All those tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorists were right.
SoD is a gateway drug to Cata/Retail, it was all a matter of time.
All these unoriginal abilities that just happened to exist specifically in Wrath/Cata weren’t caused by a lack of creativity. It was just a steppingstone.
And now when the fish has been reeled, the bait has been taken, and people flocked to Cata after P3 was practically abandoned there’s no reason to try.
That’s why we’re getting recycled content instead of Kcrypts or any other cool new never seen before raid.
It’s MC, Ony and BWL all over again with a little Cata flavor… But don’t worry they won’t release P4 without making an even bigger incentive to play Cata with the addition of Rage normalization and whatever they cook up…
Then they’ll throw your dusty, beaten and bruised character to a classic era server and just out of spite add a cloning service to cata servers
SoD is a huge flop indeed
people wouldn’t be so mad if cata’s floppy nature had no impact on SOD’s release schedule.
that fact that it DID is what gets under my skin, personally.
and yes, it does indeed feel like the playerbase is just being herded, bait-and-switch style into the version of wow where the real profits are to be made.
no one in their right mind can sit there, look at whats happening and tell me they aren’t trying to get me into the version of the game where there’s an in-game store that they’re hoping i can’t help myself from exploiting for obvious p2w advantages.
i checked some of the prices recently and its honestly just atrocious.
faction changes, race changes etc. are all much more expensive than the actual subscription costs… if i recall, it was something like 90 euros for 6 character race changes… NINETY… bro that’s like Elden Ring-and-a-half.
i said this the second they introduced boosts in TBC and i was 100% right; this is just the beginning of what they will slowly but surely add in to the store… first its a single character boost… then its however many boosts you want… then its a paid transfer… then its faction change… and before you know it, there’s a whole bloody arsenal of p2w or “QoL” features you can pay for.
sure right now people will say “but its just one mount” or “oh but its just 1 pet” and cope hard by saying “you don’t have to get it, its cosmetic” and bla bla blabityblah.
its the definition of “death by a thousand cuts” or “nickle and diming” (whichever term your prefer) which is a very common economic strategy in the very capitalist-focused world we find ourselves in… little by little they will change the game, and before you can blink we’re right back to retail which we quit in the first place.
for me, personally, i saw the writing on the wall during early TBC and was hopelessly coping that they would keep their greed in check, but by the time tokens released in wotlk it was the nail in the coffin for me.
i quit on that very day, told my guild this would ruin the game and said my goodbyes (they were all telling me “its not that bad” etc.).
i’m not falling for it.
i’ve witnessed all this before as i am sure most of us have, and i am a very keen adherent of the term “learn from history” its practically one of my life mottos.
however, blizzard is relying on the zoomers being ignorant of said history (they literally weren’t there to see it) and are directly preying on them for this very reason.
the 20 year old actual adults today weren’t there to witness what we’ve seen over the past two decades.
they were still suckling and pooping their diapers when the rest of us were complaining about meme specs throughout what used to be “retail” wotlk into cata and onwards.
OK i get your point, makes sense to me. I am shocked now too after i saw the Cash Shop in cata, like wtf is going on here now, now it makes sense sod is delayed
So 2 months of lvl 60 makes up for the 9 months of bad?
I was having the exact same thought about MoPR.
All these tinker, cogwheel and meta gems are exactly the same as runes.
I love sod and I would continue to play it. But the ques for BGs are huge, so I don’t.
I don’t agree with your premise of SOD been a gatedrug to Cata.
All the people that i have meet in SOD that are playing cata said to me straight away that SOD is just to pass time, i think every player knew if his going to play cata or not.
The delay is mostly to drug next phase relase by one month to lift the subscription numbers up again afer the 1st month of cata.
Sub numbers needs to look good for 3rd quarter of the year.
Seriously what did you expect? You pay a single subscription for 3 version of wow. Obviously the leadership will ask to trickle the content as slow as possible. They won’t make their single subscription titles compete with each other.
In retail there is usually a year without content, the time between the last raid and the next x pack. This is not nearly as bad. On the other hand I hope the devs use this time to fix the pvp balance, BG matchmaking.
SoD is still better than Cata “classic”
Very true mon - Berny is puzzled why people still fall for the scam. Playas believe cata classic is just another game to explore and ignore the truth.
Having to wait over 7 months just to see if the game maybe gets good is sad on it’s own right and merits criticism.
I mean, for you maybe but I have no intention of going back to retail because of FOMO and I refuse to play Cata so if SoD doesn’t get the attention it deserves then I’ll probably cut my sub.
SoD/Classic+ is basically Blizz’ last chance to retain my interest in WoW. If they don’t treat it right then I’ll just go play other things. Like, I’m not stuck with 3 games to my name, I have hundreds of games to play and like a hundred on my steam wishlist. I don’t need WoW in my life that desperately. I’m not that addicted to it.
What an awful take. “You can’t judge it, it isn’t finished yet” and who’s fault is that? Blizzards. Having suffered through their dog game design for half a year I can absolutely judge how poor this product and its incompetent design team has been.
Yeah the fact that this tiny team had to develop for two projects simultaneously was a horrible idea and whoever greenlit that should be demoted to scrub the toilets with their home toothbrush.
As to the prices, yeah the store prices are part of why I think Blizzard is just outright evil. Some people will try to excuse it and handwave it away but I’m tired of that. You don’t have to bleed your playerbase dry, it is not obligatory to do that, it is a choice you make as a company and it is quite frankly just evil.
I honestly feel dirty just playing SoD.
Yea i get your point too
Actually i dont care about.
I am just curios how this company can accept, that they had a game with around 500k active players peak, and nobody had and idea to make a separate developers team for it.
I understand sod classic and retail have similar playerbase, but not the same and can also attract new players.
Just imagine you have a successfull product, but you decided not to expand it because you already have a good one or two.
I wonder if the person responsible for this decision will be fired?
I don’t agree with this at all and it actually gives Blizzard way too much credibility than they deserve.
I love playing SoD, legit love it. It’s awesome despite its flaws. I had ZERO interest in Cata - I wasn’t against it but I wasn’t for it at all. At this stage however, it’s absolutely crystal clear to see that Blizzard has completely fumbled SoD and it’s became a huge flop. P3 has been a massive disappointment. There’s so many things they could’ve done differently to keep players engaged but they’ve not. It actually irritates me more than it should when I sit and think about how much they’ve fumbled SoD.
I’m raidlogging on SoD now and I’ve started playing Cata Classic and yeah, I’m really enjoying it.
Developers with smaller games put more effort.
Legit a few game modes cannibalizing each other. And blizz prioritizing the smaller ones.
Will be rewarded. The worse the product, the bigger the bonus. Companies would rather keep a known low performer than hiring an unknown genius.
Cata i do not know, but MoP remix is great fun contrary to SoD. Happy to spend some times there instead.
With the gem system there it feels like SoD runes were basically beta testing for MoPR. I guess that was the purpose of SoD all along. Classic + was never the intention behind SoD (sadly). We will see what they have in stock for s4 after the summer.
I feel like it’s peoples right to blame the devs at this point.
Most issues with SoD stems from it using a retail facade, without it’s necessary core.
I’ve been a backend dude for both ManGOS and TrinityCore for years, but to simplify what the core would actually mean in this case would be:
- Cross-Realm Matchmaking
- Custom Groups
- Cross-Actionhouse
- Reworked spells and talents, not added spells (runes)
- And finally Warmode
I can tell you that all of these points are by miles super easy for 2-3 developers to enable (except the spells that actually takes some creative balancing and effort by them…).
As i mentioned this is in the core already, it just has to be switched on, literally in the database and the world server.
It’s just a few flags that need to be edited, and of course tested with the auto bot system during maintenance.
I know some of you may not like those points, but i’d cut my fingers if this wouldn’t please or solve the most issues with SoD as we speak.
It just falls in naturally with how they have enabled and reinvented classic with everything from retail…
It would be a bit of screaming for a few days, then people would be like hey… This made this 10 times more fun.
Cause obviously we like the scale of SoD, but the core is rotten at this point.
This has nothing to do with content btw, or well some of it… Incursions would never have happend if all those 5 existed, let me tell you that. Bandaids will keep coming for every phase when they dont fix the core.
Juuuuust saying 
What the hell did I just read? “SoD is a gateway drug to Cata/Retail.” That is, you will simply ignore the fact that before the Cataclysm there was WOTLK. I didn’t play Cataclysm 14 years ago, and I don’t plan to now. I don’t see anything that can make me play Cata/Retail.