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.
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.