Skip Navigation

[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

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.


This is the sixth part of my write-up. You can read the other parts here.

Part 6 – Warlords of Draenor

This might seem like a bizarre topic to start with, but stay with me here. It all links together.

The Warcraft Movie

On 9th May 2006, a Blizzard press release announced the production of a live-action movie set in the Warcraft universe, in partnership with Legendary Pictures. Fans were euphoric. Blizzard’s cinematic trailers had some of the best CGI in the world. Even today, they have never released a bad one. Fans wanted something like that, only 90 minutes long.

"We searched for a very long time to find the right studio for developing a movie based on one of our game universes," said Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. "Many companies approached us in the past, but it wasn't until we met with Legendary Pictures that we felt we'd found the perfect partner. They clearly share our high standards for creative development, and because they understand the vision that we've always strived for with our Warcraft games, we feel there isn't a better studio out there for bringing the Warcraft story to film."

However good their intentions may have been, the film would linger in production hell for a decade before seeing the light of day. It was scheduled to hit theatres in 2009 under the direction of Sam Raimi (of Spiderman fame), but it was still only in its early stages when Blizzcon 2011 came around..

Uwe Boll, grim reaper of video game adaptations, tried to get his fingers on the film. Blizzard’s response was emphatic.

"We will not sell the movie rights, not to you… especially not to you. Because it's such a big online game success, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income, what the company has with it.”

Seven years into production, they settled on a director. Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie) had directed three films and one of them had been somewhat successful – Moon. He immediately set about changing the story, which set the film back a bit, but they were finally able to make progress. A ‘sizzle reel’ was shown at San Diego Comic Con later that year, featuring a battle between a human and an orc. By the end of 2013, the film had been cast, and began shooting in mid-2014.

Warcraft finally premiered in Paris on 24th May 2016. It grossed $439 million, making it the most successful video game adaptation of all time, but the costs of production and promotion were so high that it still made a loss of up to $40 million for the studio.

The film was… divisive. The average Western viewer was alienated by the dense lore and confusing plot. In fact, it made most of its profit in China, where people flocked to see some CGI warriors smash into each other. Critics (most of whom knew nothing about the Warcraft franchise) absolutely hated it. Writing for Movie Freak, Sara Michelle Fetters said:

”Warcraft can't help but be a major disappointment, the game all but over as far as this particular fantasy franchise is alas concerned.”

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson had a similar opinion.

”Having sat through this baffling movie's grueling two hours, I can't in good conscience even recommend it to Warcraft devotees. There's nothing here for anyone --neither man nor orc”

The New York Post was very critical too.

”Jones ... is trying to deliver something like "The Lord of the Rings" minus the boring bits, but without the boring bits what you have is Itchy and Scratchy with maces.”

It’s true that the film was… a fixer upper. The CGI was impressive but often awkward, the accents were all over the place, the armour looked like bad cosplay, the tone was off, and the characters were hard to empathise with. Nonetheless, it found a following among Warcraft’s oldest fans. On Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, it has user scores of 76/100 and 8.1/10 respectively, which speaks to its cult classic status.

It was a thrill seeing the places and people they’d been playing alongside for years, rendered with such love and care on the silver screen. Stormwind City and Dalaran, the Dark Portal, Durotar and Thrall. It was a love letter to the fans.

The user ‘nerdlife’ had this to say:

”A truly work of love. As a diehard warcraft fan this movie was amazing. So many details, amazing art design and amazing sound design. It truly shows how disconnected the critics are to the everyone else. Me and everyone i know that went to watch the movie truly liked it.”

Here are some more responses.

”Simply a great movie, enjoyed every single bit of it as a Warcraft fan.”

[…]

”As a fan of Warcraft I went into this movie a little bit sceptical, but from ten minutes in I was already loving the film. The majority of critic reviews are pathetic and should just be ignored. The CGI is mostly fantastic, and the story while it is a little rushed at the start is also pretty good.”

In 2018, Duncan Jones would speak out about the issue he raced making Warcraft. It took place during a tumultuous time, both for his personal life and for the film. He said production was plague by ‘studio politics’, with Blizzard and Legendary picking the film apart and forcing multiple re-writes.

Despite all of its issues, rumours circulated in 2020 that a sequel was in the works. The rumours were picked up by Lore Daddy Chris Metzen, who helped create the story of Warcraft, though he has since left Blizzard.

"A new movie based on the huge video game series, World of Warcraft, is reportedly in the works at Legendary Pictures. According to relatively reliable scooper, Daniel Ritchman, Warcraft 2 is now in development, thanks largely to the game and first movie's popularity overseas."

Now, you might be wondering why I started a post about the next World of Warcraft expansion by talking about the film. You see, there was a problem. The movie focused on the ‘First War’, which played out in ‘Warcraft: Orcs and Humans’, the original Warcraft game from 1994. It was pretty light on plot, so most of its story was added retroactively in sequels and novelizations. Only the hardcore lore-nerds really knew much about it.

The most recent WoW expansion, Mists of Pandaria, took place thirty years later, and those years were full of incredibly dense plot. Blizzard were setting their film so far in the past and basing it on a game so few people played, they worried it would alienate fans.

Their solution was ingenious. And by ingenious, I do of course mean mind-bogglingly stupid. The next expansion would take players to an alternate universe, set thirty years in the past.

The Big Announcement

Blizzcon 2013 was a good one. Siege of Orgrimmar had recently come out, and players were loving it. They had seen four patches in the last year, and two of the best raids ever. Diablo III’s expansion was revealed, and it looked great. Blizzard also showed off Heroes of the Storm, their first foray into the MOBA genre, the movie was making strides, and the trading-card game Hearthstone got a beta release. In terms of content, it was one of the busiest conventions Blizzard had ever held.

With so much going on, Chris Metzen didn’t have to generate any hype when he took to Stage D – the audience was already excited. But he took his time warming them up anyway. When he promised a return to Warcraft’s roots, they practically foamed at the mouth. The trailer was a hit. You can watch it here.

People weren’t quite sure what they were looking at, but they liked it.

I need to cover quite a lot of lore to give you a sense of what’s going on, but I’ve boiled it down to its absolute simplest form. Feel free to skip to the next section it if you don’t care.

There were two planets: Draenor and Azeroth. Draenor was the homeland of the Orcs, Ogres and Draenei. Azeroth had the Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, and so on.

The Draenei were being pursued by the Burning Legion, an infinite army of demons. The legion didn’t find the Draenei, but they found the Orcs and began corrupting them, starting with Gul’Dan.

Gul’Dan manipulated the Orcs into uniting to form the Horde, and waged a war on the Draenei. In an iconic scene, the Orcs drank the blood of the demon Mannoroth, turning their brown skin green and making them fully subservient to the Legion.

Empowered with demonic magic, they easily overcame the Draenei, who fled (and eventually found Azeroth). In response to all the evil energy, Draenor began to die, and the Orcs were forced to kill each other for what little food remained.

While all this had been going on, an extremely powerful wizard named Medivh was born on Azeroth, with his own demonic corruption. He made contact with Gul’Dan and together they hatched a plan. Two Dark Portals were built, one in Draenor and one in Azeroth, and Orcs flooded through. They fought the humans and succeeded destroying Stormwind, one of the Seven Kingdoms. That concludes ‘The First War’.

The Second War followed the Horde as they moved north, conquering most of the continent. The remaining Human kingdoms united with the Dwarves, Gnomes and High Elves to form the Alliance. The Horde was defeated and most of the Orcs were locked up in camps. One of them, a baby called Thrall, would go on to liberate the Orcs, cross the ocean to Kalimdor, and create a new ‘honorable’ Horde. Here’s a helpful map.

Ner’Zhul, an important dude who I’ve mostly left out of this summary, was chased back through the portal into Draenor by the Alliance. He cast an extremely powerful spell which ended up destroying the planet, turning it into Outland.

Anyway.

Thirty (in-game) years later at the end of Mists of Pandaria, Garrosh is put on trial for all those War Crimes he did. Through some confusing plot shenanigans, he’s spirited away to an alternate universe version of Draenor, right before Gul’Dan convinces everyone to drink demon blood. Garrosh sees this as the moment everything turned to shit for the Orcs, so he intervenes and stops it, as we see in the Warlords of Draenor cinematic. Rather than serving the Legion, the Orcish clans unite to form the Iron Horde. Wrathion (from the Mists write-up) engineered all this to happen because he wanted to conscript the Iron Horde to fight the Burning Legion.

They still build a portal and invade Azeroth (our Azeroth, not an alternative Azeroth), but this time they’re just doing it to be dicks I guess. The leaders of each clan make up the titular Warlords.

If you’re interested in learning more, RUN. It won’t end well for you. You don’t want to get into Wow Lore.

But if you do, here’s a concise history of the entire Warcraft universe told by a friendly Dutch fellow. Go to 13:13 for the story I told above.

The bizarre concept wasn’t as controversial as you’d expect. At least not at first. The community was eager to leave Pandaria behind and return to the themes and characters that had made Warcraft great. Draenor offered limitless possibilities for creative storytelling.

Blizzard marketed it as a dark, cut-throat, visceral expansion. The word ‘savage’ was used so much that it became a meme. When the cinematic came out, Chris Metzen tweeted, “the age of the whimsical panda is over”. To help players overcome to premise of Warlords, they showed off detailed plans for zones, patches, the new ‘garrison’ feature, and even the end boss.

This was a mistake.

Death By A Thousand Content Cuts

The beta for Warlords of Draenor began on 5th June 2014, and by all accounts it was kind of a mess.

A bug caused female Draenei characters to ‘fail to display their default undergarments’, which made it possible to be fully naked. The female draenei population skyrocketed on the affected servers. Another bug warped Night Elf facial textures, which one beta tester described as ‘similar to the aliens from They Live’. The dungeons were ‘violently unstable’, and ‘the loading bar boss was reported to have defeated 99% of players’. All characters were wiped – multiple times. At one point the servers were knocked offline due to a fire at a substation near Blizzard’s offices. One of the servers was labelled [EU] when they were all actually US servers, so that server became overpopulated because all the European players were using it.

And that was just July.

In the PvP zone ‘Ashran’, Paladins were given an overpowered item that let them stun enemies and teleport them to the Stormshield dungeon. A group of Alliance roleplayers began abducting members of the Horde, keeping them stunned while they held trials, sentenced them to death, and summarily executed them. A developer discovered this and described it as ‘awesome’, but the item was removed.

WoW betas are best compared to the Wild West. They’re a chaotic storm of bugs and half-finished assets. It can be difficult to figure out what exactly is going on. But it soon started to seem like almost as much was being taken away from Draenor as was being added.

On 26 June, Blizzard cancelled the cities. The beautiful temple complex of Karabor had been promised to the Alliance, and the Horde had been offered Bladespire Citadel, a colossal and intimidating fortress. The buildings remained as empty shells where a few story quests took place, but were otherwise abandoned. Instead, players would get Warspear and Stormshield, small villages made from generic assets, nested on either end of Ashran.

The reaction was immediate. Complaints filled every forum. The main MMOChampion thread stretched out to well over six-hundred pages. There wasn’t much debate – everyone was pissed off.

"Yes I was positive about other changes in warlords, but this one makes me one to not play the game."

[…]

"This is absolutely horrible, why would they do this?! I don't understand. I was looking forward to these cities a lot. Please change it back."

The community speculated on why this had happened. Was Blizzard cramming the Horde and Alliance together to encourage PvP? Was there a lore reason? Did they have more important plans for Bladespire and Karabor? Some players believed the faction capitals were being made deliberately shitty because Blizzard were going to introduce new, cooler ones later (LINKS TO REDDIT).

Blizzard tried to create some story-based reason, which was immediately torn apart in a storm of mockery (LINKS TO REDDIT) and sarcasm.

As more information came out, it became clear that the truth was much less exciting. Blizzard was struggling for time. Bashiok, one of the developers, said ‘We saw how much time it would take, said that’s not reasonable, and went for a reasonable solution’.

But if you read my previous post, you would know why that explanation fell on deaf ears. Mists of Pandaria had the longest content drought ever, specifically due to the development of warlords taking so long. So this expansion was taking longer to make, but delivering less? (LINKS TO REDDIT)

"This is a huge part of every expansion (LINKS TO REDDIT) because it's where we spend the most time in the expansions lifetime. And after our previous lackluster faction hubs in MoP to have an even more lackluster faction hub in warlords puts a MAJOR damper on my excitement. I REALLY hope blizzard finds a way to give us what we want."

[…]

"Ice Mountain Tower would have been better. That's something new for a city. Instead we got Orc Camp 37G."

[…]

"Fuck the shattered capital, beacon of light in a dark world. Fuck the mystical floating city. Fuck the golden pavilion hidden away in the ancient grove.

We've got wooden huts with red roofs! Maybe get some sharpened logs jutting out everywhere. Slap some spikey iron on a couple of the important buildings. And the floor can stay dirt."

There was a subset of players who tried to defend the decision, pointing out that things can change during the beta of a video game and it doesn’t always constitute broken promises, or that it simply didn’t matter.

"People are making this a bigger issue than it is. (LINKS TO REDDIT) Your just going to use it for portals and the bank anyway so what is the problem?

Honestly, I'm fine with the change. Apparently the sky is falling circle jerk revolving around this change is so strong that someone trying to stay positive is treated as a pariah, though."

The outrage which flared in response to this logic was almost worse than the fury aimed at Blizzard. The fans began to turn on one another. It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.

"Suddenly the thread is full of people who never commented on the issue before, for some reason trying to support Blizzard's bullshit. Smells pretty bad in here. Lots of people aren't just going to follow along with blizzard on this one, fucking deal with it."

At first Blizzard had given the impression that the cities had been cancelled during development. It later came to light that though the exteriors were complete, there was ‘never any actual work done to build them into faction hubs’. It seemed Blizzard had known for a while that the cities were never going to materialise – perhaps even before Blizzcon - but they had chosen to avoid mentioning it until as late as the beta. It was never going to go down well.

"So they were teased specifically to get people to preorder the expansion with no intention of actually making them?"

This realisation only added more fuel to the fire.

"Thats not even changing their minds during the developing process, which they said they did, they just fucking lied when they told us Karabor would be a city."

The discourse was getting rough, but the cuts had barely begun.

Things were disappearing from the map. This included a large island at the bottom-left of the main continent and Farahlon - one of the main zones revealed at Blizzcon. The loss of Farahlon was particularly controversial because it was meant to become Netherstorm in Outland.

"It's such a shame (LINKS TO REDDIT), because it was the zone I was looking the most forward to, and now that it doesn't even exist on Draenor, Netherstorm feels out of place…"

[…]

"Not having Farahlon leaves the experience of seeing Draenor pre-shattering incomplete, IMO."

[…]

"Fucking half assed expansion."

The explanation Blizzard gave for abandoning the zone was rooted in a lack of direction - no one could agree on how Netherstorm should have looked before it was destroyed. In a later Blizzcon, the developers revealed that the zone was originally planned as a starting area for boosted characters, but the idea was abandoned. Whether that is true, or Blizzard was simply struggling with time and resources, we may never know. We can only be sure that it was scrapped early on, at a time when almost nothing had been built yet.

Since Farahlon was promised as patch content, nobody could be quite sure whether it had been cancelled or simply delayed. There was no big bombshell moment. Blizzard certainly weren’t offering one.

"I don't necessarily think it's confirmed it's not coming so I'm holding out a tiny bit of hope but I'm not too optimistic about it."

Time passed and the map stayed empty and players were left to draw their own conclusions.

The third blow came on the 24th of July when Blizzard cut Tanaan Jungle from launch. Once again this major announcement came in the form of a tweet from a developer, but at least this time they were able to offer a little clarity. It would still arrive in the form of a patch. As Tanaan was the base of the Iron Horde, Blizzard explained, it wouldn’t be practical for players to go there straight away. And it surely had nothing to do with the fact that the zone was so incomplete on the current beta that it could barely be recognised.

The excuse would have gone down more smoothly if it hasn’t accompanied yet another lie. Once again, Blizzard said:

"As to Tanaan, the rest of the zone has always been planned as patch content."

Players were quick to pick holes in that.

"For having been in and following the beta there has been no evidence or hint Tanaan would be pushed into another patch. I don't mind personally but there has been absolutely 0 hints on Tanaan being "intended" to be a patch."

[…]

"I feel if that's the case then this should have been clarified earlier. Today is the first day that its been mentioned that the rest of Tanaan is a patch zone, it's been months since WoD was announced. People have been thinking Tanaan in its entirety would have been with WoD launch.

I have zero issue with the rest of Tanaan zone being patch content, personally. If that was always the plan, then it is what it is. But the lack of communication is disconcerting."

[…]

"Their PR is horrible nowadays (LINKS TO REDDIT). How do they advertise a zone at BlizzCon and then act like we misinterpreted when it was coming out? We understood Farahlon's status as a patch content area easily enough. Tanaan was never presented that way."

To those players closely involved in the beta, it was impossible not to notice that this was a recurring issue. It was starting to draw attention.

"It seems like every week something is getting cut, gated or completely changed from what was announced and hyped people up at Blizzcon."

[…]

"They are getting caught with their pants down, time and time again now."

[…]

"Something is definitely going on behind closed curtains over at Blizzard, the amount of cut content is ludicrous."

[…]

"We can only speculate as to what caused so many issues inside Blizzard."

Then there was the Zangar Sea, which was implied to be a zone – it had its own music, its own enemies, concept art, and someone had clearly started building it. In fact the seas all around the continent were surprisingly detailed. But the Zangar Sea simply never materialised.

There was never any official statement on Zangar. After everything else that had been cut, no one held out much hope.

"Most likely scrapped."

At Blizzcon, developers discussed the Gorian Empire, the homeland of the Ogres. They heavily implied it might be explored in a patch. But like so much else, it was cut.

While we’re on the topic of cut content, I need to mention the Chronal Spire. This appeared in very early maps as the gateway from Azeroth to Draenor. For whatever reason, Blizzard changed their plans to have players enter through the Dark Portal instead. The only problem was that they had already paid Christie Golden to write the book leading into the expansion. Garrosh travelled to Draenor with the help a rogue bronze dragon (the ones with power over timelines).

By changing this plot point, they undermined the book’s narrative, and caused a number of plot holes to appear. By connecting the dark portal in Azeroth to Draenor, they effectively cut off access to Outland. And since players broke that new connection immediately after visiting Draenor, the Dark Portal was rendered useless. Nowadays when players step through, they are teleported to Ashran – which makes no in-game sense whatsoever.

This Bronze Dragon stuff is actually kind of important and cutting it is a huge issue, but I digress.

The player Kikiteno summarised it this way: (LINKS TO REDDIT)

"Blizzard stated they didn't want this to come across as a "time travel expansion" so they really toned down any and all elements of chronal/bronze/infinite anything.

The problem is WoD became a time travel expansion the moment they decided to use fucking time travel as a plot device. Honestly, I would have preferred a time travel expansion, as dumb as it would have been, to a goddamn orc expansion."

But goddamn orcs is what they would get.

A Promising Start

Gamers can be fickle. After all the cuts, all the convoluted plot threads, the bad communication, the messy beta, and after much of the community had begun to notice serious problems behind the scenes at Blizzard, all it took to turn the tide was one really good cinematic. We’ve talked about the trailer before, but I really need to emphasise just how popular it was. To this day, it remains the most viewed video on the World of Warcraft YouTube channel. It had an extraordinary effect. The hype hadn’t been this intense since just before Cataclysm.

There were also the shorts. To promote Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard had released ‘The Burdens of Shaohao’, a set of animations explaining the themes of the expansion. Warlords of Draenor established this as a tradition. If you’re interested in seeing them all, the other sets are, ‘Harbingers’, ‘Warbringers’, and ‘Afterlives’.

Even at this point, perceptive players were beginning to voice serious doubts, but they were helpless in the face of the expansion’s unstoppable momentum. When Warlords released, ten million players flooded its servers. No one in their wildest dreams had predicted numbers like these. Clearly Blizzard hadn’t either, because in the days that followed, almost every realm was brought low by rolling crashes and waves of lag. Most players could barely stay logged on, let alone make progress. Garrisons were totally unusable. Even moving near the garrison area caused the game to break.

It was a problem, but to Blizzard, it was a good problem.

And what’s more, fans loved it. The zones were beautiful, the stories were well-told and ended with lavish in-game cinematics, the dungeons were fun (though there were angry murmurs about how few there were), the garrison system was incredibly popular, and while there was only one raid available at launch, it was extremely good. The Warcraft renaissance heralded by Siege of Orgrimmar was a bust, but this felt real. WoW was back.

While we’re here, let’s just look at what the final product contained.

There were six questing zones, but one was exclusive to each faction. The introductory sequence involved players beating back the Iron Horde at the Dark Portal, passing through, and shutting it down from the inside. Trapped in this new world, players fled on boats to their starting zones.

The Horde started in Frostfire Ridge, a snowy region littered with jagged volcanoes and full of Orcish architecture. Players followed Thrall as he got to know some of Warcraft’s big-name Orcs, such as Orgrim Doomhammer and Durotan – Thrall’s dad.

The Alliance got Shadowmoon Valley, widely considered to be the stand-out zone of the expansion. It was a blue-tinted land full of willows, glowing fae creatures, and crystalline Draenei temples. Its focal character was Yrel, a young paladin trying to find purpose.

After completing their starting zone, players were sent to Gorgrond, a beautiful and wild zone based on Yellowstone park. It typified the ‘savagery’ Blizzard had promised. Then came Talador, a Draenei zone full of fantasy forests. Spires of Arak followed, a totally original zone which explored the origins of Outland’s Arrakoa. Cities were built into its twisted rock formations, and made for an impressive sight. Finally came Nagrand, a remake of the most beloved Burning Crusade zone. It was very similar to the original, and players wouldn’t have wanted anything else.

Blizzard had clearly taken liberties when they designed Draenor, creating zones that had no business existing and ignoring zones which should have been there, but the ‘tourist sights’ had been preserved. The Dark Portal, Black Temple, Auchindoun, Shattrath, Oshu’gun. Blizzard had become masters at exploiting the draw of nostalgia, and they did it excellently here.

Pandaria’s treasures, lore tidbits, and rare enemies had been so popular, Blizzard took them to the next extreme. Draenor was packed full of things to find. Exploring was half of the fun. These zones also saw the advent of World Quests - rather than follow the tightly-choreographed story, they offered broad goals which could be completed in numerous ways, and gave the player huge EXP rewards. It was a welcome change that made levelling alts easier than it had ever been.

Every zone offered the option of two unique abilities which would only be available in that zone. It might be a mount you could use while in combat, or a tank, or a second hearthstone, or the option to call in an airstrike. Each one opened up new gameplay options, and made every zone feel distinct. Players loved it. The idea of ‘borrowed power’ would be much more prevalent in later expansions, and much more controversial, but in Warlords it was beloved.

After reaching max-level, it all became about the garrison. The much-maligned dailies of Mists were almost completely gone, and what little ones remained were kind of pointless. Choosing which buildings to place, upgrading them, collecting followers, and sending them out on missions was incredibly fun. You could have your own inn, your own bank and auction house and farm and mine. It was the player housing that the community had begged for since the game began. The system was popular.

"It’s an interesting iteration of the Panda farms, but the garrisons are good enough at this point to make it interesting to think about how future expansions will incorporate the tech. Farm to garrison to...what? Your own city? Your own airship? It’ll be fun to see how they top this."

At this point, you might be starting to wonder why anyone hated Warlords at all.

Writing for Polygon, Phillip Kollar said:

"At launch, this expansion was a brilliant addition to an already massive game, brimming with new ideas and dozens of potential directions to take things in the future. But following release, Blizzard dropped the ball in a way so spectacular that it’s still hard to believe."

The Problems With Garrisons

It didn’t take long for the first cracks to show.

After a month or two, everyone finished getting their garrisons how they liked them, and settled in for the long haul. The entire end-game was built up around garrisons, and every commodity players could possibly need was within arm’s reach. They were simply too convenient. No one had any reason to leave. Rather than purely acting as a nice place to hang out (like player housing in every other game), Blizzard had needed to make them ‘practical’, and this backfired immensely.

Writing for Massively Overpowered, Eliot Lefebvre suggested that the problem with garrisons was Blizzard’s aversion to customisation for the sake of customisation.

"…the design choices were pretty much universally made with a strictly functional viewpoint. The stated goal of having WoW‘s version of housing fell away based upon the designer assertion that no one wants to play The Sims in WoW, disregarding that the two aren’t mutually exclusive goals. There’s space to argue that these were bad choices, but I think that ties in nicely with examining the other major complaint about Garrisons being an unpleasant chore.

When you can get better rewards from Garrisons than from doing anything else short of Heroic raiding, so to speak, you are naturally going to do that, because why would you not?"

Since every aspect of the garrison had to carry a clear practical purpose, Blizzard found themselves increasingly limited in the customisation options. The features advertised at Blizzcon gradually fell away. Players couldn’t choose which zone to build their garrison in, as they had been promised. They couldn’t choose between multiple layouts - that was scrapped in development. They couldn’t name followers or display trophies taken from enemies. They were very limited in which buildings could go where.

"I think the biggest misstep here is that Blizzard stubbornly refused to acknowledge that players don’t just want an identical castle to everyone else in the game, but that they craved their own personal space to customize.

There is virtually no room in garrisons to express individual creativity. Sure, you can place buildings slightly different and choose music and I think pick a tapestry here or there, but my garrison is going to look pretty much the same as every other alliance character’s place.

Look at how rabid players are with transmog — it’s because that’s pretty much the only way that the game allows them to express creativity and visual personality. Proper player housing in WoW could have been that to the nth degree."

10
10 comments
  • Then there was the issue of isolation.

    Garrisons worked much like the farm from Mists of Pandaria. When you approached, you were ‘phased’ into a kind of pocket dimension exclusive to you. You could be standing in the same spot as someone else, but you wouldn’t see them. They would see their garrison, and you would see yours.

    You may recall the ‘never leave the city’ problem of Cataclysm. That had been bad, but at least the players had been visible. This was so much worse. Once everyone had finished levelling through Draenor, the entire playerbase simply disappeared. Ironically, you had millions of players crammed within a few feet of each other, but none of them knew the others were there. And that’s how it stayed for the whole expansion.

    "A couple of months into the expansion pretty much everyone was already in the "logging, afk in garrison, raid, logout" routine."

    […]

    "…they allowed the community to get too isolated, which I’m afraid Blizzard is going to use as an eternal example of why it should never try to do housing in the future. And that wouldn’t be fair, because real housing is inviting and social, whereas there’s almost no point to ever visiting someone else’s keep here."

    What’s more, people quickly realised that the real ‘core system’ of garrisons was effectively a facebook mini game – one which got rapidly boring.

    "Even before the game’s general release people were making jokes about the fact that we were sending other characters out to do things instead of going out and doing things. That was always kind of ridiculous."

    On top of that, there were complaints about the aesthetic. Every race in WoW has its own architecture, but most of them tend to get overlooked in favour of Human and Orc architecture for everything. The latter was starting to feel particularly unwelcoming and harsh.

    "We have tremendous levels of power but we always live in mud huts. I thought I was a General in a power that controls half of a world. Why is the garrison from which I lead my campaign a timber shack that the Swiss Family Robinson would find primitive? Why do we have all of this power and technology but I'm walking around in mud? Maybe we could stop living like filthy hobos and put our engineers on inventing the road.The Alliance figured out the cobblestone walkway. Why can't we?

    I get it. The Horde is brutal and savage. But, one, I'm fucking tired of every single building everywhere being in the Orc style. That's so fucking boring seeing the same aesthetic everywhere."

    […]

    "The horde one (LINKS TO REDDIT) is just... like their entire design brief was "SPIKES AND HUTS AND PUT SPIKES ON THE SPIKES"."

    […]

    "I realy dislike the orc themed buildings so goddamn much. The arctic location looks more apeasing to me but those huts with tusks are so old and boring now."

    [..]

    "God that looks lame (LINKS TO REDDIT), all those ugly orc huts, I would kill for some undead, troll, Tauren, belf or goblin buildings."

    Professions were totally overhauled to integrate them completely into garrisons, and became extremely grindy and slow in the process.

    "Have you ever spent a month gathering the materials for a new bag, or an epic item upgrade? Until Warlords of Draenor, neither had I."

    You had to take primary materials to a building in your garrison, where an NPC would turn them into secondary materials at a crushingly slow pace. These systems were designed to limit what you could do in a single sitting, and force you to log in regularly to make progress.

    "If you were anything like me, you found yourself feeling that all you were doing in Warlords of Draenor was sitting in your garrison setting up work orders and waiting for cooldowns.

    You asked yourself if this was what you had to look forward to for the entire expansion. Was this really all there is to gold-making in Warlords?"

    Luckily, Blizzard was aware of this problem. Toward the release of Patch 6.2, they said:

    "We are actively trying to shift rewards back our into the world (gearing, professions, etc.) Felblight, for example, you'll need to get out in the world.

    The Garrison-centric profession system and daily cooldown of professions took away from the image of being a craftsperson vs. a player collecting daily materials."

    When asked about whether garrisons would be carried forward into the next expansion, Blizzard insisted they would be left behind in Draenor, but various systems from the garrisons would be cherry-picked and integrated into new content.

    "From the outset, we have said Garrisons as you know it in Draenor are rooted/tied to Draenor. You won't be bringing those things back to Azeroth. But the core gameplay of followers/army/base gameplay? We like the system. Is it likely to take the same format as WOD? Probably not."

    Most of the community celebrated this announcement, but not all. There were those who saw potential in garrisons – they just needed to be refined.

    "Soon enough, garrisons will be a thing of the past, an interesting idea that didn’t quite pan out the way anyone had hoped — developers or players. Personally, I think it’s a shame and slightly aggravating that Blizzard spent so much time working on garrisons only to throw its hands up and walk away from them now."

    These players had nothing to worry about. Garrisons would show up again, but in a very different form.

    (Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

    • 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:

      1. To motivate dedicated players to keep playing by allowing them to pay their subscription fee in gold

      2. To give casual or new players an avenue into the economy by letting them buy gold through legitimate means

      3. To generate more profit from their shrinking player base

      4. 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)

      • 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)

You've viewed 10 comments.