First of all, I don’t want this to sound like another “WoW is dead” cringe doom post. It’s not. I want this to sound like a genuine feedback to Blizzard. I know I’ve been nagging about Dragonflight ever since the beginning, but today I got to reddit (yeah, I know, don’t mention it), and saw the topic on “How do you feel about Dragonflight” and the most liked comments were something like “Dragonflight is the most awesome expansion I have no desire to play”, or “It’s awesome, I log in twice a week, respects my time”, “It’s a good expansion that I left a month ago, have no interest in it”, “Everyone from my guild has said how awesome it is, and than haven’t logged in for months, my guild is empty”…
And all these comments align with everything that’s been happening with the game. The game being emptier than ever, que times for a raid released like a week ago being like 10 mins, Dragonflight being on sale pretty much since it came out, no hype for new patches at all, a new cinematic released barely reaching 100k views on Youtube (during SL times it would be a million easily, not to mention former expansions), Bellular making videos “WoW has never been better, but there’s no hype at all for it”, Asmongold claiming how Dragonflight is awesome while not playing it at all, generally all streamers views being but a fraction of what they’ve been during previous expansions, etc…
Than I thought about why is this? What happened? What makes Dragonflight so good? Yeah… what makes Dragonflight so good? Story? Pretty much non existent after Raszageth, and little story that does exist is let’s say “not that good” (again after Raszageth died). Zones? Huge and empty, can’t hold a candle to SL zones. Even the art has visibly deteriorated from SL. Open world content? Non existent and what does exist is by far the worst it has ever been (that’s why there’s barely any casuals left), plus the zones, encounters, quests and events seem to be designed by people that don’t play the game at all and have no idea what the game needs. Raids? Average, worse than SL. Dungeons? Again, much worse than SL. I don’t do pvp, but I’ve seen people complaining about it all the time. I don’t do Mythic+, but again I’ve seen people complain how it sucks all the time, and considering how good the Dungeons are… On top of all that, the game is easily the buggiest it has ever been, balance is easily the worst it has ever been, performance not to mention…
All in all Dragonflight is a bad expansion that has a good reputation (kinda opposite of what happened to BfA)… and things like these happen to such games. People are gonna go along with the narrative of how good this game is, and then go play the game, not have fun and leave and loose interest in it. Bad reputation damages the game, but a bad game kills it. When someone leaves the comment “good game that I have no interest in playing”, that’s what kills the game for that person, and it seems to be the general narrative for this expansion.
Further more, when you log into the current patch zone, Zaralek Caverns, and see it almost empty you definitely know something is wrong. That didn’t happen in SL, Korthia and Zereth Mortis were always filled, let alone Nazjatar or Uldum/Vale of Eternal Blossoms…
And yes, I know, T&E, MrgM, Hazzelnuttygames, Kelani, etc… and some people online are all gonna claim, as always since the beginning of DF, that it’s because SL was horrible, so it killed the game, DF stood no chance and has a massive weight on it’s shoulders… but I think that after 8 months it’s safe to say that that’s not the case and that SL has always been more popular and had more players than Dragonflight did and does. People lost interest in the game in Dragonflight, despite the good reputation. As simple as that.
Apologies for a long post, but I had to say this.