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

[Marrilaife]

Cool how some people can answer with 10 lines to something incomprehensible as:

"Why did WoD fail so hard even though Siege of Orgrimmar lasted for 2 years?
Like how does that work? "

This is nonsensical. What does that even mean?

Well it means they had shitton of time when they weren't developing any more content for MOP so that's supposedly the time they were supposed to develop more content for WOD... which didn't happen. Also it was 1 year not 2 but w/e.

They'll never admit it but I firmly believe they saw how quickly WoD shed its initial surge in subscribers and left the expansion on terminal life support while they refocused their creative efforts on making sure a rise/fall in subscribers like WoD's never happened again.

WOD had a massive sub drop off because of 1) technical mega fail where the game was unplayable for a week, lags, dcs, garrisons not loading, and so forth, 2) 6.1 being a patch with nothing in it except belf models (ok there were some skimpy amounts of quests but not much) 3) missing at least 1 major patch and 1-2 minor patches to be a full fledged expansion.

If there was a proper mid xpac patch with Shattrath hub + raid and Farahlon, but no, we got half an expac for a price of one.

You could say it was a self fulfilling prophecy, people left due to no content, so even less content was developed?

There's also the problem of dealing with technical debt: phasing / garrison tech and new models were coming behind schedule, both with bugs, it was a bumpy road for them. Basically the same thing that crippled Anthem, EA told Bioware to develop on an engine that was lacking so they spent more time fighting with the tech than actually developing the game, so it came out poor and unfinished and content starved.

[Eggroll]

Gonna need something that remotely resembles a source on that, buddy.

That's Blizzard history for anyone who cares to know it. Jeff Kaplan and Chris Metzen are prominent examples, also they took most of the character animation team.

"I don't like it therefore it sucks." Nice opinion.

The poorly designed features and bugs all over the place speak volumes. WoW never really had polished content after MoP.
If they have to completely overhaul a core system of an xpac (HoA) mid xpac, I'd say they haven't thought the whole thing through to begin with. Things of this scale never happened with the old dev team.

[Malix Farwin]

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

It didnt have "Incredible success it quite literallt matched MoP numbers at launch and quickly dropped off. Xpacs spike numbers at launch much like BfA did.

[Relapses]

Well it means they had shitton of time when they weren't developing any more content for MOP so that's supposedly the time they were supposed to develop more content for WOD... which didn't happen. Also it was 1 year not 2 but w/e.

WOD had a massive sub drop off because of 1) technical mega fail where the game was unplayable for a week, lags, dcs, garrisons not loading, and so forth, 2) 6.1 being a patch with nothing in it except belf models (ok there were some skimpy amounts of quests but not much) 3) missing at least 1 major patch and 1-2 minor patches to be a full fledged expansion.

If there was a proper mid xpac patch with Shattrath hub + raid and Farahlon, but no, we got half an expac for a price of one.

You could say it was a self fulfilling prophecy, people left due to no content, so even less content was developed?

There's also the problem of dealing with technical debt: phasing / garrison tech and new models were coming behind schedule, both with bugs, it was a bumpy road for them. Basically the same thing that crippled Anthem, EA told Bioware to develop on an engine that was lacking so they spent more time fighting with the tech than actually developing the game, so it came out poor and unfinished and content starved.

While everything you're saying is true, the graph only shows the first quarter of WoD. We have no idea exactly how bad it got (though I don't think it's a conservative estimate to say it continued the downward trend). I think that's the exact Blizzard HQ pressed the "Oh shit" button and from the ashes of what WoD was supposed to be, we got the much more casual-friendly Legion.

[Mirishka]

Like how does that work?

What is it like, living on a planet with a 7-month year?

[Relapses]

That's Blizzard history for anyone who cares to know it. Jeff Kaplan and Chris Metzen are prominent examples, also they took most of the character animation team.

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

The poorly designed features and bugs all over the place speak volumes. WoW never really had polished content after MoP.
If they have to completely overhaul a core system of an xpac (HoA) mid xpac, I'd say they haven't thought the whole thing through to begin with. Things of this scale never happened with the old dev team.

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.

[Donald Hellscream]

It lasted for 1 year and 2 months but I think much of failure of WoD had to do with how the garrison was implemented and that there was a general lack of things to do in the open world.

[Outofmana]

Time travel and ruining any sense of the story made ppl cba anymore, it was beyond confusing. Combine it with refreshing the questfinder to hop into raids doing the daily quests made it mindnumbingly boring

[Marrilaife]

So where is the "Why did Cata fail so hard, when ICC lasted 2 years" thread? (I know that ICC lasted "only" 13 months, but OP didn't care to be precise, just threw out his claims for a nice bait and boy did it work)

Well tbh with Cata I'd attribute it to the massive workload that was world revamp, both graphical and all the questing experience 1-60. So yeah, it's a legit question with a legit answer.

That's why every time there's a thread popping about world / levelling revamp or "WOW2" I always think "fuck no" (especially the overused idea about "open world sandbox game with action combat"), it would do much more damage than benefit.

[Relapses]

WoD was also when the story really jumped the shark. The whole "there are infinite worlds but finite Sargerases" thing etc. just got whittled down to "don't think too hard about this, it's nonsense". Then suddenly Grommash on our side yelling "Draenor is free"? Cata and MoP had basic, fine storylines. WoD's was silly, and everything since has been silly too.

OP Pandas and Generic Bad Guy Gets Corrupted By An Old God (Again) is okay BUT I DRAW THE LINE at time travel."

Okay, you do you dude.

[froschhure]

wow im glad i did not play that for 2 years.

SoG is pure garbage

[deenman]

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.

stuff got cut out,happens everytime,if im not mistaken vanila had by far the most cut content and no1 complains,wrath had some,cata had a bunch etc

- - - Updated - - -

OP Pandas and Generic Bad Guy Gets Corrupted By An Old God (Again) is okay BUT I DRAW THE LINE at time travel."

Okay, you do you dude.

garrosh wasnt corrupted,and atleast mop had consistant content and the lore was atleast in universe and made sense

[FelPlague]

Like how does that work?

Soo didnt last 2 years...
14 months is not 2 years...
hellfire citidal lasted just as long.

[Daymanmb]

WoD was an end to another generation of WoW. WoD wasnt bad, it was the last time PvP was good.

[FelPlague]

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.

no they didnt lie.
they spoke their implications
and sadly that didnt make it.

by your logic they lie every single expansion.
no, they REALLY want it to be in the game, thats why they tell us.
but it doesernt allways make it

vanilla, outland, necromancers, demon hunters, dragon isles.
Demon hunters literally were on the box, and dragon isles at the announcement.

wotlk runecrafting, ariel pvp combat, which literally made it onto the box, i have mine right here, always laugh, that even to this day we don't have aerial pvp.

cata, path of titans

mop upgraded guild levels

wod farahlon, tower of time, ogre empire

legion the island thingy cant remember name

bfa... actualy idk? i dont think anything we learned about gut cut.

shadowlands... umm yeh


those are just the ones i can think off off the top of my headf.

[Nightstalker]

1) Wasted development time on garrison options that didn't make it into the game (multiple locations for building)
2) Scrapping the opening scenario
3) (Re)moving the originally planned capitals

Mismanagement overall. No wonder Tom Chilton left the team since he was the lead at that time. Hazzikostas took his position for the Legion development and "maintaining" WoD.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

2 - WoD lacked patches. What if Legion ended after Kil'jaeden's defeat and we skipped straight to BfA? That's less content updates per xpac, making the game more expensive since you would need to buy the next expansion to continue at max lvl.

There was meant to be a mid-tier patch with a Shattrath raid which would have actually connected the Legion bit of the expansion to the Orc bit. It's more like if instead of Tomb of Sargeras we got the Legionfall campaign and then a cutscene following Kil'jaeden back to Argus with Illidan disenchanting him.

[Oakshana]

I think their implication is that the SoO being out for so long should have meant that WoD should have had more work done on it.

As I said in my post above (refer to it for more detail,) a lot of work WAS done on WoD. It's just that a lot of that work was ultimately for naught.

100% true. And 100% of it was annoying and frustrating. Somewhat (for me at least) for the cut content, but I think a bit part of the anger was because it was a very strong example of how the devs and designers just simply were not listening to their playerbase and it was the first significant time they flipped us all the bird and shoved what they wanted down our throats.

I think also this was the point that Ghostcrawler departed and Ion took over? Which speaks volumes.

But, on topic... yeah. Pretty much most end game raids since Wrath have lasted nearly, if not, a year. But that 2 years comment from OP is nonsense.

[Luxeley]

How does your crazy math come up with SOO lasting 2 years?

[Shockzalot]

WoD was the worst expansion, IMO. The first "content" patch was absolutely laughable. The expansion started off promising, then making the garrison one of the prime focuses was where shit went terribly wrong. I felt that Highmaul was actually one of the better introductory raids out of all the expansions if not the best of them all. The story line began good and eroded almost immediately with the garrison patch. Players were bored and didn't want to play "mobile" in an MMO so they unsubbed. I want the dumb ass mission table concept that has been lingering around since WoD removed. It's tedious and now it's extremely unrewarding to boot.