Why did Blizzard abandon Scenario's (3 man scenario's)

[Lochton]

I honestly don't know. I would love to see it returned with scenarios of events plucked from the books, you know, scenes we don't see in-game but experience in the books.

[Ielenia]

How did it fail? Everyone back in the days at MoP loved it.

Myself, and everyone I knew, only "loved" scenarios because they were the quickest way to farm valor back in the day, especially as DPS, since the queue was near instantaneous most of the time since we wouldn't need to wait on a healer or tank.

[hulkgor]

How did it fail? Everyone back in the days at MoP loved it.

No, they didn't. Some did, but the widespread opinion was that they were completely rubbish and a boring experience (With zero replayability), hence why they were scrapped and no one (besides yourself, in your thread starting tantrum) complained about it.

[Foolicious]

The biggest problem what i remember is that most of them where a glorified escort quest. You where basically looking at some dude doing some important stuff while you killed the spawning bad guys that tried to stop him. It was very hard to fail, you had no real agency like you have in a real dungeon and tanks as well as healers where more of a burden than help for the group.

It works great for quests and should be used more to create a more dynamic adventure, but i don't think they are great as alternative content besides dungeons for example.

[Aucald]

I honestly don't know. I would love to see it returned with scenarios of events plucked from the books, you know, scenes we don't see in-game but experience in the books.

Scenarios would be a cool way to shoehorn in set pieces from the novels, short stories, and comics into the game as lore connectors of a sort. Add in some vanity rewards like xmog, mounts, or toys (perhaps the occasional piece of gear or such) and people would probably run them a few times.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

They were both boring and unrewarding, they also were a huge pain in the ass if you were carrying two idiots who didn't know how to do anything.

They were worse than 5mans when it came to dealing with afks, because you actually needed 2/3 to kick the afk instead of the 3/5. So if both of the other people were AFK, you were fucked. Either you did it solo or got the deserter debuff, while the AFKers got rewarded for all of your effort.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Because they were boring chores after doing them once and Blizzard has to this day struggled to find a place for content outside it's default reward structures. They were also superceeded by fully dynamically scaling group content.

[Lochton]

Scenarios would be a cool way to shoehorn in set pieces from the novels, short stories, and comics into the game as lore connectors of a sort. Add in some vanity rewards like xmog, mounts, or toys (perhaps the occasional piece of gear or such) and people would probably run them a few times.

Always what I thought would be cool. Let it be run by Explorer's League, the Reliquary, and the Lorewalkers, all three groups take you through stories and history of events in ebooks, comics, and books.

[Greyvax]

I actually enjoyed heroic scenarios. Quick role agnostic content and rewarded valor points to exchange for gear/upgrades.

[MrLachyG]

"Everyone" you know may have loved it, but they were broadly unpopular. That may be due to being poorly rewarded, though.

This. There was no incentive to do them. I think you got VP/JP but you could get that from other sources too so yeah there was no point. If they bring them back and give mounts, pets, toys, titles etc then people will do them

[Pakheth]

I found them too heavily scripted, often making you stand around waiting for the next part to start. If they had made them fluid, speeding up if players finished tasks earlier than expected then I think they could have been more well received.

I didn't dislike them however and I enjoyed collecting the unique colour versions of the gear it dropped.

[saixilein]

How did it fail? Everyone back in the days at MoP loved it.

I do scenarios so barely i cant even remember how many i did or wich one. Noone i know talked about it or played it.

[Sondrelk]

The main flaw of Scenarios were always that you had to queue for them. Noone likes sitting around for 10 minutes waiting to see what the next bit of questing is just because noone else is doing that questline at the same time.
Scenarios were always pitched as a questing equivalent, and with them being baked into regular questing they have effectively peaked in terms of what they offer as a medium.

The regular 3-man scenarios that were not strictly storyline focused in MoP were probably scrapped because they didnt add much more than a dungeon you didnt need a dedicated healer and tank for.
More importantly though because there were no ways to make it not annoying if you added rewards to them, and even worse if you didnt. Either everyone feels forced to do them, or noone wants to, and you potentially sit for hours trying to get into one.

Besides. MoP style scenarios have been in the game fairly recently. If you played through BfA you might remember Island Expeditions, which were in fact at some point mentioned as being designed as the MoP scenarios we never really got, with proper RNG features.
It failed spectacularly because of a myriad of reasons, primarily that they were 3-man and required for efficient grinding.


So in short, you could argue that 3-man Scenarios failed because they were 3-man, and not solo, which coincidentally is an option for all the Scenarios players enjoy now. From questing scenarios, and all the way back to rerunning old MoP scenarios and BfA Island expeditions.

[Katchii]

I remember enjoying them a bit back in MoP, but I honestly completely forgot about them afterward. I don't remember ever doing them besides just to see them, like a tourist, rather than for any actually compelling reason. They were forgettable to me, completely overshadowed by other aspects of the game.

[Fkiolaris]

I thoroughly enjoyed them on my dps characters. The normal daily was giving JP and the heroic daily (that you needed to manually form a group for) was giving VP. It was another way (enjoyable to me) of meeting your weekly quotas of JP/VP in case you were bored with dungeons, raids and daily quests. So they definitely served a purpose in my eyes.

The main complains from what I remember were that some were scripted/having too much "dead" time, some required the completion of objectives that were not clear/had bizarre timers and obviously the rewards. Personally, I think that all these things could have been dealt with and then scenarios could have been in the game, still, as a quick and fun side activity for those who want to do them.

[Guyviroth]

I would like to see scenarios reintroduced via the Caverns of Time, allowing us to revisit past, future, or alternate events on Azeroth. Could include;

- Battle of Blackrock Mountain during the second war between Anduin Lothar and Doomhammer.
- The defeat of Lei Shen at Uldum
- The battle between Aegwynn and the Avatar of Sargeras
- The war of the Three Hammers
- The co tamination if Gnomeregan
- an alternate timeline where Arthas listens to Medivh and retreats to Kalimdor, as outlined in Stormrage(?) novel
- an alternate timeline where Varian dismantles the Horde with our help
- an alternate timeline where we aid Garrosh in defeating the Alliance and conquering Azeroth

These scenarios could offer gold, materials, cosmetics, pets, and mount drops specific to each scenario. Something aki to the reward structure of islands, minus player power, but will be more involved than islands.

This could even be something that, if it is popular with the player base, could be continuously developed on to add more scenarios.

[Pandragon]

The same reason everything else gets abandoned. It's not quite right when it first launches, everyone bitches about it, then the rewards arent good enough so it dies down after a few months until no ones playing it. So they take that as a "everyone hates this feature" and they drop it.

[Kallisto]

How did it fail? Everyone back in the days at MoP loved it.

No, they didn't. People would quite literally ignore them until they added valour points to the heroic version. Even then they'd be done grudgingly. Things like this, dailies (remember when WoD announcement BlizzCon happened and they announced there would be no dailies in it. The crowd erupted) and few other things in MoP is why WoD was basically raid or don't bother logging on. People in mop bitched about scenarios, bitched about dailies, bitched about lfr having tier sets, bitched basically about not being able to log on and just raid. Which lead to THE raid of die expansion which is WoD, the most hated expansion. Now the cycle is complete with the complaints of the last 3 expansions (Legion, BFA and SL) to the point gearing-wise in a game where the gear chase is king is going to fully raid of die again it seems.

[MoanaLisa]

It's a feedback thing. The idea behind scenarios was great. Instanced content that was good for any number of players from 3 to 40 as it was originally introduced.

Then Blizzard created a bunch of uninspired cut-and-paste scenarios which were not well received because they were all pretty much alike. Blizzard read the negative feedback and abandoned them as a separate thing.

I thought it was dumb at the time as I believed then and believe now that applying some creativity and perhaps doing even a scenario chain or two for a patch would be better received. The most frustrating thing about it was one developer, I don't remember which one, said that the software wrapper for scenarios was flexible and easy to work with. They just never exerted themselves to do that.

For fuck's sake, they could have put some world bosses into scenarios, but no. "We'll give you two dozen of these things, most of them indistinguishable from another and trust that you'll love them."

Heroic scenarios were better received but I think the true problem with them was any lack of creativity to the content and the rewards at first were shit.

[Myradin]

No, they didn't. People would quite literally ignore them until they added valour points to the heroic version. Even then they'd be done grudgingly. Things like this, dailies (remember when WoD announcement BlizzCon happened and they announced there would be no dailies in it. The crowd erupted) and few other things in MoP is why WoD was basically raid or don't bother logging on. People in mop bitched about scenarios, bitched about dailies, bitched about lfr having tier sets, bitched basically about not being able to log on and just raid. Which lead to THE raid of die expansion which is WoD, the most hated expansion. Now the cycle is complete with the complaints of the last 3 expansions (Legion, BFA and SL) to the point gearing-wise in a game where the gear chase is king is going to fully raid of die again it seems.

Its pretty much this which has generated endless QQ about wow over time. Some people want to do more than just Raid or Die, but others just want to do Raid or Die and be equally capable as the first group. The first group is also unhappy if their non-raid content is rendered trivial in the gearing system.

Thus, outside content that rewards gear is 'bad' because its 'mandatory'. But content that doesnt reward gear is largely considered useless and a waste of time.