Season of Discovery analysis from a very disappointed player - How did "Season of Dads" become "Season of Parsepigs"?

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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Before I begin, I’d like to note that the goal of this post is for the developers (if there are actually any of them reading these forums) to get some insight as to why Season of Discovery lost nearly 80% of its player base before P4 even launched. I had around 35 days total /played across all my characters with my main being a little over 22 days when I quit.

With the recent announcement of the delay of P4, I believe we might see some really grim numbers, but only time will tell. i’d also like to note that I will focus a bit more on Phase 1, because it was the closest to the product the developers originally advertised.

Phase 1 and how SoD was advertised
In the beginning, Season of Discovery had very strong selling points that appealed not only to the Vanilla-only fanbase, but to the people who transitioned to WOTLK and even some Retail players. The season was advertised as:

  • Casual-friendly
  • Alt-friendly
  • More emphasis on the outdoor world (Vanilla’s strongest point)
  • Less grindy
  • Modernized class design with focus on retaining the original class identity and covering each spec’s shortcomings (to a point)
  • Better rotations without the massive bloat that are retail specs
  • New, never before seen content and class roles

Before SoD launched, the hype was really spiraling. There was art of fat balding men in Vanilla-themed armor running around in the world with the title “Season of Dads”. People were generally excited to see what their favorite specs can do and they also were getting tired of Wrath.

I can’t say with certainty that many people were excited about Tank Rogues and Healer Mages, but Warlock Tanks as well as many of the meme specs getting toolkits covering their shortcomings and giving them raid utility and desirability was a very welcomed prospect by the community.

Then P1 launched and oh boy did it deliver. The servers were massive, the world was probably more alive than the launch of original Classic. People were out in full force, everything was farmed, alts were being made, the raid was ran constantly, the professions felt alive. Everything clicked and with the word of tongue over the course of a few weeks SoD grew more than anyone expected. Now, why did that happen?

  • The raid was easy, fast and rewarding (this is very important and I’ll get to back to that later)
  • The leveling was fast and the phase was VERY alt friendly
  • Communities were being formed and the servers truly felt packed day and night
  • The majority of runes are easy and fast to get

Then we get Phase 2 and here is where the problems began to show and were not addressed in even a remotely competent way. The solutions, which the devs made showed lack of experience and a vision for the game, not shared by the majority of the playerbase. So, what about Phase 2 then?

Phase 2 - shifting from alt friendly to unpugable and gate-keeping

So look over Phase 2 and how things drastically shifted from P1. Phase 2 had:

  • A raid, which was too hard to pug and was INCREDIBLY anti-melee (This is probably the BIGGEST reason why people stopped playing).
  • Very lackluster runes for the majority of specs
  • Terrible balance (state of Shamans and Priests in PvP and PvE)
  • Very slow leveling. (This is also important because due to P1 being heavily time-gated, people made and geared A LOT of alts, which they wanted to raid on)
  • A fun, but not very rewarding PvP event in which the “exploit early exploit often” law was proven true once again

Phase 2 saw a bigger population drop than P3 (yet) simply because it failed in the most simple areas, The things, which made BFD successful were, like mentioned above - It was EASY, FAST AND PUGGABLE. We saw high end pvpers and even Retail players attempt to pug Gnomeregan and they couldn’t even finish the raid.

While in the eyes of a player who has played the game for years, the raid was obviously not hard, it was also not easy for the casual player base, which in fact, made a huge chunk out of SoD’s popualtion. So what was the result:

  • Players stopped playing because they couldn’t pug
  • Alt raiding was reduced probably tenfold
  • Players felt punished for picking “the wrong spec” in a season, which was about everyone being able to do what they couldn’t before
  • Guilds started to disband because alt leveling was too slow and Phase 3 revealed ST was going to be 20 man

I can list many more factors as to why players were dissatisfied with Phase 2, but the most important factors, which drove the majority of people away are the raid difficulty, the class balance and the inability to actively play alts. Which brings us to Phase 3 and this is obviously where things really took a turn for the worse.

Phase 3 - incursions, bosses with more HP than Gruul and parsing

Let’s get straight into it - incursions. “Exploit early, exploit often”. If you were one of the lucky ones to be able to take a day off work, then you could play Phase 3 on launch. It didn’t take long for people to see they had guild mates, who were level 47 after 2 hours while they were still returning quests in STV. Discord, YouTube, Twitch and all that jazz helped people quickly realize you could literally get thousands of gold and get to level 50 in roughly 2 to 4 hours of running the same quests and you can also get some very nice starter gear along with it. So, when your guildmate who was stuck at work the whole day came home to see his entire guild level 50 and the incursion exp nerfed by half he probably wasn’t very happy about it. Let’s not mention that the 1000 gold he was farming over the course of 6 months was done in 1 hour by practically the entire server.

In general, incursions were what drove away the majority of people. They destroyed in 1 day what people were working on for months. They are the worst and most out of touch decision I’ve seen developers do. I can honestly keep writing about incursions for hours, but I believe the raid is what actually killed SoD for many people.

We all saw the state of ST on release:

  • Bosses having more HP than Gruul
  • Buggy bosses
  • Nerfs the size of Texas before a single guild managed to kill the last 2
  • Terrible loot tables, which made a huge chunk of the loot go to disenchanting on the first week
  • World buff and warcraftlogs degeneracy

Who was Sunken Temple designed for? It obviously wasn’t for Echo - the world first guild, who couldn’t kill the last 2 bosses pre-nerf. Nah, they have Mythic raids designed exclusively for them and Liquid so who were the devs designing this raid for? It’s obvious it was untested and the numbers were slapped on quickly, but after the lead developer assured people the team is hard at work and refused to give any P3 info until he was practically bombarded with messages shows a worrying trend.

ST is an abomination of a raid. It clearly trampled everything SoD was originally advertising for and replaced it with parsing degeneracy, elitism and rightfully, drove many people away. I don’t want to go too deep into the $25/month addon that shows parses, that should speak volumes for itself. What I wanna highlight is the difference in reality and expectation that people had. Sunken Temple has guilds class stacking, pugs demanding world buffs and the most unfun bosses I’ve ever seen and I did play Amirdrassil and Sepulcher of the World First ones.

That being said, when the casual community was driven away, all that was left was parse pigs. There is no world exploration, there is no class exploration and feeling of community, there are only parses and desperate guilds looking for to fill the void of the droves of people who’ve had enough. I can go in detail about why Warriors doing 4.8K dps on bosses in level 50 gear is bad for the game, but that’s something anyone can see.

Phase 3 and Sunken Temple specifically has been my biggest disappointment as a very long-term player. I really hope the developers do something for the players this season was supposed to be made for. Me and many others will not return no matter what they do, but I honestly hope for the sake of those players who are still playing for fun, not parsing, there is something for you at the end of that journey.

This turned out longer than I had hoped, hope some of you enjoyed reading my ranting.

-Cheers

29 Likes
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Don´t want to read what probably is just some “It´s too hard” thread, just judging from the title here.

Hate to break it to you though, classic, including sod has always been a parse show, especially on those larger realms.

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If you don’t wanna read then don’t comment. You’re bound to say something useless.

To the OP, while I agree with you on pretty much every point you make, though not as strongly as you do, there is one thing that I wanna point out and it’s the fact that the community itself has a responsability in gate-keeping players and making SoD a try-hard parsing themepark.
I dont know what changed cause I played vanilla classic and I wasn’t into raiding at all but that didn’t keep me from having fun. The game was so vast, there was so much to do that I was still running scholo/strat and doing world PvP when TBC came out.

We take the game too seriously as a whole atm, especially since we are still on phases leading to max level. I enjoy parsing simply because it makes PvE less boring. But my goal was only to get purple parses, I don’t need to get 99 everywhere (and I probably can’t).

Maybe the phases idea wasn’t that great. Better let everyone enjoy the game fully at our own pace rather than gate-keeping and trying to keep everyone on the same bandwagon. It’s bound to make things toxic if you keep the try-hard parsers (and I don’t say that in an insulting way, we all enjoy the game differently) and the casuals.

Casuals don’t often create their own pug. They simply want to log in, find a pug raid and clear the raid after a good day’s work. So it’s mainly the parsers who take the time to build a pug and they certainly won’t take the chance to burn their weekly ID without a full clear, so they make sure to pick only people with the same approach : fellow parsers.

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TWW beta is coming I doubt Blizzard will look back at SoD, just remember they are pushing back P4 for Cataclysm and Pandapokémon to get noticed, just as a note I went and tested Pandapokémon, it’s just not World of Warcraft, it’s an abomination which taunts you everytime you go on the login screen to go play fast because you only have X days left to play !!! while they keep sucking your credit card wether you play or not.
This was and is a big scam. 6 months of subscription and no end game content yet. they are creating a new community of toxic players for this version of the game, by the time you decide to come back and play, you will find an inflation sky economy where the gold you made in P1-P2 and P3 will be worthless, they will probably add a cash shop ingame, and SoD will be just as toxic and unfriendly as retail is. last week I had doubt about all of this, but their announcement yesterday made it clear where the game is heading to.

Edit: btw 6 months of flowing subs just before they launch TWW beta/Cata/Pandapokémon is a genius move financially.

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2 layers, maybe 3 at times all day on Wild Growth today - 2 or 3 weeks ago there was consistently 10+

Thats all the evidence you need to see to prove SoD is pretty much dead in the water right now.

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Every day there is some person who doesn’t like something and he believes that many many people will leave the game and it will die. So that’s the thing, you can’t please everyone. Some say that too much has been changed, others say that very little has been done. I think everything is great. They wanted to introduce people to the history of Azeroth. Raise interest in unpopular dungeons. Pay more attention to the world. That was done. No big changes can be made. Developers do not have the ability to create new raids or anything like that.
80 percent of the gaming base? really! maybe this is not the base of the game, but stupid hype lovers. There were also a lot of people at the start of the Classic. All kinds of streamers, not just WOW. Because of this there is a queue again. and I had to abandon the first phase. In the second phase, hype lovers fell away and it became possible to play with friends.
“raids increased to 20 people and therefore many stopped playing” THIS IS SUCH A SURPRISE!!! in Classic there were always raids of 20-40 people. It is logical that there will be progression and perhaps you need to create a guild where initially there will be several groups, which will then unite into a raid for 40 people. What did you expect when you started playing? that in the endgame there will be raids for 10 people. How do you suggest balancing the game? Should the four horsemen also run around on their own like in WOTLK?
For me, SOD is just a good upgrade to the classics that I happily played and still play. And which came out at the right time, unlike Season of Mastery.
For me, this is a great opportunity to return to the good old raids and enjoy their vibe. I hope the Endgame content will not be released in one day or a short period. a Each phase will receive a full release with an upgrade of items for each specialization, as well as new crafted items

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If this is anything to go by, my guild is the definition of “casual”.
we got a few parse monkeys, but the majority of us just want to clear the raid, get our loot and maybe get a few chuckles along the way.

we do not demand world buffs, enchants and consumables, although we encourage people to get them for their own and everyone else’s sake, because they make the content easier, there’s no doubt about that.

now, let me tell you; the roster boss has been a difficult one, the primary roadblock by far.
but it is not because the raid is hard or because its 20 man sized.

we made our peace with the fact we’d have to recruit some people to get a solid 20 man roster going before we even went into phase 3.
likewise, we already know 40 man raids is going to be the standard raid size at lvl 60, so its not going to catch us by surprise, as apparently is what happens to so many players out there (lol seriously what did you expect, this is classic guys, how can you go in expecting anything less?).

the problem with that, is the fact that outside the raid this phase is downright terrible.
you already mentioned all the negative aspects of it, so i won’t bother repeating, but needless to say that people were (and still are) dropping out left and right - every day, every week.

so every week the process of trying to get new people to participate on a regular basis resets, forcing us to get a new round of pugs every week, and this is where i get to my point:

- we don’t check logs.
- we don’t sweat.

and to be honest, this has come back to haunt us every time we decide to skip on vetting the pugs we recruit, and the raid becomes an utter slog as a result.

not because the raid is hard, but strictly (solely) because people cannot be bothered, nor expected, nor trusted to do the bare minimum when it comes to things like getting on discord, listening to the raid leader when he explain tactics (for the 4th time), or just pushing their damn buttons and doing the mechanics.

this week we had a relatively good run in ST despite our pugs but when we got to hakkar things got really, really frustrating… because we ended up wiping to this loot pinata about 6 times before he finally went down, and this was solely because pugs were LITERALLY too stupid to understand that the disease is a mechanic they NEED to deal with properly for the boss to die.

SIX wipes before they finally understood that disease spread = wipe… bro, this is unfathomable… no words can explain how frustrating it is to explain - in detail - how the encounter works 5-6 times with people STILL making the same mistakes by the 5th attempt.

me as a tank do not have to do much this fight, so i had plenty of time to observe the other raiders, and even on the 6th attempt, i saw melee dps confusingly stepping out of the melee group, spinning around (keyboard turning) in place, wondering where the hell they were supposed to go and i just lowered my head in embarrassment on their behalf… like seriously how many times does someone have to yell “GO BEHIND THE TANK” before the message sinks in?

no wonder people think the raid is hard when they are incapable of listening to the simplest of instructions.

THIS IS WHY RAID LEADERS RIGOROUSLY CHECK LOGS TO MAKE SURE THEY DON’T INVITE THESE SUB 80 IQ PLAYERS

if people would put in the barest minimum of effort, raid leaders wouldn’t log check as if their life depended on it, but the problem is; they cannot be trusted, so raid log checks abound.

blame yourself and your inability to play the game. (yes, you, the pug player looking for an ST raid).
the fact the average pug expects the raid leader to hold their hand in literally every regard is also a toxic mindset and its frankly completely unreasonable to expect the raid leader to play your character for you.
take some personal responsibility and at least watch a god damn youtube guide.

next week, when we pug (which we 100% have to) we’re going to be log checking our pugs as well, and this is not because we’re sweating, its because whenever we don’t, the idiot players go and prove why log checking is needed.

these players have caused us - the definition of a casual guild - to logcheck just to get through the raid without making it the most frustrating ordeal of our week.
that should say it all… we USED to look down on logchecking as a sweaty tryhard thing too, but we’ve quickly come to realize why it has become a standard practice after experiencing a few raids where we forego logchecking…

you only have yourself to thank for the current state of things, if you are that pugger who is complaining you can’t get a raid, and the longer you remain careless about personal responsibility, the more raid leaders you cause to logcheck.

we’re literally a living example of it.

i hope this explains to you how “season of dads” has become “season of parsepigs”.
it is you, the dad gamer’s fault… you don’t care that your carelessness ruins a raid, so we have to make sure to take active measures to avoid your type when we recruit and to be honest, you’re lucky the pool of puggers to choose from are slim pickings, essentially forcing us to relent and invite you (even if we don’t want to) if we hope to get the raid going at all, hoping we’ll be able to cope with your inability to play the game.

when phase 4 comes around and (hopefully) the skilled playerbase who is currently on hiatus/raid logging comes back, you’re going to find yourselves in deep trouble because your competition will increase tenfold.

this is, of course, assuming there’s going to be a playerbase left at all.

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Most likely you got really bad reading skills, nobody cares what you think if you cant even read, so shut it monkeyboy

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  1. Phase 1 was complete upon release.
  2. Phase 2 was not complete and needed attention while phase 1 was running.
  3. Phase 3 was never completed during phase 2 because Blizzard switched focus to cata and had no resources for completing phase 3, and we saw how that ended.
  4. Phase 4 was never even close in being completed.

Blizz draged people into SoD phase1.
Giving them an kind of ok phase 2 but a garbage phase 3. And a non existing phase 4 since all the resources were in cata. Thus the complete scilence during phase 3.

Even when all the resources were diverted to cata, we saw huge bugs in cata pre patch. Thats a really bad sign!!!

All of a sudden when they fixed most of the bugs in pre patch and cata is ready for launch they lifted their silence.
Giving all the left behind SoD players new hopes for a future.
But its going to be a late launch of phase 4 they say. Confirming that they never had a phase 4.

My guess is that blizz knew what was going to happen and just did a hit and run. A cash grab and let players sub for 5 months giving them garbage after phase 1.
Now they want your subs again :rofl:

And for the parsing and logs, narcisitic and toxic players… I wont miss you if you dont return.
Blizzard must remove logs or phase 4 will be as bad as phase 3.

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Incursions problem is well sumed up by OP.

And as a famous philosoph-I mean streamer said one day:

  • If you make harsh and punishing gamedesign to bore players when they wipe, then the players will make sure they never wipe and will apply gatekeeping behavior.

Gnomeregan difficulty was a bit too hard but ST was legit insane.

Combine this with the classic ID-locked raid system and you get a naturally increasing toxicity which results in more and more people left by the wayside then unsubbing.

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sod :x: cata :x: era :x: retail :x: GLORIOUS HARDCORE :dracthyr_blob_dance_animated:

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ok, we have to admit that Blizzard got something wrong. and in my opinion, the reason was that they released phase 3 too early.)) there weren’t very many dissatisfied players at that time. so waiting another month and making the content interesting would be possible. But now there are a lot of dissatisfied people and there are several reasons to delay the content: this is the release of Cataclysm and the intersection of players (although this is precisely why the content was released earlier), and also the addition and balance of updated content. In general, it was necessary to improve not only the raids, but also the rest of the dungeons; now, if I’m not mistaken, the chance of dropping epic items has been increased.
In general, there is no universal solution. Maybe raise the level to 60 and let you enter the dungeons, but not Raids

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Surely you jest?

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tis’ a jest

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Yes, it was rushed. It broke the flow like a surge of cafein for few days, but quickly tasted bland, and now the servers are collapsing.

ST is bad. Loot is irrelevant, it does not even support/expand meme-specs, it is full DE material except for healers (that were already fine from Gnomer loot). I can’t see how it could have been relevant during P4 - indeed they will retune the loot table. We still have to see how.
Last bosses were ludicrously scaled. So people left to come back later and just forgot to come back.
Now it’s still the same issue like Gnomeregan, PUG- and semi-PUG-forbidding mechanics. People who won’t bother finding a PvE working-office-like guild but want to raid still, get frustrated and leave.
Also! 20men unlike Gnomer, that is by all evidence guild-killing. So most of guild-attached raid players can raid no more and leave.
Guild fusions happen. Still not allow to reach numbers. More and more dissatisfied people cease to play.
Then the players who are not directly affected by these issues (like me) still see the collapse, the leavers, server having to shut down and sh!t to resettle. Gets annoyed. Leave in their turn.
So there are less people to sustain the whole edifice.
So more people think “it’s screwed” and leave. And so on and so forth.

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when they tell me that because of raids for 20 or 40 people people leave the game I only feel a facepalm

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ST was fine, it needed perhaps a tweak or two but not nerfing into the ground before the first reset. Absolute fail on blizzards part. Our raid got eranikus down to 2% right before the nerf, next pull they hotfixed the fight midway. It was a learning curve and people would have figured it out sooner or later instead they went with the braindead approach and over 50% nerfs

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If it was fine then we wouldn’t have such massive disparity between player experiences. Some say it is fine. Some say it is too easy. Some say it was fine then it became too easy. Some say pre-nerf was the appropriate difficulty. Some say it is puggable, others that it is impossible to pug. For some it takes (take this with a grain of salt) 25 minutes, for others it takes 3.5 hours.

ST isn’t fine. Even if you wanna blame bad players for being bad then ok why are they bad? Because they don’t parse? Because they don’t use addons or the correct addons? Because they don’t have consistent guild numbers so they have to pug a few that end up holding them back? Or is it because the telegraphing of certain mechanics is just bad? Is it the balance between classes is just awful so without a good comp then it will just automatically be harder for you than it otherwise would? Is it a disparity between raiding experience from group to group? Are you expected to have raided all of WOTLK and retail or a first time raider?

If SoD is for casuals, which is what Aggrend said that it was, then we should not be having this kind of a disparity between experiences for ST. To you it might work out just fine, but there’s a lot of others for which ST is just painful and unfun to do.

If this ‘is’ casual then… Well what the hell are players doing wrong then? If this is casual difficulty then no one should be having these issues except for maybe players who have literally never touched wow and never raided before.

Yet people are.

And that is going to drive a lot of the playerbase away over time if this idea of “casual difficulty” keeps up.

[edit]

Personally I think it is fine as a raid raid for a guild to progress through. I just don’t vibe with it. But as a casual seasonal fun mode kinda dadgamer raid? Dropping numbers and constant criticism of its difficulty would go to show that something is wrong with its design.

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Many of these things wouldn’t have been a issue if Blizzard kept their promise and kept phases 2-6 weeks long (and “shorter than patches”, like they said during BlizzCon23).

People would just accept that raids and content (no matter how hard or easy) were short bonuses on their way to 60 - where hopefully something more thought through would wait.
Items would be equal to whatever dungeon drops one usually gets during “normal” leveling, good to get but not necessary, and whatever imbalance we would have wouldn’t last long enought to be relevant.

Events wouldnt be watered down and milked.

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Wait, they said that?
Then… Why the hell are they lasting 2 months?

1 Like