dude, it’s literaly just your opinion and nothing else
- content draught
- doubling down on convoluted useless systems
- clear lack of direction in developement. (ie domination gear forcing people to reforge their lego because the slots overlapped for no reason)
- lack of QA on many features (path of ascension, worldbosses lagging entire zones ecc)
- no other saving features that BfA had ( allied races)
- Waste of potential of the SL concept with tons of dead characters completely forgotten
- nonsensical story with a villain that has never been foreshadowed before but was retroactively hamfisted behind every single facet of lore so far, cheapening it.
- sylvanas fatigue, her mysterious 5d chess superplan that lasted multiple expansions in the end reduced to her trusting the jailer for no reason.
- cosmic escalation of the setting, where people have no investment of sort.
- Tyrande storyarc completely wasted
- korthia sucks compared to mechagon for example, some people might not have loved mechagon, but at least it was creative
- boreghast
- Bfa was bad, but SL HAD to be good to keep the alternating good/bad expansion cycle, even being on par with BfA means it automatically is a bigger disappointment.
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Shadowlands has long grind systems that puts people off that BFA didn’t have. Thats basically it.
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You hated bfa because of sheep mentality. You seen youtubers telling you to hate it do you did.
As for 1 singular thing. Titanforging
IT offered you much more replayablity then śl does. Here you are done and bored after 2 week.
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Glad you like it, but I disagree on basially all of your points. BFA was far better in terms of aesthetics, soul, etc. And it’s not like BFA was great to begin with…
The only thing that’s good in Shadowlands is the dungeons, but even those were better in BFA imo.
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Shadowlands has a terrible long term design. It had enough content to keep majority of players interested for 3 to 6 months but after that… just a small grindfest patch (korthia) and now we’re waiting for the same thing but in a more colorful landscape. Just another research tree like visions /torghast with research times up to 7 days.
Majority of playerbase finds that totally uninteresting.
Content production.
For as much as players may have individual preferences about what kind of content they enjoy, then one thing is certain.
Everyone enjoys getting more content.
The “great expansions” aren’t great because everyone likes everything in them.
They’re great because there’s so much content in them that everyone has plenty to like.
I think there’s a forum tendency to focus too much on the quality of the individual content and really dissect the design of it, as if the consumption of WoW is meant to be the equivalent of eating Beluga caviar. A very small and particular experience, but extremely delicate.
But that’s not how anyone consumes WoW.
We consume it in volume. And in large doses. And over long periods of time.
It’s meant to be the equivalent of rolling sushi. You get presented with new dishes constantly, and half of them don’t look very appealing, but it doesn’t matter, because you’re stuffing yourself in a frantic attempt to keep up with all the other dishes you do find appealing.
That’s WoW’s strength. It’s a theme park ride. The game benefits from size and additions.
That’s why Legion and BfA come out better than WoD and Shadowlands. They were bigger. They had more content additions.
There’s simply more content to like and more to consume. And WoW is all about consuming content.
Great WoW expansions are those where Blizzard really gets ahead of the ball and manages to push out content patches at a rapid pace, because that keeps players in the loop of always having new content to consume and more content to look forward to.
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Few things imo but the critisicm isn’t necessarily about BFA or objective for that matter.
First thing first : these are not necessarily the same people. It needs to be said, just because people complain now doesn’t mean that they played back in BFA or that they appreciated it more if they did.
As for SL there are 3 main reasons imo :
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The scandals & all the bad PR Blizzard accumulated for the past few years led to its reputation reaching an all time low. It’s bad for business when bashing your game is trending.
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The various delays and lack of response from the Devs kinda led to this “Content drought” complain, which is imo often blown out of proportion but that still doesn’t help
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Even if SL is an improvement it still is very similar to both Legion and BFA in term of format. Sure there are tweaks here and there but at its core it’s still mostly the same game with the same issues. And some people take this as being lazy or doubling down on the same issues again and again.
The reasons you start seeing “BFA was so much better” threads are either because people can’t get rid of their rose-tinted glasses, have a very selective memory or are just no longer emotional about It and can now more objectively see the expansion for what it is compared to its initial “dumpster fire” review.
It wasn’t nearly as terrible as it was often described back when it was live but it certainly wasn’t better than what we currently have save for a few specific points imo.
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i’ll start with the good from my point of view…
diversity in m+, classes aren’t as convoluted as they were in bfa, they could do much better…on my havoc i’ll wait 1hr+ for a 21/22 with 2.5k rio.
even so it’s much better than bfa, imo everyone should be able to play what they enjoy and reach pug limit in m+, some classes have a limited kit and would suffer but dps should never be the decider in this case.
daily activities have been more and more annoying with every patch since bfa. that’s a big turnoff, though not actually essential. way less relevant than on bfa.
story is meh, maybe cause i lost interest but i remember more mini movies/whatever on the patches from before. got people more engaged with whatever is happening. SL failed here.
overall the feeling is of staleness, this doesn’t feel like a sub game currently. more like pay and play, ESO online comes to mind. i’m not surprised people are leaving as there is little to do currently.
Yes it is and there nothing to add… 10.0 will show if they listen to casuals and new players again. Meanwhile I will just playing the forum game and not pay anything to the next 9.2 grind horror
i dont know whats wrong with it, but when i log in nothing seems fun or worth doing. i thought its just me being sick tired of the game, but from what i read, it aint.
what i think the problem is is just that the game is very shallow. when you dig in a bit under the hood it shatters any of that magic wow is already struggling to keep.
Purely subjective. Every thing that you list as bad for BfA I felt was good. The zones all feel connected and have a place in the world. The music is stellar and most of the raids were fun. Dungeons too. Only issue I had with BfA was how classes were fully dependent on certain azerite traits and that there was just too much borrowed power.
And yes, Legion was so good that BFA just felt ‘okay’ in comparison, in both story and systems.
SL on the other hand feels super disconnected to me. I dislike most of the dungeons and zone zones are just fine, but I hate they’re a floating rock in nothingness. Also Borrowed power and convoluted systems are getting a bit much.
The problem is how they did it. They now drip feed the gear so it takes so long to gear up that by the time you are geared it’s the next patch and time to start again.
They’re so afraid of letting us progress to a “done” state in a reasonable time in case we decide to leave that they extend all progression systems (gear, sockets, conduits, whatever) over months.
In old days you got to a good state then you either used that good state to do current content or you leveled an alt or two.
The problem with the too much gear was that you were constantly gearing. You were never done for a while. We’re still in that place just it’s slower.
I just don’t play in Shadowlands anymore.
Just keep making alts and level them to 50. Quit, make alt and rinse and repeat.
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i will answer this question in a simple and an educated way
- Systems were put in place to cover the loss of artifact power, thus creating a paradox of systems that do not work together
- the Heart of Azeroth and Azerite gear provided multiple traits that filled in holes from legion, Shadowlands compensated for the removal of the system with class bound and sometimes spec bound systems through the covenants. thus creating a cess pool of grind and frustration
This has been a big issue for me. I think that a degree of linear questing is fine, as in a quest chain telling a story. But these used to be about a village needing help or in Cata about a zone needing help. But now it’s the entire expansion. The older style was great for world building, you’d learn about a village or a zone but now it’s all about cosmic Dread Lords rewriting the history of the entire game.
I’ve managed to level two alts (apart from my main) to 60. One got to 58 doing Hyjal dailies and pet battles and then did Threads of Fate in Bastion (just the side quests). The other is 60 without doing any Shadowlands, just doing dailies, pet battles, world events etc.
But that goes really really slow, right?
BFA had really good start, and less depresive theme. Location and races was familiar to lots of players and not everything was new take out of nowhere. Shadowlands is like putting Spyro in to God of War game.
yeah, pretty slow.
But it was content I was doing anyhow as Shadowlands was boring. So I’d pick an alt to do the pet battles that could earn xp.
It takes about 20 pet battle dailies to earn one level. So you can fly around and do a few every day (takes a few minutes plus some travel time) and every 10 days get a level.
You could do every pet battle daily in the game and earn a level every day or two. But that would be a lot of travelling.
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At least I can play a favorite alt longer than stopping at 50 and making a new.
Thanks. Didn’t think about this actually.