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

[Villager720]

They did tell us what happened. When Titan got cancelled, they moved most of the Titan devs back to WoW and the WoW teams were bogged down by bringing the Titan devs up to speed. Apparently there was also a culture clash between the two groups as to what direction to take WoD in; the buckets of wasted time and man hours resulted in a total development shitstorm and what we got was a half-baked wet shart of an expansion.

Huh, guess I missed that. Where’d the info come from?

[Kokolums]

WoD was excessively anti-social. You log in, check table missions, log out. Oh and maybe raid, but maybe not. And even if you DO raid, it means nothing like it used to without server communities. You are a nameless faceless entity. WoW is first and foremost a social game, and WoD game design was murder on WoW.

[Micronetic]

They did tell us what happened. When Titan got cancelled, they moved most of the Titan devs back to WoW and the WoW teams were bogged down by bringing the Titan devs up to speed. Apparently there was also a culture clash between the two groups as to what direction to take WoD in; the buckets of wasted time and man hours resulted in a total development shitstorm and what we got was a half-baked wet shart of an expansion.

Did they? Can't remember this. The only thing I remember is that the classes were better designed than in BfA though.

[Cæli]

simply because wod was made by a mixed bag, some talented dev, along with inexperienced or dev with bad taste, which still remain hovering around wow to this day

[Usernameforforums]

Farah, ogre island, cities, shat raid were all cut. Farah or at least ogre island(don’t remember the name but it was part of the maps for a while in beta) should have been 6.1 content but all we got was twitter and a bird named Pepe.

[Nihilist74]

Like how does that work?

I did not mind that SOO lasted so long because I really enjoyed the MOP expansion. I created a lot of alts and enjoyed it. I wonder how the numbers compare for how many people kept playing WOD compared to how many people kept playing BFA. I liked WOD a lot more than BFA. The only thing I hated about BFA was the way they set up the arms warrior's abilities.

[BlimeyLimey]

Blizzard also opened WoD by lying about what zones were going to be included, then lying about lying about it, so it didn't exactly get off to a great start.

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE they changed their minds during the dev cycle because they had taken too big of a bite >(((((((((((

thats not lying you moron - lying would be waiting until the game actually launched to say something about it

[Wirzy]

still no idea what WoD was about, Future, past or whatever

[cparle87]

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.

So I give you a list with over a dozen items. You bring up two of them and sat "Well, eventually you'll be done with two of them. Therefore there's no reason to go outside." Are you going to even talk about them or just parrot the party line in the face of evidence to the contrary?

- - - Updated - - -

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

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

For the first point, correlation does not mean causation. Blizz has given us the reason why they stopped showing subs. Because they were no longer a good metric for the health of the game. You can accept that. Or go with the tinfoil mania that they don't want us to see how badly the game is dying.

As for the second, apexis were actually very hard to get before Tanaan opened up. Like I've said in my post I was one of those do everything everyday kind of guys, and when I saw there was going to be a mount costing 150 freaking thousand of them I was like "Will I be able to earn that many before the next expansion is out, even if I completely ignore all the other things?" Tanaan easily increased how much apexis you could get by an order of magnitude at least.

[Marrilaife]

still no idea what WoD was about, Future, past or whatever

It was about trying to appeal to nostalgia, the problem is nostalgia alone cannot carry the game far.

I can see it with Classic already, my battle tag friend list used to have tons of people play Classic, now I think there are 3-4 die hard fans that are and will continue playing it, but the rest already got bored.

WOW has an awful tendency to recycle old lore figures and villains, and since all the Orcs from Original saga were dead (except Drek'thar), they had to do some time travel alternate reality shenanigans to bring them back.

Legion played on TBC / Illidan nostalgia, but it wasn't barebones and introduced a lot of new content. But yeah the whole plot twist that Illidan is a demon so he didn't really die in Black Temple, they couldn't do it with the Orcish Warlords so had to take a different approach.

But lo and behold, Shadowlands is coming and there, again recycling old lore figures, featuring Uther, Kael'thas, Draka...

[Kokolums]

still no idea what WoD was about, Future, past or whatever

WoD feels like it was made by rule-of-cool.

They decided they wanted to explore the entire world of Draenor and to start with the continent we know and slowly branch out to the ogre continent etc. Unfortunately, Draenor got blowed up by portal jockeys. So they created alternate universe lore to get a Draenor. Unfortunately it was poorly thought out and ruined lots of lore.

Writers hate to give up on an idea, so I'd bet were going back to Draenor. The best solution is to give it a rest for several years, and then rewrite the lore of AU-Draenor by saying the version of the lore we laughed at was just from a point-of-view of someone and not the TRUE lore.

[Relapses]

But lo and behold, Shadowlands is coming and there, again recycling old lore figures, featuring Uther, Kael'thas, Draka...

Can you blame them? It obviously works.

It's like complaining about all the superhero movies and pointless remakes/sequels that Hollywood churns out. If people stopped buying tickets to that shit, we'd see a lot more original ideas. The problem with original ideas is that there's a risk involved. Why open yourself up to risk when you can rely on already-proven ideas instead?

Not to say nostalgia farming isn't kind of a lazy cop out... just that it's understandable why we keep seeing it happen.

[Marrilaife]

Can you blame them? It obviously works.

I don't blame them, I'm more baffled at the thought they intended for lore / nostalgia alone to carry WOD as an expansion. And it's not exactly a risk free idea like nth remake of a marvel comic, the whole "alternate universe / time travel" concept pissed off a lot of lore purists out there.

[Relapses]

I don't blame them, I'm more baffled at the thought they intended for lore / nostalgia alone to carry WOD as an expansion. And it's not exactly a risk free idea like nth remake of a marvel comic, the whole "alternate universe / time travel" concept pissed off a lot of lore purists out there.

I said it a few pages back but I don't believe it was strictly the lore that Blizzard banked WoD's success on. I think they very incorrectly assessed the popularity of raiding and the long term feasibility of Garrisons as a method of creating casual-friendly content. Lore does, however, sell box copies and I think it's pretty safe to say that WoD succeeded on that front even if they pissed off a few purists along the way.

[Marrilaife]

I said it a few pages back but I don't believe it was strictly the lore that Blizzard banked WoD's success on. I think they very incorrectly assessed the popularity of raiding and the long term feasibility of Garrisons as a method of creating casual-friendly content. Lore does, however, sell box copies and I think it's pretty safe to say that WoD succeeded on that front even if they pissed off a few purists along the way.

Yeah, the box sales went really great, that's true.

However if they planned to make xpac for raiders maybe there should be more than 3 raids total in it?

MOP had 5 raids, 3 of them in the initial patch. Legion had 5 raids too. Cata had 5 as well, 6 if we count Tol Barad. Wotlk had 9, ok, 4 of them were 1-boss-holes and another 1 was basically a "world boss" thing, but we can clearly see WOD was stingy even for raiders. No filler or side raids, and except HFC the other 2 didn't even have that many bosses in it.

[Tojara]

Siege of Orgrimmar certainly didn't last 2 years, lol.

WoD had great raid, dungeon and leveling zones (IMO) with very little to do at the end game. If you didn't like doing challenge modes or raiding, there wasn't much for people to do. The garrisons were an incredibly 'fun' feature for the first couple months (I thought they were anyway), but quickly grew very dull after the leveling experience. For the most part, garrisons and outposts in the leveling areas were done quite well.

Regardless as a raider I still had a great time in WoD because I'm typically a raid logger, and it just allows me to play other games between raids.

MoP is just seen as better for a variety of reasons. It introduced a new class, new systems (challenge modes), more raids, and more outdoor content between it's patches. The content that WoD did have that differentiated itself from MoP dried up very quickly. Personally launch MoP sucked and I'd rather build garrisons and do the god awful apexis shit than do any of the 400 million dailies. While I think BRF is a superior raid to ToT (both are insanely good), there was nothing to really compliment BRF when it was released. We just got a raid. Prior to ToT we had an entire patch in Krasarang with more story elements, in addition to the ToT patch adding an entire outdoor area before even venturing into the raid itself.

If you just added some standard shit that Blizzard typically adds to their patches and apply it to WoD, it would have been far superior as a product compared to MoP. Add a staging type area similar to Isle of Thunder to BRF while adding a raid between BRF and HFC. Suddenly you have an expansion that people remember far more fondly. Instead people are going to remember mission boards, the shipyard, apexis dailies and garrisons which lost their luster after a couple months. Imagine how shitty MoP would be if MGSV was the main raid for 6 months, with the second tier being HoF and ToES, finishing with SoO. You basically remove ToT and Isle of Thunder to make WoD essentially.

[Enthusiastic Steward]

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE they changed their minds during the dev cycle because they had taken too big of a bite >(((((((((((

thats not lying you moron - lying would be waiting until the game actually launched to say something about it

I'm assuming you read zero of the follow up posts about this. So what zone am I talking about and why am I saying they lied?

[Relapses]

Yeah, the box sales went really great, that's true.

However if they planned to make xpac for raiders maybe there should be more than 3 raids total in it?

MOP had 5 raids, 3 of them in the initial patch. Legion had 5 raids too. Cata had 5 as well, 6 if we count Tol Barad. Wotlk had 9, ok, 4 of them were 1-boss-holes and another 1 was basically a "world boss" thing, but we can clearly see WOD was stingy even for raiders. No filler or side raids, and except HFC the other 2 didn't even have that many bosses in it.

Early raiding in WoD was weird because Highmaul and BRF were technically supposed to be the same tier but Blizzard decided to delay BRF a few months and make it drop slightly better gear as well as Tier, pretty much invalidating HM's existence overnight. (It kinda sucked for my Mythic guild because we were working on Margok when BRF launched and ended up having to revisit it after we were 6/10 in BRF then proceeded killed it in one night. It felt pretty anticlimactic because I really liked progressing on that fight.) There was also the Shatt raid that never materialized so number of raids in WoD seems to be a somewhat unfair metric to judge the expansion with. Iunno, something clearly went wrong in WoD and we got Legion from it so all is not lost... This community just has a weird fixation with shitting all over the expansion like it punched a baby or something.

[Verdugo]

It was about trying to appeal to nostalgia, the problem is nostalgia alone cannot carry the game far.

WoD didnt have shit to do with nostalgia, it was a fucking movie commercial.

[Osmeric]

What also needs to be taken into account, it's entirely possible that they fucked up the planning phase of WoD.

I suspect the schedule was also screwed up by an attempt to synchronize with the release of the movie (which was then delayed, ironically).