Like how does that work?
Like how does that work?
SoO only lasted 1 year 1 month, not 2 years. In WoD, HFC also lasted 1 year 1 month, but there was no content before HFC for about a year also. 6.1's "Content Patch" was Twitter Integration and no content.
Garrisons was the primary focus of the game, outside of your weekly raid there was very little to do once you had finished your garrison
I'm not sure that you mean. WoD actually had an incredible succes when it first launched, it was after the first quarter that subs started to go rapidly:
People were excited for WoD because they were tired of MoP's theme and wanted to see WoW return to its roots, and WoD was generally seen as a TBC 2.0
I'll echo pretty much this.
The first half of WoD had no incentive to do dungeons, no incentive to do dailies (those weird apexis things), minimal incentive to even move around the world since your garrison had herb, mining, and fishing inside of it. I guess there was Ashran for some grindy content if you wanted it.
The second half of WoD was just Tanaan and HFC. Having Tanaan at least added some world stuff that actually mattered a bit more than the original apexis dailies.
WoD was basically the alt leveling or mount farming expansion, since there was so little to even do on a max level character in current content each week. Particularly alt leveling for missions table gold. I think I spent 75%+ of my playtime in WoD in Vanilla/TBC/Wrath/Cata/MoP zones rather than WoD zones. The other 25% was like 15% garrison and 10% raid.
Last edited by Fritters154; 2019-12-05 at 09:00 PM.
WoD had great initial success because WoD was sold as TBC 2.0 by Blizz PR. It was not, in fact, anything remotely like TBC 2.0 (one of several reasons for the massive decline after the initial surge). WoD's numbers declined so rapidly that Blizz stopped reporting subscriptions thereafter...
It's more like people were excited for WoD because Blizzard was giving off the impression that they actually planned to bring WoW back to its roots. Instead we got a steaming pile of a mobile game. You can see on the very chart you've posted that the subs started dropping quite literally the moment after launch. I sincerely doubt people were so tired of MoP's theme, it may not have been attracting to many, but MoP was a very good xpac, its problem and the reason it lost as many subs as it did (still less than Cata and far less than WoD, anyway) is that it was not revolutionary in a situation when WoW needed a revolution after the shitfest that was Cataclysm. Many people, myself included, were hoping that WoD would be that revolution.
1 - Aside from SoO, you also had Timeless Isle and the rest of MoP to play, which were pretty fine. In WoD, not even the regular reputations were "playable" because they were very archaic to grind for. Tanaan Jungle was okay'ish but the rest of Draenor couldn't match to Pandaria in terms of replay value.
2 - WoD lacked patches. What if Legion ended after Kil'jaeden's defeat and we skipped straight to BfA? That's less content updates per xpac, making the game more expensive since you would need to buy the next expansion to continue at max lvl.
3 - And then the whole thing with lots of planned / announced freatures becoming something else after the beta. Garrisons became a big questing hub, main cities were not implemented, etc.
Although if you ignore WoD's massive surge and drop off at the start it maintained the steady 100k per month decline that started in Cata.
WoD had 2 big problems. The first was an overreaction to complaints about being "forced" to do too many dailies and rep grinds at the start of MoP, instead we were restricted to one Apexis zone (equivalent to 3ish dailies) with crap rewards and a bunch of other things that were finished with quickly. As a result there was little for people to do after the first couple of months.
The other issue was the over reliance on the garrison which was much less popular than they had hoped. This meant they decided to cut their losses and cancel some planned content (6.1 was basically 6.0.1 and 6.2 should have been 6.1.) to concentrate on Legion.
They also promised different capital hubs - then argued they didn’t do that - then said we’d still see the inside of Karabor even if it was not a hub.
The doors remain shut.
And I never got my zangarwhale. Or dragonfly mount.
WoD clearly hit some sort of enormous development implosion along the way - I honestly thought we’d have been told about it by now.
I had completely forgot about those, but now I am mad about them again.
Part of me is wondering if they internally pumped the brakes on WoD and started shifting resources to Legion right after the Blizzcon announcement when they had to spend virtually the entire time re-explaining and clarifying the "it's time travel but also alternate universe so you're in the past but not your past a different past" and the reaction was pretty muted.
They cut corners left and right, who knows why, official excuse was "we hired a lot of people and had to train them" but they could you know... train them by making them do some job?
WOD had tons of scrapped content like Bladespire / Karabor capitals, Farahlon, Southern Ogre Continent, Kargath mini-raid and he was lumped into Highmaul, Shattrath raid, Yrel story arc, Doomhammer proper story arc, Tess Greymane story, reps were an afterthought, apexis gear was way too overpriced trying to mask lack of content with extended grind (a theme we will see time and time again afterwards), ability to put your Garrison in any zone of your choice was removed and put into static spot, promised ideas of decorating Garrisons with trophies from slain rares and raid bosses removed and replaced with 3 monuments, racial customization in buildings and followers never happened all we got was a handful of guards, Blood Elf models were delayed until 6.1 and a lot of other ones had to be tweaked, from female Draenei faces to female Orc and Troll animations, Goblins & Worgens delayed until BFA lol...
I could go for ages.
The suspected reason why WOD was abandoned was that they tried to develop WOD & Legion parallelly to transition into "yearly expansions" (cashing in on box sales when subs jump to 10 mil on launch only to drop to 3-5 mil after was a lucrative perspective if you could double the frequency), but failed so hard that they finally realized best they can do is keep the 2-year expac cycle we had since basically tbc / wotlk.
They'll never admit it but I firmly believe they saw how quickly WoD shed its initial surge in subscribers and left the expansion on terminal life support while they refocused their creative efforts on making sure a rise/fall in subscribers like WoD's never happened again.
Warlords was a terrible expansion because of the sheer amount that was cut from it, as well as so little to do outside or raid, pvp, and your garrison.
I honestly would've rather stayed in SoO for maybe another 2 or 3 months if it meant WoD could've been much better.
"A delayed game can be good, but a rushed game will always be bad." - Shigeru Myamoto