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

[potis]

The hate for WoD came in strong after a couple months, when people realized there wasn't much to do. It was a raid logging heaven with good leveling zones though.

The hate always comes when the clueless majority reaches the point where they are supposed to start raiding, and since they refuse to do so, its the games fault.

This has been the case since 2005 when the game released, the only thing that changes is how long it takes the clueless majority to reach the point where they realize they have to raid.

Usually its around the 5th month the last 4 expansions or so, things you are supposed to do the first few weeks (If they arent timegated), combined with the questline time gating they like to do to prolong subs, gives this result.

The more experienced players complain about systems from the alpha testing, they get ignored because its literally something like 5000 subs, vs 5m-10m subs of clueless that just buy the next expansion to play a bit and disappear again, and Blizzard knows this, thats why most feedback gets ignored.

The only difference is, the amount of information to the players, 2005-2010, still had low amount of information despite sites existing, now every single player uses some sort of information site, so they actually catch up eventually.

[Lorgran]

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

You forgot tBC, but tbh, it's so bad I see why you omitted it...

[kaminaris]

If you want to look at it another way, I bet WoW’s current player retention is a lot higher than it was back in vanilla, TBC, and Wrath.

That is only if you ignore the amount of people that stumbled upon it but decided its too late to join. Because current retail actively pushes out new player as early as in very first step.

[Relapses]

That is only if you ignore the amount of people that stumbled upon it but decided its too late to join. Because current retail actively pushes out new player as early as in very first step.

You do realize the game has a free trial designed specifically to help offset that likelihood, right?

[Kyphael]

Not really a fair way to compare expansions.

1. Woltk had no other big online games around. League of legends was still small and cs go wasnt to big yet. Both took off around cata

2. The older a game gets the harder it gets to hold subs and gain new. swap cata and woltk release and the sub count wouldnt have changed

People who read one graph and use it to say good or bad are weird for me.

Next you look at the graph of hate crimes commited in the US, see black people are overepresented in commiting them, and than you will claim all blacks are bad and asians who barely commit any are good.

thats not how graphs work, there is a enviroment behind them.

And mods before you now scream racist or anything, this is just the most easy example, if you have a better one i gladly exchange them in my comment

I don't know where the hell you were trying to go with that crime/rate analogy, as there's really no correlation at all here, but I'm just going to overlook that and bold the one thing I'll address.

Pretty sure WoW wasn't the only MMO around. It certainly wasn't the first of its kind, it just became the most popular and mainstream the fastest due to, well, it was a damn good game.

Also, Wrath sustained a healthy subscriber base because it was consistent in quality gameplay and replay value. Cataclysm crashed and burned because this was when the game became very polarizing to its increasing player base, finding it difficult to strike middle ground and content appealing to the hardcore and casual players alike, not to mention lack of actual abundance of content as so much time was spent on re-building the world at the expense of other content cut due to lack of time.

Arthas was also a very popular character, with Wrath solidifying him as a mainstream villain whereas Deathwing, while aesthetically very cool at first (cool, giant dragon destroying the world!), it quickly became very obvious his story was going to be more 2-dimensional than an Atari game, even to casuals and general players who had been exposed (over-exposed?) to The Lich King in dungeons and quests throughout all of Wrath, versus Deathwing who just spent his expansion cycle screaming and spinning fire at people.

Wrath was an expansion of much higher quality in every way which is why it maintained its healthy player base, versus Cataclysm which was flawed with bad decisions all around right out of the gate.

[Ringthane]

I wish we could go back to the days where my biggest gripes with the game was something like class balance.

I remember when the biggest problem people seemed to have with WoW was that the dragon in the Wrath login screen was too loud. People used to post how quickly they could get logged in and bypass it.

[Palapop]

You left out WoD DESTROYED GATHERING. Also NO FLIGHT for far too long, and only getting it after serious player abandonment.

Ouh... thought that 1 came with Legion. Ty for remind agree on both things.

Completely forgot.

[kaminaris]

You do realize the game has a free trial designed specifically to help offset that likelihood, right?

Free trial is step 2. People fall off at step 1 - around research.

[Maruka]

This will be the first XP since cata that i havent cancelled my sub at one point during the XP. The reason is TBC/Classic i gave up on SL long ago.

[cparle87]

I actually disagree here. I really liked the idea of a "subclass" that you have to dedicate your character to. Like there would also be "no harm" in letting people swap their class and race at will, mechanically speaking, but that sort of defeats the purpose of roleplaying a real character. If I had designed covenants, all of the spells would have been cosmetic glyphs to replace existing class spells, so nobody would have "needed" to be in the best covenant for different types of content. That or just only allow Covenant spells in open world content.

They're running with that idea in Zereth Mortis. I've already found a bunch of threads with people calling the entire zone "meaningless" cause it won't contribute to raid/key power.

[Afrospinach]

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

These features were much later in the xpac.

Aside from the usual balance humdrum WotLK was really well received until that point. I have to say now with the re release of classic and so on all the criticism about LFG was dead on too.

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.

Thing is you have no idea what the retention rate was.

I bet you the first 3 xpacs lost more people than any other xpac, there were just people lining up to replace. Something like more than 100 million people had played wow at some point by WotLK. This also probably explains why the whining seems louder now, that is what you have left. The people that are just going to up and leave have already left a long time ago.

[hulkgor]

No.

Every expansion is shat on throughout its existence, or at least some aspects of it, only for it to turn to praise and nostalgia as soon as the next one releases.

It's actually very, very funny to observe.

[Coldkil]

Early Legion was pretty shit with Legiondaries but it got a lot better by the end. I wasn't a huge fan of it. I quit in Nighthold and it remains the only time I quit the game because I just wasn't having fun with it.

Are you me by chance? xD

Anyway on topic: yes, every expansion is gonna be shat on because some people won't like the new stiff introduced for whatever reason so it's gonna be automatically bad.

[Black Rider]

No, each one was.

Simple truth lol

[Polybius]

I’d say no expansion has been shit on, just their features. Lately, the expansions have been on track for introducing the worst systems conceivable and forcing them on the player, all for the sake keeping the player subscribed without fun factored in.

[Steelangel]

To answer the OP's title question:

No.

Every xpac has been shat on by people who hate it to the extent that the forums for current content look like hatefests.

About 2 xpacs later, the forums look back with nostalgia over the past expacs.

I never EVER thought I'd see the day when people looked back at Cataclysm or WoD fondly. But here we are.

[Syegfryed]

Bfa: No explaination

Shadowlands: No explaination

no explanation? rly?

the thing is, the community is divided, some people will complain about everything, just because there is complain don't mean is justified, most of MOP complain was daily and pandarens, game had less far problems there than now.

- - - Updated - - -

I never EVER thought I'd see the day when people looked back at Cataclysm or WoD fondly. But here we are.

thats because they suck, but not much as the recently expansions, simple as that.

[Lionhearte0]

only factor on whether an expansion sucks or is successful is raw sub data. subs went up gradually from vanilla to wrath.

No it fucking isn't. There's tons of reasons subs will fluctuate that have no importance on whether the game is good or not. WoW's numbers began to decline after the subprime mortgage crisis hit in America and I knew plenty of people during late-Wrath who had to quit because money got tight and either they or their parents couldn't afford to keep them subbed. That's about when subs began to drop.

Cataclysm also correlated with many of the Vanilla players entering college at the same time, so sub numbers dropped.

Shadowlands is also the fastest-selling WoW expansion of all time, with more than 3.7 million copies sold in one day, which happened to be in 2020. In the middle of a fucking global pandemic.

None of these mean anything in terms of how good the game is.

[Relapses]

No it fucking isn't. There's tons of reasons subs will fluctuate that have no importance on whether the game is good or not. WoW's numbers began to decline after the subprime mortgage crisis hit in America and I knew plenty of people during late-Wrath who had to quit because money got tight and either they or their parents couldn't afford to keep them subbed. That's about when subs began to drop.

Cataclysm also correlated with many of the Vanilla players entering college at the same time, so sub numbers dropped.

Shadowlands is also the fastest-selling WoW expansion of all time, with more than 3.7 million copies sold in one day, which happened to be in 2020. In the middle of a fucking global pandemic.

None of these mean anything in terms of how good the game is.

You're close but not quite there. (I will say I think this is the first time I've seen sub losses correlated with the subprime crisis... that's a new one.)

Importantly, it's not just people quitting that matter for a subscription model. Equally as important as attrition is new player generation. Players on forums only seem to care about making arguments about the reasons people quit but they hate to acknowledge the very real fact that new WoW players are created every day. I mean, after all, how could new people be signing up to play a game they don't like??? Unbelievable! Since Blizzard has never released their retention or new player creation data, take it with a grain of salt every time you see people correlate {x feature} with {y number} of subscriber losses.

[ArenaDk]

I don't know where the hell you were trying to go with that crime/rate analogy, as there's really no correlation at all here, but I'm just going to overlook that and bold the one thing I'll address.

Pretty sure WoW wasn't the only MMO around. It certainly wasn't the first of its kind, it just became the most popular and mainstream the fastest due to, well, it was a damn good game.

Also, Wrath sustained a healthy subscriber base because it was consistent in quality gameplay and replay value. Cataclysm crashed and burned because this was when the game became very polarizing to its increasing player base, finding it difficult to strike middle ground and content appealing to the hardcore and casual players alike, not to mention lack of actual abundance of content as so much time was spent on re-building the world at the expense of other content cut due to lack of time.

Arthas was also a very popular character, with Wrath solidifying him as a mainstream villain whereas Deathwing, while aesthetically very cool at first (cool, giant dragon destroying the world!), it quickly became very obvious his story was going to be more 2-dimensional than an Atari game, even to casuals and general players who had been exposed (over-exposed?) to The Lich King in dungeons and quests throughout all of Wrath, versus Deathwing who just spent his expansion cycle screaming and spinning fire at people.

Wrath was an expansion of much higher quality in every way which is why it maintained its healthy player base, versus Cataclysm which was flawed with bad decisions all around right out of the gate.

Expansion of higher quality.

reusing 3 raids

many 1 room raids

using upscaled trashmobs as bosses

timegating
low amount of different daylies
reused armor assets with colour shifts / minor adjustments spread through the whole expansion

but cata was low quality, yep. Naxx was an insane raid tier, or do you loved the tournament more? Oh wait Ulduar....but the devs recently made an interview saying it was one of the least progressed raids of all time while it was in content..... something doesnt add up. maybe you mean the new bg? no wait everyone hated that one....and cata had 2 who are still beloved....

I think you miss wrote low quality carried by hype. But I would love to hear how you excuse that

And to get back to topic. Its also a bit more how the way of expressing us changed. Forums, Twitter, youtube nowdays give a far bigger audience and usually drama gets the most attention. No one will like to hear me talk about how I loved pet battle but everyone loves to read negativ comments and the fights which follow