Intresting take regarding WoW since Cataclysm.

[DesoPL]

Yep reddit post, so probably not many will take it seriously.

https://old.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comm...essful_mmorpg/

Cataclysm was a super light expansion on everything, missing an entire raid tier, but it was understandable since they essentially rebuilt the entire world.

I can agree on that, Cataclysm was light expansion, because many things were scrapped like path of the titans, which later in Legion was reused and modified for artifacts. But also PvE content was scrapped much, remember Abyssal Maw raid? Also i agree, whole Kalimdor and EK was changed.

Then Mists of Pandaria rolls around and they literally just drop the game at the end, leaving over a year with 0 new content. The biggest MMORPG and they just shelved it for a year without even trying to get people to stick around.

I cannot say anything regarding MoP myself, was not playing back then, but what confuses me now is mix of opinions like. "I miss pandaria, but hate pandarens"

WoD drops and it's a failure on all fronts, so again, they just say fuck it and pack up without even trying to fix it.

I think, WoD mainly was scrapped in fact, that Project TITAN failed, and all stuff from this project, or most of it moved to Overwatch. But yeah WoD was bad.

Legion comes around, and it's good, albiet still that daily chore grind nonsense they started up in WoD.

I came back before Legion release, and i agree here. Expac was good, if you forget farming reps and stuff. Storyline in Suramar i consider as one of best in game, allthough whole storyline in expac was small bit wasted potential. To show other worlds controlled by Legion not only Argus, or seeing for ourselves worlds destroyed by Legion. Shame Blizzard didin't showed us more worlds than Argus and Azeroth. Yep there was Niskara, but small portion of it.

Then BFA releases and it's an absolute shell of a game. This one didn't last most people even a month. They released broken concept after broken concept that everyone hated.

Okay in paper, BfA sound good. But in practice was very bad. First of all, people were dissapointed about heart of azeroth, and grinding which was much slower than Legion artifacts. Storyline idk where to start here, so i pass talking about it. The only good thing about BfA was allied races, mechagon and nazjatar. Even 8.3 was an failure.

Now we have shadowlands. The art style, scenery, zones, music, and story is honestly great, but they are again completely dropping the ball on everything else. So much potential yet we are already looking at huge gaps in time between major content patches while they throw in a bunch of solo busywork to do in anima farming for cosmetics, stuff that is causing a mass hemmorhage in subs since people just want actual content.

And here we got Shadowlands. I admit they took time about making scenery really good, i still enjoy Ardenweald or Maldraxxus. But i agree here that anima farming for cosmetics sucks. Torghast in other hand is really fun feature for me, but after finishing twisting corridors on layer 8 i feel it is pointless doing TC. Unless they will add new rewards in 9.1 if they will not scrap whole expansion, like they did with WoD.

[rowaasr13]

TLDR: and point of this repost is...? I couldn't find a punchline. Yes, original asks a good question, but you simply list some bad points from it and ask nothing.

> Cataclyms missing a tier

I don't care what it was "missing", regardless if that's empty player fantasies or not. I only care what it "had". It had 2 solid raids in 1st tier, one very cool in second and fine in 3rd - pretty much in line with many other expansions. 3 absolutely new zones, many new and redone dungeons. What exactly is "superlight" about that?

MoP was absolutely great, except stupid AvH theme that a hate, spit upon, loathe and detest and want to burn in hell forever. But since it was only one of other themes, it was fine. I don't think delaying next expansion somehow magically makes current one worse.

Legion is good again. Though "daily chore" shit actually started back in TBC and was around ever since.

I don't get people's problem with BfA. It was great once again, except as I already mentioned shitstupidly fucktarded AvH theme and that this caused you to miss half of new zones with all their quests and storylines unless you play both sides. Fortunately there was more to it again, so I could pretend I don't see AvH shit.

SL is fine. Though it does feel a little too small at the moment. I hope it gets better as expansion goes on.

Going back to original question on reddit: yes, Blizz DO look lazy. They probably just found a good ratio of money spent on new content and players atrracted/returned and don't bother to make more. Also several game mechanics, mainly those that invalidate old content once new comes along doesn't really gives them much initiative to release tons of content at once: why serve a big dish if all of it will spoil in a while anyway? Just cut it in small chunks and make several releases at same effort.

[Kralljin]

Still not buying this whole "lack of development resources", the WoW team has over 200 members, so either those resources are poorly allocated (which is the fault of the execs team of Blizzard) or they're just producing content at an extremely inefficient rate (for whatever reasons).

Regardless of what is the case, "more resources" do not solve the issue when they either are poorly allocated by Blizzard or their production pipe has way too many hiccups to produce quality content at a steady rate.

In my opinion, the biggest issue of WoW is frankly the lack of direction of the game, the game simply develops into every direction, everything must still somehow for everybody (because when people do not access a given content, that's bad because metrics).
While this may be seen as a "product" issue to some people, i think this also has started to impact their development - when people seem to have no coherent vision of what the product is supposed to be, it gets difficult to produce content at a good pace because the developers constantly need to evalute whether the work of others fits into the game as a whole.

Putting aside some obvious issues such as Class design, which frankly becomes an ever increasingly difficult thing to pull off due to variety of modes that exist in WoW, the need that all of them are balanced on their own, while also having to deal with borrowed power.

[Cæli]

why would they put any efforts when all they have to do is add 10 levels and reset the season ladder with one button, and still get most of their profits, due to players being addicted to the game?
I wouldn't be surprised if one day they just stop producing content, there's so much content already, I bet most of the playerbase didn't saw even half of it
compared to other online games, wow is probably way too expensive, having cheap developers isn't enough

[erifwodahs]

Legion is good again. Though "daily chore" shit actually started back in TBC and was around ever since.

I don't get people's problem with BfA. It was great once again, except as I already mentioned shitstupidly fucktarded AvH theme and that this caused you to miss half of new zones with all their quests and storylines unless you play both sides. Fortunately there was more to it again, so I could pretend I don't see AvH shit.

Agree with the first point.

BfA was a good expansion from 8.2 ( i know some poeple had a beef with nazjatar and benthic gear, but it a war blizzard can't win) imo and mechagon was amazing including the mega-dungeon with hard modes. 8.0 and 8.1 wasn't bad either - it was as a regular - pre-legion expansion, it just suffered from Legion being so good. I mean Legion had so much shit to do at the start. They have featured Nighthold raid way before expansion launch. In comparison, we were showed the next raids 3 months after expansion launch in SL. To put it in perspective, if the new raid releases in June/July - Legion had already had added 3 boss raid, mega-dungeon, Nighthold raid AND 7.2 content patch added (not raid). This is not say that SL/BfA is was shit, it's just that Legion was damn overloaded.
Ofc. Azerite Armor and warfronts was not what we have expected, but it does not make it "horrible" it's just not interesting. 8.3 was blizzards second attempt at making gear "interesting" as a lot of people were requesting prior 8.2, so it 8.3 was their second take and if it had a vendor from the start. Anyway, after the vendors it was really fun - throw the rule book out and go crazy as it was expansions end. Ofc. there was opposition to corruption gear, so after that blizzad went 180 and did "let gear be gear again" which is just crazy.
Visions was really cool to explore and progress through. After initial progress it was just frustrating. They went wrong way around making it - added frustrating mechanics to create a challenge instead of giving you nice bonuses and balanced the difficulty around people using those bonuses correctly.
All in all, in my opinion, BfA was not bad at all, it was just not Legion. Don't forget that Legion added M+ and WQs. If it was added in BfA it would have made BfA to look very differently.

[Soon-TM]

compared to other online games, wow is probably way too expensive, having cheap developers isn't enough

In my country, you can buy any non recently published AAA game with two months of WoW sub. So, if am getting timegated, drip fed, scarce content, I am timegating my money (for Blizzard) as well

[Blackmist]

They always have about a year of fuck all at the end. That's where it's time to unsub and wait for the new one.

And only WoD was cut short. Cata wasn't. It had three full sized raid tiers, including Firelands which was one of the best overall raids. The main problem Cata had was it was spread over the entire continent, most of the effort went into rebuilding old areas that nobody cares about, and the LFD system was suddenly faced with actually hard dungeons. Especially for pugs who had spent the last year blitzing Azjol-Nerub and Drak'Theron Keep in full ICC gear.

[Relapses]

Why doesn't Blizzard just plant a game developer tree and grow more game developers????

- - - Updated - - -

They always have about a year of fuck all at the end. That's where it's time to unsub and wait for the new one.

And only WoD was cut short. Cata wasn't. It had three full sized raid tiers, including Firelands which was one of the best overall raids. The main problem Cata had was it was spread over the entire continent, most of the effort went into rebuilding old areas that nobody cares about, and the LFD system was suddenly faced with actually hard dungeons. Especially for pugs who had spent the last year blitzing Azjol-Nerub and Drak'Theron Keep in full ICC gear.

Nah dude. Blizzard has to release new content every 3 months or else they're a bad company that makes a bad product that I will post very angrily about while continuing to pay $15/mo for this bad product I clearly hate. After all, how else will Blizzard know how incompetent they are if I don't continue to give them money? This isn't rocket surgery.

[StillMcfuu]

Yep reddit post, so probably not many will take it seriously.

https://old.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comm...essful_mmorpg/



I can agree on that, Cataclysm was light expansion, because many things were scrapped like path of the titans, which later in Legion was reused and modified for artifacts. But also PvE content was scrapped much, remember Abyssal Maw raid? Also i agree, whole Kalimdor and EK was changed.



I cannot say anything regarding MoP myself, was not playing back then, but what confuses me now is mix of opinions like. "I miss pandaria, but hate pandarens"



I think, WoD mainly was scrapped in fact, that Project TITAN failed, and all stuff from this project, or most of it moved to Overwatch. But yeah WoD was bad.



I came back before Legion release, and i agree here. Expac was good, if you forget farming reps and stuff. Storyline in Suramar i consider as one of best in game, allthough whole storyline in expac was small bit wasted potential. To show other worlds controlled by Legion not only Argus, or seeing for ourselves worlds destroyed by Legion. Shame Blizzard didin't showed us more worlds than Argus and Azeroth. Yep there was Niskara, but small portion of it.



Okay in paper, BfA sound good. But in practice was very bad. First of all, people were dissapointed about heart of azeroth, and grinding which was much slower than Legion artifacts. Storyline idk where to start here, so i pass talking about it. The only good thing about BfA was allied races, mechagon and nazjatar. Even 8.3 was an failure.



And here we got Shadowlands. I admit they took time about making scenery really good, i still enjoy Ardenweald or Maldraxxus. But i agree here that anima farming for cosmetics sucks. Torghast in other hand is really fun feature for me, but after finishing twisting corridors on layer 8 i feel it is pointless doing TC. Unless they will add new rewards in 9.1 if they will not scrap whole expansion, like they did with WoD.

Pandaland and WoD in some respects are remembered more fondly because class design was at it's best. If the main way you interact with the game is phenomenal, even if the game wasn't that great, it's still going to be fun to play for a bit of time.

I think this underlies WoWs biggest current issue. Classes are by far their worst right now, it's just not fun to play most of them. Legion had this problem and it was fixed with Leggo effects and Tier pieces, but when Legion released and up until .2, it wasn't a good expansion. First tier sucked, without specific leggos your class sucked, etc... Legion had a lot of issues but with Suramar, Broken Shore, Kara, new dungeons, Nighthold, etc... by the time 7.2 hit with flying and Broken Shore opening (i think rep rewards came at this time too), Legion was fantastic. BFA's issue is it was just Legion, but didn't learn the lessons of legion, class design still sucked, Azerite gear never fixed that issue. Even though BFA had some great story lines, beautiful zones, great raids, etc... It's undermined by how unenjoyable it is to play the game with the current classes in their current state. SL's also has this issue, it's just Legion 3.0, with continued unlearned lessons. Leggos don't do enough to improve class gameplay, tier sets aren't in yet, covenant trees are little more than azerite 2nd ring traits, covenant abilities are rarely rotational, and don't fit into classes all that well... making them uninteresting.

Outside of class design and how the main interaction with the game is flawed, I just think they are out of ideas. Torghast was a great idea but it's implementation is decidedly poor, ignoring the issue of rewards, it's essentially just throwing power at you, which means you do the same thing you would normally do, but faster and with bigger numbers. The Maw isn't fun either, I usually like difficult zones (Suramar) but the Maw just misses the mark. No rewards in it, no point to go into it also makes it bad to play. BFA had similar issues with Borefronts and Islands.

Blizz needs to figure out what they are doing with WoW, because half-assed content isn't cutting it anymore. I shouldn't be excited for the 15 year old version of the game, I shouldn't be looking forward to next year because that's when the next classic expansion will likely come out.

[Myradin]

I cannot say anything regarding MoP myself, was not playing back then, but what confuses me now is mix of opinions like. "I miss pandaria, but hate pandarens"

Because Pandaria wasn't entirely pandarens. Raiding and PvP had very little to do with them, after the initial patches the number of daily quest givers who were pandaren also dropped.

Class design was also pretty good during MoP and WoD.

[Soon-TM]

And only WoD was cut short. Cata wasn't. It had three full sized raid tiers, including Firelands which was one of the best overall raids.

Um, Cata was cut short. Maybe not to the degree of WoD, but it was nevertheless. 4.1 had literally no new raids, and had to do with the revamped troll dungeons. Since you mentioned Firelands, it's one of the best examples, since 4.2 was going to have two raids, Firelands and Abyssal Maw. AM was supposed to wrap up the story of Vash'jir, but since it was cut off, it came to a sudden stop and that is. I heard that AM was revisited during BfA, and refurbished as EP btw, but take it with a grain of salt.

And 4.3 was a shameless rehash of existing assets, so the whole expansion had a very rushed feeling plastered all over it.

- - - Updated - - -

BFA had similar issues with Borefronts and Islands.

Blizz needs to figure out what they are doing with WoW, because half-assed content isn't cutting it anymore. I shouldn't be excited for the 15 year old version of the game, I shouldn't be looking forward to next year because that's when the next classic expansion will likely come out.

At least !@#$fronts gave you good gear for trudging through them (or just afking lul), and while IEs were nothing but a boring AoE fest, they were done in 10 minutes, 15 at most - much unlike Snoreghast, which feels like rowing through a lake of tar.

[Relapses]

Um, Cata was cut short. Maybe not to the degree of WoD, but it was nevertheless. 4.1 had literally no new raids, and had to do with the revamped troll dungeons. Since you mentioned Firelands, it's one of the best examples, since 4.2 was going to have two raids, Firelands and Abyssal Maw. AM was supposed to wrap up the story of Vash'jir, but since it was cut off, it came to a sudden stop and that is. I heard that AM was revisited during BfA, and refurbished as EP btw, but take it with a grain of salt.

And 4.3 was a shameless rehash of existing assets, so the whole expansion had a very rushed feeling plastered all over it.

Care to tell us what planned content was cut from Cata? (I'll help you: There isn't any.)

[Soon-TM]

Care to tell us what planned content was cut from Cata? (I'll help you: There isn't any.)

Officially acknowledged by Blizz EDIT other than GC, none. Which means that the game doesn't have any cut content whatsoever, since it's never been admitted by Blizzard. Happy?

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Abyssal_Maw_(instance)

Might wanna read here a bit. Ghostcrawler talked some about the cutting of AM.

Interesting bit. That must have been the only time a WoW dev admitted having to cut stuff out, AN (in WotLK) also comes to mind.

[Lei]

Care to tell us what planned content was cut from Cata? (I'll help you: There isn't any.)

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Abyssal_Maw_(instance)

Might wanna read here a bit. Ghostcrawler talked some about the cutting of AM.

[Relapses]

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Abyssal_Maw_(instance)

Might wanna read here a bit. Ghostcrawler talked some about the cutting of AM.

I stand corrected. Care to tell us what content was cut that a single living human being on the face of the entire fucking planet would give the faintest fuck about?

[Koward]

I cannot say anything regarding MoP myself, was not playing back then, but what confuses me now is mix of opinions like. "I miss pandaria, but hate pandarens"

You have to place yourself in the context of the time to understand.
Pandaria, as in the continent itself, was great content. The quests were compelling, scenarios were good, the endgame was correct and balanced.
Perhaps a bit too disjoined from the rest of the Warcraft universe until the Trolls added back, but that's a minor thing.

Pandaren, as in the race and more specifically the character model, felt very out of place in the game, notably due to their animations. Today, you don't feel it because all races have Disney/Dreamworks animations since WoD, but when that race arrived, it was a bit like adding a dancing Jim Carrey in the Lord of the Rings.
Hell, the MoP cinematic did not help either. It starts as very Warcraft-esque, and then the tone switches to cartoon in the middle when the Pandaren appears.
Comparison with a 3D animation movie for kids called Kung Fu Panda was immediate.
On top of that, the Panda is the symbol animal of China, and the characters were also seen as a greedy reach to its extensive customer market.

[TheFirstOnes]

"Shame Blizzard didin't showed us more worlds than Argus and Azeroth."

We did go to other worlds in 7.3 with the portal thing, but that's it. In Antorus, we BARELY got to see stuff from Nathreza and co, but outside of that, yeah...

[Soon-TM]

Pandaren, as in the race and more specifically the character model, felt very out of place in the game, notably due to their animations.

Well, I think that part was intended, since the only precedent (at least I know of) of Pandas in WoW was Chen in WC3, and he already contrasted sharply to more "Warcraft-proper" characters such as Rexxar or Rokhan. As a matter of fact, pandas on the surface looked like some sort of comedic relief race, even if different to gnomes/goblins - but just on the surface. The story of MoP is actually one of the best written in the entire game imo, and it was probably the last xpac with a decent backstory.

[Zyrinx]

Lost me at good looking scenery in Maldraxus, which looks like a dorm toilet at 230am on a Saturday night.

Idk, this is my opinion but even art has gone way downhill. The Covenant armor sets are, again imo, very lackluster. There's about 2 total I'd consider using, and they really don't fit the theme of most classes that can wear them.

It really does feel like the wind down after a .3 patch but basically this thing just started. 9.1 better be good. Real good.

[munkeyinorbit]

I stand corrected. Care to tell us what content was cut that a single living human being on the face of the entire fucking planet would give the faintest fuck about?

That would be AM. You are corrected again.