Basically extremely little content after launch.
Garrisons also went against the whole MMO notion.
I think those are the two main reasons.
I enjoyed the expansion, because I returned after a long hiatus. So I had plenty of other stuff to get caught up on and thus the content draught didn’t affect me.
Orcs
Bland starting zone for the horde garrison
Angry orcs
Slightly fewer content than ever before
Weird orc sounds
Garrison breaking immersion by pinging you to return every 15 minutes
Orcs in the garrison
Time gating with content
Lava and orcs
Time gating in the garrison
More orcs and lava
Final zone gated behind raiding
Filled with orcs
It also finished consolidating factions to be humans vs orcs
Orc capital forced down our throat
Hope for a sensible horde crushed with Vol’jin deleted - and then Legion things
If you just play the story, especially as alliance, it’s roughly fine. It has a lot of upsides, pretty zones, plenty of lovely music, such as Talador or Auchindoun.
Blizzard famously released stats on subs after WOD. If you believe that information, subs platoed on WOTLK-Cata, then started going down with Pandaria, and every subsequent expansion did worse than the previous one, untill wow classic was released.
And now that there are several versions of WOW, we the simple folk cant even tell, if people are actually playing retail, or only the legacy mods lol.
So based on those subscription stats, WOD performed with general public somewhat according to the existing trend of that time. However, Legion, BFA etc., which had less subscribers than WOD, were praised by “the community”, but WOD was for all intentents and purposes “cancelled”. As with many “cancellations” it is a storm in a teapot of sorts.
Basically, WOD did not have enough top-end content, raids, farms etc., so the players, who exceed average play time by a considerable margin, quickly ran out of things to do. WOD was aimed at casual players, not raiders and not many other elite groups. There was a lot about wod, that was against special interest of different groups of professional and semi-professional players, most of all the garrison.
As the result, the player elite divided into two camps: camp “give us more content to grind and now” and camp “stop making content now, make next expansion”. Either position meant criticizing WOD and thats what you see on the forum and youtube.
Blizzard has taken the whole situation to heart and since then popped out as many grinds, mythic, limited-time alternative gamemodes farms and other content for bored wow-heads as possible, to avoid another youtube slaughter.
And thats the WOD teapot storm.
Its just a forum/youtube thing. Does not have anything to do with the general wow public.
Its like, you know, when 5 people come out to protest, so the news agency shows them up real close, so you cant tell its not a revolution.
or at least thats the picture we get from existing information, maybe, blizz will reveal something new later, who knows.
i dont think bfa was praised that much .people were not happy during bfa expansion time .it is only that shadowlands was so bad that people anger shifted to that from bfa.
WoD was the only expansion I did not buy when it was actual. I got it with Legion, I think. I chose not to buy it because the whole timetravel idea felt like recycled content. I was not interested in other planets, only in Azeroth.
Besides raiding, there was very little content, and what there was, was pretty grindy, the last raid season lasted for a full year, the story was rushed and incredibly Orc-focused, since the story of Yrel was… just left hanging…
And of course the infamous Selfie-cam patch, yes, that was the whole patch: An in-game selfie-cam toy…
WoD was the only expansion where i played the first 6 months then quit until Legion came out
Its content drought soured peoples’ opinions of it despite it being mostly positive prior.
One thing I’ve seen people say that I don’t think mentioned here is the claim that garrisons killed the multiplayer aspect of the game. You gathered mats in your personal phased garrison, and you could get raid gear from missions (I don’t know the specifics of that).
But that’s in addition to stuff already mentioned, content drought, a lot of cut content, no flying for most of it
I think BFA suffers from “survivor bias” if I may call it that. The sentiment was negative back then, but a lot of people quit, so those who kept playing didn’t hate it as much. Couple it with nostalgia goggles and SL being considered a worse expansion (I personally disagree but that’s another discussion) and you now have people who say “BFA wasn’t so bad, guys”.
WoD has sold a LOT of copies, so thematically it was very popular. Probably the actual, effective quality of the game with lack of content was the problem based on what I saw. I wonder if they will fix wod in wod classic, but that’d be a bit much
Loved wod.
Second best expansion only beaten by tbc.
Cut content was it’s only flaw.
Wasted opportunity for Garrisons.
I fear what happened in WoD for Garrisons will happen in Midnight for housing are Blizzard are notorious for abandoning expansion features once theyve been reduced to daily hubs or something to farm raids and dungeons for to get the 200th reskin of a wall ornament.
Story. WoD was the first to see Blizzard heavilly retcon which they have continued with ever since. WoD if anything was filler between MoP and Legion. It just shows how little is actually left to wring out from the WoW story without resorting to retconning characters and storylines.
Thankfully though, we were spared the pathetic shambles that was Sylvanas as a “leader”.
At least. Until Legion.
that sounds like saying only flaw of a glass house in sahara is that u burn to ash
…But the view is just to die for!
Not if the wind knocks it over and you die to the glass shards.
this is wod. it was a beautiful pig but it was small and still a pig
I miss WoD so much. Best PvP era, no contest, not even close.
certainly it was the easiest to get into pvp. all classes were the same and had 5 buttons
Pretty accurate depiction of Legion.
In WoD, Mistweaver had two stances and a dozen of mechanics revolving around Chi.
In Legion, stances were removed, Chi was removed, all those mechanics too, and Soothing Mist became a passive ability. Yikes.
yes, legion had significant pruning and class reworks, but this was mostly to bandage the wounds from the butchers axe that was draenor pruning. it also made changes to the talents and enhanced things through the artifact weapons to make classes and specs feel more distinct than in wod.
it had it’s own pvp problems ofc like gearing