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

[Aucald]

I see this a lot, people saying they werent popular followed by an admittance that they themselves and others they knew did like them. Did people really not like that, or is that an assumption based on their no longer being around? I've rarely seen anyone hate on them, mostly either indifference or love.

Pretty sure the developers actually stated that they weren't very well received when people asked where Scenarios had gone when WoD rolled around since WoD only had a handful of them and they were only tied to quest-chains and not independently persistent or able to be queued. Anecdotally I know a lot of people also disliked them or didn't bother with them as well, considering them not really worth the time/effort and so forth.

[Toppy]

Pretty sure the developers actually stated that they weren't very well received when people asked where Scenarios had gone when WoD rolled around since WoD only had a handful of them and they were only tied to quest-chains and not independently persistent or able to be queued. Anecdotally I know a lot of people also disliked them or didn't bother with them as well, considering them not really worth the time/effort and so forth.

And we both know the devs never lie, especcially in regards to systems they remove and are met with a wave of anger over it.

[Aucald]

And we both know the devs never lie, especcially in regards to systems they remove and are met with a wave of anger over it.

I don't recall the removal of Scenarios ever being met with a "wave of anger," though. It was more of a puzzled "huh?" from a smallish cross-section of people who liked them.

[Flurryfang]

And we both know the devs never lie, especcially in regards to systems they remove and are met with a wave of anger over it.

We know they lie, but if you would be very counter-productive if they lied about if something is popular or not, as it is in their interest to make more of what is popular.

Its not like scenarios were time consuming or not worth the effort from a developer point of view. They could easily be mass produced with the tools they have now, so there is proberly some truth in their statement.

[Celement]

And we both know the devs never lie, especcially in regards to systems they remove and are met with a wave of anger over it.

I mean I recall half hour queues after two weeks with the normal ones. Heroic were ran a ton but not because they were awesome but they were by far the most efficient way to gain valor.

[Sondrelk]

I don't recall the removal of Scenarios ever being met with a "wave of anger," though. It was more of a puzzled "huh?" from a smallish cross-section of people who liked them.

I think some of it also came down to noone really being sure what scenarios were supposed to really be.
The queueable questing thing was definitely neat, but having it be infinitely redoable didn't really add much to the experience over something more standard like a dungeon. It really was the case here you had to ask why not just make quests as a whole redoable seeing as that is what scenarios really were.

Imagine if Blizzard added a feature where you could reset a zone and do all the quests again.
What exactly would that feature really bring to the table? Sure it might be neat to revisit a particular questing experience with your preferred character over using an alt, but would you do that more than once?

And of course, as I mentioned before. It was 3 person content. So you couldn't even really do it on a lark for fun at your own pace. You had to either find two other like minded people to do it, or just hope that the two random people you found didn't intend to Speedrun it for whatever reward.

[Aucald]

I think some of it also came down to noone really being sure what scenarios were supposed to really be.
The queueable questing thing was definitely neat, but having it be infinitely redoable didn't really add much to the experience over something more standard like a dungeon. It really was the case here you had to ask why not just make quests as a whole redoable seeing as that is what scenarios really were.

Imagine if Blizzard added a feature where you could reset a zone and do all the quests again.
What exactly would that feature really bring to the table? Sure it might be neat to revisit a particular questing experience with your preferred character over using an alt, but would you do that more than once?

And of course, as I mentioned before. It was 3 person content. So you couldn't even really do it on a lark for fun at your own pace. You had to either find two other like minded people to do it, or just hope that the two random people you found didn't intend to Speedrun it for whatever reward.

Yeah, Scenarios had a lot of elements about them that kind of made them lackluster in terms of repeatable, queueable content - if you didn't like the story behind the Scenario, they quickly became chore-like (which is why people would generally speed-run them for the rewards).

[Nzx]

This attitude is reaching a new zenith with Dragonflight, wherein there is nothing new to keep you occupied other than raiding/m+/rated PvP. It's going to be the instance-oriented player's dream of never having to interact with the world of the game at all.

Can't wait. No more engaging 'world content' like flying around ZM for 30 minutes a day doing chores. If that's the kind of shit you enjoy doing, good riddance. Stardew Valley or whatever exists for you.

[Atrea]

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

No they didn't.

Towards the end of the expansion you couldn't even get a group for them. You'd sit in queue for hours.

[saintminya]

No they didn't.

Towards the end of the expansion you couldn't even get a group for them. You'd sit in queue for hours.

That wasn't my experience at all. Queues for normal and heroic were basically instant early on, but by 5.4 it never took more than like 9 minutes for heroic.

More power to you if you actually waited that long for something fun but hardly rewarding, I wouldn't even wait an hour for a fresh or stale SoO run.

[bloodmoth13]

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

Often enough how enjoyable particular content is is based solely on the rewards provided and nothing to do with the content done.
Doing something Hella fun but with no reward doesn't give the dopamine hit grinding something you hate that rewards something great does.
This game is populated by Pavlov's dog.

[Wermys]

Reason a lot of us hated Scenarios was that the scenario with a little tweaking could be made into a Dungeon. It was basically a stop gap half assed solution that could have gone the full way instead and gave us relevant content.

[FuxieDK]

They were perfect for telling story of a specific zone or town. They were used for alot of places in MoP and it was pretty well received during it's lifespan.
So why did they quit doing this? It required no tank/heal most of the times, you had fast queue's, the run itself was alot faster then dungeons and you could still get some rewards from it. They were perfectly made really.

So why not just re-introduce it for leveling and endgame?

They were incredible lame and even more a zerg fest than dungeons are, as they were designed for 3x DPS.
Story telling wise, they did nothing solo-scenarioes can't do today.

[Guanciale]

It was their attempt to solve lack of healers/tanks, created by way too hardcore dungeons in Cata. It failed. Nobody liked it.

As usual, when you are not spouting casual rubbish, here you are making points you couldnt possible know when blizzard themselves never stated offically. Just cos ideas spawn in your brain doesn't make them true or of any worth.

[Tojara]

I'm going to guess that they didn't see much use, otherwise they would've kept at it. While Blizzard does bullshit certain things with responses, it would make absolutely zero sense to continue features that are seen as wildly popular. While you can question releases, lack of content and overall balance in the game, it would just seem downright destructive to purposely get rid of features in the game that were wildly popular.

Blizzard in my eyes just got better at doing tech which involved solo scenarios, and scratched out regular 3 man scenarios.

Scenarios were originally designed as role agnostic, a short story attached, that allowed people to 'quickly' get in and out. I don't recall them ever being rewarding except for some of the heroic ones where there was a chance to get something okay for like an alt. You could get reroll coins or smash valor on some of the quicker ones, but that was about it. They never felt forced to me as there was alternate means to get both reroll coins and valor anyway. I remember doing the RFC scenario (or Vale I forget now) a lot at the end of MoP simply because it was super fast and a great way to get quick valor. The rest of them? I did once to see the story and then proceeded to never do them again.

In my eyes they just seemed like a 1/4 of a dungeon and towards the end of MoP they still had queues despite not being designed around healers/tanks, which sort of defeats the entire purpose of it. They weren't challenging in the slightest (this is okay, not everything needs to be challenging) and there were alternate ways to better rewards instead of doing them. They just seemed pointless to me, and the time spent making them would've probably been better used making more dungeons (MoP never added additional dungeons) or just making better solo scenarios in the game.

It's sort of why they eventually abandoned challenge modes as well. Keep in mind my opinion on CMs is that the MoP/WoD ones should still exist in game, but M+ is just a better evolution of it. While there was a big community around CMs initially I think that was mostly just because MoP had pretty nice looking sets and it was a new feature. You could certainly tell the drop off in interest in WoD, but part of that was likely because just a single weapon and a Yeti doesn't outweigh four different bird mounts and an entire unique looking class set. If you want another 'feature' they removed, you need to look no further than 5v5 arena. The participation in 5s dropped off so fucking massively after the first couple seasons in TBC.

[Sialina]

The first time doing a scenario I quite enjoyed it, but after that it felt very samey.

They had a few key problems preventing me from enjoying them fully:
1. A scripted encounter is great once, maybe twice, after that you just want to get on with the gameplay
(The stratholme Dungeon/scenario where you lead Arthas around comes to mind, people just drop if it pops)
2. Sometimes you'd get queued up with 2 other people that already did it, and they'd be a hindrance from enjoying the
story bits.
3. Because of 3x dps I wager they had a lot fewer interesting mechanics that could be implemented beyond zerging.
4. The scenarios we got felt very samey after 1 playthrough.
5. The queues die out after a while, scenarios made a comeback in legion as the end of the invasions (3 man scenario that you
queue after completing the 5 worldquests) and again by the end of legion it was nigh impossible to get a queue to pop.

[McNeil]

Scenario's were just cheaper dungeons. I like the storydriven ones like assisting Vol'jin but the ones at the start were really dull (especially the one where you had to escort a pandaren to the top with her ale, so much scripted content just to wait for ambushes). Like with most feature it had potential to be a lot better but it gets tossed away as usual. I guess Island Expedition is kind of the same but also sufferred from being just a chore to earn borrowed power. At least it has a lot of collectibles to make up for it.

[Darknessvamp]

Because there was a bunch of issues with their execution as repeatable content as e.g. they rewarded the charm currency which was used to buy your weekly raid boss coins and valor meaning Blizzard intended you to do them over and over but also gear that wasn't worthwhile, the scenarios stages were hardcoded so having played them once then you'd seen it all and knowing what to do to rush (but not make interesting) certain stages as well as how much downtime that could occur in certain scenarios soured the experience and not to mention how queuing for one became more of a chore when they introduced Heroic Scenarios later which were then exacerbated by the playerbase e.g. people constantly dropping queue or quitting at the start of 'dead' scenarios (laughably a scenario that was designated as would take 'too long' to do) to re-queue leaving many runs in limbo since most scenaros required three players for key sections in addition to people suddenly becoming concerned with performance when doing them with the intro of the heroic versions and acting like they were picking someone for a raid and then finally Blizzard's approach to fixing the problems didn't do much e.g. introduced Heroic scenarios late in the expansion that gave you more valor and decent gear once a week (they expected you to run the mode once) but you had to manually form the group yourself in order for the Scenario section of the DF to let you queue for it and people would still quit depending on the type of scenario you got and you then had no proper way of replacing them with the new grouping requirements meaning the run would usually have to be abandoned and start over a new group and it just felt like another chore much in the same way dailies did at the start of MoP.

Which is why you see Blizzard mainly using the technique for story quests or events instead of repeatable content and when they do something similar for rewarded end game stuff e.g. islands, N'zoth's Nightmare, etc it's usually more open in what players can do.

[Zka]

I hate these mandatory, unskippable, long, boring, unchallenging scenarios with a passion and would have paid $ to skip them.

Optional scenarios (easymode dungeons) you needed to queue for were OK. Mostly because you didn't have to do them

[Puxycat]

They were too easy and not rewarding at all.