[Repost] [Games] World of Warcraft (Part 6: Warlords of Draenor) – How content cuts, bad communication, money-grubbing and rewrites turned WoW’s most anticipated expansion into its most hated ever

Wintry · edit-2 1 year ago

[Repost] [Games] World of Warcraft (Part 6: Warlords of Draenor) – How content cuts, bad communication, money-grubbing and rewrites turned WoW’s most anticipated expansion into its most hated ever

Wintry · 1 year ago

The Inflation Crisis and the WoW Token

Perhaps the most destructive part of Warlords was what it did to the economy – rampant hyperinflation. WoW had always had inflation, because players had always gathered more gold than they spent. Blizzard wanted to make it possible for new players to buy stuff, so each expansion rewarded more than the last. WoW’s economy sat in this delicate balance for over a decade without issue. Until Warlords.

Garrisons gave players the ability to easily farm herbs, ores, or other material, and also to process them into valuable items. They could send out ‘followers’ on missions which required zero effort to complete, but rewarded hundreds or thousands of gold. Here’s a guide from the time.

"…between 2014 and 2016, it was possible for dedicated players to generate quantities of gold that were previously impossible to obtain, and have not been possible to obtain since.

In that expansion, NPC followers could get an ability called “treasure hunter” that doubled any gold rewards they earned from a quest. And “treasure hunter” perks stacked, so it was possible to get a few thousand gold per day, per garrison. Many casual players who had never had significant amounts of money before earned hundreds of thousands of gold during Warlords of Draenor. Players could sock away millions, since each character could earn roughly the same amount of gold from their garrisons, and you can have as many as 10 characters on a server."

Before long, the game was full of millionaires.

Blizzard’s solution to this problem was… rudimentary. They removed the ability to generate enormous amounts of gold when the next expansion came out, and they filled the game with gold sinks. A gold sink is an extremely expensive item designed to remove money from the economy. These included gear appearances and toys, but mainly came in the form of mounts. This wasn’t anything new – the famous Traveller’s Tundra Mammoth went back to Wrath of the Lich King. What changed was the sheer cost of these mounts, as well as how many there were.

The Marsh Hopper cost 333,000 gold, and there were three to buy. The Lightforged Warframe and Palehide Direhorn each set you back a spicy 500,000 gold. The Bloodfang Window cost 2 million, and the famous Mighty Caravan Brutosaur cost 5 million.

This wasn’t really a solution. The gold farmers had so much money that none of these mounts made a dent in their wealth, and it meant a lot of mounts were totally unattainable to everyone else. This was especially bad in the case of reputations. Imagine working your socks off for weeks to max out your reputation with the Argussian Reach faction, only to find out you would never get the mount, because it had been turned into a ludicrously expensive gold sink. One expansion (Battle for Azeroth) would turn ALL of its faction mounts into gold sinks.

Rather than fix the problem of inflation, this just made the non-wealthy players more angry about it. Now it was affecting them directly. And since it didn’t fix inflation, everything else remained exorbitantly expensive.

“There is massive inequality, because WoW’s trade goods economy tends to funnel wealth to a small number of players.”

If you avoided these gold-making techniques, or weren’t subscribed during the time when they were possible, you were effectively locked out of the game’s economy.

“Blizzard is fully aware of the damaging impact that some content in Warlords of Draenor has wrought onto the game economy. However, I am worried that attempts to fix it will not be heavy-handed enough, which could cause problems such as making new player experiences even more frustrating due to the sheer amount of gold they’d have to earn to make any headway into some aspects of the game.”

Blizzard did have one other trick up its sleeve to help with this.

In April 2015, Blizzard introduced the WoW Token. It was an in-game item representing one month of game play-time. Players could buy them for real money, and sell them to other players.

WoW gold had always had an in-game value on black markets, but now it was official. Blizzard took some measures to limit the tokens - unlike other items, players could neither set the price, bid or haggle, or choose who to buy from. The market price was automatically set by an algorithm based on supply vs demand, and tokens could not be directly exchanged for real money – though they could be exchanged for Battle.net account balance to spend on other Blizzard games, and those games could be legally sold on key-selling sites for real money.

"Players only need a finite amount of game time; you buy 24 tokens, and you’re fixed for two years. So the players sitting on hoards of gold had an incentive to sell only a fraction of their stash. The rest of their wealth sat idle in their coffers, out of circulation.

Once Blizzard allowed players to redeem tokens for Battle.net balance, however, there was basically no limit to how many tokens players needed. Rich players began dumping their stashes, and with so many more people trying to sell than buy, the value of gold relative to dollars plunged, and the gold price of the tokens started skyrocketing."

The WoW token had four aims:

To motivate dedicated players to keep playing by allowing them to pay their subscription fee in gold
To give casual or new players an avenue into the economy by letting them buy gold through legitimate means
To generate more profit from their shrinking player base
To undermine the black market

It succeeded spectacularly on the first three, but failed just as spectacularly on the fourth.

Most MMOs had some kind of ‘token’ service – WoW wasn’t doing anything new. Indeed, most of the community were in favour of tokens. It was a popular addition which benefitted new and old players.

Here are a few comments from the Youtube trailer

“Even though I quit WoW a long time ago it’s good to see things like this being implemented in to the game.”

[…]

“This feature is completely amazing! Thanks so much for this Blizz ! :)”

[…]

“Finally an excellent idea, now people will play easier without thinking about membership. Great Job.”

[…]

“let me just say, as someone who’s highest level non-death knight is lvl 26, that this is the best feature i’ve ever seen on a multiplayer game”

But the community was divided on whether the WoW token would actually work.

Some players worried that in order to pay for WoW tokens, more of them would start farming gold, and so inflation would rise rather than fall. Gold spent on tokens never actually left the economy. If anything, by linking all of the servers within a region in the same token market, Blizzard guaranteed that gold would hit the same value everywhere. In small servers with low inflation, that meant a huge drop in the value of gold.

Internet angry-man Asmongold had this to say.

"I think that it is a negative. I think that it makes the game worse, and it’s a bandage that Blizzard puts on the game in order to make up for the fact that they’re not balancing, and they’re not dealing with [back market] gold sellers. That’s what it comes down to. It fucks the economy. It makes every single accomplishment that can be achieved with gold – which is basically all accomplishments – basically an Ebay achievement.

WoW token legitimises and it provides a vehicle for pay to win to occur. […] And what is winning in WoW? Winning in WoW means something different for everybody. But I think for many people, winning in WoW does imply, to some degree, getting a good arena rating or getting very good gear. Gold can buy both of those things, and if you can buy gold, I think that’s pay to fucking win."

To clarify, he is referring to the ‘boost’ economy, in which groups of highly skilled and geared players escort other players through end-game content or pvp so they can get the rewards, in exchange for gold. Since the creation of the WoW token, the black market has gradually transitioned away from selling gold and toward selling these boosts.

It has been streamlined to the point where it has more in common with Uber than the shady websites of old. But unlike the black market gold sales, Blizzard profits immensely from the boosting industry, because players pay for boosts with gold, and they get that gold from tokens. In fact, Blizzard overtly works with boosting companies to track down RMT (real money transactions) in exchange for the implicit protection of these companies. In order words, Blizzard audits boosters to keep the profits flowing through the token system.

“Fundamentally, it’s a lot like randomly getting an insanely good group on the group finder, but reliable, repeatable and on-demand. They have made it convenient, low risk, and professional. Hell, if your run goes wrong, you can even get a refund. These companies have moderators, they have customer support staff, and of course advertisers. All so that you can have a good experience.”

Most full-time boosters come from poorer countries, where the profits from wealthy westerners can easily cover the costs of living. Globally, it’s an industry worth tens, perhaps hundreds of millions.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

Wintry · 1 year ago

How to Monetise Fun

That was not remotely the only money-related drama in Warlords.

In the Wrath write-up, we covered the controversial sparkle pony. Players had been furious at the idea of paying real money for a mount. But Blizzard had assured them that it was only so expensive because half of the profits were going to charity.

Then, they added another mount to the store. And another, and another – each costing $25 or £19. Blizzard’s half-hearted excuse was that they didn’t ‘fit the theme’ of the expansion, and so there was no logical place to get them in game. But that logic didn’t persuade anyone - Blizzard had deliberately designed them that way.

Around the time of Warlords, it really kicked off. This was due to the addition of the Iron Skyreaver and the Enchanted Fey Dragon (the latter changed colour). These two mounts not only ‘fit the theme’, they were actively present throughout Draenor, both on the ground and in flight paths. It was pretty obvious that Blizzard had picked through the mounts of Warlords late into development, chosen the two most attractive ones, and cut them away to add to the in-game store. There was even an area in Shadowmoon Valley full of fey dragons and NPCs labelled ‘dragon trainers’, which suggested there had been a whole section of content surrounding these faction mounts, like the dragon serpents in Mists of Pandaria.

And it escaped no one that a vast majority of the mounts in Warlords were slight recolors of the same half a dozen models. There were, for example, nine different variations of the same wolf mount. It was almost like they had to compensate because they’d lost two of their main mount models.

“The best mounts should be ones earned in game no excuses, it ruins the game when you can just buy all the coolest stuff.”

Since mounts were technically cosmetic, there were some players who didn’t care.

“Don’t like them don’t buy them. Very simple.”

But for the most part, the community was incensed.

“Would someone please think of the wealthy corporate executives and majority shareholders!”

This usually always led onto the debate of whether Blizzard needed to sell store mounts. Costs were going up and subscribers were going down, some said, so Blizzard had no choice but to push harder on microtransactions. Profits were higher than ever, others replied.

And so the response would always be that Blizzard was a business, their goal was to make money.

A company providing a service, they were told, and the customer is king, not the shareholder.

Then quit, they’d say. Vote with your wallet. If you’re going to keep paying your subscripton, you’re implicitly supporting Blizzard’s choices, and so your arguments are in bad faith.

This was an effective rebuttal. It left the complaining party with two choices – sit down and shut up, or leave the game (and shut up). It may have been effective at stifling arguments, but more and more players were taking the latter option these days. That was becoming a problem.

When you’ve been in the WoW community long enough, you look at disputes in the forums the way Doctor Strange looks at timelines. The exact wording changes, but it always plays out the same way.

Regardless of what discourse went on, store mounts were insanely successful, and so they have become more and more prominent. For context, there are now twenty-two. It would cost you $550 dollars to buy them all.

Another money-grubbing addition was the level 90 boost. This isn’t the same as the boosting I described in the previous section. When pre-orders became available for Warlords, one of the perks used to justify the higher-than-usual upfront cost was the ability to send any character straight to level 90 – max level in Mists of Pandaria.

After Warlords released, you could buy as many Level 90 boosts as you liked – for $60 dollars each.

Casual players rejoiced.

“Free lvl 90 is exactly what this game needed. I’ve been playing off and on since vanilla, and leveling a new character to max level is the absolute LAST thing I want to spend my time doing. I’d literally rather be outside shovelling snow because I’d at least be getting a bit of exercise.”

[…]

“Hey, this isnt a bad thing ._. why does everybody treat it as such. Gives players who dont have the oodles of time to spend leveling 1-90 a character tht they can play endgame stuff with. Thats pretty awesome.”

It goes without saying that not everyone was happy. To many hard-core players, it was a slap in the face. The early World of Warcraft experience was defined by painful grinding, and now yet another rite of passage was being stripped away to pander to casuals.

“I guess this makes sense if you hate levelling (LINKS TO REDDIT) so much that it feels like work that you should be paid for, but it’s just part of the game to me. Paying extra money to skip part of the game that you’re paying a sub fee for seems crazy to me.”

[…]

“Even though I hate levelling, I wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything.”

It’s certainly true levelling gradually teaches players the basics of the game, and their class. Skipping that risks overwhelming newbies with systems and challenging content and an interface full of abilities they have no idea how to use.

“Getting a boost from level 1 to 90 is like learning how to swim by jumping off a diving board, straight into the deep end. As a newly minted level 90, I expected to see a special quest marker or notification that pointed me in the direction of adventure. There wasn’t one.”

“While endgame raiders have always bellyached about bad players, the sudden influx of level 90 characters without 90 levels of player skill has caused drama in WoW’s Looking For Raid feature. And while it’s hard to quantify the issue, it’s not hard to imagine that many low-DPS accusations are based on players who haven’t mastered their new characters.”

When asked about the steep price of the boost, Blizzard declared that their motivations were not capitalistic – far from it. They only cared about the game.

“In terms of the pricing, honestly a big part of that is not wanting to devalue the accomplishment of levelling,” Hazzikostas said.

"If our goal here was to sell as many boosts as possible, we could halve the price or more than that - make it $10 or something.”

How benevolent of them.

“So what are we to Blizzard? Are we just poorly educated pissants who flock to their games no matter what they do? Are we actual people who make their game live or die, or are we just cash cows to be milked until we can be milked no more (or until we start kicking)?”

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

Wintry · 1 year ago

More Like Trashran

It was designed as a small island zone, rocky and covered in ruins, just off the coast of Tanaan Jungle. Players from either faction would meet in the middle and battle it out for rewards. The controversial hubs of Warspear and Stormshield perched on either end – close to the PvP action, but separate from it.

It should have been simple. Blizzard had been making PvP zones since Wrath. They knew what to do, and what not to do. With such a pedigree, it’s mind boggling that they fucked up so badly with Ashran. It became so overwhelmingly, unanimously hated, in fact, that it is held up as a symbol of just how terrible Warlords became.

“Ashran, a shitty battleground that no one liked and just sucked fat, meaty Ogre cocks.”

But what made it so unfulfilling?

Players criticised the layout of the zone, which tended to result in a big confused ‘soup of people’ at its centre, and which usually ended in an unsatisfying stalemate.

The design did nothing to split the factions down into groups, so individual players felt like they were just being carried in a vague, chaotic wave, with very little personal responsibility and no opportunity to shine.

In other battlegrounds, getting two evenly matched sides forced players to work harder. In Ashran, getting two evenly matched sides meant nothing you did could make a difference – so there was no reason to bother working at all. It was boring and monotonous. When you finally pushed toward the end, you won, but you didn’t really. You might get your loot, but then a new wave of enemies would spawn and the fighting would continue. Unlike Wintergrasp or Tol Barad, Ashran never ended.

“Ashran is super lame. Just two blobs of players wacking at each other until one side wins.”

According to Bellular, another flaw was that Blizzard rewarded players for completing secondary objectives which didn’t contribute much to the flow of the battle, and failed to incentivise actual PvP. As one player put it:

“It didn’t even feel like a BG, it was just a bunch of PVE events in a PVP environment.”

Other criticisms surrounded Ashran’s size - it was cramped for the number of people it was meant to host in a single match. And it’s queues were soul crushing, though that was nothing new for WoW. It was also horrendously laggy.

"Never once won it by completing the objective, it’s just raw attrition and lag.

Which speaks of terrible design. If the objectives are less efficient than butting heads for 40 minutes, the objectives clearly suck."

Tweet About It

The biggest controversy of the expansion was Patch 6.1, ‘Garrisons Update’. The name alone gives you an idea of how much effort Blizzard had put in. The patch contained an heirlooms tab, updated Blood Elf models, introduced Twitter integration and the ability to take in-game selfies, and added a few bits to the garrison. That’s it.

The announcements came in February 2015.

“In terms of fresh, repeatable content to keep players invested, there was virtually nothing.”

It would be an understatement to say that players were upset.

“That video felt offensively underwhelming for a full content patch.” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

[…]

"When players ask Blizzard to fulfill promises that they’ve made, they get all abrupt and moody, and tell us that it will cost us a raid tier.

WHY BLIZZARD, WHY HAVE YOU GIVEN US TWITTER INTEGRATION, WHEN NOBODY ASKED FOR IT, NOBODY WANTS IT, AND ONLY A SMALL MINORITY OF PEOPLE WILL EVER USE IT? DID THAT COST US A RAID?"

[…]

"Remember how you waited 14 months with no content during SoO? And when we promised you we learned our lesson? And then when we charged extra for this expansion? And when we cut Farahlon, pushed back Tannan and BRF, and took away your capital cities?

Here’s Twitter and a few things for your garrison, keep paying us $15 a month and maybe we’ll give you something in the spring. Actually, make it the summer.

This is why I am pissed off. Because after all the promises, all the delays, all the millions of loyal fans paying $15 per month for over a year (the equivalent of buying a new AAA game every four months), taking more time to develop than any other expansion, and then still requiring us to pay more when it finally arrived, Blizzard completely drops the ball at launch and delivers less content than we’ve ever seen.

And then patch 6.1 comes along. Does Blizzard try to remedy any of this? Regain their customers trust?

No, instead we get the garrison update with Twitter integration.

What. The. Flying. Fuck."

So why did this happen?

According to Blizzard, they had always given ‘minor’ patches a second number. So instead of being patch 6.1, Garrisons would have been patch 6.05. For whatever reason, they chose to change that with WoD, perhaps because they were falling behind on their first major patch.

“Which means that Blizzard itself admits that Warlords was only technically a two-content-patch expansion — in actuality, it was only one content patch.”

The subscriber numbers didn’t just fall, they collapsed. Warlords may have begun with an unprecedented spike in players, but just a few months later, the game was facing an all-time low. Blizzard pressed the ‘abort’ button and simply stopped reporting the numbers.

“Note that this is the last quarter that we plan to provide the subscriber number as there are other metrics that are better indicators of the overall Blizzard business performance,”

But that wasn’t enough to escape the cruel eye of the community. Through machine learning, one wise nerd came up with this graph. Warlords hit lows of just over four million. It represented the beginning of a new trend for Blizzard, in which subscribers would peak and then immediately drop with the release of each expansion. And excluding those temporary subscribers, the core community (who remained subscribed non-stop) followed an almost linear decline.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

Wintry · 1 year ago

The Pathfinder Achievement

Lead Game Director Ion Hazzikostas heavily implied in May 2015 that patch 6.2 wouldn’t be the final patch of the expansion.

“We’ve got plenty of more story to be told after this,” Hazzikostas says when asked whether patch 6.2 would be the last big content update for Warlords of Draenor. But Blizzard is also working hard to make sure players aren’t left waiting for new content in general.

This was not true.

In an interview just a few weeks later, fellow Blizzard lead Cory Stockton revealed the truth – there would be nothing after the upcoming patch. It wasn’t the mid-game update players expected, but the big finale. Aside from the shocking u-turn, the interview struck the playerbase as incredibly out of touch, with Cory being torn apart for statements like, “Overall we are happy with garrison feedback," and perhaps even worse,

”Sometimes we’ve had four patches in a cycle, sometimes we’ve had three, obviously here we’re looking at two big patches with 6.1 and 6.2”

[The community responded]( https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1811060-Cory-Stockton-(Mumper) as you might expect.

“What kind of fucking bullshit is that, 6.1 should not even be called a fucking patch!”

[…]

“How fucking deluded is he? Being happy with how WoD turned out doesn’t give me any hope for the next expansion, which will probably be overpriced and only have one “big” patch. Pathetic.”

[…]

“Do they communicate internally at all?”

[…]

“Nicely done Corey, you just added in the final nail to the coffin.”

All this left 6.2 with a lot to live up to. But would it deliver?

‘The Fury of Hellfire’ released on 22nd June 2015. It was pretty good. Players were finally able to explore Tanaan Jungle, a tropical zone with a demonic aesthetic. Its raid, Hellfire Citadel, was long and complex. Players enjoyed it immensely.

But it served as the first raiding patch of the expansion, and was the only raid the game would get until the launch of the next expansion, 434 days away. It didn’t matter how good it was. No content could stay popular in those circumstances. Warlords went into a content drought (LINKS TO REDDIT) with an already-paltry amount to do.

"Every World of Warcraft expansion prior to Warlords of Draenor boasted either three or four content patches. Warlords settled for a mere two.

It gets worse. Those two content patches for Warlords of Draenor were some of the most anemic and disappointing in the game’s history."

There was also the issue of cohesion. Most of the expansion lay on the cutting-room floor, and the writers had to cobble together what remained into a usable story. Perhaps that’s why many of the characters in Warlords have such promising beginnings, and such anticlimactic ends. Players often say that if Warlords had been finished, it could have been the greatest expansion ever, but we may never know.

The Farahlon patch was gone. The Ogre Continent never even made it off the ground. Shattrath City, a recreation of the most iconic location in Burning Crusade, had been planned to host a raid, but that had been cut, so it was left an empty shell that couldn’t be entered or interacted with.

"I still don’t understand the deal with Shattrath (LINKS TO REDDIT) even now at this point in the expansion.

The Draenei are pretty much locked out of their own capital city aren’t they? You think something as big of a deal as that would come up at some point in the story but no - we just kill some mobs on the perimeter and act like everything’s A-ok."

If all that content had been completed, Warlords may have a very different legacy.

But setting all that aside, it may surprise you to know that the big controversy of 6.2 had nothing to do with the writing or the raid. It all came down to an achievement called ‘Draenor Pathfinder’. You see, ever since Blizzard introduced flying in Burning Crusade, they had been looking for an excuse to get rid of it.

Every time the idea was even mentioned, the community rose up in fury, and flying remained. For a long time, the solution had been to let players buy flying, but only after they had out-levelled most (or all) of the new content, so they were forced to play through it once on the ground. That came with the added benefit of making it feel so much sweeter when players could finally fly in those areas.

Prior to the release of 6.2, Ion announced that Warlords of Draenor would not have flying at all, and nor would any future expansions.

“At this point, we feel that outdoor gameplay in World of Warcraft is ultimately better without flying. We’re not going to be reintroducing the ability to fly in Draenor, and that’s kind of where we’re at going forward.”

And so, like clockwork, the outcry began.

“Keeping flight out of Draenor permanently is a truly, profoundly awful plan. Ugh.”

[…]

“The no flying at max level was a disaster. No flying while leveling was great, everything he mentioned. But, no flying at max level made for a dead world, no reason to explore or play the content.”

This was a widely repeated idea.

“I’m fine with not flying while leveling, I’m fine with not flying till the first major content patch, I’m not fine with no flying ever.”

There were more than a few players who left the game entirely due to it.

“I just quit WoW over this, on an account active since 2004.”

The user Muneravenmn put it succinctly.

“Wading through crap may be immersive, but it isn’t fun.”

[…]

“if we lost flying it would be another hit against this game for me that would result in me no longer wanting to play. I don’t want to have something that takes 1 minute to reach turn into 5 minutes because I have to run. It would make no sense to bar flying forever, especially since they just released another flying mount with the expack.”

[…]

“Just because flying is allowed, doesn’t mean you have to use it. If you like slowly walking around exploring in old zones, knock yourself out. No one is forcing you to fly.”

This wasn’t a one-sided issue. Many players, such as the user ‘Steveosizzle’, defended the decision.

“For the time I spent after resubbing I found it great. I’ve played since vanilla and I forgot exactly how much the community lost when they added flying. It was great to have that back.”

A topic on the World of Warcraft forums about this announcement reached over 500 pages, and most of the responses were overwhelmingly negative.

Inevitably, Blizzard backpedalled. They went with a ‘compromise’ that united the playerbase – against them - the Pathfinder achievement. In order to get it, players had to explore every part of the continent, complete all the story quests (each zone had easily over a hundred), collect a hundred treasures, complete twelve daily quests, and grind reputation to ‘revered’ with all three of Tanaan Jungle’s new factions. The latter could take weeks. After doing all this, players could fly in Draenor.

Unless you were willing to dedicate days upon days to the achievement, you were out of luck. A lot of players went multiple expansions without being able to fly in Draenor. And the strangest thing is that Blizzard carried the system forward to future releases.

Writing for Massively Overpowered, Tyler Edwards summed up the mood of the community.

”I think about having to do another Pathfinder grind, and my heart just sinks. The story is what drove me away, but Pathfinder is what keeps me from coming back.

Meeting in the middle always sounds virtuous and reasonable, but Pathfinder is a great example of how a compromise isn’t always fair if the original ask was completely outrageous.

It’s an exhausting, tedious grind, and the worst thing about it is you don’t even get something new and awesome out of it. You just get to go back to using a feature that has been a pillar of the game for the large majority of its lifespan.

I firmly believe Pathfinder only exists as a way to artificially extend the length of content so as to earn more subscription dollars. It’s not as if Blizzard is above that sort of thing."

By forcing players to grind in so many ways, Blizzard guaranteed that everyone would encounter at least one mechanic they hated. Players who liked levelling dungeons were forced to go back and ensure hours of questing. Players who only cared about raids were forced to grind reputations.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

Wintry · 1 year ago

“Draenor Pathfinder is a bitch and a half, especially the rep grinding. Instead of grinding rep with all the factions we care about and have been playing alongside for the entire expansion, we’re introduced to three new factions toward the end of the expansion, which can only be grinded via dailies and weeklies. To me this just seems like a time waster.”

Pathfinder has somehow stuck around, requiring players to fill out a new arbitrary shopping list of goals with each expansion. It remains a hated part of the game (LINKS TO REDDIT) by most, though some players have come to embrace it. Blizzard keeps toying with the idea of removing flight completely, only to add it in a later patch. It has become just another part of the cycle of life.

Half-finished Stories – Yrel and Maraad

Cutting several zones, raids, and entire patches had a serious effect on the characters who were meant to develop over the course of the expansion. None suffers more due to cuts than Yrel – particularly unfortunate since she is the only significant Draenei in an expansion which is technically meant to be half Draenei, half Orc. She’s introduced at the start of the expansion as a native of Draenor, and is intriguing by virtue of how normal she is, in a game-world where everyone with any importance is either ultra-powerful, royal, or both. She is immediately likeable.

The plot of Shadowmoon Valley focuses heavily on her and AU-Velen, and ends with his self-sacrifice. It’s a great cinematic, but it fails to hit emotionally for reasons this blogger explained better than I could.

"…making an alternate reality your story is BAD, especially when you’re revisiting characters that exist/existed in your main reality.

You know why? Because those characters had their shot, or are currently having their shot, shall we say. Those MU characters are YOURS. See, the Velen on Draenor that died? Well, what did it matter? That wasn’t OUR Velen. Our Velen is still doing nothing in the Exodar, so the AU Velen’s sacrifice comes off as almost false or not as horrible. Emotional, yes, but something easy to shrug off when you remember that our Velen is still okay. Therefore the emotional connection to the AU characters is more or less carved in half with this in mind."

She appears again in Gorgrond, in the company of the other main Draenei, Non-AU-Maraad. Accrding to the writers, Maraad had originally been married to Non-AU-Yrel, but she died, so he has a whole big story with AU-Yrel, who doesn’t know him (AU-Maraad died before he could meet her). Gorgrong’s story was meant to focus on their relationship, with the two gradually falling in love. That whole backstory and love affair was cut, so they never get beyond acquaintances. Maraad still gets his climactic death in the next zone, but it’s hard to care because he was such a minor character.

Yrel skips Spires of Arak, but comes back for Nagrand, where she is suddenly wearing Maraad’s armour (one size fits all, I guess) and using his ceremonial title, and multiple characters are talking about how ‘Maraad would be so proud of you’. Presumably some important stuff was cut there. Then in the Garrison questline, Yrel goes through a series of trials to become an Exarch – one of the three people who lead the Draenei on Draenor. It’s sudden and inexplicable. There’s even a quest where she emotionally lays Maraad’s ashes to rest and says goodbye to his spirit – even though they only knew each other for like an hour.

When the player investigates her backstory, they learn she has a ‘dark secret’ with enormous consequences, but that part of her story was cut too. When she was added to Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard’s tactical game tie-in), one of her flavour dialogues referenced this.

“You want to know what my dark secret is? I see dead people. Kidding! About that being my secret, that is. We Draenei see dead people all the time.”

Yrel appears in the final raid and has a speaking role in its cinematic. Another character foreshadows the following expansion, and she says ‘If you ever need us, we will be here,’ and then expresses her intention to rebuild Draenor alongside the Orcs (a goal she never mentions prior to this, presumably because it was cut). But any future she might have had is cut too. Yrel doesn’t appear in the next expansion. Like almost all of Draenor’s characters, she’s simply forgotten.

She gets a cameo in the one after that, however, when it is revealed that time has sped up on Draenor, thirty years have passed there, and Yrel is now ruling the continent as some kind of Holy Hitler. Despite how major that sounds, it is never expanded upon in much detail.

Half-finished Stories – The Warlords

The seven Warlords of Draenor are Kargath Bladefist, Blackhand, Kilrogg Deadeye, Durotan, Grom Hellscream, Ner’Zhul, and Gul’dan. They all appear briefly during the introduction at the Black Portal, but after that, their fates become a little scattered. Almost all of them fell pray to content cuts. Also, as far as I can tell, no AU-character meets their non-AU counterpart, ever. Blizzard didn’t want too much time travel in their time travel expansion.

Arguably the most important Warlord was Ner’Zhul. His non-AU version had been responsible for turning Draenor into Outland, and had become the first Lich King. Despite barely appearing in WoW, he had been pivotal to the entire game’s narrative. But in Warlords, he comes to a pathetic end. After a foiled attempt to create an evil Naaru (light god), he gets killed off in a dungeon.

“What pissed me off (LINKS TO REDDIT) the most was they bring back all of these iconic and cool characters, then we literally just steamroll all of them.”

Kargath comes to an even more inglorious end. After barely appearing in the questing zones, he becomes the first boss of the first raid, Highmaul, and you can really tell he was thrown in because they couldn’t think of any other way to get rid of him. Considering he had gotten a short film and everything, players were unimpressed at his death.

Blackhand appears multiple times over the questing of Gorgrond, gets a cool cinematic, and becomes the final boss of the raid Blackrock Foundry, which is dedicated entirely to him, and is arguably the only Warlord who gets a satisfying ending in this expansion. He’s literally the only orc in this expansion that no one complained about.

As the leader of the Iron Horde, Grom Hellscream is the most fleshed out Warlord before the expansion begins. He fills the cover of the game, but barely appears until the Hellfire Citadel raid, where he was originally meant to be the final boss until he was ousted by rewrites.

In the raid trailer, he is shown having a random and inexplicable change of heart, and now totally supports the players. He is freed in the raid, and lives on to make the Iron Horde good. It’s an incredibly jarring transition which can only be the product of cut story content. He proudly lifts his weapon at the end and declares ‘Draenor is free’ as if the Iron Horde was never even a thing. There’s no talk of him facing consequences for trying to genocide the Draenei or take over Azeroth. The Iron Horde never even officially disbanded, and he never stood down as its leader. It’s all nonsense. He is one of the most butchered characters of the expansion.

"What in the world? GROM gets to have the victory salute while yelling “Draenor is free!” ? Grom, who TERRORIZED Draenor by slaughtering Draenei, threatening annhilation on the orc clans who wouldn’t join the Iron Horde, and transforming various parts of the continent into his own personal war machine so he could slaughter even more people on a world he’d never been to?

???

And just because Gul’dan is the “bigger bad,” we suddenly have collective amnesia and go: oh yeah! Gul’dan had Draenor in his clutches the whole expac… not Grom for the majority of it."

[…]

“Now this utter lack of commentary about Grom’s villainy would be better (but still horrible) if we got some hint – ANY hint – that Grom is remorseful for his actions. That he saw what his absolute greed for conquering and war had done to his people (sounds familiar, I’m sure.) But instead, we get nothing. Grom only allies with us because he got captured and Gul’dan got the best of him. If Gul’dan hadn’t happened, Grom would have kept pushing back with the Iron Horde despite his heavy losses. Victory or Death, and all that. Hundreds, if not thousands more, would have died – both his soldiers and ours, and innocents besides.”

As the only ‘good guy’ of the lot, Durotan gets more development, especially since he’s Thrall’s dad. Most of Frostfire Ridge is dedicated to his story, but he accompanies Horde players throughout the expansion. At the end, he is promptly forgotten about for multiple years. Two expansions later, we’re told he was killed by Nazi Yrel.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

Wintry · 1 year ago

Kilrogg becomes a demonic follower of Gul’dan and becomes an early boss in Hellfire Citadel. The dude is basically an extra in his own expansion.

“Kilrogg? He might as well have been any no name boss.”

Gul’dan himself ends up being the primary antagonist of Warlords, by summoning Archimonde, one of the two generals of the Burning Legion. Not AU-Archimonde, just Archimonde. Apparently there isn’t a different version of the Burning Legion for each timeline, there’s just one, because their home in the Twisting Nether exists outside of space and time. But this time when he’s killed, it’s for good. It’s confusing and rife with plot holes (LINKS TO REDDIT). A lot of players joke that the only purpose of the expansion was to introduce him to the story, so that he could set up Legion.

While not technically one of the warlords, Orgrim Doomhammer was a major character in the original timeline and was promised to be significant in Warlords. He ended up being written almost completely out. As one reddit user put it, his story became. “I follow the Iron Horde! Wait, the Iron Horde is bad! Agggh, I am dead!”

“Orgrim…that pissed me off so bad. Iconic guy relegated to a stupid quest chain and then just casually dies…no big deal”

So out of seven Orcs, one gets a solid story with a good ending. These are literally the people they named the expansion after. How could it go so wrong?

It was mentioned in one of the art blogs that the expansion was originally designed to focus entirely on the Iron Horde. Each zone had a clan, each clan had a warlord, and each warlord had a story. However at some point during development, Blizzard realised this caused, in their own words, ‘Orc-itis’. They expected players to get sick of the constant Orcs.

Halfway through the alpha, large parts of the story and zone design were scrapped, and new threats were brought in to make it all feel more varied. Gorgrond was almost entirely remade. It originally had an entire functioning train system (which is still inexplicably present in the Grimrail Depot dungeon) but it was changed to focus on Primals (sentient plants). Nagrand became Ogre-centric, Tanaan got its demon makeover, and the Iron Horde invasion of Shadowmoon Valley from the trailer was removed entirely.

Draenor pivoted from a theme of all-out war to a focus on exploration. The Iron Horde got pushed to the background. There was no time to rewrite the warlords to make their stories fit around this new premise. Instead, we are left with small snippets of their original plot lines, and hastily thrown-together resolutions.

#Half-finished Stories – Garrosh and Thrall

Perhaps the most hated writing choice was Garrosh’s death.

He had been the main antagonist of Mists of Pandaria, and its final boss, but had escaped and set the plot of Warlords in motion. You might expect his ending to be climactic, and involve the player heavily. But you would be wrong. He runs into Thrall, the two have a mak’gora – an Orcish tradition of ritualistic duelling. On its own, that sort of works. Garrosh had actually had a mak’gora with Thrall before, during Wrath of the Lich King, and Garrosh began his ‘downward spiral’ during a mak’gora at the start of Cataclysm, during which he dishonourably killed another major character, Cairne Bloodhoof.

The cutscene that follows is wildly controversial. Not only does Thrall steal the kill for the second time in a row, not only does he blatantly cheat in order to win, he also completely dismisses any responsibility he holds for making Garrosh into a villain. But since it’s Thrall, and as we established in the Cataclysm write-up, Thrall can do no wrong, he is treated like a hero.

“First of all Thrall (LINKS TO REDDIT) and his babymomma stole the spotlight when we killed Deathwing. Then Garrosh starts pulling all this shit and Blizzard finally says, “Hey you can kill that asshole now!” So we gather up a raid, we fight our way to him, we fight him, we defeat him, only to force us to spare him, put him on trial, have him travel into the past, so we follow him again, lead an assault on the Warsong, fight our way to him again, fight him again, only to have Thrall interrupt the fight, and have us sit on the sidelines while we watch Thrall kill him.”

[…]

“Thrall doesn’t even bat an eye when Garrosh starts screaming at him that he left him to pick up the broken pieces of the Horde. Thrall isn’t stupid, Thrall isn’t heartless, in that green Mary-Sue is the feeling that he DID have a hand in breaking Garrosh. The fact they ended the story between them by saying “No…you did this to yourself” and calls down Zeus on his ass, just left a sour taste in my mouth.”

[…]

"Ahh, Garrosh. We get a quest called “Justice for Thrall” and watched as Thrall takes the player’s fight with Garrosh into his own plot-armored hands and slaughters him in a shoddy duel in a horrifically brutal way.

Right. “Justice for Thrall.” Not Justice for Pandaria, Theramore, the Trolls… okay. Whatever."

#The Legacy of Draenor

Warlords did basically nothing to forward the main plot of Warcraft, outside of the final boss of its final raid. It was a pointless diversion that existed purely to familiarise players with the characters in the movie – which was delayed twice and hadn’t even come out by the end of the expansion.

"Warlords, in the end, hardly affected our world. The Blasted Lands got hit, sure, and Stormwind got that annoying Everbloom portal, but other than that, Azeroth is A OK. We did lose some great characters (Maraad and Baros come immediately to mind) but otherwise…

Nothing happened that mattered.

See, that’s it. In my opinion, Warlords didn’t give us ANYHING THAT MATTERED. The story could have been completely annihilated and we wouldn’t have lost any development, except getting back a couple characters."

This sentiment is echoed in an article on Gameskinny:

“Call me unfeeling, but there’s really no connection between the players, who have lived and died as heroes in one timeline’s Azeroth and Outlands, and this alternate timeline Draenor. The alternate universe Draenor is not Azeroth. It would be one thing if the timelines were bound together in some manner and actions in one timeline had consequences in another. But they are separate, and by the next expansion this alternate Draenor may be almost entirely forgotten.”

This expansion left behind a troubled legacy. It’s a scar on the history of Warcraft, spoken about in the same tones used by cliche Vietnam veterans. It has become the benchmark for bad quality, the low-water mark against which all other disappointments are compared.

“At best, Warlords of Draenor is something that never reached its full potential. At worst, the expansion sets a precedent for future expansions: that Blizzard will be giving us less content, and poorer quality content at that, for more money.”

[…]

“It’s important to look at the data to understand just how disastrous Warlords of Draenor has been. There isn’t just a vague feeling that the game is worse now than it used to be; there is objective evidence that this is the expansion with the least amount of additional content Blizzard has ever provided.”

Blizzard had long established a system in which three expansions were always in production. At any one time, they were working two expansions ahead – or so they claimed. But nothing about Warlords matched up with that.

“If Blizzard had planned properly, we could now be enjoying some sort of post-Hellfire denouement for Warlords in Farahlon, just as the Timeless Isle provided a satisfying resolution to Mists.”

When they unveiled their next expansion, Legion, it was with the promise that things would be better. You live and learn. At any rate, you live. But they had been making this game for a decade, with development often led by the same faces. How was it possible they were getting worse with practice?

“Blizzard developers have been very upfront and honest about their failures with the last expansion. The studio has, if it’s to be believed, learned its lesson.”

No one was quick to trust them there.

“With every expansion, Blizzard states that they know that these content gaps are terrible for the game, but whatever actions the company takes to rectify the situation continue to fail.”

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

Wintry · 1 year ago

After reading all of this, you might be asking why? Why did Warlords of Draenor fail so spectacularly. Well we have a few reasons.

Firstly, Blizzard was hiring. During the development of Warlords, they expanded their team by 50%. Blizzard had to divert a large portion of their staff to help train up the new recruits.

I’ve already mentioned the huge sweeping rewrites and redesigns of Draenor, but Blizzard also got held back in other areas. Garrisons turned out to be far more time-consuming to build than anyone expected, with huge amounts of content half-finished and thrown away, and updating character models proved unusually resource-heavy.

Blizzard’s leaders also brought up the idea of yearly expansions with fewer patches, and suggested that Warlords was meant to pilot the idea. Consumer backlash put a quick stop to it.

And of course, when Warlords started to flop, they cut their losses and shifted most of their staff onto the next expansion, effectively leaving Warlords to die.

And die it did.

"[WoD in my opinion is still the biggest wasted potential that Blizzard ever made with this game. The hype for this expansion was huge. WoW saw a huge spike in subscriber numbers for this expansion.

All for it to turn out to be a failure." (LINKS TO REDDIT)

A Final Note

If you follow the HobbyScuffles threads, you may know that halfway through writing this, I shattered the radius and ulna bones in my right (dominant) arm, severed a number of tendons, and had to undergo a four-hour surgery to reassemble my arm. I have typed this with my left hand and the help of voice dictation while on extensive painkillers, which is a new thing for me. As a result, there may be some errors in the write up. Please point them out and I will make sure to fix them.

I really appreciate the help, kindness and support I’ve gotten recently from this sub, and want to thank everyone who has read through these posts or posted feedback on them.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

verity_kindle · 1 year ago

I saw no errors and I’m keen on spotting that stuff. You did a great a job, Wintry. Feel better soon and heal fast. Thank you for making this epic available on Lemmy. I now have rich historical context for my own experiences, playing far too much from 2014-2015. It was a “lost year” of depression and anxiety which I tried to medicate with WoW. I’m so glad I quit, based on my therapist’s recommendation. =)

[Repost] [Games] World of Warcraft (Part 6: Warlords of Draenor) – How content cuts, bad communication, money-grubbing and rewrites turned WoW’s most anticipated expansion into its most hated ever

[Repost] [Games] World of Warcraft (Part 6: Warlords of Draenor) – How content cuts, bad communication, money-grubbing and rewrites turned WoW’s most anticipated expansion into its most hated ever

Part 6 – Warlords of Draenor

The Warcraft Movie

The Big Announcement

Death By A Thousand Content Cuts

A Promising Start

The Problems With Garrisons

The Inflation Crisis and the WoW Token

How to Monetise Fun

More Like Trashran

Tweet About It

The Pathfinder Achievement

Half-finished Stories – Yrel and Maraad

Half-finished Stories – The Warlords

A Final Note