He quit WOW mostly after SL because of how abysmal the lore was in SL, as did many others.
Like I said, SL was the worst expansion in terms of lore, and it’s not even close.
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You were never really the chosen one though. You were technically “the leader” of your order hall, but all the cool things were done by the big lore characters. The “champion” only helped canonically.
didn’t realise you were talking about update changes only since i experienced the rest of it and enjoy & embraced the story but a wow player being elitist does not surprise me. still think it’s a way better expansino on lore which is not relevant wwhether i play it at the time or not & the casual aspects it has. at least it didn’t make people stop caring about the lore & the game itself and had innovative aspects unlike dragonflight.
and he did not comeback for the ‘‘best expansion’’ . many people didn’t like bfa lore either but they came back for shadowlands with record breaking sales, same thing didn’t happen with dragonflight because it did not look exciting after the first trailer .
boring people out is worse than making them mad & feel something.
other than that
- dragonflight has no engaging outdoor content everything is trivial and they all become irrelevant & useless & empty after season starts, there’s nothing like mage tower ,torghast , expeditions, great questlines , it all becomes ghost town after 2-3 weeks
- exploits happened in both s1 and s3 start, people farmed renowns and reps faster than others
- other than dragonriding(which is a good addition) the game did not change and evolve in any good way, crafting became something that you only do if you start doing it earlier in the expansion because of the how bad catching up is
- m+ and raid experience is the only good thing about wow right now as i said lore is boring and no casual content
- renowns have no good rewards like covenants that they had to add crest to make people farm the renown .
- no good changes to m+ to fix its issues , they only made people free from chores but didn’t even think of fixing the content
- no voice acting in some campagn quests in 2023
the cosmetics at least got better since last update but that’s about it
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First of all, I never called DF the best expansion. Second of all, he did come back, as he streamed DF a few times on twitch.
so shadowland didn’t make him quit but dragonflight did ? because how boring it was. if it was good or controversial he’d stay and talk about it . that’s how they get more views etc. even lore people leaving the game because how bad the lore is and people still think this isn’t the worst expansion
Legion is considered “gold” for a lot of WoW Lore channels, SL is considered the death of it. DFs lore is mediocre at best which is not as bad as SL completely destroying it, a lot of WoW content creators (not just the lore ones) quit focusing on WoW alone due to SL. DF improves the game when it comes to gameplay, but does nothing when it comes to improving the story after the mess SL did.
You do know those “record breaking sales” had 100 caveats tied to them right? It was something like 3.5mil on launch, but including pre-orders. Pretty much all of those sales were from people that BfA retained, which again was considered very low for a WoW expansion. Last recorded numbers for WoD were 5.5 mil, estimations for Legion was 7+ mil at start and ~6mil by the end, estimated for BfA were ~7 mil at start and ~3 by the end, estimated for SL were ~4mil at start and bellow 1 mil at end. Estimated for DF were ~3 mil at the start. See the pattern here?
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You’re forgetting a small detail. SL sales data have to be picked with a grain of salt. They were HUGELY boosted by COVID and the subsequent lockouts, which almost matched its launch. A lot of people suddenly found themselves with nothing else to do in their free time and thus they turned towards online gaming. Not only Shadowlands, but a lot of MMOs saw their sales greatly improved compared with previous years.
In consequence, a significant amount of the sales of Shadowlands weren’t because of the quality of the product, but because a lot people had nothing else to do than gaming on their free time. If SL was launched today, it would struggle to sell half of the copies than it did during lockouts.
Also at the time a lot of people were really excited that they were finally going to be leaving BfA, so there is also that. People often forget that BfA originally started the “Worse than WoD” debate in the first place.
It’s true for all expansions.
Player retention is a better indicator of the quality of an expansion.
“Sales” just show how good the marketing was.
But SLs marketing was garbage.
I disagree. The expansion cinematic built hype for edgy teenagers.
Big mommy Sylvanas broke the crown of the Lich King and tore the sky open - it looked epic.
Of course, after playing through the expansion, we know that it’s all garbage.
But this cinematic made it look intriguing and cool for the average consumer.
Idk I remember people were really upset about that, having the Lich King beaten so easily, destroying the crown (the start of the “disrespecting legacy” debate), even more Sylvanas after the BfA fiasco. People were hyped because they heard that dead characters will be making a return, but idk how much that carried sales.
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There could have been good explanations for this. Being empowered by someone else, etc.
The cinematic looked cool. It was promising, just like the WoD one.
People expect epicness and violence from their WoW expansion. These two seemed to deliver just that.
I mean most WoW expansions had epic cinematics. I think MoP, DF and TWW are the only exceptions.
And these two exceptions sold poorly. Marketing matters.
The TWW cinematic should have shown an Earthen Shaman smashing some Nerubians with massive boulders and lava bursts or something, with Old Gold blood whispering in the background.
I can’t say MoP sold poorly.
" Sales. On October 4, 2012, Blizzard had announced that 2.7 million copies of Mists of Pandaria had been sold within the first week of its release (Cataclysm sold 3.3 million copies within the first 24 hours of its release), with the global subscriber base passing 10 million subscribers."
2.7 doesn’t look that bad, given that Cata had 3.3 after WotLK which was considered the absolute high of WoW expansions and then Cata being considered as the first bad one (at the time). And having 10 mil players at launch.
I’m not hating DF. There are plenty of things where I feel they delivered well, and they rectified some bad choices from before.
It’s a bit tame storywise. Don’t offend, play it safe, all hold hands and celebrate forgiveness and harmony. I have a few other issues with the game but I got the impression with Blizzcon they’ve heard it, and want to address it.
All in all it feels rather like a ‘reset’ expansion. An uncluttering of the stage for the next act.
Legion borrowed heavily from D3 at the time like class-design, M+ (while never fully committing to it till this day). While AP Grind = Paragon.
If you left or kicked someone in GRs the whole instance scaled down accordingly. That is somehow old news yet somehow an idea that doesn’t exist in WoW and never will because parasites are MAU and we are seeing the consequences even more now.
You had everything baseline which is great and the only options where the exact same things we have now like swapping between AOE or ST CC or DPS in rare cases, except it somehow got even more cumbersome for almost a year because moving points somehow had to remove everything before it? Is that potato logic again? Yes it is.
Most talents in DF are just fluff and filler garbage as we can compare to SL Covenant system while being somehow worse. 3% healing? Really? Are we really back to Vanilla alpha talent system now where you put 20 into nothing just to get 1 good option? Yes we are in fact. The vocal minority won on that aspect and now everyone has to suffer.
The illusion of choice/freedom is not a choice just like how a free lunch is not in fact a free lunch.
And don’t get me started on PUGs or even premades where people, even decently geared somehow forget to spec improved cleanse or hard CC for a key instead of it being baseline like it should be. And now no one can remove this weeks affix or people who outright refuse to pick said talent or even use it because “you don’t pay my sub”. And guess what? Ruined keys wastes everyone’s time and downgrades it because of 1 bad apple. An apple might I add that gets away scot-free. Blizzard even encourages this behavior it seems.
Breaths already covers the rest or what I’ve mentioned in other posts like this. And if TWW turns out like I think it will, I guess I’ll go back to SP games again which is only an ever growing list. I hard quit during early BFA and I will do it again if need be. You can follow the lore on youtube these days so there’s nothing to lose either. What’s so great about clowns throwing keys because they’re clowns? Exactly. Nothing at all.
The big question is do players actually care about the story anymore. I mean yeah DFs story is lame (imo), it had 0 chance on winning me on that front because it’s dragon, shaman, druid related, but I don’t know if anything will make me interested in the lore after SL. I have seen a lot of content creators sharing that opinion as well (the SL one) but idk how the actual playerbase feels about that.
I get that conclusion. I think tho, if storytelling is good, that you can’t really resist getting sucked into it again, unless someone has always been the type of player to click accept without reading and skip the cinematics 
I have no idea whether they’ll manage to deliver there but if they do, I’m guessing quite a few people will be more enthusiastic than they can envision right now. But that’s a guess on my part, and it depends on whether Blizzard will do that.