WoW 11.0 Titanforge

[Nokster10]

Revamping the starting zone is a new experience, Dragonflight graphics, immersion of todays upgrades and actual improvements will do wonders.
Make old zones relevant at the same time for the older players. There is much more to focus on then the 4-5 new zones they only make in every expansion that gets boring way too fast.

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It mostly sold poorly because Blizzard had been underfire for whole of Shadowlands due lawsuits, the content inside shadowlands was bad and shadowland itself was worst of WoW's state. People lost fate. Dragonflight shown there is actual improvements again and that Blizzard can make decent content, the next expansion should increase in sales then DF did.

It sold poorly because there was nothing marketable, no big bad guy, no important event in the lore, nothing. They pushed the marketing on flying dragons, that's literally it...people who usually buy the expansion and play because they see some badass character simply didn't care or bother.
WoD was a complete shitshow that massacred the playerbase yet Legion sold great, becasue it marketed the burning legion and Illidan.

[Gimlix]

It sold poorly because there was nothing marketable, no big bad guy, no important event in the lore, nothing. They pushed the marketing on flying dragons, that's literally it...people who usually buy the expansion and play because they see some badass character simply didn't care or bother.
WoD was a complete shitshow that massacred the playerbase yet Legion sold great, becasue it marketed the burning legion and Illidan.

You comparing WoD with maybe triple the playerbase that SL had. Also you must remember that SL was biggest sold PC game within 24 hours for a brief period, Dragonflight being able to surpass that record is hard when SL also was considered the worst expansion of all time and people already losing alot of hope during BFA.

Dragonflight is the first real decent expansion since pandaria and it only requires onward from here.

[Mecheon]

It sold poorly because there was nothing marketable, no big bad guy, no important event in the lore, nothing. They pushed the marketing on flying dragons, that's literally it...people who usually buy the expansion and play because they see some badass character simply didn't care or bother.
WoD was a complete shitshow that massacred the playerbase yet Legion sold great, becasue it marketed the burning legion and Illidan.

"Dragons" was a good enough selling point for Deathwing back in Cata and we saw how that turned out. The theme is fine and a lot of WoW people I know put off by Shadowlands are much happier with it being the theme and a return to Azeroth. I'd also argue "Ancient Titan ruins that's the home of dragons" is kind of an important thing

Blizzard having its very public issues, a competitor coming out with a highly regarded competition in the form of Endwalker and World of Warcraft being an almost 20 year old video game of a generally dead genre that like, let's be frankly honest, most people have played and don't care about any more at this point, however? That'll hurt more than "We didn't drag out a new villain as the person to kill this time"

[Randris]

It sold poorly because there was nothing marketable, no big bad guy, no important event in the lore, nothing. They pushed the marketing on flying dragons, that's literally it...people who usually buy the expansion and play because they see some badass character simply didn't care or bother.
WoD was a complete shitshow that massacred the playerbase yet Legion sold great, becasue it marketed the burning legion and Illidan.

I think it also had to do with the attitude towards Blizzard. A lot of people still had confidence in them as a developer and felt they would right the ship. So WoW players were still willing to give the game a shot. I also think many were still stuck in the mindset of "WoW is the only MMO worth playing". That lasted up through Shadowlands. Not so much now. Obviously a lot of things went wrong for Blizzard and WoW over the past 5 years. A lot of it they brought on themselves but there's no doubt to me that the overall sentiment is very negative right now. So when we talk about low player counts and low expansion sales I think this is simply the new norm for WoW going forward.

[Luck4]

Certainly something they've tried with expansions. See WoD and us having to basically build up every city, plus initial plans for garrisons. Didn't turn out of course, but they've certainly tried with that.

Orcs came from Hell in Warcraft 1. The story was a portal opened up and they're spilling out so now you gotta lead them to victory or defeat them. We knew nothing about their land until WC2 came along and went "Hey, what if they weren't actually from hell?"

I don't understand why you replied this to me, my point wasn't about Garrisons' or the Orcs' origins.

That's exactly what happened in WC3. We went to two new places (Northrend, Kalimdor) and saw it from a foreign perspective, at least initially. We get over there with the orcs and there is this war we know nothing about, but stumble into the middle of and help the tauren.

Warcraft 3 stories started in Eastern Kingdoms for both the Human and Orc campaigns, and we see the Kalimdor exploration through the Orcs' perspective, and once there they start working with the Tauren, but our perspective remains on the Orc side of things, both the Tauren and the Night Elves are presented from Orcs' perspective, only after that we see Night Elves perspective and their Campaign, the story flow is completely different from what Blizzard is doing in recent expansions, were we see everything from a foreign perspective.

Same thing with Northrend, where we only go there after a whole Human arc in Eastern Kingdoms that lead us there. Same for Outland in Frozen Throne.

The problem with a world revamp remains the very simple Monke Brain thing of "Peopel want New Thing". A pure world revamp is, by definition, not a new thing and will be torn apart by people comapring it to . A new coat of paint on something isnt' going to change what's underneath. A pure revamp expansion will be torn apart because I've already been to these places, this isn't new content, why am I paying expansion prices for this worse version of Cata as Cata at least gave me zones we couldn't get to previously

I would agree with that if Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor weren't so Old and Outdated, not to mention that said expansion would still have New Dungeons, New Raids, and New Features, and all the World Content activities that are available in recent expansions could be added to these two continents.

Also, Arathi has proven that a Revamp can make a zone nearly unrecognizable.

And frankly, I don't think there's anything world revamp people can do about that. A pure revamp will always be seen by many people as an inferior product simply because it is focusing on polishing what is existing, rather than giving us something new. As far as players are concerned, expansions should be giving new stuff

More important than exploring new places is telling a good story, and the only way to achieve a good story using the playable race's lore, is by changing their status quo, that's why there's so much talk about Time Skip/World Revamp/WoW 2/and even Warcraft 4 because Blizzard already used all the good/popular stories; as was said by other posters the last pieces of Warcraft established lore was wrapped in BFA, this is so true that to make Shadowlands work they needed to change so much stuff that many players and content creator agreed that it did more harm than good for the whole franchise.

If a World Revamp is such a waste of resources and impossible to make, then I would say that, at the very least, Blizzard should make a side game to progress the lore further and change the status quo of Azeroth, so we can have places that make sense to visit, charismatic heroes to follow, popular villains to kill, and good stories to make us eager to know how it ends.

[Mecheon]

I would agree with that if Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor weren't so Old and Outdated, not to mention that said would still have New Dungeon, New Raids, and New Features, and all the World Content activities that are available in recent expansions could be added to these two continents.

Also, Arathi has proven that a Revamp can make a zone nearly unrecognizable.

You gotta understand when it comes to world revamps that there are lot of oldies like me that went through Vanilla, TBC, WotLK and then Cata, and as a result? We do not have a fond outlook on Cata changing up everything. That a lot of its effort was kind of wasted on, say, not giving us Abyssal Maw.

Basically, a revamp would be nice, sure, but what's the overall point when we want New? We've explored all of EK and Kalimdor at this point, where can we fit new dungeons except for like, I dunno, finally making Jadenar a dungeon (it basically has always been a semi-one) without doing another "Oops all Deathwings" style event?

Arathi's still recognisable as the zone it is. All of the background stuff is there, just the towns are expanded onto land that was blank previously. Every single point of interest is still there, including areas that aren't relevant to the warfront are just there, unused. The orc fortress is just built over the other Syndicate farm that used to be there. Look at Hammerfall or Faldir's Cove, both done up for the revamp but, don't play a part in what the zone becomes in its revamp. Both there ever since Vanilla. Also note the giant underwater ruin just off Faldir's, completely unused in the revamp. I don't even know if there are mobs there in that phase.

More important than exploring new places is telling a good story, and the only way to achieve a good story using the playable race's lore, is by changing their status quo, that's why there's so much talk about Time Skip/World Revamp/WoW 2/and even Warcraft 4 because Blizzard already used all the good/popular stories; as was said by other posters the last pieces of Warcraft established lore was wrapped in BFA, this is so true that to make Shadowlands work they needed to change so much stuff that many players and content creator agreed that it did more harm than good for the whole franchise.

If a World Revamp is such a waste of resources and impossible to make, then I would say that, at the very least, Blizzard should make a side game to progress the lore further and change the status quo of Azeroth, so we can have places that make sense to visit, charismatic heroes to follow, popular villains to kill, and good stories to make us eager to know how it ends.

There is more that BfA didn't touch. Undermine and Tel'abim, Odyn's inevitable betrayal, Black Empire as a wider thing, south of Pandaria and west of Kalimdor, the whole Last Titan thing from MoP and Azeroth's inevitable hatching from Azeroth, Void Lords, inevitable Yrel coming back, Outland's whole falling apart. Plenty of plot threads to tug on and do stuff with that we don't need time skips for. But, well, as both an Alliance player and a gnome main, player race lore being ignored has been the status quo for the Alliance ever since Wrath.

Thing is though, a revamp isn't necessarily going to fix all this because we've been to those placers. There needs to be a balance between revamping the old. Changing Elwynn Forest up to be fancier and have new buildings doesn't mean squat when I know it as the level 1-12 zone I spent time in gathering copper when it was going for high amounts on the AH on. I know Elwynn like the back of my hand. I've been up to that secret Elwynn house even in Classic. Its change in Cata wasn't all that big and I haven't done any of the revamped quests because.... I have actually no reason to. I've already been the whole way through Elwynn. This is the reality of a revamp, people there for a long time just aren't going to interact with it unless there's a draw to do so.

Shadowlands surprisingly did give us a popular villain to kill. Just, he wasn't the one Blizz were expecting to be the popular villain. It comes down to writing good villains. The dragons are considered far better villains than ol' Jailer for one, simply due to being written better and having clear understandable motives. Revamping the world or going to a new place doesn't make any chance to that, its just consistency in writing. Revamp or not, that's what's the important part

also as a dork on a roleplay server the sheer mention of another time skip is utter annoyance for us because 'time skip' also translates into 'whoops all the human/orc characters are dead but the elves are still kicking!'. No more time skips please. You've got the next generation of folks to play around with and do things