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

[Wyrt]

They scrapped way too much stuff to try to make garrisons work and it was not at all worth it.

[cparle87]

I shouldn't have used the word "literally" but I don't need to defend my stance. There is no argument for 6.1 being anything but a complete and utter failure of a major patch. It should have been a 6.0.x patch. Blizzard had implemented system changes involving integrations/new UI/updated models/etc. in 0.0.x patches before. They should have done it again. People all over the place were talking about how they were quitting WoW because they weren't going to pay $15/mo for that to be a major patch. A few people were even worried that Blizzard was running out of content "clearly" so they should quit before the game starts sucking even more.

It being a minor patch wouldn't have changed how much content WoD got, obviously, but some psychological thing in people's heads ticked when a major patch came out and that is what it was.

Sorry for the nitpick. When people practice hyperbole I can't help but poke holes in it.

You seem to have forgotten the weather and voice chat patches. We've had major patches with less than 6.1 gave us. We've had major patches that were virtually nothing but a system no one used or hardly noticed, and the ineviatable class balances. Imagine a major patch about the new water we got in MoP.

As for the whole paying $15/month for a major patch. My standing is that you don't pay your sub for the latest patch. You pay for the game as a whole, all the content everywhere and the social aspects of it. When I hear people complain that the latest raid or dungeon or zone isn't "enough" to justify them paying a sub it honestly boggles me. Like at the end of MoP the way people were carrying on about SoO I was wondering if they'd all selectively forgotten there was more to WoW than their respective Shrine, the raid, and the space between them.

[UnluckyAmateur]

Speaking purely from a lore perspective, they tried to turn player housing into a gimmick instead of a purely cosmetic thing and THEN abandoned almost an entire patch of content which lead to not only a missing raid tier but vital story to make the expansion make sense. NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO HAVE A MECHANIC OR HAVE TIMED MISSIONS, SOME CONCEPTS ARE PURELY COSMETIC. Look at pretty much every other MMO with player housing of some kind, it doesn't factor into your primary gameplay and is purely for self-expression. It was a bad idea from the start to put soooo much resources into a system that has no business being tied to gameplay in the slightest. Another theory I've heard was that WoD and Legion were being made at the same time to the point where they could have put Legion first then WoD or WoD first then legion.

So basically they wasted resources they didn't need to on trying to make player housing a mechanic instead of just a place to chill at if you wanna RP or just have something you can customize yourself.


Slightly offtopic:

Losing that raid tier for me at least, ruined the entire narrative of WoD which was only exacerbated by the story almost changing on a dime with Grom being sold as the big bad of the expansion. The story was a fucking mess and it shows, especially with the final patch with Grom doing an entirely undeserved character flip out of nowhere because "GULDAN BAD". For a game called "World of WARcraft", everyone seems to just be holding hands and singing kumbaya even after they had been actively enslaving and murdering people months, days or even WEEKS prior. Then they tried to turn the victims (Draenei) into the oppressors while blatantly ignoring their horrific acts. MoP is probably the most cohesive expansion we've had alongside wotlk.

[MasterHamster]

There was a very clear design paradigm shift going into WoD, moving away from many core MMORPG-designs, and instead moving into more short-term burst design and more focus on "action".
It also very clearly cemented the play-the-patch mentality the game devs has been stuck in ever since.

[Wyrt]

I ll repeat myself: Garrisons per se were bad game, garrisons as a method to become filthy rich and invest in your wow future were the best shit ever invented. Just imagine having 10s of alts in connected realms farming gold missions for the mere effort of levelling some toons and spending an hour a day sending missions for so much gold that it still pays the subs today.

Garrisons were basically Blizzard approved gold farming bots and it was bad for the game.

[Marrilaife]

Except the heirlooms interface; the trader/raid quest/Harrison quest/profession quests in your garrison; the music box and the rolls to hunt down; new follower missions including for the BRF raid; numerous class changes; a follower for completing the ring questline; new battle pets in BC raids; item fixes to make transmog easier, etc.

Yeah. It was literally nothing but Twitter. /s

Tbh the biggest "feature" was the belf models.

But they were somewhat behind schedule, if they released stuff from 6.2.5 or what was the patch number (mythic dungeons, timewalking etc.) as a part of 6.1 it would give players something to do outside of raids and diminish the feeling of drought. That patch (timewalking / mythic0) was a good idea, but little too late to save the xpac.

And shipyard was just horrible. Even people who liked Garrisons, I don't think they liked the tacked-on worse "garrison lite" that was shipyard.

For me, WoD started so poorly, the bad taste in my mouth just lasted the entire expac. The 1st 2 weeks, the game was literally unplayable, crazy long queues, when you got to character list, game crashed. I persnally loved garrisons, I made so much gold, I couldn't believe they let it go so long before nerfed it to the ground, some days I was making 75k gold a day for logging in on 11 toons for 5 minutes each. Doesn't sound like much to some, but it adds up fast.

Agreed, the game being unplayable at launch probably scared off a lot of people who traditionally buy the box, sub at the start of xpac and then hibernate until big content drop.

I know people who take time off work for xpac launches and this one, they just couldn't play. Myself I spent first 3 days doing nothing but herbing in Talador after the initial scenario, due to massive lag and garrisons not working, so unable to pick any quests as all of them started in garrisons. It was so bad they had to give an apology and 7 day free game time compensation, which they haven't since wotlk, and never afterwards either. I can only imagine how many people ragequit and uninstalled in frustration, maybe even tried a refund.

Sad part is after everything was fixed, I actually had a blast levelling in WOD, my favourite levelling experience of all xpacs. But it was all ruined by technical meltdown on the Blizzard side.

[Ange]

[B][I][U]These where the biggest issues with Warlords of Dreanor:

Really? Lore Issues? Thats what you think is the major drive for regular players of the game not happy with something?

Are you serious?

Garrison/HOUSING was a community feature, begged for years to the DEV team and blizzard delivered. They delivered the feature so successful, that it showed why the whole concept is stupid in the first place. Isolating players appart from each other in a MMO is not really smart.

Zero alternative gearing, Zero raid-alternative content and garrison's, the main factor the game felt dead everywhere, did a lot of harm to this MMO in the last half of the expansion. LEGION just had to do EVERYTHING different and it was allready a success story.
LEGION gave us:
=> GRIND for alternative EVERYTHING, legendarys, gearing, collectables
=> no more housing, meaningless class halls (WIN WIN)
=> M+ as the direct alternative to raiding, not only a gearprogression alternative but true PvE content alternative

LEGION was basicly the biggest FU to raiding as the only core feature of the game and another big FU to player housing from blizzard and it blow up, more regular players as ever in the history of the game and more game time spend per player. The polar opposite of WoD.

Lore issues? Get real.

[Marrilaife]

It also very clearly cemented the play-the-patch mentality the game devs has been stuck in ever since.

Huh? That was a thing basically since wotlk, or cata the latest.

[deenman]

I clarified this in a later post. I was talking here about Tanaan, which was included on the map at the Blizzcon announcement when they were covering Draenor, which is also where they said Farahlon would be coming in a later patch. Months later it was announced that Tanaan would not make it into launch. The issue is they then turned around and said this was always the plan, Tanaan was always going to be coming in a later patch though at the announcement they made no such statement.

If that was the case, when they had the world map up and were talking about Farahlon coming later why didn't they ALSO mention Tanaan? Either A) Tanaan was never planned to be playable at launch and they just didn't tell us despite talking about another zone on the world map also not planned for launch, which was misleading, then feigned surprise when nobody knew the thing they didn't tell us and got upset about it. Or B) Tanaan was planned for launch, had to be delayed, and instead of adding one more thing to the list of things being scrapped/altered they lied about the delay saying it was always the plan.

As I said, in the grand scheme of the expansion this is minor, but this sort of either misleading or false communication to your playerbase does not win you any fans.

I simply dont see a beneficial reason for lying willfuly about taanan,all it does is make them look bad,thinking taanan is a launch zone wont sell extra copies

[Marrilaife]

Zero alternative gearing,

Apexis gear was meant to fill that gap, but it was flawed for 2 reasons, 1 the items cost way too much for their value so it wasn't viewed as worth grinding (contrary to nethershards, argunite, mana pearls etc.), and 2 the quests to obtain apexis were generic, lazy, copy pasta afterthought with no variety, just go there fill the bar, every single one of them.

That's why everyone was so happy about world quests, they gave catch up / casual gear quickly, and they had decent variety of types. Obviously they aren't perfect, as seen with the war on WQ addons Blizzard started because they suddenly found out people are finishing their daily batch "too fast" when hopping into groups.

[Statix]

I'm not sure that you mean. WoD actually had an incredible succes when it first launched, it was after the first quarter that subs started to go rapidly:

People were excited for WoD because they were tired of MoP's theme and wanted to see WoW return to its roots, and WoD was generally seen as a TBC 2.0

It had both the steepest increase and steepest decrease in subscribers. What does that say about WoD? People were excited for the new expansion, because of how it was marketed. The final product, however, was disappointing and they left again.

I know I did. But I've had that with every expansion since MoP. Cataclysm and MoP are far inferior to WotLK, but compared to the more recent expansions, they were glorious.

The reason why raids last so long is because Blizzard is lazy.

[Ange]

Obviously they aren't perfect, as seen with the war on WQ addons Blizzard started because they suddenly found out people are finishing their daily batch "too fast" when hopping into groups.

I don't think to fast was the main issue for blizzard. Questing in raids or even groups is a prohibited thing since vanilla. It gets nerfed/hotfixed pretty fast if the majority is using it. Since WQ are the main/basic content for everyone (majority), the reaction from blizzard to prohibit addon cheese was to be expected and surprised not even the addon authors that much.

Questing passivly from flying mounts was not really a good thing and the only outcry I remember with its nerf was from the boost-buying extrem casual crowd, that is not playing the game either way, so I couldnt care less.

[Wyrt]

Many things are bad for the game with vicious, slanderous forum comments being the #1.

I don't see any significant difference between having a bot farm gold for you while you AFK or having an NPC farm gold for you while you AFK other than the latter was approved by Blizzard.

[Osmeric]

They tuned up the raid content from Siege to WoD. More casual/mediocre guilds who had a place in Siege, in Flex and them Normal mode, had no place in WoD until HFC.

The devs never seem to be able to learn the lesson that when they exclude players, they stop playing.

[Ange]

The devs never seem to be able to learn the lesson that when they exclude players, they stop playing.

And how do you explain the cruel difficulty in mythic raiding with LEGION/BFA while player participation for every other content is peaking new records?

If raiding difficulty was significant to player activity/sub-time LEGION and BFA should have been much, much worse. But they were not. LEGION and BFA showcase how much alternative content to raiding matters and how litte the actual raid quality means for the majority of the players.

[Osmeric]

And how do you explain the cruel difficulty in mythic raiding with LEGION/BFA while player participation for every other content is peaking new records?

I explain that statement by you making shit up.

[Beatman]

Remember patch 6.1?

[Ange]

I persnally loved garrisons, I made so much gold, I couldn't believe they let it go so long before nerfed it to the ground, some days I was making 75k gold a day for logging in on 11 toons for 5 minutes each. Doesn't sound like much to some, but it adds up fast.

75k is a small number in todays 150k/week/toon from WQ/paragon RAW GOLD only, with TRANSMOG missions, basicly passive farming for the most lucrative items to sell.

Since WQ's are not needing your full attention to the game and with multiboxing so widespread, you min-max your daily gold grind, while watching a single episode from your favourite show.

But it works out for blizzard. The threshold to min-max world quest is slightly above what the garrison crowd was able to do, so its not widespread, as you can see from the huge outcry because of the brutosaur removal.

[Exhuman]

Everything went down when we recieved Twitter integration patch 6.1

- - - Updated - - -

Also Garrisons were the start of WoW economy transitioning into Venezuela

[MrLachyG]

Like how does that work?

Siege didn't last for 2 years. Problem with WoD was it had very little content. If you were a raider, the only time you stepped out of your garrison was to raid. rest of the time you were in there. no outdoor world content like we have in Legion and BfA. No Mythic+. If you didn't raid and just did LFR then you stayed in your garrison. If you pvp'd you were at Ashran or doing instances.... from your garrison. The content itself was fine; there just wasn't enough of it.