After time travelling back (or whatever spin version of this Blizz wants to call it) Garrosh is quietly killed off in some minor quest and never mentioned again. In fact, that time travel happened is never mentioned again and Blizzard takes this as an opportunity to reboot the whole franchise. Similar to how Abram's new Star Trek at least feels like something that was written in this century, remake the lore of WoW in a more serious way that merits having multiple lines of novels and games coming from it and not a patchwork of gunk tacked onto a short video game story from the early 90's.

Divide everyone's level by 10, so that max level characters from mists are now starting the new Draenor at level 9. Make it nearly as long as Vanilla WoW to get to max level, and try and get the 2 Azeorth continents out as quick as possible to follow up. Leveling is a giant mess right now because Blizzard has never settled on one way to handle it with ever increasing content. Giving away 85's and then 90's makes leveling cheap and yet at the same time its far too expensive if you actually have to do it without these kinds of perks. Its just a radical difference in time investment depending on when and how you do it. Then you have how uneven and awkward the experience has become. It wasn't designed to be like this and in response the dev team has made numerous changes, going in different directions to fix it. There's no skill to it like needing a James leveling guide or having experience would make you better at it. Its the same thing over and over with slightly different gimmicks here and there. LFG is necessary but they need some kind of small atunement or just showing up at the dungeons gate the first time so it doesn't become another round of gothic architecture you race past. There's no coherent narrative, so the plot line is shot as well. It doesn't work as a game and it doesn't work as a story. At one time Blizzard would cancel a game like Warcraft Adventures or the space strategy game in the 90s (Star Imperium or something?) if they thought it was substandard. At this point, can they really look at what the leveling experience in WoW has become and think its any good?

Clearly, Blizz doesn't want to risk making a WoW2, maybe because of what happened to EQ2, its a risk people won't transfer over and if its population stayed lower than WoW1 it would be quite embarrassing. Yes, they have Titan, but by all accounts this is meant to be an all new kind of mmo, there are still many of us that want a EQ/WoW kind of mmo, and I really don't believe that genre is going to disappear anymore than fps or single rpg games will vanish anytime soon. WoW needs to become an mmo again whiich involves community and a persistent world, it needs to be designed from the ground up to be a good game experience when playing your first 100 hours leveling a character up, and it needs to be on par with modern games being released now.

Instead Warlords of Draenor looks like one more round of patching the beat up old ship just enough so that it can make one more sea voyage without sinking. The time travel is terrible if its part of an ongoing plot, it makes everything around it all the more meaningless. Yes, there's been time travel on the sides, just like there were cutsie things like gnomes and pandas before mists, but its different when you put those things front and center. WoW's story is now like a network TV series where they keep putting off the main plot and writing as if the show could go on for 20 years. If they made the next 2-3 expansions about going to Argus, the Burning Legions return, and stuff leading up to a resolution to all this they could probably get good sales just based on people wanting to find out the ending of it all. Then make WoW 2.0 in the background, set 10,000 years in the future. Instead the plot line is left to fester and become an actual negative to the game. I'm not really that into the lore side of video games, their stories are nearly always much worse than B grade fantasy novels, but even my interest would be piqued by seeing how it all turns out.

That there wasn't a plan in place on how to handle leveling and the story disconnect 10 years down the road are just the most obvious examples of patched together WoW. At some point they need to radically change a lot of the game to stay relevant. Offend everyone with the changes all at once. Looking around I now believe trying out one of the many high quality F2P mmo's out there like Age of Conan, LotRO, and so on is time better spent. Most people aren't going to stay more than 3-4 months in a new WoW expansion or patch anyways, so why not try out something new, that's had years of polishing behind it? That wasn't the case a few years ago. I could be completely wrong, clearly it is my opinion, but the numbers are suggesting that the cautious strategy of small changes is going to get the same results cata and mop got. With mop I was blown away with how much TV advertising there was for it. Not only were the subscription numbers lower, but that included what had to be 100's of millions of dollars for all those NFL games spots to get there.

Anyways, think Draenor will be a fail, not because of any small issue like flying or no new class or race, but because its not a radical enough change from what they have been doing. /rant off