Usually the reason to quit SL is a very bad work/reward ratio. Up to certain point its true for me too.
But the main reason i quit WoW 1.5 months after release was the clear realization that SL developers DONT respect me, the player and customer.
I played every aspect of SL and can point at two major parts that define the disrespect towards players:
1)disrespect towards players time
2)pure incompetentce.
WoW always asked for a certain amount of time spent to get the rewads. It was fine every new expansion. Shadowlands took the crown of how every single part of gameplay designed to make player spend more time in the game with very little payoff.
1) Hamsterwheel time machine:
- WQs are put far from flying/teleportation point to make player run all the way to get to them.
- Map terrain designed the way to make player spend a lot of time to run around. Verticality of the landscape is the most brutal across all expansions.
- No whistle, no two way Oribos-Covenant portal are made to make players spent 5-10 minutes AFKing during flying. It struck me often how much time i spend in the game just AFK in the air while moving to different locations.
- Introduction story has no reason to not have a skip button. No reason at all. Its not fun beyond first time and its tedious.
- MAW. You know the deal.
- Anima requirements. 35-105 anima rewards, rarely 250. 1500, 2000, 3000 anima cost of a single reward piece that has already been put behind Renown or Quest time wall. 5k, 10k, 20k anima cost for Covenant upgrades. People who designed THAT dont care about players.
- Rare loot that makes players spend more time to get the rewards. Its in no way meaningful, since the game for a decade was designed so you can replace your item piece that you couldnt get for a few days in like a half an hour with lucky random drop. It makes no sense to make loot drop so rare.
2) Pure incompetence.
It boggles my mind how this game felt like it was in beta stage even 1.5 months after release.
- The most glaring one was the Maw Elite WQ that spawned twice a week. There are four rotating WQ with 1% chance to get the Maw Mount. I dont know was it fixed by now, but 1.5 months after release only ONCE i did that WQ succesfully. The rest were bugged in one way or another. You come in, you cant finish the quest, you check it out on Wowhead, you see people in the comment section sayin «Yeah, the quest isnt working». And this is pretty major Maw feature.
- Covenants werent tested out, neither powers, nor features like the commander table. The fact that it took Blizzard two months to somewhat bother to fix them with a tons of feedback that was given week 1 is a mindboggling. This is not an indie developer, this is 30yo rich company and the 15yo game.
- Bugged WQs. For a month doing one or another WQ i encountered some sort of minor or major bugs that werent fixed for a week or longer. I still wonder did they fix the ground bug around one of the Bastion’s transport point, where you COULDNT use teleportation (which was bought by Transport System upgrade for a 5k anima power btw) after completing daily activity, unless you relog.
- Torghast not being tested at all. Anima powers and mob scaling are way too off in between specs and classes. Twisted Corridors arent balanced at all.
I encountered everything i described above and to me this is enough to feel how developers despise me, whil asking my money for the game. I realized i cant encourage this attitude towards playerbase with subscription. It must NOT be tolearated.