in some cases unnecessary work. Much time was wasted on concepts that were scrapped later on. I kinda feel like WoD was a failure of management more than anything else.

[Tabrotar]

Warlords was a terrible expansion because of the sheer amount that was cut from it, as well as so little to do outside or raid, pvp, and your garrison.
I honestly would've rather stayed in SoO for maybe another 2 or 3 months if it meant WoD could've been much better.

"A delayed game can be good, but a rushed game will always be bad." - Shigeru Myamoto

You do know they already delayed wod by 6 or more months? And that was one of the reasons that it got rushed/had cut content?

[Gaidax]

I, personally, liked WoD because I am raider first and WoD had excellent raids AND I could just raidlog too. Which of course was an issue for a sizeable chunk of the population, as the world aside from initial experience ended up being meaningless.

[Relapses]

The problem with WoD was, that somewhere during Mists the majority of the developer A team who were responsible for WoW were moved to develop what was then published as Overwatch.

The WoW team in turn got a lot of devs from the failed Diablo3, which explains the increased "Diablofication" of WoW. The new devs were more or less just thown into the cold water, thus couldn't deliver the usual amount and quality of content a seasoned WoW dev could.

Gonna need something that remotely resembles a source on that, buddy.

Why they are still bad at delivering polished quality content remains a mystery.

"I don't like it therefore it sucks." Nice opinion.

[Tabrotar]

What was cut was a big enough issue on its own, but how they dealt with it only magnified the problems. I was thinking of Tanaan. At the announcement it was on the world map, and that was where they said Farahlon would be coming in a later patch. The announcement that Tanaan would not be in-game at launch came months later, and then they tried to turn around and say that had always been the plan. Ok... so why didn't you say so in the same conversation where you revealed the map and told us Farahlon was coming in a later patch? If you knew Tanaan would ALSO be coming in a later patch wasn't that the exact time to say so? Or did you mess up, and hope in all the uproar about Farahlon getting cut, faction hubs changing to Ashran, Garrisons no longer being able to be placed in any zone, and so on that nobody would notice being deliberately dishonest about Tanaan?

I mean in the grand scheme of the expansion this is a minor thing, but it's a great example of the dishonest/misleading communication an unhappy playerbase was getting on top of features getting cut left and right.

I really "liked" the whole "we neve rpromised you getting karabor and bladespire" when in the presentation for wod that wa sone of the big fucking features...