Is World of Warcraft Struggling?

There is a bit of gloom floating around these days. Anxieties going around, people not knowing what’s around the corner for World of Warcraft. Patch 9.1 feels amorphous and far away. Or maybe some are wondering why they have drifted away from the Shadowlands expansion in spite of all the launch hype they felt. Sure loads of people are having fun. However we are noticing others are wandering off, so what is going on? How can you have a record selling World of Warcraft expansion end up in a funk pretty quickly?

2:10ROARING LAUNCH

Shadowlands launch was great! It sold incredibly, Blizzard’s marketing and the initial launch experience all led to a big success. People actually got stuck in it actually worked out quite well. We hit max level and we get reasonable gearing. In the early days the game worked so well and your goals are all clear. The early gearing systems in the game felt decently paced and quite attainable and targetable with your time. That means you can log in, you can progress and you’d be happy. Of course not all was perfectly rosy but the basics of the early loop worked out pretty well. Truly an exciting period of a new World of Warcraft expansion. 

4:42 SHATTERING THE GLASS

Did the Shadowlands honeymoon lead to a long and happy marriage? We had fun together, but when reality set in that’s where Shadowlands started to have some issues. 

For many of the casual players, the rate at which souls were obtained vastly outpaced anima. To the point where it was just a situation of “good luck getting the cosmetics that you want and upgrading your sanctum”, not satisfying. Soul earnings set odd expectations. The Maw and world quests that hardly set people on fire did it.  And then the campaigns were time gated by renown so the storyline actually did not have pacing. I also do not think campaigns were great overall. Especially gameplay wise, your average Timeless Isles, rare or elite, have more interest in gameplay that you have to pay attention to than all the campaign stuff. 

Versions of Torghast on Beta were pretty awesome little roguelite playgrounds where you just went in and bait. Soul ash comes from the worst version of Torghast, the one that does not last long enough in terms of the number of powers that you get. So you never actually get that fun broken anima power feel for your class. And then the balancing was wildly inconsistent and that forced Blizzard to nerf it. Plus failing in it felt terrible in a way that almost no modern roguelite has achieved. On top of that, the rewards sucked. You need soul ash but what else? Island Expeditions had so much more in terms of rewards. 

Then you hit the Maw. It has lots of content but only really on a technicality because the zone’s overall format did not work out that well. For the most part you were there for stage yet instead you went into two things, Torghast upgrades or player power via conduit leveling and sockets. Many people did especially for conduits because raiders could not get potency conduits through raiding for a whole bunch of the time and that meant they had to use Ve’nari. So the two main reasons why you’d be in the Maw had nothing to do with the Maw. More effort went into making people who are not interested in Torghast need to do it then perhaps time went into making Torghast have a bunch of cool rewards and progression that would convince somebody to do it for its own sake because it’s fun. That overall just left the Maw and Torghast not really coming together. 

For me Shadowlands is not a grindy expansion. Tell that to somebody who’s trying to play it like an RPG and wants to upgrade their sanctum and get cool cosmetics. The odd thing is that all shows how Shadowlands was put together hastily at the end. The capped resource for covenants is souls and that sets the assumption that souls should be your limiting factor for progress. Yet we are all flooded in souls and have nowhere near enough anima. So obviously it feels really grinding to people. Basically so much of the anima system mixed up with player expectations to the point where I think so many of the cosmetic driven players, they see how much work it would take to get a few covenants in a good state and actually get their cosmetics. They’ve decided they perhaps rather not- Torghast is shattered, endgame cosmetics sort of character driven RPG stuff shattered as well. 

Many aspects of Shadowlands started off so promising but then they ran aground for easily avoidable reasons. Generally speaking, the parts are actually quite great. The problem is that Shadowlands is less than the sum of them. That is the tale of the current game we are playing right now. What about the future? 

10:15 PACE OF DEVELOPMENT

When I wrote this and did all my calculations we were 113 days into the expansion. 9.0.5 just came out but compared to the first 0.5 patches of a legion or BFA, it had just about no content. It was just VP and balance. Thus I don’t really count 9.0.5 as content and I think many players would agree. 

PTR’s usually last about 2.5 months or around 75 days. Now assuming 9.1 patch hit the PTR  right on time then it would be released on around the first of June and that is around 180 days after Shadowlands is launched. That’s almost half a year with no minor content patch to bridge that gap. If it was BFA then we would have been just a week away from patch 8.1. That was a content patch that came out 120 days after launch. And that was what at that time was considered to be late. Sure it had content they had planned but it also had their stopgap fixes too like issues with Azerite. BFA was very late initially but Shadowlands seems even more behind schedule. There is probably another two months behind schedule. By this time in Legion, we had 7.1 return Karazhan and we were about 2 weeks away from 7.1.5. 

What’s interesting is the pace beyond that was one patch every 77 days up until the end of Argus. BFA was a different story, 8.1.5 to 8.2 was a 115 day wait. The problems of BFA clearly slowed Blizzard down.  8.1 was fire fighting a bunch of launch issues. Patch 8.2 was trying to fix up Azerite and give us a new thing. It was rough and slow for BFA. 

Many players would expect that Legion like content cadence to be what we get and they would be right to. It can feel like money is going less far like your sub is getting you less content these days. Shadowlands of course was delayed due to pandemic as it forced a full live production game home and all that it entails. Shadowlands is great in broad strokes but then you look at the details and that’s where it starts to struggle. The balancing of the systems and the way they are tied together is the issue. 

So a quick time estimate until the next content patch is likely two and a half months or maybe three from this video’s release date.

14:01 CONTENT SPARSITY 

In Legion, each order hall had its own campaign so that’s 13 classes. Each spec has its artifacts and Professions have their own questlines too. Suramar in fact had its own big zone story and then the campaign that came in with a patch. Right now we’ve got no end game zone, Maw is not like Suramar. We’ve got 4 campaigns which themselves are kind of content sparse. There’s no Profession quest lines, we do have covenants but there are issues with them. The covenants themselves do not have a massive amount of content and they are so animated that rewards do not feel obtainable or worth pursuing. It’s a pretty far cry from the mass alting and artifact hunting of Legion where even each artifact hunt felt like a distinct activity. 

In both expansions, DPS meter obsessed people had raids and dungeons to do but for many other players it is the casual content that is so much of the game. This is where I thought Shadowlands could have done quite well for a long time but it ended up being it did not work out well. The difference is that by now in the Legion expansion, we were a patch in with the new Suramar campaign and the Karazhan mega dungeon. And then of course for Legion we also knew that time we had more around the corner with the Nighthold. We even knew a bunch about patch 7.2 because of Blizzcon’s detailed announcement. In the recent BlizzConline 2021, there was a TLDR of 9.1 but basically had no specifics. So it’s harder to feel what’s on the horizon. The lack of knowing what’s next is what’s hurting us. It impacts players’ sentiments. 

16:32 SHOULD WE BE WORRIED

Should we worry? I would say yes right now but existentially speaking, no. I just think patches are going to be late for a while and that means you will feel like there’s less WoW to play. The question is, should we worry about future patches and will they suck? Shadowlands’ issues were coming together so fast at the end. And that means if Blizzard had the time then I think this would all have been in a better place. When you look at patch 9.1 there are signs of promise. Certainly the core issues of Shadowlands are a lot more fixable than BFA’s, so I do think there is promise in 9.1. Basically I think it would just take an unfortunate amount of time to get there and that will sting. That means the follow up question is will the waiting time hurt the game for us? In a way, yes it will. It’s going to inflict more losses, and would lose us guild mates. 

Blizzard cannot just get used to the patch cadence of Shadowlands and BFA. It feels so long as compared to what they had just done for Legion. We need to get our patch cadences looking more like the actual main body of Legion. That’s the place we need to be in, not in this sleepy BFA situation or the Shadowlands situation where we are really brought damaged by this pandemic and we are in a weird situation with the content just can’t come fast enough. And the current game systems are not really doing a great job of holding players’ attention unless they are just content to do their end game instanced content at least for many people. So in the short term it is going to sting, for the long term I do actually feel quite positive about patch 9.1. 

The key to enjoying WoW in this troubled era, it is the ability to recognize that the game is no longer giving you what you want and be okay to just step back and come back later. The best thing to do would be to enjoy all of 9.0. In case you decide to unsub, it is best to let Blizzard know why, for it will help them out.