
Originally Posted by
Hitei
He wasn't a leaker.
There was a post on NGA (a major Chinese forum) during Legion that was attempting to establish a pattern in expansions, where he pointed out that themes in old expansions show up again in new expansions. e.g. "Burning Crusade was about Draenor and about the Legion, WoD is about Draenor and Legion is about the Legion". So he then concluded that following that same pattern, Wrath (Old Gods and Scourge) meant that the expansion after Legion would be about Old Gods and the one after that would be about the Shadowlands; and Cata (dragons and elements) meant that 10.0 would be about dragons and 11.0 would be about the elments.
People now mistakenly call him a leaker and also take his guesses as prophetic word.
Except we already know that expansions aren't developed like that, because the devs have outright said (on at least two occasions) that they just collaboratively brainstorm where would be cool to go next a couple expansions in advance and then decide on the story to get there. We also know that his lucky guesses have already sort of run out, because Dragonflight is both a dragon and elemental expansion, and his guess for 12.0 and 13.0 was that MoP was "Faction war and Sha" so 12.0 is gonna be Horde vs Alliance and 13.0 is going to be about the Sha, but even he recognized how the Sha coming back made no sense and suggested 13.0 was going to be the end of wow and about the Void instead--and of course, we already dealt with the faction war storyline back in 8.0 at the same time as the Old gods, so the pattern isn't actually a pattern.
tl;dr it was a regular forum poster who self-admittedly was guessing about random ideas and got lucky a few times, the guesses of whom people now really stupidly take as evidence of stuff happening in the future. In this case, Teriz really wants an Underground expansion, so he's arguing that the guess about 11.0 being "elemental" is proof of an Underground expansion.
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If Badlands were more to scale instead of essentially a single fairly small canyon, it'd make more sense for it just to be a desert-y western area. It's just such an out of the way zone though.