Has there ever been an Xpac that wasn't shat on by the community

[crusadernero]

You're damn right, that's our tradition and all future wow players heritage and we must fight to preserve it

- - - Updated - - -



Because Blizz was stuck on "meaningful choices"

To a certain degree I can respect that. But when they realised how badly it worked out(not long after SL launch), they should have just done what they did in 9.1.5. It sucks that Blizzard is SO slow in making changes.

[Merin]

As someone who lived through each expansion launch, my take was that they had had far less biting negativity, there was more concern and focused feedback rather than outright ire like nowadays.

Earlier expansions were flawed in spots, but obviously still very enjoyable. However, after years of ignored feedback, company and developer apathy towards both the game and its playerbase, core improvements almost halting to a standstill for half a decade+, a tidalwave of brain drain and now endless office drama and corporate miasma those flaws have turned to rot.

If you're concerned about all this negativity and simply want to play: avoid social media, or at least find a pocket of it that suits you (they exist). Absolutely none of this matters the moment you press X on the browser.

It's OK to protect your mental wellbeing, in the end it really is just a game.

[caervek]

What you're saying is technically correct OP, every expansion has been shat on (even TBC was flamed at the time by players who preferred vanilla) but what you're missing is scale. I.E soldiers from my country died in both the Falklands war and WW2, but if you asked which was worse you would get a pretty unanimous answer. Yes every expansion has been shat on but not every one has been shat on as hard and by as many people.

Legion was the best-received expansion I can remember. But I think that had a lot to do with coming after WoD, one of the worst received expansions

WoD was also very well received (as was Shadowlands) for the month until most people ran out of stuff to do. And then of course the mechanical changes started hitting hard (last minute removal of flying in an expansion with maps designed for flying, removal of 10m mythic with no proper adjustment and refusal to engage player issues, etc).

- - - Updated - - -

People get very confused around Legion. Legion was massively flamed from the get go until 7.3 when the game actually became playable. A few reminders:

/snip

Thats just off the top of my head. 7.3.5 legion was practically what people remember, but that was created after hundreds of changes and hotfixes.

One big one you forgot (probably because it exploded when Lore admitted it but had simmered down by launch (as players had given up on trying to convince them they were making a mistake by then). Was the removal of Warriors Gladiator spec, because the Legion team couldn't be bothered to design a fourth artefact (I think they removed Monks Fistweaving too?). Still waiting for it to be added back after Legion like Lore said they were hoping too :P

[Sharein]

After BFA and Shadowlands it got me thinking. Has there ever been a WoW expansion where the community didn't shit on it? Its always whining. Some of it is deserved absolutely, but I feel a lot of it is just ridiculous. Like I can get why Metzen quit because of negativity

Wotlk: Introduction of LFG and the first store mount

Cata: Heroics too hard, Dragon soul

MoP: "Kung fu panda and too many dailies!!"

WoD: Nothing to do, worst expansion ever

Legion: World of RNGcraft. Legendary system is terrible.

Bfa: No explaination

Shadowlands: No explaination

At this point I almost feel like Blizzard could have made the perfect expansion and people would still find a way to complain about it. Not saying that right now its not deserved, but if you think about it, there has been whining about every single expansion ever. People may even have complained about TBC and Vanilla IDK I didn't play then

I don't know, it kinda pierces my heart. I know deep down, we all love WoW and want it to succeed so why are we so hard on it? I still dare say that even during Shadowlands, its still the best MMO out there. The systems are whack, but the gameplay, the lore, the everything is just so many miles better than anything else.

Then again there is no excuse for people like Danuser and Ion

No.

Even TBC and WotLK were shat on during the day.

[florclorbromiod]

No. According to the WoW playerbase the worst expansion is always the current one.

People shat all over WOTLK when it was current. Naxxramas re-use got mocked, ToC got mocked for being one room, LFG got mocked, ICC's timegating got mocked and " Father... is it over? " and " There must always be a Lich King " got memed into oblivion. There was OUTRAGE on the forums.

And now WOTLK is thought of as the best expansion.

You should never listen to forum complaints unless they have actual facts behind ( like balance issues, those are fairly easy to prove as objective fact )

[Vakna]

Nope, because even if you're the best game dev on the planet you can't please everyone. Appealing to one subset of fans will always actively displease another subset of fans.

[Powerogue]

You forgot how BC introduced flying and ruined world pvp forever.

Now people absolutely lose their minds if they have to spend more than 1 second online to use flying in a new zone, they need it that badly.

[Orby]

You forgot how BC introduced flying and ruined world pvp forever.

Now people absolutely lose their minds if they have to spend more than 1 second online to use flying in a new zone, they need it that badly.

I am still kind of anti flying to this day, especially in the thought of it in a MMO. When it comes to MMO immersion I see it as you are supposed to immerse yourself 'in', not 'over' it.

But at this point I am more an advocate of 'okay so we have flying, but try and incorporate it better into WoW than it currently is'. Flying these days is more a cheat code and not another way to travel. Flying needs to have its own risks as much as ground riding does.

[Swnem]

No. Problems were gradually fixed within whole xpack and had been completely fixed only by Cata, that caused another meme to appear.

Yes, it was. One shots were nerfed after the first patch, but Ret was still strong especially paired with the also OP DK in 2's. They further gutted paladin in Cata, yes. I know, i was there and played Paladin.
Anyways, back to the point, the game has always had balance issues. That never stopped and i assume never will. It's not reason for any one expansion to be bad. It's just a bad aspect of the game as a whole.

[crusadernero]

I've been playing a number of other MMOs lately and none of them have flying and they are just fine. But, then, they don't need flying because they don't make travel either a tedious chore or a taxi-ride excuse to hit the restroom and get a drink and order a pizza. Travel in WoW just is, and always has been, pretty awful and flying is the one thing that makes it somewhat less shitty.

In MMORPG these days its flying or portals everywhere with loading screens, or both. Personally, I prefer flying.

[Aurabolt]

No, each one was.

Correct, Burning Crusade included.

All one has to do is look at TBCC for reminders =P

This is also why I think Blizzard should make Single player games set in the Warcraft Universe personally.

[crusadernero]

I'm cool with either, really. They're all solutions to the same problem: travel is boring in games. When I play a game I just want to get into the action and have fun, not plod along with the scenery for a few minutes to a quarter of an hour (some taxis in Vanilla were super-long), wasting my precious playtime.

I understand that and that has always been a tight balance in MMORPG games, not just in wow. How much of convenient transport before its to much or to little? Why make wast worlds if people just want to plop into action?

I strongly dislike any MMORPG with loading screens, it sucks. It has its use and is conventient, but I feel disjointed from the world as a whole. I prefer the vanilla style than over that. That said - I understand why others find the vanilla foreverflightpaths to suck.

In recent years wow retail zones has made me wanted flying much more because the mob density is so high and the zones feels small. They cram so many mobs into smaller zones it gets annoying to traverse around.

Example: I can mostly run around in vanilla zones rather freely without there being some omegachad mob there to ruin my day, most of the time. Retail? They are everywhere except on the road.

[cparle87]

After BFA and Shadowlands it got me thinking. Has there ever been a WoW expansion where the community didn't shit on it? Its always whining. Some of it is deserved absolutely, but I feel a lot of it is just ridiculous. Like I can get why Metzen quit because of negativity

Wotlk: Introduction of LFG and the first store mount

Cata: Heroics too hard, Dragon soul

MoP: "Kung fu panda and too many dailies!!"

WoD: Nothing to do, worst expansion ever

Legion: World of RNGcraft. Legendary system is terrible.

Bfa: No explaination

Shadowlands: No explaination

At this point I almost feel like Blizzard could have made the perfect expansion and people would still find a way to complain about it. Not saying that right now its not deserved, but if you think about it, there has been whining about every single expansion ever. People may even have complained about TBC and Vanilla IDK I didn't play then

I don't know, it kinda pierces my heart. I know deep down, we all love WoW and want it to succeed so why are we so hard on it? I still dare say that even during Shadowlands, its still the best MMO out there. The systems are whack, but the gameplay, the lore, the everything is just so many miles better than anything else.

Then again there is no excuse for people like Danuser and Ion

All of them have been shat. BC for "ruining" the Legion with spaceships and such. Wrath for making Arthas a Saturday morning cartoon village, the store, and lfg. And you got most of the rest.

[Orby]

I've been playing a number of other MMOs lately and none of them have flying and they are just fine. But, then, they don't need flying because they don't make travel either a tedious chore or a taxi-ride excuse to hit the restroom and get a drink and order a pizza. Travel in WoW just is, and always has been, pretty awful and flying is the one thing that makes it somewhat less shitty.

I think flying has made the community very conditioned to have it, we have had it for so long that its pointless to try and change it. I feel removing flying from WOW could do more worse for the community than better despite how much I feel about it.

So I have just come around to accepting flying but trying to take it that step further. So I don't wanna take flying away, I feel that ship is sailed, but to try and make flying better is some way than just a get out quick scheme. Personally I feel MMOs should not have flying, but if you do have flying, make it more than some A-Z easy transport. that's what flightpaths are for :P

[Isaelyn]

Lmao... WotLK was the most most hated. Yet it's named the best expansion by the vast majority of players. And through out WoD people were bitching about WotlK? Gotta love when people spout bs like that.

I don't disagree that wrath was a good expansion, personally I loved wrath, my point was just that at the time I saw more hate for wrath during the time wrath was current than I have for any other expansion at the time of it's own being current, before or since. When wrath ended, the hate stopped and it became accepted as the best expansion, but in it's own time the forums and in game chats were absolutely vitriolic in their hate for the expansion on a level I did not see in WoD directed at WoD, or even BFA directed at BFA

[KSM899]

I've been playing since BC, I would say Legion was the least xpac community complained about.

WoD was the most, closely followed by BFA and Shadowlands.

[Diaphin]

only factor on whether an expansion sucks or is successful is raw sub data. subs went up gradually from vanilla to wrath. id say that was successful regardless of opinion. when did blizzard stop releasing sub numbers? if subs were still going up id bet blizzard would still track it. but as long as it drastically is going down they never will. you could give someone thousands of dollars and they would still bitch. couple years ago here in the st louis area a man won a 15 million dollar lottery prize. on tv he was bitching about it taking up to a week to get his money deposited, and how he had to go to his bank to deal with the issues of having 15M deposited. guy had a disgusted look on his face the whole time while speaking on tv. like come on man you won 15M dollars and he was bitching..... doesnt matter the expansion/scenario you arent pleasing everyone. some people just hate life.

This isn't really a good measurement of the games quality though, considering that this is a 17 years old game and during that time, the video game industry and the tastes of newer players rapidly changed, away from MMO-RPGs more into other genres, especially since the whole genre of mass online gaming became more diversified and social media made one of WoW appealing points, that you are basically able to meet and interact with people all around the world, redundant. So Wotlks height was never that sustainable and won't be reached by a MMO-RPG again, as long as the industry isn't massively shifting into the favor of that particular genre again.

only 3 expansions i can recall were flat out shit on. the rest seem to have overall positive comments from the community.

They usually get received more positively long after they are over, during the time an expansion is running, its usually always received as the worst expansion ever. I bet that in a few years, we will also see quite some BfA nostalgia rise up again. I mean, hell, I even saw some WoD nostalgia around here.

[neik]

community didn't shit on it

People are allowed to have opinions. How many times in human history people weren't abused like trash by corporate mongrels? Close to zero I'd suspect. The degeneracy is uncanny, people do remember it. This doesn't mean that the Blizzard should obey every single player demand, but they shouldn't act like a "Muh money.." tyrants, either.

[BarosanuNr1]

Obviously, it's never the same people complaining. Almost all systems that received complaints over the years have been very divisive among the playerbase (e.g., TBC's welfare PvP gear, WotLK's difficulty & LFD, Cata's dungeons & LFR, MoP's dailies & pandas, WoD's flying ban & content amount, Legion's various systems etc.). Take Cataclysm as a more specific example: (some) people complained that dungeons were too hard, so Blizzard nerfed them; then, (some, obviously other) people complained that dungeons were too easy. No matter how Blizzard chose to react (stick to their original plan or bend over), they would have still gotten complaints from somewhere.

[craigw]

This isn't really a good measurement of the games quality though, considering that this is a 17 years old game and during that time, the video game industry and the tastes of newer players rapidly changed, away from MMO-RPGs more into other genres, especially since the whole genre of mass online gaming became more diversified and social media made one of WoW appealing points, that you are basically able to meet and interact with people all around the world, redundant. So Wotlks height was never that sustainable and won't be reached by a MMO-RPG again, as long as the industry isn't massively shifting into the favor of that particular genre again.



They usually get received more positively long after they are over, during the time an expansion is running, its usually always received as the worst expansion ever. I bet that in a few years, we will also see quite some BfA nostalgia rise up again. I mean, hell, I even saw some WoD nostalgia around here.

the more people you have playing your game means you are doing something right. people bitching up a storm about wrath of the lich king is unwarranted. raw numbers prove that the shitting on is uncalled for. it just means that individual in particular doesnt like it. complaints are fine, but completely shitting on it when it had the highest numbers of all time doenst make a lick of sense. if people are shitting on a game you make, and it is 10 years old but yet you have the highest raw numbers of any point in the exsistance of the game are you gonna overhaul everything to accomidate those shitting on it or are you going to go about what you were doing in the past as it was working while your numbers constantly grew. as long as numbers grow the complaints of the few are meaningless. now with the later expansions with people shitting on everything and anything and numbers consistently going down id say the shitting on is warranted. popularity of a game is def a factor and a good measurement to tell yourself if you are doing something right and the path you need to move forward in. if you feel the quality of a game is bad who are you? does everyone feel that way? are yours and my def of a quality game the same? you use raw sub numbers. as 12 million active subs are greater than your complaint that the game is shit in quality.