Which expansion was the absolute worst?

[Doffen]

That's probably the reason why so low votes on Legion because everyone that was "touched" the wrong way by it, already left game for good.

LOL! Best excuse yet.

So many quit early in Legion, WotLK, TBC, Vanilla and MoP seeing they got so few votes. I mean, WotLK must be the worst expansion seeing it only got 8 votes. BfA and WoD got most votes so they must be the best expansions seeing they kept so many players playing and now so many voting on them being worst, in your eyes. This is your logic, the Kaminaris logic.

You can't make this shit up.

Ok litterally everyone... Sure!

You should read this one's logic too Venziir. Of course, everyone hated Legion, but they can't vote Legion since they quit so early

[Akka]

You can see it from game decisions that still continues for 3 expansions.

Ah, yeah, the famous infallibility of Blizzard.

[kaminaris]

LOL! Best excuse yet.

So many quit early in Legion, WotLK, TBC, Vanilla and MoP seeing they got so few votes. I mean, WotLK must be the worst expansion seeing it only got 8 votes. BfA and WoD got most votes so they must be the best expansions seeing they kept so many players playing and now so many voting on them being worst, in your eyes. This is your logic, the Kaminaris logic.

You can't make this shit up.

Don't worry, after a couple of years will pass, those complainers will quit game again and BfA will be remembered fondly. Since shadowlands is basically BfA minus islands and with static loot. Just like MoP is now despite being absolute worst dogshit ever created while it was current.

WoD however managed to break that cycle.
And Legion managed to break people. Even my super hardcore grinder friend took a year break from farming MoS from dusk till dawn.
And first expansion I see people being traumatized by legiondaries LOL.

Like complaints about covenants don't realize how legiondaries were bad in that regards (even Ion admitted that in recent interview).

Imagine being assigned covenant by random, and you can't change that unless you get godlike luck or 8 months of farming.

[Venziir]

Don't worry, after a couple of years will pass, those complainers will quit game again and BfA will be remembered fondly. Since shadowlands is basically BfA minus islands and with static loot. Just like MoP is now despite being absolute worst dogshit ever created while it was current.

WoD however managed to break that cycle.
And Legion managed to break people. Even my super hardcore grinder friend took a year break from farming MoS from dusk till dawn.
And first expansion I see people being traumatized by legiondaries LOL.

Like complaints about covenants don't realize how legiondaries were bad in that regards (even Ion admitted that in recent interview).

Imagine being assigned covenant by random, and you can't change that unless you get godlike luck or 8 months of farming.

MoP was amazing.

[Dalheim]

BFA.

I loved the zones while leveling, and I loved Siege of Dazar'alor, but thats about it. Classes were boring as fuck to play, the reduction in WQ rep was just pure bullshit, the story was the definition of meh.

[Venziir]

BFA.

I loved the zones while leveling, and I loved Siege of Dazar'alor, but thats about it. Classes were boring as fuck to play, the reduction in WQ rep was just pure bullshit, the story was the definition of meh.

Oh god, I'd forgotten about that... Yeah that was just a kick in the nads!

[Relapses]

And what makes you think that the game wouldn't have attracted new players as time went on ? Did chess die because they didn't altered the rules during the previous 50 years ?

Comparing Classic WoW to Chess is a comparison so unfair and out of left field that it's barely worth addressing. It's like comparing a Yugo to a Rolls Royce and saying, "Why don't people pay more for Yugos? They both serve the same essential purpose!" Blizzard wasn't looking to create the next Chess when they released WoW Classic and outrageous comparisons like this just make your arguments look incredibly weak. Please stop doing this.

And again, where is your evidence of that ? We see that sub fell after they changed their design philosophy. Of course it could be (and probably in good part is) due to market saturation/people becoming bored/whatever, but where is the evidence that it would have fared worse if they actually had kept the initial philosophy ?

Where are your evidences ? Correlation is not causation, that's obvious, but you don't even provide correlation to support your opinion, you provide NOTHING.

The lack of evidence contrary is not evidence of your position, either. This is how conspiracy theories begin. Knock it off.

Moreover, there is a blog from Gregory Street where he discusses this exact subject. His response is a fairly solid rebuke of the common "{x feature} ruined the game" bullshittery you find on forums:

Question: “Unsubbing is often seen as the only ‘real’ way by players to express their displeasure in a way that affects the devs. However, one thing I’ve never known is how devs themselves react to this. Do you double down? Scrap plans? Abandon the game?”

There are a couple of different ways to answer this.

Developers do care if you stop playing their game and they want to know why. However, for games like WoW and LoL, the answers are almost always “I have less time to play now (job/school/family” and “My friends don’t play anymore.” (I’m basing that on having seen a lot of data - it’s not super open to debate.)

Dropping a game because of a specific design change (despite what you might read on forums / Reddit) is actually pretty rare. I know it happens, but if you’re stack ranking the reasons why people quit, those specific responses end up being so far down the list that it is hard for a development team to take actionable feedback. It’s really rare you see “Wow, that change we made cost us 10,000 players. Let’s revert it!”

If you want to be cynical and say that GC's opinion doesn't count because he doesn't work at Blizzard anymore, go for it. But this is the closest we have to somebody who has actually seen the retention data for WoW publicly speaking about the reasons people quit the game. It's really fucking easy to just make blanket statements and conspiracy theories about Blizzard intentionally fucking over their playerbase -- it's much more difficult to address the fact that game design for WoW is a culmination of thousands of ideas and while not all of them may resonate with 100% of its players, no single design change (or expansion) is directly responsible for attrition. As I've said, it's an incredibly intellectually dishonest argument to imply otherwise.

This leads me to my last point...

Speaking of shitty argument, that's just some sort of retarded circular reasoning where you claim that Blizzard knows better because they know better. Especially when they show time after time that they can and do make huge mistakes.

The day you scrutinize your own shitty reasonings to the same standard that you try to apply to arguments you dislike, you're in for a big surprise.

I am not saying that Blizzard is infallible. At no point have I said that. I do say, repeatedly, that the fact that the game still has an audience 16 years after its release is likely a result of the developers generally making the correct broad strokes decisions about the game but that doesn't mean that I'm giving Blizzard a pass on every change that they've made to the game or that I fully support everything they do. Could the game be better? Abso-fucking-lutely. My criticism isn't with your preference of older WoW design philosophy. It's that you're so fucking obsessed with it that you think Blizzard intentionally changed their game just to piss off its players. (Insert No True Scotsman logical fallacy here.) No rational game developer would ever do something like this and cherry picking data without context and slanting it with a cynical outlook which you cannot substantiate with any proof (ie, "{x feature}/expansion killed the game") is disingenuous at best and outright deceptive at worst.

[Doffen]

Don't worry, after a couple of years will pass, those complainers will quit game again and BfA will be remembered fondly.

In your wet dreams

And all I see is complaining about legiondaries, one thing. Wish we could say the same about BfA.

I do agree with you about Covenants, and how they made so we now can choose legendary. Yes, Ion said that, he also said that during legion, we all said that. But he also said legiondaires were cool, and many did think so. What gets me though that you complain about Legendary grind, but for some reason the extra grind we have gotten in BfA is good and cool? Make no sense to me. If it was only Azerite Armor and AP, then yes, much easier in BfA. With Essences added we were back to Legion, but still less grind. Then we got 8.3 But we know the story. Blizzard and many players were not happy Azerite Armor. So we got more, and more stuff.

Then again, if you have a spec that you really enjoy you'll forgive the bad systems more easily. Understandable.

[portillos]

Cataclysm, MoP, WoD are the worst in that order.

[Dalheim]

Oh god, I'd forgotten about that... Yeah that was just a kick in the nads!

Quite, especially since they were introducing allied races behind reps, so it was even more frustrating.

[MiiiMiii]

To me really Legion.

Why? I stopped being interested in raiding in the end of WotLK due to the multiple difficulties and the fact that Cata made 10 and 25 man get same gear really counted me out. But still, I could PvP and farm PvP gear and dominate that part of the game for those periods.

In Legion, they did their "gear should not matter in PvP" mentality. They removed PvP vendor and gear mattered so little in PvP it was just boring. Why would I bother progressing my characters gear?

BfA was almost as bad, but at least in this expansion gear matters more.

Shadowlands with their PvP vendors looks better. However, I still prefer a PvP stat to make PvP gear = PvP dominance.

[Kaibhan]

Torn between BFA and WoD. BFA gets the nod as worst because wod raids were fun and wod class design was better and wod gearing wasn't so whacky. BFA had more features to be sure but warfronts and island expeditions could hardly be compared to ashran so that's a wash. M+ and challenge modes are a wash. So that leaves visions as being the only real pro over WoD.

[Venziir]

Quite, especially since they were introducing allied races behind reps, so it was even more frustrating.

Yeah, I mean it was obviously done to drag it out, thus taking longer to unlock the races but still... Urgh!

[kaminaris]

In your wet dreams

And all I see is complaining about legiondaries, one thing. Wish we could say the same about BfA.

Because we can't. Every single system has been better than the one from legion.
And we actually had a gear compared to those 3 slots in legion.

Oh and it killed off pvp since that is one thing that we CAN check.

[Doffen]

Because we can't. Every single system has been better than the one from legion.
And we actually had a gear compared to those 3 slots in legion.

Thats why blizzard go back to Legion systems in BfA I guess.

Oh and it killed off pvp since that is one thing that we CAN check.

BfA made it worse, so check that as well.

[OFiveNine]

Still find it wild so many people shit on MoP. Was probably the best expansion so far since TBC

[kaminaris]

Thats why blizzard go back to Legion systems in BfA I guess.

BfA made it worse, so check that as well.

Nope and nope. If you meant shadowlands then its continuing on BfA and getting back to era before legion in some cases. Smoothly avoiding shit like a wind.

And nope again, gear actually matters in BfA again in PvP. Legion had that weird experiement of templates which failed hard.

[Kralljin]

And nope again, gear actually matters in BfA again in PvP. Legion had that weird experiement of templates which failed hard.

Too bad gearing via PvP is basically an Ironman challenge in comparison to any other game mode.

1,8k in order to get a HEROIC ILVL out of your weekly chest.

Meanwhile, M+ hands out identical loot for doing a +15 or +10 for equivalent Weekly rewards.

Not even mentioning that you needed to pull the right Azerite pieces, or hope for an upgrade token if the weekly rotation already blessed you with the right Azerite piece to upgrade.
The fact that gear barely mattered in PvP was one issue in Legion, once that was removed, the second issue, that gearing yourself via PvP is simply not viable was then exposed.

I predict a similiar situation in SL unless the reward structure matches the time investment and required skill of PvE sources.
(Which could potentially cause other issues, but that's another story)

That's the irony of PvP in BfA, you're better off ignoring PvP entirely until you acquired gear from PvE, it's much more efficient.

[schwank05]

The first raids in Cata was indeed really good, I also liked how the dungeons were on release, in my opinion! Just so people don't think I talk for everyone.

For those two reasons alone Cataclysm was way better than both WoD and BfA, IMO! Classes played decently too, those I played anyway(mage, boomkin and Hunter), until they gutted the little niches classes had left in MoP. Imo!!

What do you think of Legion then Schwank? Shit? Horrible? You only mentioned BfA and WoD.

- - - Updated - - -


Broken Chore was just that, broken. But it had Mage Tower, which was AWESOME! So the shitty pick up 3 chests/kill 1 rare was quickly forgiven. But I did it on 12 characters for Class Mount! So I was kinda tired of it, just a little, a tad, SICK of it

Man that was a slog to get through. But the actual quest where you got the mount was good. Fun tracking down that Dire, eh Wolfhawk.

I hated legion as an alt aholic I have been punished since CATA IMO. I loved how fast leveling was in cata as well since it is the thing I hate most about the game. I have not truly enjoyed the game since MOP when Disc Priests were perfect and pre nerf Monk Tanks were fantastic. I despised the overall theme and the king fu pandas though. Really my favorite times in WOW were TBC and WOLTK, I could still run Kara, mags lair and Gruuls lair weekly and love every minute of them to this day.

[kaminaris]

Too bad gearing via PvP is basically an Ironman challenge in comparison to any other game mode.

1,8k in order to get a HEROIC ILVL out of your weekly chest.

Meanwhile, M+ hands out identical loot for doing a +15 or +10 for equivalent Weekly rewards.

Not even mentioning that you needed to pull the right Azerite pieces, or hope for an upgrade token if the weekly rotation already blessed you with the right Azerite piece to upgrade.
The fact that gear barely mattered in PvP was one issue in Legion, once that was removed, the second issue, that gearing yourself via PvP is simply not viable was then exposed.

I predict a similiar situation in SL unless the reward structure matches the time investment and required skill of PvE sources.
(Which could potentially cause other issues, but that's another story)

That's the irony of PvP in BfA, you're better off ignoring PvP entirely until you acquired gear from PvE, it's much more efficient.

Gearing yourself purely in PvP was almost never possible in WoW, maybe in WoD but then again, op trinkets from raids, tiers working in lower pvp.
Regarding azerite you don't have to hope for anything, you can drop one from raids or buy specific one.

And what was worst in gearing via pvp is that every single joe used pvp to gear alts because it was faster.
Bgs and ashran was infested with people who didn't give a flying fuck about pvp. And was there for free fast and easy gearing alts.
It was fucking clownfiesta.