Okay, so. As this is my first post here it would only seem fitting to give some background and introduction into why it is here and what I want to convey with it.
This is not a “eff blizzard, they can’t do a single thing right, small indie company etc”, I will do my best to try and explain my thoughts on what will be discussed later but just wanted to get it out there in case someone reads too much into this or not enough.
Now, with that out of the way and the title read we should start at the beginning.
Warbands
I think most people agree that the warband launch and subsequent feedback I guess we should call it.
Patch day, takes some time loading and getting into the game as is expected with patch days but otherwise fine for me.
Now onto the first point and the title of this post, disappointment.
That was the first thing I felt logging into the game and seeing that most things were disabled or buggy(a quick search on wowhead told me it was disabled and not buggy/broken as most people were claiming in chat).
It’s fine, you could do the quest and only the warbank was disabled as far as I could tell.
But then there were things which I thought would be implemented which weren’t(I later learned this was on me not reading/interpreting it correctly), such as, the rep, currency(which seems to be tied to the banking) and then it ends.
Weird, I thought to myself as I could have sworn there would be more to it.
Afterwards I started going through the different systems and found there to be some a few more things but nothing that felt like what I had painted in my mind that it would be.
One of the main points was the shared rep and being able to clean up my character list.
And then it was just the Dragonflight rep and nothing else. As written above I went back and reread the statement several times to where I was fitting the statement into what I now know instead of the other way around.
Now I realise that is on me and my wishes with having ALL rep being account wide, legacy content included, just not account wide progression but still brought up to what my other characters has. Still think this should have been communicated in a different way.
I did the 4 quests and then logged off and started doing something else, no rush.
The Event
We come back a week later starting to get hyped for TWW and thinking it’s getting close.
Logging in, seeing where the event spawns next and here we go, finally something to do, a few mounts, some collectables, gearing an alt, we got it all.
Event spawns, going to one memory, another, another and then boss.
But where is the boss?
Checking with a buddy who has been doing them all day and there should have been a portal to get to a boss where you need to aoe cause you cannot target the boss sometimes, fine. Maybe some rares or something to do in the meantime, but nothing.
We go again, this time a portal but cannot hit the boss, even with aoe.
Logged out and will probably not try again for a few days to make sure it is fixed.
And so we get to the reason this post was created(and I now realise this has gone on for far too long).
Conclusion
My worry is what this bodes for the future, especially in a few weeks when TWW is supposed to be released.
I haven’t played that many pre-patches so far during my time in wow but every single one of them has been better than this.
Not to say that it has been flawless, but it has never been this bad in my experience.
But then there has been A LOT of content in the last 6 months or so, from SoD to Classic to MoP Remix, to S4 to… and so on.
And somewhere in there it feels like the focus went from producing fun and intriguing things to just putting more content out there to draw focus away from the subpar events with more events. Where the goal of each event is making you forget about the last one even when they have yet to tell you about the next one.
To sift through the mess of my own thoughts and the text above.
TLDR;
The communication on new content is lacking.
The fear of a buggy pre-patch event staining future patches and launches.
Reverting back to releasing content which is not ready to be released. See BFAlpha
Content for the sake of content and not good/fun content.
Lastly(I promise… maybe), I in no way, shape or form am trying to attack or undermine the efforts of the wow team, I have enjoyed most of the content. I just wished certain things were communicated better and hope for the future that the stint of buggy/unfinished content is not foretelling of what is to come.