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

[Enthusiastic Steward]

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

Well I mean I don't see a beneficial reason for either option, but it has to be one of those two. They either mislead us about it for months, or lied about it. Both are bad, both are pointless, and I don't understand the reason for either. But here we are.

[Marrilaife]

I don't think to fast was the main issue for blizzard. Questing in raids or even groups is a prohibited thing since vanilla.

Well they said themselves in a statement that people took only few seconds for what was meant to take them few minutes, and it was considered a pacing issue.

Questing in groups existed in vanilla and still exists on classic. Not raids, 5 man groups. It was always the case.

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?

1. Raiding stopped being the only source of end game gear
2. Raiding gear and other rewards aren't even that much better than other sources of rewards
3. Raiding requires much more grinding since introduction of AP, then legion leggos and bfa essences
4. Raiding is tuned around the populace having higher ilvl from the get go due to all the other sources of gear floating around, which means you can't outgear it as hard as you could let's say in wotlk, where the difference between entering a raid and exiting was massive in gear.
Edit: forgot to add there's no tier sets, BFA raid transmogs are ugly, and half the raids didn't even have a mythic mount in BFA...

So yes, raiding lost on attractiveness, while gained on extra steps required to be considered "ready" for it. No wonder people are quitting raiding.

Imo m+ shouldn't be nerfed, since it's popular and no point pulling the rug from under people's feet, but raiding should be adjusted to either have less hurdles to "grind" for it, or having better rewards, or being easier (m+10 is easier than heroic raid despite rewarding the same ilvl). Since better rewards would create outcry about wow being "raid or die" again the only other solution is reduce barriers to entry, logistics and difficulty tuning of raiding to match other content.

But they obviously won't do it, because they wanna design raids as something people will bash their heads against for months, while m+ apparently it's fine to be steamrolled for gear and expected to be repeated ad infinitum, while if raids were steamrolled apparently nobody would replay them... logic.

Well, putting the gear cut off in m+ at 15 up from 10 in 8.3 is at least a step in a correct direction. Nobody cares if +25 is uber hard if it rewarded the same gear as +10 that is easier than heroic raid. And there is no in-game reward for anything above 15. It's only on 3rd party websites.

[cparle87]

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.

Well, the person I was quoting to specifically said "content" so I was looking at things you could do/gather/collect/etc. Learn and upgrade the heirlooms, new quests, music rolls to hunt, missions to do, new follower, new pets, new mogs to learn. Also a bit of clarification about your mythic0 statement. I thought all the WoD dungeons were available with mythic mode from the beginning, but your statement to me reads that they were added in 6.2.5?

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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.

I only had one toon and I had plenty to do. Garrison chores like gathering work orders, garden, and mine. Hop around to find the trainer, Harrison quest, and bounty quest. Restock my barn. Beat each pet tamer in each zone while cycling around doing said Harrison/bounty quests. Do my random heroic for points. Do all the M0s over the course of the week. Do challenge modes. Do the apexis quests. Do archaeology. Farm the outdoor elites that drop order resources. Hunt for rares that drop mounts. Grind reps. Then Tanaan added several more hours of things to do in the form of mini bosses, more apexis quests, more than a dozen pet battles, baleful farming for alts. I honestly and truly boggle when I see people say there wasn't enough content in WoD. The only conclusion I can come to is they disregard things they don't want to do as "not content" so they can complain what's left isn't enough.

[Blackmist]

Probably because they cut an entire raid tier out of it, and expected us to stay subscribed anyway.

[Marrilaife]

Also a bit of clarification about your mythic0 statement. I thought all the WoD dungeons were available with mythic mode from the beginning, but your statement to me reads that they were added in 6.2.5?

Pretty sure dungeons were released in the version of normal, heroic (required proving grounds silver to queue) and challenge mode. Mythic was added later.

According to my search it was added with HFC patch so 6.2 in June 2015
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Patch_6.2.0

There was no 6.2.5 apparently, there was:
6.2.2 in september which added flying, merc mode for pvp, timewalking badges and some darkmoon toys
6.2.3 in november with more timewalking dungeons, timewalking mount, heirloom trinkets from mythic0, valor upgrades and x-realm mythic
6.2.4 in march that was just technical fixes

[shise]

WoD was more than capable to be the biggest expansion. Draenor is, literally, a whole other planet, a rich one. An amazing one in fact.



WoD should have lasted a whole extra year and have the corresponding extra 3 MAJOR content patches. But instead they made it a quick, smaller expansion.

So much was left behind with it and, obviously, it is all lost now.

[caervek]

Like how does that work?

Basically, the were two big problems with WoD.

Firstly they designed the expansion with the expectation players would be able to fly at max level but then opted to remove that feature. This made the max level experience SIGNIFICANTLY worse than it should have been as everything was tedious/time consuming compared to in previous expansions. It made a lot of content too laborious to be worth doing which added to the fact there was very little content in the first place caused massive issues.

The funny thing is, when they finally added flying it instantly made WoD a significantly better expansion, if it had been in at launch it would probably be looked back on much more fondly, or at least a lot better than Cata.


Secondly, they removed 10m mythic raiding and that had a big negative impact on the raiding scene. You see back in MoP/Cata/WotLK you only needed 10 people to raid at the max difficulty level (albeit in WotLK it gave lower quality loot than 25m), there were two options you could either raid as a 10m group (the playerbase's preferred format) or in a 25m group (Blizzards preferred format).

The problem with this was that 10m was slowly killing off 25m and rather than let that happen Blizzard stepped into save it, removing 10m and dropping 25m to 20m (with the intention that 10m groups would merge). The change did not go down well, many players opted to simply stop raiding mythic rather than bend to Blizzard's will and as a result the mythic playerbase shrank by 2/3 over a time period where the total playerbase only shrank by 1/3, the repercussions of this are still being felt today.


So yeah that's basically it, two massive changes that both negatively impacted the game leading to what is considered one of the worst expansions.

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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.

You are correct.

It's in the same vein that buying gold for real money off a website or eBay was a bannable offence but buying gold for real money off Blizzard is fine :P

[FelPlague]

there wasn't even dailies in WoD, just a single daily, and while lvling was amazing it was also short, u can pretty much be done with max 2 toons to lvl
sadly it was best time to make gold for zero effort, my friend had 11 toon with max garrison, he was generating sh8tload of gold for just 10 min login and logout

blizz stopped release numbers because FF14 beat them in subs imo

1. wod had tons of dailies, the inn had atleast 5-6, the gairrson inn itself had 4-5 depending on the day, then buildings themselves had specific dailies, pair that with all the "daily stuff" you had to do in the garrson, mine, herb, buildings, missions, then tanaan was FILLED with dailies.

2. lol got any source on "FF14 beat them in subs" cause FF14 only last year passed 1 million cocurrent subs. and wow does not have less then 1 mill, nor has it ever, it would have been VERY obvious, but hey if you have a source to show wow has less then 1 mill subs go ahead, otherwise i will keep calling you a liar.


3. you say "blizz stopped release numbers because FF14 beat them in subs imo" yet when wow stopped reporting sub numbers was september 2015, at 5.5 mil subs. so unless you say FF14 had more then 5.5 mil subs in 2015. which is funny ff14 only got 16 million players TOTAL in its entire lifespan (since 2010), may this year... which wow got... in Burning crusade... And had reached 100 mil by mop. 2 years ago people were debating if the active sub count for FF14 was 400k or 800k. you really think it was 5.5 mil in 2015?

[Niroshi]

WoD was abandoned in favor of Legion. None of the issues of WoD could be addressed in WoD because the game was essentially left 50-60% complete. That's likely the only reason it's considered a "failure", as if they'd been able to address the biggest gripes in 6.2 and 6.3 then people would have been fine.

[MrLachyG]

I only had one toon and I had plenty to do. Garrison chores like gathering work orders, garden, and mine. Hop around to find the trainer, Harrison quest, and bounty quest. Restock my barn. Beat each pet tamer in each zone while cycling around doing said Harrison/bounty quests. Do my random heroic for points. Do all the M0s over the course of the week. Do challenge modes. Do the apexis quests. Do archaeology. Farm the outdoor elites that drop order resources. Hunt for rares that drop mounts. Grind reps. Then Tanaan added several more hours of things to do in the form of mini bosses, more apexis quests, more than a dozen pet battles, baleful farming for alts. I honestly and truly boggle when I see people say there wasn't enough content in WoD. The only conclusion I can come to is they disregard things they don't want to do as "not content" so they can complain what's left isn't enough.

And that is true but those things do have a finite time on them. Eventually you reach a point where you don’t need to do more archaeology, or farm apexis because there’s nothing to do with them. As I said, there was content and it was good just not enough. There should always be a reason for you to go out and about in the world and in WoD that was lacking.

[sam86]

1. wod had tons of dailies, the inn had atleast 5-6, the gairrson inn itself had 4-5 depending on the day, then buildings themselves had specific dailies, pair that with all the "daily stuff" you had to do in the garrson, mine, herb, buildings, missions, then tanaan was FILLED with dailies.

2. lol got any source on "FF14 beat them in subs" cause FF14 only last year passed 1 million cocurrent subs. and wow does not have less then 1 mill, nor has it ever, it would have been VERY obvious, but hey if you have a source to show wow has less then 1 mill subs go ahead, otherwise i will keep calling you a liar.


3. you say "blizz stopped release numbers because FF14 beat them in subs imo" yet when wow stopped reporting sub numbers was september 2015, at 5.5 mil subs. so unless you say FF14 had more then 5.5 mil subs in 2015. which is funny ff14 only got 16 million players TOTAL in its entire lifespan (since 2010), may this year... which wow got... in Burning crusade... And had reached 100 mil by mop. 2 years ago people were debating if the active sub count for FF14 was 400k or 800k. you really think it was 5.5 mil in 2015?

1- pre-tannan era claim it had tons of dailies is questionable, and the 'daily' from building was just go a hc dungeon and do jc one, they were still useless (also jc one did give good gold)
2- no there is no source, but blizz stop showing sub after making it standard for over 12 years (at that time) means they know they are losing and not want to show how bad it is
3- never played FF14 to know if they beat wow or not, i do know that FF14 1.0 was sh8t, only 2.0 was actually good, as for the debate u talking about, neither side confirm anything but it is debatable (ironic that even there they glimpse about the leak security disaster and also just focus on sub numbers...)

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WoD was abandoned in favor of Legion. None of the issues of WoD could be addressed in WoD because the game was essentially left 50-60% complete. That's likely the only reason it's considered a "failure", as if they'd been able to address the biggest gripes in 6.2 and 6.3 then people would have been fine.

wod was abandoned before it was even released, after they finished horde capital of the Ogre stornghold (don't remember its name, that big base in Frostfire ridge on south left side) they still didn't make it our capital because they didn't bother make the alliance one, then they abandoned the idea of moving garrison after they already made ground work for it (i think they finished gorgond one before scrap project), then they gave a brief taste of BRF yet not release it until way later in 6.1 the comical 'major' patch selfie patch, there is also that island they heavily promoted that was never introduced in game, just a shipyard mission
and wtf was that shipyard, that part i admit i'm not sure but didn't they promise a naval war akin to the scenario in MoP ?
tldr: they scrapped a lot of half or even 1/4 ideas that were going to be made for game, and as already mentioned it was heavy publicized as TBC 2.0 which ended zero relation to it
unpopular opinion but i did like patch 6.2, maybe because i had zero expectation but 6.2 was 'better' than i expected

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or farm apexis because there’s nothing to do with them.

didn't apexis shards drop like crazy and u easily cap them very fast in first place?

[Sondrelk]

In general for questions like these it is important to remember that, at least from how the devs talk about it, the expansion are made by the conveyor belt principle.
There isnt a large nebulous team of "expansion developers" there are many separate teams that work on wildly different things, from my guess roughly split into 3 sections.

You have a writing team, who are working on the expansion far before it sees the light of day. This team might be the closest one to an all-encompassing team, but even then theyt are probably the one working with the longest timespan. I have no doubt that they are currently discussin possible locations for 9.2 and beyond.

Secondly you have the world design team, who definitely work far ahead. As was shown at Blizzcon they are already mostly done with the initial zones coming for Shadowlands with the possible exception of the Maw, since they didnt show it. So in general we can assume they work about 1 year ahead of us.

Then there is the team designing how the zone will be to play, and how the levelling will work in it. Deciding where to put mobs, NPCs and quests. And figuring out how to best bring across the vision the writing team and the world design team had in mind.


Putting this all together we can make a reasonable timeline of how Blizzard operates, and it is also fairly easy to see how this means that even if a raid lasts a year, and the team in theory has all that time to work on a new expansion, they are still under time pressure.
WoD was simply a victim to time and Blizzard falling behind. Even beyond that, adding a whole bunch of new devs is problematic for efficiency, since you need to dedicate time, and more importantly other developers to make sure they know how to use their homebrew software, and that their work is at an acceptable level.

WoD quite simply hit the wall, and instead of falling behind Blizzard cut the knot and sacrificed developing WoD to make sure Legion was as close to perfect as possible.

[Nephys]

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

One of the reasons people often ignore is the story, Wod had the possibility to write an amazing story, and the story from the beginning was actually pretty good, the starting zones are amazing, but after that it came downhill, of course that is not the only reason, but I believe it is one of the reasons.

The ending of Wod was probably the worst ending of all wow expansions, Grom had no business standing where he stood, saying what he said.

[FelPlague]

1- pre-tannan era claim it had tons of dailies is questionable, and the 'daily' from building was just go a hc dungeon and do jc one, they were still useless (also jc one did give good gold)
2- no there is no source, but blizz stop showing sub after making it standard for over 12 years (at that time) means they know they are losing and not want to show how bad it is
3- never played FF14 to know if they beat wow or not, i do know that FF14 1.0 was sh8t, only 2.0 was actually good, as for the debate u talking about, neither side confirm anything but it is debatable (ironic that even there they glimpse about the leak security disaster and also just focus on sub numbers...)
?

1. yeah no, at level 1 it had 2 quests, 2 it had 3, and then 3 it had 5 each day...

2. "12 years" i didnt know november 2004 to september 2015 was 12 years... odd... and no, they stopepd reporting cause it was just pointless.

3. and oh look you completly pretend you didnt say "wow stopped putting subs cause FF14 beat it, and so ff14 has been the king since" which was just 100% false.

[CaptainV]

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.

Well raid tiers aside and frankly a good way to highlight why they were so bad on account they were the only content "to" do aside from farming apexis and bg's...

Basically, MoP still had a legit tonne of content to do outside of SoO, you had Isle of Thunder, Dino Isle, Timeless Isle, you had 4 Raid Tiers, you also had world pvp, world pve, daily quests that actually came in more than "one" per day.

There was still alot in MoP that actually felt relevent, even if it was a soft introduction to some of the core features id call insidious and damaging over time (Bonus rolls/titanforging, rng heavy loot rewards)

MoP ultimatley did what WoD could not, it kept an idea to the point and managed to deliver a consise story, Pandaria's story ended after ToT and SoO worked as a good epilogue since it was being built up since 5.1

Alot of the story just did what most current wow expansions cant (save maybe legion) remain consistant and keep its theme to the end.

The one thing MoP did wrong? Garrosh surviving MoP, a 5.5 patch was promised that basically became warcrimes as a novel, and imho, no content that should be in game should -ever- be turned into a book.

That, was the only mistake.

[sam86]

The one thing MoP did wrong? Garrosh surviving MoP, a 5.5 patch was promised that basically became warcrimes as a novel

Did they talk about something like that ? I don't remember at all any hint about transition of mop to wod by in-game representation?

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1. yeah no, at level 1 it had 2 quests, 2 it had 3, and then 3 it had 5 each day...

2. "12 years" i didnt know november 2004 to september 2015 was 12 years... odd... and no, they stopepd reporting cause it was just pointless.

3. and oh look you completly pretend you didnt say "wow stopped putting subs cause FF14 beat it, and so ff14 has been the king since" which was just 100% false.

for f8ck sake...
1- i don't know exact number, but as literally everyone here said they were all sh8t and didn't matter, useless
2- 11 years 5 months 4 days and 10 hours, no idea about seconds go count them urself
3- i did say imo blizz sensed that FF14 beat them so they stopped it, never claimed it was official, and it doesn't make sense after u make the standard to publish ur sub numbers to stop to after massive of over half ur sub numbers unless u just hiding the fact u are bleeding horribly with no future sight of any remedy soon
what is fact is wow became fraction (sadly) of its former far better days, specially in wrath where everywhere u stumble with wow players irl, now there are gamers who don't even know wow still exist sadly, after it was envy of everyone and reason why console gamers bought pc

[Eggroll]

"Everybody who cares already knows the story" isn't a source.



All of WotLK's initial raid content was cleared in the first week of its launch. The only remotely difficult encounter was Sarth 3D and even that was a bit of a snooze fest. I really don't know how you can say everything post-WoD "lacks polish" when one of Blizzard's most universally revered expansions had almost zero content at launch.

It's public knowledge, not a secret. If you watch some of the dev interviews from that time, they even say it - new devs had to be trained in WoW matters. No tinfoil hat attached.

Quantity doesn't equal quality ("polish"). MoP was the last high quality WoW xpac. Legion had some good stuff, but the constant balancing issues connected with Legendaries and M+ progression, the AP grind/AP progression stuff ruined it somewhat. Sometimes, less is more.

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WoD was abandoned in favor of Legion. None of the issues of WoD could be addressed in WoD because the game was essentially left 50-60% complete. That's likely the only reason it's considered a "failure", as if they'd been able to address the biggest gripes in 6.2 and 6.3 then people would have been fine.

Yeah, and that, too. WoD was an xpac they just gave up on from the start. Should've given us our $$$ back. Is this even legal? Advertising a product you're not delivering on later? Sounds like a scam.

[FelPlague]

Did they talk about something like that ? I don't remember at all any hint about transition of mop to wod by in-game representation?

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for f8ck sake...
1- i don't know exact number, but as literally everyone here said they were all sh8t and didn't matter, useless
2- 11 years 5 months 4 days and 10 hours, no idea about seconds go count them urself
3- i did say imo blizz sensed that FF14 beat them so they stopped it, never claimed it was official, and it doesn't make sense after u make the standard to publish ur sub numbers to stop to after massive of over half ur sub numbers unless u just hiding the fact u are bleeding horribly with no future sight of any remedy soon
what is fact is wow became fraction (sadly) of its former far better days, specially in wrath where everywhere u stumble with wow players irl, now there are gamers who don't even know wow still exist sadly, after it was envy of everyone and reason why console gamers bought pc

your the one who said it mate.

their last report was september 2015, game launched 2004 novebmer, not 5 months.

3. no, ff14 had not beat them, not even close, again it only reached 16 million total players this year. took them 9 years.
wow in 9 years got 100 million, so no, not even close.

[peter92q]

because it was a glorified patch to set up the real expansion?

[Relapses]

It's public knowledge, not a secret. If you watch some of the dev interviews from that time, they even say it - new devs had to be trained in WoW matters. No tinfoil hat attached.

At no point in any dev interview has anybody ever came out to say that WoD's development team was moved to work on Overwatch. Some of WoW's core team DID move to Project Titan from which Overwatch was eventually born but this move happened while WotLK was still around. You are incorrectly taking publicly available information (Blizzard moved staffing to work on Project Titan) and conflating it with a conspiracy theory that because Overwatch was released while WoD was around that they MUST have borrowed from the WoW team. The reason I've repeatedly asked you to clarify your claims is because you're literally making shit up. Knock it off. Thanks.

Yeah, and that, too. WoD was an xpac they just gave up on from the start. Should've given us our $$$ back. Is this even legal? Advertising a product you're not delivering on later? Sounds like a scam.

Yes, because obviously Blizzard endeavored to half ass WoD from the beginning! Let's start a class action lawsuit against Blizzard three fucking expansions later!