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WoW Content Comparison
One of the relatively common criticisms of Warlords overall has been the lack of content in comparison to prior expansions. With 6.2 being confirmed as the last raiding tier and Blizzard rather adamantly opposed to creating new 5-man dungeons – despite them being “one of the greatest strengths of the genre” – I find it increasingly unlikely that a hypothetical 6.3 patch would include either. So what better time than now to offer some data to back up the claim?
For this part, I am taking all info from Blizzard’s own webpage:
| Raids (Boss) | Dungeons | BGs (Arena) | Other | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warlords of Draenor | 3 (30) | 8 | 0 (0) | Garrisons? |
| Mists of Pandaria | 5 (43) | 9 | 3 (2) | 18 Scenarios 1 Race/1 Class |
| Cataclysm | 6 (31) | 14 | 2 (0) | 2 Races World Revamp |
| Wrath of the Lich King | 9 (54) | 16 | 2 (2) | 1 Class |
| The Burning Crusade | 8 (44) | 16 | 1 (3) | 2 Races |
If you found that I made a mistake somewhere in the calculations, let me know.
Otherwise… well, the results kind of speak for themselves, yeah? Cataclysm, hitherto the worst expansion in the game, was the closest to Warlords in terms of raid bosses. And yet it had six more dungeons, introduced two new Battlegrounds, two new races with entirely novel starting areas, and a complete revamp of the entire world. Perhaps not everyone necessarily wanted the old world revamp, but that still represented a rather insane amount of designer attention. The same sort of attention that has seemingly clocked out starting from Day 2 in Warlords.
Indeed, when you start thinking about it a bit deeper, the Warlords situation is even worse than first glance. The devs might have built eight dungeons, for example, but the dungeons were designed for no one to actually use them. I invite you to watch that mea culpa video from Ion Hazzicostas again, or perhaps for the first time. The TL;DR version is this reckoning:
Just to recap, Ion admitted to Blizzard screwing up Reputations, Apexis Dailies, endgame content in general, Professions, Garrisons, Dungeons, Demo Warlocks, requiring Disc Priests for serious raids, and that unfun ability rotations are intended.
I wanted to bring the above up again, just to point out that even if Warlords had a comparable amount of content to other expansions (it doesn’t), the base structure of the game denigrates the content that does exist. For example, suppose you want to include the ten Timerwalker Dungeons into the Warlords count for whatever reason, even though they are only actually available for a limited timeframe and aren’t even revamps of the originals. In that situation, I would argue that Warlords only has ten dungeons overall, since those ten Timewalker Dungeons are the only ones still relevant to anyone in the game (by dropping high-level gear). In contrast, even when you were progressing through ICC in Wrath, running Gundrak was useful in getting you Frost Badges and that much closer to a tier piece.
In a bizarre sense, Warlords is the result of Blizzard’s design working as intended. The devs have said for years that they wanted to get to a place where they could pump out faster expansions. And as players, we all agreed… but not to this. By “faster expansions,” we meant not waiting 12-14 months with zero content. Which, by the way, is still a very real possibility with Warlords.
6.2 is It
So the latest WoW news, delivered once again in a random-ass interview no one saw coming, dropped the following bomb: Patch 6.2 is the last raiding tier. It may very well be the last content patch in Warlords of Draenor too.
I… don’t really know what to say. I pretty much agree with Asmiroth’s points and concerns though. Especially the part about lack of content:
WoD will clearly be marked as the expansion with the least amount of content since launch. 2.5 raid tiers, 8 dungeons, no races, no classes, Garrisons, which killed cities, Ashran which put the final nail in open world PvP, a near-complete destruction of crafting. But we got selfies.
Items that were supposed to be in this expansion (from their Blizzcon): Shattrah raid, Bloodspire and Karabor (cities), Farahlon (zone/pvp). You’d think that would be at least 1 more content patch worth.
Warlords is both the most expensive expansion Blizzard has released and the one with the least amount of content. Even if Blizzard actually delivers on the promises they made in terms of faster expansions, the best case scenario here is… what? BlizzCon is in four months. Will the beta for the next expansion be released at that point? So are we looking at 10 months from now at the earliest?
Here is a more relevant question: is an expansion even what we want at this point? I didn’t even pay full price for Warlords and I’ll be damned if I’m buying another expansion box within a year after this absolute clown show. I say this as a person otherwise sitting on nine (9!) months worth of WoW Tokens and enough gold to buy a dozen more.
By the way, one of the items frequently omitted when talking about all the ways Blizzard fucked up this expansion is arguably one of the most important for casual players: PvP faction balance. This video by Asmongold sums it up. Or perhaps this single picture:
Current as of 7/2/15.
What you’re looking at is the 3v3 Arena leaderboard for Horde. In other words, while Asmongold was slightly off in his video, the very top Horde players in the US are sitting beneath 188 Alliance players. Is it just a complete coincidence that the best PvP players in WoW have all up and faction transferred to Alliance after a decade of Horde dominating basically everything? The answer is clearly no. And at this point, even if Blizzard went forward with a “radical” change like disabling all racials in rated PvP, there is no real reason those top players would pay the blood price Blizzard asks to transfer back.
If you think 3v3 Arena doesn’t have much of an effect on overall balance – and admittedly, the 5v5 numbers are a lot closer – then take a look at this:
How the tables have turned.
So if you have been pleasantly surprised with your Alliance BG experiences lately, the above is why. It can certainly feel good to finely have the shoe on the other foot, but Alliance has taken the Horde’s shoes, socks, and pants, and are now a mile away. Racials likely don’t have much effect in the aggregate when it comes to random BG outcome, but as always, perception is reality. And the reality is that the top Horde players have left the faction, which is discouraging, which then depresses the remainder, which causes further PvP losses, which culminates in a death spiral.
I have no idea how Blizzard can even begin to fix this. Not that I have much faith in their ability to fix anything at this point.
Not Garrisons
One of the recurring themes across various forums concerning WoW’s shocking 2.9 million sub loss is “Garrisons did it.”
Garrisons offer too much convenience. So much that Draenor went from populated to empty in a few short months. Nerf garrisons. (+239)
On the surface level, it’s easy to agree. Everything in this expansion pivots around the Garrison, from the 2nd Hearthstone to its more centralized location, to the mission system, and beyond. And as many people have pointed out, Blizzard went from being worried about player housing siphoning people from the capital cities and sequestering them into instances to… encouraging players to stay in their instanced Garrisons. Why leave? There are no daily quest hubs or relevant reputation factions to farm, and grounded travel limits your vision to the immediate horizon.
But then Grumpy Elf made me realize what was actually missing:
5) Valor / Justice:
This is the biggest, single most missed thing in the game right now. So much is connected to it that I imagine that you do not even realize it. Valor was a carrot, one we kept chasing each and every week. It was a motivator, something this game is lacking at the moment.
For any game of this type the key to success is to keep up running the wheel and points did that. Be it valor to get the weekly cap or justice when you wanted to convert it to honor or buy heirlooms. Collecting points was a good motivator. It gave content repeatability. At the moment you can hit 100 and really have absolutely no reason to do dungeons except to start the ring quest line but with valor, and associated valor gear, for a fresh dinged character it would once again be worth doing them, ring or not.
What’s the first thing you think about, in terms of casual content in MMOs? Raids? World PvP?
Or, you know, dungeons?
Grumpy Elf is absolutely correct here in pointing out that dungeons in this expansion are a joke. Why would you ever run them? You can bypass the gear check for LFR with crafted gear and questing, the former of which you can craft with… wait for it… Garrisons. And that’s what is going on: Garrisons replaced Dungeons. Where do you get raid-level gear this expansion, without having to raid? From your Garrison. Where did you get raid-level gear without raiding in every other expansion thus far? Dungeons. QED.
I can even see where Blizzard might have thought they were doing casuals a favor. Casual players are most likely DPS who were stuck with 40+ minute queues to do the one activity that allowed them character progression at the level cap. LFR certainly gave them a bigger target to aim for, but that’s only once a week. Dungeons were every day. The current system is also really good for alts, as who has time for multiple 40+ minute queues, right?
Well… it was a bridge too far.
The other possibility, which is really more alarming, is simply the lack of content, period:
- No new races
- No new classes
- No new battlegrounds
- No new capital cities
- No new profession
- Remaining professions gutted
- Farahlon cut
- Tannan pushed back to 6.2
- BRF pushed back from launch
- Ashran is a complete failure
- No daily hubs
- No reputation factions to work for rewards
- Only five new leveling zones (Shadowmoon and Frostfire are basically faction specific)
The original post is too large to quote in its entirety here, but “TiredOfYourShit21” makes an unassailable argument that WoD quite literally has less content than any other expansion ever released. And this time Blizzard doesn’t even have the moral excuse of Cataclysm, where people kinda forgot about the all the new 1-60 content when doing their calculations. For Warlords, expansion price went up, content went down. Maybe, maybe you can argue that the new character models represented a lot of “effort capital” that would have otherwise gone into the game elsewhere. But the truth is more likely that all that effort went into the Garrison instead of dungeons or anything else.
I dunno. I’m still playing for now, but it’s definitely more in the sense of completing a Bucket List than anything else.
WoW Back to 10 Million Subs
Christmas came a little early at Irvine, as reported by MMO-Champ:
This afternoon Blizzard released the subscribers count as of November 13, 2014. This is up 2.6 million from the Q3 2014 call that listed WoW at 7.4 million subscribers.
Warlords of Draenor has sold over 3.3 million copies so far, up from 1.5 million pre-ordered in August.
There is an interactive graph on MMO-Champ, but for posterity’s sake here it is again:
That Bell Curve might end up an Arby’s logo.
There is already a lot of prognostication and pontification out there as to what this means for WoW, what Blizzard is doing correct with Warlords (that presumably it did incorrect with Pandaria/Cataclysm), and so on. The only thing I know for sure is that everyone commenting is just firing blindly into the dark – not even Blizzard expected this level of engagement, as the server issues attest.
That being said, I just want to point out a few things that might get lost in the weeks and months ahead.
1) This is the largest expansion jump in the game.
Just look at that graph: 2.6 million people coming back is unprecedented. The next closest was the 900k bump coming into Pandaria. Prior to that, the norm was 500k. Of course, the total population had been the lowest it had ever been since vanilla WoW, but still, this clot of players would be enough to make any other MMO the #2 in the industry.
2) The Warlords endgame doesn’t even exist yet.
The first Warlords raid doesn’t unlock until December 2nd, two weeks from now. I’m pointing this out because all the people talking about a return to “old-school WoW” can only really be talking about story-wise or quest-wise. Or I suppose dungeon-wise, but I strongly doubt that.
3) WoW went 13 months with zero new content.
Siege of Orgrimmar was released September 10th, 2013. The pre-expansion patch 6.0.2 was released October 14th, 2014. You can view historical information in this Reddit thread, but the bottom line is that the next closest content drought was ~9 months at the end of Cataclysm. Technically there was a year inbetween Icecrown and Cataclysm’s release, but an extra raid was released in the middle of that. For similar reasons, I don’t count the gap between Black Temple and Sunwell back in TBC given the release of ZA (etc).
Guys, do you understand how impossibly stupid this is? Any other MMO that up and went dark for an entire year would be declared abandonware. Instead, WoW went from 7.6 million subs in Sept 2013 to 6.8 million at the lowest, then back to 7.4 million in anticipation of patch 6.0.2. And, as you know, it’s sitting at 10 million right now.
There is no clearer evidence demonstrating that WoW is more platform than game than this. Blizzard got a whole year of subscription payments and gave back nothing until now. It boggles the mind.
4) The 10 million figure doesn’t include China.
From the official press release:
The expansion launched today (November 20 local time) in South Korea, mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. […]
*More than 10 million subscribers as of November 13, 2014.
Given how “subscriptions” work over there, I suppose it’s possible for some “preorder” shenanigans or whatever to have influenced the final count (e.g. they’re already being counted). No doubt that Blizzard will be ready to fire off another press release about 11 million subs if the China/SK bump ends up being significant. I’m just saying it could be significant.
As for why Warlords is bringing everyone back, your guess is as good as mine.
You can’t really ascribe it entirely to the MMO Tourist/Locust phenomenon, simply because there’s too many people. There were 10 million subs at the start of Pandaria, so perhaps this can be expected to be the normal plateau, with ~2.5 million people cycling in and out as new expansions are released. Maybe Warlords has simply came out at an auspicious time, just as the darling MMOs from the last year begin their slow descent into obscurity. Or was it the revamped character models? Or the instant level 90, rescuing lapsed veterans from the horror of Cataclsym leveling? Or perhaps even the server merges connected realms change revitalized the community?
The safe (and lame) answer is most likely “some combination of all the above.”
I myself plan on coming back for the token month or so, starting whenever Blizzard decides to discount the expansion. And why would I do this? Well… the core game never stopped being fun for me – I simply ran out of things I wanted to do. As mentioned before, I have little interest in dedicating more mindspace learning to dance in raids, so there is ever a natural expiration date to my return. But compared to the token efforts I make trying out these other F2P (or soon to be) MMOs? I do miss that sweet, sweet feeling of character progression in a game that feels big enough to matter. And for me, that has always been WoW. And likely only ever will be.
Of course, I am kinda nervous about the culture shock of going back to tab-targeting and lack of Shift-running and/or double-jumping.
In An Age 