I’m far from the first person to write on this issue, but putting a little bit more data in there maybe could help in getting this … I don’t know, maybe fixed? It’s a legacy thing, which means I understand it being low quality, but this game is supposed to be so much more than just the latest patch.
So… we get that shiny minimap button for our garrison, order hall, BFA mission table or covenant. However, it seems like Blizzard never expects us to interact with those except when it was current content, despite them being required for many quests, obtaining transmogs and artifact appearances, and so on.
The way it currently appears to work is as follows: When you first unlock your Garrison (doable as early as about level 10) or Order Hall (same), it will give you this button. If you have both, the Legion button will override the Garrison, being newer content.
Then, at level 33, this button will vanish, because the game now expects you to go unlock the BFA mission table. This in itself is a bug, considering that the earliest level you can do the quests to unlock the table is 35, but even then many people might not care to collect war resources for the unlock quest, especially if they are levelling in WoD or Legion already.
So far so good anyway… after this, as soon as you hit level 50 the BFA button will also vanish, until you select your covenant. Now, with Threads of Fate this can be done pretty soon… but Blizzard are killing Threads for all characters not already on it, so I then expect that the button will be gone until you have completed enough of the campaign to choose a covenant.
The way this appears to work in game is that the button code most likely checks for the results of the function C_Garrison.GetLandingPageGarrisonType() - this function will return what the game considers to be your highest Garrison type - 2 for WOD Garrison, 3 for Legion Order Hall, 9 for BFA Mission Table or 111 for Shadowlands Covenant. It is this function that is malfunctioning primarily - it should likely return your highest actually unlocked expansion landing page, but it does not and this causes your minimap button to go on vacation from time to time.
So, for a TLDR, here are what I would say are the issues and fixes - from minimum viable to slightly more fleshed out:
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Once you have a “Garrison” of some kind unlocked, that button should never become unavailable. If you want to give people the option to hide it that is perfectly fine, but for those who have need of it you are just taking away part of their interface and driving them away from your game’s legacy content. The “next level” of button should get added in when that button becomes unlocked, and the previous one should be available completely until then.
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Without addons or slash commands to run scripts, it is currently impossible to go back and look at an earlier mission table landing page. Addons have shown that it is far from difficult to simply add tabs to allow the player to switch between them and again - taking away parts of a player’s interface because they level up is not a good design unless they consent to it.
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Slightly more niche as you can work around it as long as the above two are fixed: The minimap button also has additional information functionality, in that it glows and pulses when you have something that wants your attention (finished missions, a building that is complete, and the like) - once you have “ranked past” a mission table this functionality breaks, which would be annoying if, for example, a player is lvl 35+ but wants to do their Legion order hall quests (many of which cannot be done until level 45, I will remind you). Many such quests require the player to complete Order Hall missions, and not having a notification that your mission is complete anymore is a negative to Quality of Life. Ideally, the pulse should be there for any of the garrison-type features the player has active. If you actually implement a tabbed system to select between them, then the relevant tab could glow/pulse when you open the screen, as a simple suggestion for QoL functionality, but even just a glow that we need to hunt down the source of would be better than nothing.
