In the MUDding world, specifically the Iron Realms brand of MUD, two games (Imperian, Starmourn) have been put into “legacy mode” by the company, which means that a lot of the more useful, grabby, and/or addictive features typically found in IRE games will be unsupported going forward, as well as disabling the ability for characters to retire INTO Starmourn or Imperian, while retiring OUT of them is still doable. Everyone’s expecting mass exodus. Vitally, entering legacy mode means that the administration of these games will no longer be paid by IRE, so if they intend to stay and keep the games going they’ll be doing so out of the goodness of their hearts - it can’t be their job anymore, so their time will by necessity be focused elsewhere, at least a fair amount of the time.
Starmourn’s population in particular is panicky, as it’s very new in comparison to other IRE games and has a dedicated playerbase. Among other things like the literal end of the world looming on the Starmourn horizon, rumors abound that entering legacy mode will mean Starmourn, which already has a problem with over-indulgence in PK, to become fully “open PK,” because if the administration isn’t present then there will be no one to enforce the rules. The administration has countered this claim, but the panic continues.
Meanwhile, on more popular IRE games with ostensibly less tOxIc playerbases, people are dreading an influx of undesirables from Imperian. I guess people don’t like those guys.
I somehow missed this one! I remember there being a ton of drama surrounding the wedding pack back when it came out, but it was more surrounding the bugs and some features not being fulfilled, fulfilled poorly, or the overall angst that surrounds basic game content that probably ought to just be included in the game you boughtinstead getting segmented off into multiple pricey packs or expansions for additional purchases.
This one is downright nutty. I really can’t even imagine what they were thinking.
It is the only instalment since Wrath to gain more positive reviews the negative ones on Metacritic. Blizzard had taken a major gamble by killing Warlords of Draenor to give Legion a shot at success, and it paid off. To many, it was the best expansion ever – the culmination of everything that had come before it, and a fitting send-off. Indeed, it felt like we were seeing the end of World of Warcraft. And in hindsight, it may have been best if the game ended there, when we look at what was to come.
But it was not without flaws, or controversy. And if one thing should be obvious by now, it’s that the World of Warcraft community will always find something to complain about. There are the doubters, the cynics, and those who insists that Legion wasn’t that good at all, it didn’t deserve the praise, but “being an okay expansion sandwiched between two dumpster fires will have that effect on people.”
They may have a point. While Legion has carved itself into the history of wow as a golden age, it benefits from hindsight. Most of its problems were fixed by the time its final patch released. The early days were far from perfect.
One of the big features of Legion was ‘Artefact Weapons’. Every class got a weapon for each specialisation, which they gained through a unique story mission. A lot of these weapons were lore-significant, so players were eager to get their hands on them. There were various appearances you could mix and match for each weapon too, and these were all obtained in different ways.
Artefact power (AP) was best understood as a way to continue levelling, after levelling was done. Each weapon had its own progression system, with unlockable abilities and levels. This was all done through AP. Some of these abilities were woefully unbalanced, but that’s what players loved about them. Gone were the tiny stat increases and passive bonuses of previous expansions - here was max level progression that felt consequential. Some abilities made getting around more convenient, some completely changed the gameplay, and some were so good that they were made permanent at the end of the expansion. Long story short, AP was seriously important.
Unlocking all of the abilities for just one weapon took weeks of work, and every class had at least three. The early traits came thick and fast, before slowing to an insufferable crawl. And if you chose the wrong weapon, you were shit out of luck. Though perhaps the worst part of AP was that it technically never ended. You could keep levelling up your artefact weapon forever. Of course the benefits were slim, but completionist players nonetheless felt the pressure.
AP is often attributed with driving away or burning out most of the players who returned at the start of the expansion.
”I log on for an hour, get burned out because I can’t do much other than daily quests, get bored, then boot up steam.”
[…]
”Being on a gear treadmill (LINKS TO REDDIT) has been part of WoW for over a decade. Yet, this neck grind just feels so much worse. I look forward to getting gear; I’m motivated to do content for it. AP, on the other hand, just feels lethargic and tedious.”
The system also did much to undo the alt-friendliness of Class Orders, by incentivising players to invest time in a single character. If you switched, you had to start from zero every time.
”It really hurts playing alts for me… Everytime an alt gains AP that’s Ap not going to my main, who already needs every ounce of power he can get because Shaman.
Even worse with low level alts… When I have time to play I have to think about not just leveling up… But leveling through Legion, getting the weapons, getting AP, getting gear…”
Another major issue was the overuse of RNG mechanics – random chance – particularly when it came to legendary item drops. Legendaries could drop during almost any max-level content, and came with unique abilities. Players were guaranteed to get the first few quickly, but the drop rate lowered with each legendary they obtained. The game gave no indication when players might get a legendary that was necessary to play competitively. Since there was no clear connection between work and reward, some felt like they were slaving away for nothing.
Blizzard gradually made it easier to gain AP, and by the final patch, the grind was removed entirely. They also created a vendor for legendary items. That did nothing to bring back lost players, but it did wonders for the reputation of Legion going forward.
Unfortunately, many unpopular systems from Warlords made it into Legion (like the garrison mission table) and even more of the unpopular systems from early Legion made it into the next expansion. But that’s a story for another post.
”Legion was the beginning (LINKS TO REDDIT) of all the awful design philosophy shifts that people have been complaining about ever since.”
Tentacle Boy Just Won’t Go Down
As the general of the Burning Legion, it’s reasonable that Kil’Jaeden would be a difficult enemy to kill. But what resulted was one of the most unforgiving, brutal bosses in the history of the game, with zero margin for error. It was a fight riddled with bugs and design issues, to the point where it was impossible for even the top guilds in the world - until Blizzard tweaked it. To some, that made him the best boss ever. To others he was the worst. Entire guilds disbanded over Kil’Jaeden, such was the trauma of smacking over and over into a brick wall without making the slightest progress.
”…after a butt load of nerfs it became manageable. It’s a very challenging fight, maybe the hardest one I’ve done in my 11 years of raiding.”
[…]
”Overall I consider it as the hardest boss ever done (in terms of mechanics).”
On the highest difficulty, every small advantage was vital. His knockbacks pushed players off his platform to their deaths. Every class had some ability to overcome it, with the sole exception of priests. And when they died, the fight failed. But Goblins could be priests, and they came with a racial ability that dealt with the knockback. When the Tomb of Sargeras released, almost all top Alliance raiding guilds had already switched to Horde, but the final holdouts were forced to bite the bullet just for a chance to beat Kil’Jaeden. (LINKS TO REDDIT)
On one server, he wasn’t killed on mythic difficulty until three years later.
Really though, the fact that these were the worst complaints about Legion should tell you how good it was. It was a fantastic time to be a World of Warcraft player. But there were storm clouds on the horizon. The two expansions that followed would reduce the game to its lowest ebb, leave its playerbase a weathered and self-hating shade of its former self, and bring Blizzard to ruin.
The most remarkable thing about Legion was that it was, for the most part, a success.
There is drama to be had, but it’s thin on the ground. This summary is mainly for non-players, or people who skipped Legion, so that we don’t have a two-year gap in the write-up between Warlords of Draenor and Battle for Azeroth (there will be PLENTY of drama there, I promise). If you just want the controversies, skip to the next section.
It began with a teaser trailer , showing Gul’dan (the only important guy from the last expansion) awakening Illidan (beloved and iconic antihero from Warcrcaft III and Burning Crusade). It generated a lot of hype.
Blizzard officially revealed their next expansion with a features trailer at Gamescom 2015, and then went into further detail with a cinematic and the usual presentations at Blizzcon a few months later. Like a beaten hound loyally returning to its master’s side, the community overflowed with excitement, and optimistic hope that this expansion would be better than the last.
After the mess that was Draenor, Legion had a simple premise. The biggest big bad in Warcraft history was back. Led by the fallen titan Sargeras, the infinite Burning Legion had tried multiple times to escape the Twisting Nether and conquer Azeroth, but had always been thwarted at the last moment. Now it had arrived for a full invasion. The heroes and nations of Azeroth had to do the impossible - defeat the Legion once and for all.
With the previous two expansions, Blizzard had done everything possible to avoid touching their existing lore. Now it seemed the shackles were off. Major changes were happening, major characters were dying. No one was safe. Everything was coming to its natural conclusion.
That resonated with players who had been around since Warcraft first started. Everyone wanted to see the final battle between the Titans and Sargeras. When Legion released in August 2016, the number of concurrent players hit the highest peak since the launch of Cataclysm – though the subscriptions immediately fell again, as had become tradition.
The expansion took place on the Broken Isle. It had always existed in the lore as a group of tiny islands, so Blizzard scaled it way up. Dalaran was copied (with a few improvements) into the skies above the new continent, and served as the major hub.
There were five zones at launch, and players could complete them in any order they liked. Each held a magical item, vital in the fight against the Legion.
The Norse-themed Stormheim, full of steep ravines and jagged rocks, a deliberate call back to the popular Howling Fjord of Wrath. Players helped WoW’s version of Odin defeat Helya, the goddess of the underworld.
Tauren-focused Highmountain, with its scenic plateaus and snowy peaks, complete with a small city called Thunder Totem. Its story revolved around a dispute with the local Drogbar.
The ancient groves of Val’Sharah played host to druid society, which had gathered around the world tree Shaladrassil. Its story focused on the Emerald Dream.
Suramar was the stand out zone of Legion. This ancient capital of Night Elf civilisation had been protected from history by a huge magical barrier, which had only recently fallen. It was basically ‘Elf Venice’, and remains one of the most visually stunning cities in WoW – or any game. Since the Nightborne of Suramar were working against the Alliance and Horde, players could only explore the city with a disguise. Certain NPCs had the ability to see through it, and would voice their suspicions whenever the player got too close. This made navigating the city frustrating for many, and caused the NPC lines (which were repeated ad-nauseum) to gain meme status.
Each player joined a Class Order – a secret society where the most iconic lore characters of each class worked to repel the Legion. Each class got a separate ‘Order Hall’, a uniquely designed headquarters that no one else could reach, with its own story and mounts. The halls carried forward several aspects of garrisons, but lacked major conveniences like hearthstone points or auction houses, so players never spent too much time in them. The community loved the Class Orders, though some of the campaigns were better than others (LINKS TO REDDIT). Priests were particularly screwed over, and had to be rescued by the Paladin class hall in their own campaign. But some, like the Death Knight story, had repercussions that are still playing out today. Since every class had such a different experience, it was a good time to level alts.
Then there was perhaps the most well-received addition, the Demon Hunter class. With a dark aesthetic, a double jump, and fan-darling Illidan as their poster child, they became wildly popular. Players have been begging for demon hunters four years, and Legion was the perfect time to make them available.
The dungeons were good (and there were ten on release, an improvement over the previous expansions), and both of the first raids were excellent. The Nighthold ended with Gul’dan’s spectacular death.
Patch 7.1 brought with it a short raid and a fantastic remake of Karazhan, one of the game’s most popular raids (the new version was a dungeon). It also added to the story in Suramar.
Patch 7.2 began when the final General of the Legion, Kil’Jaeden, made his big move, and the armies of Azeroth pushed back against him. Players returned to the Broken Shore, where they gained Legionfall reputation through a mix of world quests, rare bosses, treasures, and story quests. There was also a new dungeon called Cathedral of Eternal Night, and a raid to pair with it, the Tomb of Sargeras. Players repelled the Legion and defeated Kil’Jaeden. At the end, Illidan opened the space between Azeroth and Argus, the fractured homeworld of the Legion. It became visible in the sky in every zone.
Patch 7.3 took the fight to Argus. Players boarded a Draenei spaceship and began their offensive, meeting with the Army of the Light (the new reputation) and working to take the Legion capital. Argus had three small zones, which players could navigate by moving their ship, the Vindicaar. They were Krokuun, Antoran Wastes and Mac’Aree. The latter, a reference to lead level designer Jesse McCree, was renamed to Eredath when he became accused of sexual harassment, but that’s a clusterfuck for another write-up.
Blizzard introduced Invasion Points, which were like world quests, but they teleported the player to small alternate worlds to sabotage the Legion. And of course, there was a dungeon and the big raid: Antorus the Burning Throne. Players worked with the Titans to trap Sargeras once and for all, putting a conclusive end to the Burning Legion. In the climactic final moments, Sargeras thrust his sword into Azeroth.
When it came to the Horde/Alliance split, very few servers had ever been equal. Often, one faction would vastly outnumbered the other. In the fifteen years since the game began, Blizzard had worked tirelessly to find a solution. Some ideas had worked, but all of them had come at a cost. Whether it was combining servers or splitting them up or developing systems that moved players seamlessly from one to another depending on the need, it always meant messing with the delicate ecosystems and communities of the game’s many ‘realms’.
Faction ratios were just some of the many problems Blizzard recreated in Classic. Racial abilities were much stronger when the game first came out, and certain classes were exclusive to one faction or the other. After many years of debate and investigation, it is generally agreed that the Alliance had an edge in PvE content, whereas the Horde pushed ahead in PvP. The two were different, but surprisingly balanced.
”Even during Classic WoW, there are many arguments about which side is actually best. In the Burning Crusade however, the player base pretty much unanimously agrees that one side is better than the other.”
Without going into too much detail, it all came down to Blood Elves. They were the one Horde race that could play Paladins, which had been an Alliance-only class in Vanilla. To differentiate them, Horde Paladins got an ability called ‘Seal of Blood’, and Alliance got ‘Seal of Vengeance’. Combined with the overpowered racial ability ‘Arcane Torrent’, Blood Elf Paladins had a major PvP advantage. The Undead racial ‘Will of the Forsaken’ was equally overpowered, and nothing on the Alliance could compete with it. To make matters worse, BC introduced arenas which pitted players against one-another in groups of just two or three. In that setting, a small boost went much further.
This imbalance left a legacy that remains even now. The Horde still dominate high-end raiding and PvP on retail.
”For some, this radical asymmetry is the biggest scar of the Burning Crusade.”
Blizzard had no choice. When BC Classic came out, it brought this problem with it. Whether they wanted to or not, they couldn’t betray the spirit of the original, or incur the fury of the #NoChanges mob.
And so, as expected, the faction ratio slid inexorably toward the Horde. Their majority quickly grew from 53% to 62%. On PvP servers, the Horde simply had no one to fight against. Queues to get into battlegrounds and arenas got longer and longer, so players went out into the world for their fun, which usually meant ganking low level Alliance as they quested in the zones of Outland. In the face of these roaming death squads, those Alliance players either quit, switched to Horde (LINKS TO REDDIT), or fled to the safety of PvE realms, where they formed a majority of 65%. That just made the problem worse.
”Obviously not all horde are like this (LINKS TO REDDIT), but there’s soo many that seem to just try to do whatever they can to make alliance experience a frustrating experience. My last straw for me was leveling in Zang. I realized out of the past 3 hours I had played, about an hour of it was spent corpse running. I could never get alliance to come help. And every day it seemed like I saw less and less alliance. Finally after seeing a horde blockade around one of the towns, I just threw in the towel. Switched to a PVE server and never looked back.”
The end result was a lot of servers where one faction made up over 99% of the population.
“My server at the beginning (LINKS TO REDDIT) of phase 2 was healthy and strong pop with the most balanced h:a ratio at the time.
It’s like 5:1 ratio now and the alliance has basically all stopped playing, or left the server.”
In retail, Blizzard had fixed the problem with ‘Mercenary Mode’, a feature that magically swapped players to a race of the opposite faction to fill in gaps. It had never been around during BC, but Blizzard piloted it anyway. It was either meddle with the game, or let it die. Horde players were given cardboard masks with Alliance races painted on them.
The #NoChanges community saw Mercenary Mode as just the first step to destroying the greatness of BC. There were even calls to reboot the whole project. And with ‘Classic Classic’, we’ve come full circle.
If Classic starts solving ‘old’ problems with modern solutions, at what point will the two MMOs become indistinguishable?”
Some disagreed.
” You know, it seems like people seem to not get that there’s a HUGE gulf of QOL improvements that could be added to Classic and wouldn’t “make it retail”. This is a strawman at its best. You can like parts of Classic and, god forbid, parts of retail and it’s not binary.”
[…]
” I think people just look at the differences between classic and retail and assume anything that retail has that classic doesn’t is “retail” and bad.
The truth is that the problems with retail are numerous, but that not all things that changed are bad.”
Should Blizzard implement modern changes, or preserve the game in its original form, no matter how broken it may be? This debate has come to define the Classic community, and corrupts all discourse surrounding it. And as long as the developers keep trying to find a way forward without upsetting either side, they will be paralysed as well.
Glad that the classic wow community has devolved into the world largest trolley problem. (LINKS TO REDDIT) You can either not pull the lever and let the game run into the same problems that have been there since the original release or you can pull the lever and implement the fixes to these problems that came later in the games lifetime BUT someone will say its retail bullshit
In the days of Nostalrius, fans had one simple goal - they knew what they wanted, and everyone was on the same page. Their united effort was able to change the will of a billion dollar company.
But that is the past. Now everyone has a different idea of where the game should go. And so the problem remains; lots of the people are mean, and most of them are miserable, even the ones with digital deluxe editions.
And as if Blizzard was deliberately trying to infuriate their Classic players as much as possible, they announced the Digital Deluxe Edition, for the low low price of $69.99. Every single feature came like a new dagger to the heart.
As well as a Dark Portal Pass and 30 days of game time, it included the Path of Illidan toy, which caused characters to leave a trail of green flaming footsteps, a unique hearthstone, a mount for retail-WoW, and most important of all, the Phase Hunter mount, specifically for BC Classic.
Pretty bold of them to firstly cater to a hardcore traditional community by making classic versions of the game, to then add something that this community deeply despises in the pursuit of some extra revenue.
[…]
”This is precisely why I’m #NoChanges because you give Blizzard an inch and they take a mile.”
[…]
“What do u mean it’s a slippery slope?! We just want X and Y!”
[…]
”The sad part is (LINKS TO REDDIT) the whales will still eat it up.”
[…]
”I know I shouldn’t be (LINKS TO REDDIT), but I’m always amazed at the incredible amount of corporate fanboying and defending of corporate greed going on here. It’s really hard to tell if it’s bots/paid shills or if these people genuinely just want to suck the teats of Blizzard that badly for some reason.”
Asmongold, one of the biggest WoW personalities, who had followed Classic from the beginning, encouraged his fans to fire the /spit emote at anyone who used the mount. The idea was that if they disincentivised the mount enough, no one would buy it, and Blizzard would learn not to try these kinds of techniques again. The harassment campaign applied to everyone who bought store mounts, but was specifically targeted at those who bought the Digital Deluxe Edition.
It was intensely controversial.
”If you think people trying to punish others (LINKS TO REDDIT) for not conforming with your opinions isn’t toxic then you may need to take a break from the internet. That is the real childishness here.”
Most content creators strongly opposed the campaign, whatever their views on store mounts. But many players were on Asmongold’s side.
”If you think people emoting on a game is harmful, might wanna take a break from the internet until you grow up.”
An addon was created to automatically spit on players with the Deluxe Edition mount. Screenshots emerged of players’ chat logs filling up with notifications that they were being spat on.
One user on Reddit suggested (LINKS TO REDDIT), “I guess Blizz was worried people would be afraid to buy the mount LULW. While another added, “they found a spit emote too problematic and ‘toxic’ because people were using it against players who spent money on their cash shop.”
They insisted that Blizzard didn’t care about harassment at all, they were just trying to protect their golden goose. After all, Blizzard had done nothing to curb the use of racial slurs.
”You can buy the n-word pass from the ingame store.”
“Wait, is it actually dead? What the fuck? It’s actually dead.”
When Classic first released, there was little no real concern about it cannibalising the playerbase of retail WoW – the games were totally different, and catered to different people. Burning Crusade Classic didn’t have that advantage. It was directly aimed at players who had enjoyed Classic, but who wanted to move on to Outland. There was a serious risk of splitting the community in two.
When Blizzard cloned players over to the BC servers, their Vanilla characters remained, and the Vanilla servers were never going anywhere – the company had been clear on that. But with everyone playing in BC, the Vanilla community simply disappeared. Since most players went on to BC without paying the $15 dollars for the character cloning service, their favourite characters were gone from Vanilla forever.
Folding Ideas compared World of Warcraft to a religion going through a major schism, with a more progressive branch (Retail) and a fundamentalist branch who desired a return to the old tradition (Classic). And here with BC Classic, the branch split again. Vanilla was left in the hands of ‘Classic Forevers’ who rejected expansions of any form, and chose to remain pure.
In those servers left behind, it was often hard to find more than a dozen max level characters online at once. They soon grew disdainful of the traitors who had abandoned Vanilla.
”Do i just like… (LINKS TO REDDIT) keep running naxx over and over and over for years? What do these people DO with their WoW time. I literally have nothing left to do and quit playing.”
Did the game simply stay this way forever? Would Blizzard start developing new content to extend Vanilla separately to the original release (as had happened to old school Runescape)? Would they reset the game? Or was Burning Crusade Classic on the way?
Blizzard wasn’t too sure themselves. They knew they wanted to go with the latter, but they weren’t sure how to make it work. A survey was sent out, asking players for their opinions. All of the options proved popular, so they tried to appeal to everyone.
There was a lot of nostalgia for Burning Crusade – nostalgia which had yet to be monetised. I won’t explain what BC was because we’ve covered it here before (LINKS TO REDDIT).
The crazy thing about the ad was that it promised BC Classic would be available in less than a month.
”We’re less than a month out of this date and we still don’t have official word, it’s fucking stupid”
[…]
”Blizzard needs to communicate better so i can book my fucking vacation lol.”
Once again, there were a number of questions to answer.
BC couldn’t overwrite vanilla - that was the whole point of Classic – so players weren’t sure how it would integrate into the existing game. But by that point, Blizzard had decide it would be a separate service to Vanilla, but still covered by a single WoW subscription.
So far, Blizzard had done everything right (more or less). But the announcement of BC was incredibly botched, and infuriated the community in multiple ways. They offered players the option of transferring their Vanilla characters to the BC servers for free. Or, for the price of $35, they could clone their character, keeping one the original in Vanilla and getting a copy in BC.
Cue the shitstorm.
”$35?! To copy some code?! (LINKS TO REDDIT) I mean even $10 would be a lot for that, but it’s in the realm of reasonable.”
[…]
“Oh wait, you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.”
[…]
”At this point (LINKS TO REDDIT) I’m reasonably sure I don’t want to spend any dime on TBC. Even a subscription. This is just going to continue to get worse.”
”This process takes SECONDS (LINKS TO REDDIT), and now we are supposed to pay 35 USD for each character if we wanna have a copy in both eras of the game?!”
[…]
”Horrifying amount of greed for something that is basically 100% automated.
Their excuse for charging so much for retail server transfers/race changes is they don’t want people to do it too much (some do anyway), what possible excuse is there to charge so much to simply ACTIVATE a clone?”
A lot of players were discussing the idea of abandoning the Burning Crusade altogether out of protest.
”Vote with your wallet. Don’t sub, don’t play TBC.”
The player base worked itself into a lather, getting angrier and angrier until the developers had no choice but to respond. Just days after announcing the price, Blizzard backpedalled and reduced it to $15.
“However, over the last week or so, we’ve gotten a very large amount of feedback from the community, and we’ve decided to lower the price.”
The players had won.
”Absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for listening! I wasn’t going to clone my main due to the high cost, but now it certainly looks a lot more tempting.”
But some were quick to point out that they shouldn’t be paying anything at all. Others suggested that this had been the plan all along. Blizzard never intended on charging $35, they just wanted to make $15 look good by comparison.
Lord Bobby has blessed us. Now I only have to pay an extra £12 on top of the annual £120 access fee, if I want to keep playing the game I bought in 2006 for a tenner.”
[…]
”They are charging money for literally a copy/paste. “
[…]
”I’m still not buying it and i’m not falling for this crap for 1 second, Blizzard have revealed their true intentions when it comes to Classic.”
Alas, the cloning fee was not the only controversy here.
Players could buy a Dark Portal Pass for $39.99, which would take any character on a BC server straight to level 58 and provide everything they needed to start playing in Outland right away. That pissed people off even more than the cloning fee.
In an AMA prior to the release of Vanilla, one of the developers had declared, “Character Boosts are not in keeping with Classic. We don’t want to break any hearts.” (LINKS TO REDDIT) That had come as a huge relief to the community at the time. And now it came back, as a betrayal. The cracks were starting to show. The only crack players wanted to see in Burning Cruade was Illidan’s, and that’s the only one they weren’t getting.
We already covered the arguments against boosts in the Warlords of Draenor write-up, but those feelings were felt more strongly here. Not only did players care far more about levelling as a rite of passage which was meant to be slow and painful, they were also keenly watching for any signs of ‘corporate money-grubbing’. They saw modern WoW as the ‘darkest timeline’ and wanted to prevent Classic going down the same road. As far as they were concerned, meddling with BC was like trying to rewrite the Bible.
”Please change your mind on providing boosts. It makes me happy to see you guys are noticing our complaints and that you’re talking to us because maybe y’all will take boosts out. Tbc is still a classic wow game, and it had no boosts originally.”
Not everyone was against the idea of boosts, however.
”The leveling was part of the draw of Classic, and so they did not want to take away from that. The boost for BC Classic takes you straight to the bare minimum level to get into BC, where that leveling can take place, and gets you to endgame faster, which had a much bigger focus in BC than it did in Vanilla”
Some players thought boosts should be conditional – perhaps they should be limited to players who had already hit max level in Vanilla, or they should only be available for a month after launch.
There were also concerns about bots. Classic already had an issue with them, and giving them a way to skip levelling risked making the problem worse. More bots meant more gold farming, which in turn meant more damage to the economy.
In protest, a thousand players banded together to ‘reboot’ BC on one of its smallest servers, starting over from level 1. ““Blizzard announced Burning Crusade Classic with no fresh servers and no mention of what will happen to the existing low population / dead servers, except hinting there could be the possible creation of new servers post-Burning Crusade Classic launch,” said the organiser behind The Fresh Crusade.
"This makes sense especially in the current state where most servers don’t have a levelling scene with players very much soloing their way from 1-60 with issues finding groups for dungeons/group quests, which is an integral part of the WoW Classic journey.”
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.
“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.
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.”
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.”
“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.”
“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.
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.