What went wrong with WoD?

[JayceTheJuggernaut]

Nothing really untill they started cutting major content and taking shortcuts to tie up plotholes. Kind of the same thing they're doing with bfa sadly

The leveling experience in wod was rly good and fluent (minus the starting server issues with Garrison's)

[Dhrizzle]

Actually the MoP complaint was that there wasnt enough content to do thats why it was quite common for people to be running raids on 2-4 alts.

Me personally was raiding on a priest, warlock, paladin, and DK.

That's great for you, personally I got to the cap and was presented with a wall of daily quest for multiple rep grinds I needed to get through just to use my tokens from dungeons, I tried it for a week or so then gave up on the whole expansion as it just wasn't fun for me.

I know forums aren't necessarily an accurate poll but there were a lot of similar complaints which Blizz tried to address with later patches and (in my opinion) totally overcompensated for in WoD.

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What went wrong with WoD? Yes.

More seriously, a lot of it was down to three big issues in my mind. First, Blizzard over-correcting on the Mists "dailygate" by minimizing world content. While the excessive amount of required dailies annoyed lots of people in Mists, nobody liked the Apexis replacements, found to be boring and hardly rewarding anyway.

Personally I found the Apexis areas to be much more fun than the old-style dailies. Experimenting with different mechanics to see which was the easiest/quickest way to complete each are made it a lot more interesting than just being given a list of things to do. I reckon they got a bad rep because they were so restricted and unrewarding, but when Tanaan came around and gave a decent amount of daily content with decent rewards people seemed to take to them a lot better.

[Beefhammer]

Mists of Pandaria had complaints there was too much content people were forced to do. WoD overcorrected the problem and gave players barely anything worth doing in terms of character advancement. Blizz also made the garrisons too integral to the expansion.

Overall I think it was a shame as WoD had some cool ideas, great dungeons and what I consider to be the best open world content the game has ever seen. It was just put together in a way that squandered the effort that had gone into it and made for a largely underwhelming experience.

Wrong. WoD had less content due to onboarding issues. Had nothing to with any complaints from MoP, which too much content was never one of them.

[Darknessvamp]

Personally I thinks it's because they went all in on the Leveling Experience and Garrison whilst not giving enough thought to the end game, the rest of the expansion's story, PvP and Dungeons. I mean not going to lie the leveling was great with it's developments and set ups for characters but as soon as you got to level cap and hit Highmaul it all disappeared and as buggy as the Garrisons were they had all their features and progression paths in place, too bad that most of it was regulated to "Don't play to get the most out of it". Not to mention all the things that went wrong right from the start with the fighting over Loot Distribution and the decision to force Personal Loot which has messed with Dungeon Loot distribution since and how they went out of their way to remove the fun out of the only end game content available at the time e.g. The Daily Apexis Quest and Rep farming could be done in a raid group and was a laugh to do that way with everyone actually interacting with each other and giving the server the idea of community again. It got nerfed to no longer be doable in a raid along with a bunch of other quests and it became more confrontational as groups fought over mobs to finish the quest.

Then after Highmaul there was barely any story advancement with Blackhand and then they just gave up on the expansion pushed out a final content patch and went all in on Legion.

[Gimlix]

I think it is a well known idea by now that there were massive changes made during the development of WoD. I'm pretty sure Ghostcrawler up and left for Riot about halfway through the development time of WoD. People wondered about this already back then, it seemed like there just were a lot of changes and that they scrapped everything and tried to start from scratch again about 6 months before they were supposed to release the expansion. Entire capital cities got cancelled, entire zones, storylines, etc.

The sad thing is though, as BFA now shows too, is that they seem to cut short every expansion that doesn't live up to expectations. Whenever an expansion is struggling the managers come down demanding that they stop whatever the fuck they're doing and start working more on the next expansion instead. Lots of story and ideas get lost like that sadly.

Wait what? Ghostcrawler left during cataclysm lol. 4 years prio to WoD.

[Thage]

Quoting myself from another thread:

It's not so much about development time. If memory serves, SOP is to launch the year following the Blizzcon announcement. In that, Shadowlands is no different, and if their statements are to be believed (on face value there's no reason to disbelieve this one), they have teams leapfrogging so one team develops the expansion's initial content and hands off the game plan to the patch development team, meaning Shadowlands has been in 'hard' development (as opposed to storyboarding, design discussions, etc.) where the actual game systems are worked on and art assets are developed, for at least two years now.

What matters is a) design direction, b) clear communication, and c) staying on task. As an example, Warlords of Draenor failed on all three fronts by bringing in the former Titan devs halfway through development. This was all covered in WoD postmortem interviews and posts. The developers that worked on Titan and the developers that worked on WoW already had conflicting design goals and came to loggerheads often. The design direction and vision weren't unified. They also weren't able to stay on task because large amounts of man-hours were spent catching the Titan devs back up to speed on WoW's engine, art direction, and other development necessities. This led to a lot of things left on the cutting room floor. Things were exacerbated because the lines of communication weren't clear and well-maintained. CMs would ask two developers the same question, get two answers, and relay those answers to the players, leading to conflicting information on numerous subjects, even subjects as simple as 'Was Draenor developed with flying in mind?' Their avenues of communication were so broken they announced a major QOL change (no longer supporting flight in current and further content for the foreseeable future) in a Polygon interview rather than any official channel of communicating with the players, and leading up to even the day before, CMs continued to give conflicting information as to when/if flight was going to be a thing in Warlords of Draenor

[Dhrizzle]

Wrong. WoD had less content due to onboarding issues. Had nothing to with any complaints from MoP, which too much content was never one of them.

Well the content was there, it's the way it was implemented that was a problem. If they'd opened it up so we were doing several of the Apexis zones a day with at least one guaranteed invasion, and made the rewards worthwhile, it could have been great.

[Gimlix]

That is definitely not correct:

Street was hired by Blizzard Entertainment in February 2008, and was the lead systems designer on the MMORPG World of Warcraft until November 2013.[9]
Release date - Warlords of Draenor – 2014.

I very clearly remember the news / announcement at the time.

Wait i remember it being during the end of Cataclysm, Wtf
Because i remember blizzard apolegizing for the failure of cataclysm and 4.3

[Shakana]

I think it is a well known idea by now that there were massive changes made during the development of WoD. I'm pretty sure Ghostcrawler up and left for Riot about halfway through the development time of WoD. People wondered about this already back then, it seemed like there just were a lot of changes and that they scrapped everything and tried to start from scratch again about 6 months before they were supposed to release the expansion. Entire capital cities got cancelled, entire zones, storylines, etc.

The sad thing is though, as BFA now shows too, is that they seem to cut short every expansion that doesn't live up to expectations. Whenever an expansion is struggling the managers come down demanding that they stop whatever the fuck they're doing and start working more on the next expansion instead. Lots of story and ideas get lost like that sadly.

Couldn't put in a better way. That's exactly what happens.

[Nnyco]

They forgot to add endgame except one wq per day and raids.

[Asmonbronze]

I remember playing WoD non-stop on release day, getting level 100 fully heroic geared by day 2 and doing same on all classes by time Highmaul released.. I remember that juicy November release.. However with nearly 2000 days played I've been getting real bored and feel so bored

[Niroshi]

They ditched it. WoD is one of the sorest spots for me as a Warcraft fan primarily because it could've been an extremely cool expansion. If they'd taken time to rebalance the reward structure of the expansion and actually finish the thing off it would've been great.

[Ardac]

I think WoD was an attempt to recreate the feel of WC1-2. They brought back the original villains of the series and the horde has gone enough by this time to no longer have the views of the old horde (in theory >.>). The hope was that it would be defenders of our world fighting these invaders from beyond the portal once more.

Now for what ruined it.
- I can't speak for balance / game wise fro much of it. I don't recall.
- Endless whining about alternate worlds and time travel i think helped to put the nail in the coffin of WoD sooner then planned. The t6 remake was data mined in this expanasion and would have fit into the theme but was never used.
-My personal issue with WoD: I felt many of the orcs were wasted. We basically steam rolled over most of them.

The biggest failure in WoD imo however was Admiral Taylor. Gorefiend was my fav orc leader in WC2 and his story was that he was a orc whose spirit now occupied the animated corpse of a nameless alliance soldier. When i found Taylor strung up but a necromancer this was the first thing that back to mind. We should have slain Gorefiend earlier on and his spirit could have been put in Taylor's body. A fiend in the body of a hero of the alliance would have made for an awesome story imo.

[Relapses]

There have been plenty of post-mortems of WoD, most of which are supported by completely unsubstantiated guesswork on the parts of the people writing the articles. Truth is, I doubt we'll ever know for sure unless Ion decides to write a memoir to explain what was happening behind-the-scenes during the development of WoD/Legion.

That said, here's my completely unsubstantiated guesswork:

• The developers were surprised so many people came back to play WoD. WoD's launch was notoriously shitty (so bad players were given 5 days of free game time) and is largely the reason, imo, Blizzard developed sharding to help offset this issue in the future. (See: Legion's much less troublesome launch.)
• The developers incorrectly believed that raid content alone would be enough to support the playerbase.
• Garrisons were a development nightmare.
• Once the developers realized that people were leaving the game at a rate that had previously never been experienced, the developers went into panic mode and were forced to rethink their overarching strategy moving forward.
• Because of this refocus, development time on what would have been content for WoD was shifted to work on Legion instead.
• 6.1 wasn't a real content patch and I'm sure in retrospect the developers regret trying to ship it as such.
• If players hadn't begun to leave WoD after reaching max level, WoD would have likely been a much different expansion.

WoD was a victim of circumstance more than anything else. I don't think that excuses all of its many flaws but we got Legion as a result of it so I don't think it's nearly as bad as many people on this forum like to pretend it is.

[Nitros14]

Nothing went wrong with it.

Good raids and you could raid log the whole expansion and only log on for raid.

Perfect. The rest of WoW is shit anyway.

[Cthulhu fhtagn]

Both the failing movie and badly received first tier made them panic from what i understand. They cut a tier, changed the tanaan tier by a lot and also had to start working on legion earlier than expected. The biggest failure was that the longest patch in wow was one that was developed for a really short time. For these changes the story made no sense. Still don't really understand how shit ended with Grom and Yrel.

There also was no mythic+ or any progression system outside maybe your pvp rating that you didn't max out in 2 months.

[Dhrizzle]

Two things:

1. The team focused waaayy too hard on the launch experience and didn’t think about sustainability. I’ll admit it - Garrison was kinda fun to get up and running, but after a month or two it was dead.

2. They just didn’t produce enough content. 2 raid tiers is very, very weak. Not sure why, maybe they had internal turmoil, or maybe it was just cost cutting/lots of devs being diverted from wow to ow/hearthstone etc.

They basically ditched part of the expansion to squeeze more into Legion, there was supposed to be an ogre continent we would visit.

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I always thought that’s why dragon soul was so crappy - short with lots of reused assets. Then again, the HOT heroics were legit.

Remember 3.3 days when we got a 12 boss raid AND 3 excellent dungeons?

Remember 3.2 when we got a tent to serve as both dungeon and raid? (Mostly just kidding, there was a lot of tents in that patch and some of them had reasonably cool stuff.)

[Relapses]

Nothing went wrong with it.

Good raids and you could raid log the whole expansion and only log on for raid.

Perfect. The rest of WoW is shit anyway.

While I agree with you, that's a mighty brave opinion to have around here.