And vice versa
But instead they’re all pals and buddiessss yayyyy superpals!!! Come on over to stormwind for tea baine. Yes, of course shaw and his boyfriend can go on holiday in silvermoon.
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We’re going holidaying in Ironforge then!
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Sounds reasonable! Just text anduin for a permit that says anyone who hinders you gets executed
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I’ve got diplomatic immunity 
Maybe Baine shows up and berates you for choosing violence. Yes, even for alliance players.
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They always say . . . prevention is better than curing . . . alas, can Shadowlands really be cured? Can this fetid boil and infectious disease be purged, and WoW slowly recover . . . ?
:trolldespair:
Honestly the CDEVs are just diabolical.
Yeah I can cure shadowlands
calls in a mana-carpetbomb airstrike
I won’t defend BFA or WoD, they were both really bad, but I feel confident in saying SL is worse.
I never unsubbed during the former two - I stayed active, for the RP if nothing else. SL hasn’t even left that alone.
Meanwhile now in SL I have not logged into WoW since late August, and had it not been for my friends and guildies, it would have likely been back in January instead.
I am not wishing for this game’s death - some people still enjoy it, and AD isn’t quite like anything else out there. But I won’t claim the game deserves to survive by any merit of its own, either.
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I think preach said it really, really well in his reaction @ the FFXIV interview between Asmong and Yoshi where Yoshi said that he personally is mega competitive and during every break they have/if they can sneak it in they play the game.
And then Preach just laughs and blurts out "There’s NO way ANY of the devs during a lunch break went “HEY GUYS DO YOU WANT TO DO SOME ISLAND EXPEDITIONS/WARFRONTS? 
:D”. Like no. Didn’t happen. Absolutely did not happen.
It just (doesn’t) works.
Wotlk was received very well right from the get go- Sure, there is always people who are vocal about “previous expansion was better”, but nobody can convince me that this has always been the case/is always the case, no matter how good/terrible the expansion was. After all, if this was the case, wouldn’t vanilla be ranked as the best game to date, and every other expansion following the other? No.
Yeah, it’s a leadership issue- But as Aldher said, employees also have some responsibility.
Wasted developer resources, could be used for something better. We know that warfronts, island expeditions and all the alternative systems in BFA took a lion’s share of development work in the expansion- Which has been a thing since Legion, actually.
Blizzard develops a system/activity → Blizzard spends the entire expansion trying to fix it → Blizzard abandons the work when a new expansion launches.
It just works.
What BFA was sold to me as:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/431113366350725121/833352777399795762/Dkexb3zXsAEkS16.png
:despairtrollface:
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I can certainly echo that feel. I stuck through WoD thanks to RP alone… BfA while it was more ‘meh’ I played it intermittently I thought we truly had reached the bottom of the barrel. There’s something you can defend in both WoD (As little as it had) and BfA, anyone who could make good faith arguments for them, I’d take them at their words.
Shadowlands is the first time I unsubbed from the game for longer than 3 weeks. Been out since mid july and I can only say that what I miss… Is the RP, but that alone cannot justify a sub, even one paid through tokens and gold.
I’m not sure if this game can recover. Is there even the will to, from its own custodians? I’d like to see one of my favourite games, rise from the ashes and prosper. What I’d hate more is to see it being puppeteered for the sole purpose of profits with no passion or interest in the product. Watching a game you invested so much in slowly die ain’t fun.
You say that, but the Tauren and Silvermoon had ambassadors in IF during the Shattering book!
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Warlords could at least be kept going by the creative energy of the server, but arguably more importantly - even if all you did was farm raids, you were still… Done. There was no artifact/azerite/covenant progression to grind out, loot boxes to chase down, or 1% increases in your player power. Once you had the level of gear you wanted, the rating you wanted, the things you wanted to do done, you could just mess around in-game and go hunt down raid mounts or transmog or whatever. The fact you could just be done with Warlords is kind of enough in a lot of ways.
I stuck around in BfA, though mostly because the space between content patches (and necessary changes) was a lot shorter and thus it never got so long that I considered outright quitting. 8.2 was the turning point for BfA which lifted it out of being a total dud (by making the Azerite system bad instead of straight garbage) and that took about… Ten months or so after launch? Conversely, Shadowlands is getting the changes which should have been made in beta, almost entirely because of a horrifying lawsuit, over a year after launch, during which it’s seen exactly one content update.
Shadowlands is more or less the perfect storm. It’s the barren update cycle of Warlords with the unfun, unending grind of Battle for Azeroth and the boring gameplay of [pick your least favourite expansion here, as applicable per class].
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RP aside, WoD was absolutely carried by not messing with the raids. You could raid three times a week and it was mostly self-contained. As you say, no infinite titanforging, no AP or M+ that you have to grind to keep up…
It was the best part of WoD gameplaywise for that reason, even if overall it gets a low score there too due to only having three raids and me not liking HFC much.
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There’s always something incredibly resassuring about the developers being invested in the product they’re creating. I always knew Metzen was passionate about the game and there’s no doubt in my mind he’d play on break, then go home and play some more. These new guys though? They seem so blissfully unaware of their bad systems that I have to wonder if they do a single heroic dungeon per night and call it a day.
The classes also played better, WoD warlock was genuine fun. The amount of content was absolutely pitiful and is downright inexcusable, but how your class plays is a big part of player retention. It’s how you interact with the world, you’re always pushing your buttons and if your buttons aren’t fun to push then you just don’t have a good time.
And once again I have to state that all of the classes and specs I’ve played have felt like inferior versions of their Legion iterations.
Tying player power to your covenant choice was an absolutely bonehead move and it leads me to believe that Blizzard (and their most loyal defenders) think that people who casually play an RPG have no interest in improving their character. Like they’re playing Skyrim and they get the level up prompt and go “uhhhh no I’m not gonna pick health/magicka/stamina, I’m just gonna sit here at level one forever.”
For a while I defended the move, ironically, because surely they would not do something so radical without very precise and nuanced balancing?
Needless to say, that notion didn’t last…
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I’m sure that if it was just covenants they could probably get them at least somewhat in line with each other, but Blizzard has to go and make systems in their systems like Soulbinds and conduits until you’ve got a bunch of devs doing busywork on constantly tuning them all.
Unless I’m experiencing an extreme case of mandela effect (and i doubt that), I quite distinctly remember WotLK experiencing a lot of heavy criticism over LFD, the easiness of dungeons, Naxxramas being absolute 
rehash etcetera.
It’s only later that people though ‘huh I guess things weren’t as bad in hindsight’. And we’ve seen that over and over with each subsequent expansion. MoP had it especially bad (and if we talk about sub numbers, was also the expansion with pretty big drops).
I think maybe only Cataclysm is the expansion that people don’t actively defend right now, since the zone reworks were trash and the raids were pretty uninspired too (also cut content).
I think this is where a large team can have benefits, as long as the leadership’s good enough. Those B-side content mechanics can absolutely be developed by some devs without wasting the resources on designing actual raid tiers or dungeons, which we also saw with the prevalence of M+ and Raids.
Devs working on story etcetera are likely not doing too much (or use it as vehicles for additional story being told w/e) with the expeditions/warfronts. I don’t think it’s a lion’s share, and I’m also not sure what you’d rather have those specific resources been spent on instead. You can’t remove apples and wish for oranges, if that makes sense.
Unless Blizzard has a really weird and bad management of resources, which I wouldn’t put past them, but in that case I don’t think you’d get much in return anyway.
Either way, it’s a problem of the leadership.
Not sure if I’m misremembering, but didn’t people have a problem with the Warforging in WoD as well? (And then what Blizzard did? Doubled down on it, of course!)
Not hunter at least, was the expansion where I changed into Druid because I found the Hunter gameplay absolutely atrocious (and continued to be even worse in following expansions).
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Titanforging was practically unlimited, meaning that BiS gear could drop from almost anywhere and resulting in absurd grinds if you wanted to be competitive.
WoD and MoP era war/thunderforging was fixed to six item levels, meaning a warforged LFR item was still worse than any normal mode item.
Very, very important.
No, I mean that people had a problem even with the smaller, capped Warforging from WoD.