In light of the sub numbers, heres my rant:
The big problem I have with WoD is that as a non-raider, there really isn't compelling content to do. In MoP and other expansions, there were dailies, and cool new zones like Isle of Thunder or Timeless Isle that lured you out into the word to collect things and progress your character besides raiding. Dungeons we're tedious, sure, but there was a reason to run them (what most casuals consider end-game). Justice, Valor, they served a purpose and you felt like you were progressing your character if you didn't have time to raid.
We don't have that in WoD. I remember the marketing for the game talking about how the whole world would be this huge timeless isle, designed with treasures and rares to get you out in the world...except all that stuff is a 1 and done deal. So its not like timeless isle or isle of thunder at all. Hell, now the rares become non-rare and drop junk when you kill them again.
Any dailies were replaced by "grind 100 mobs to get apexis (a useless resource) crystals!" Reps...Gring 99999999 mobs to rep up!
Its probably one of the laziest expansions they've ever produced at end-game, and I can't wait for someone to reveal whatever shit-storm happened at Blizzard to cause it. All this on top of the fact that when Titan got scuttled, the WoW team was bigger than ever. Yet we sit in the most dry content expansion yet. The icing on the cake...it was 10$ more! I seriously wonder if they didn't just write WoD off as a failure, push it out the door (2 raid tiers, REALLY?! What a last minute change from PTR -- having Korgath escape vs dying in Highmaul...Cho'gall's story ended abruptly with no explanation what the pale orcs were...) so the bulk of the team could work on 7.0 and try to get through WoD as quickly as possible. Patch 6.1 ....I don't even know what I can say about this. I think this picture sums it up, really:
What a joke.
Some MAJOR people left the company during WoD's development and on top of that the initial plan, to even the months before launch had huge content cuts (move-able garrisons, Heirloom tab, Capital cities relegated to Ashran, Farhalon gone, Ashran scope cut down considerably). Not to mention the fact that it was delayed insanely from the announcement at Blizzcon's Q&A panel, where they were anticipating launching months before they ended up at. Don't even get me started on the launch, and proceeding week(s). The game had broken quests which were required to do ANYTHING (setting up your garrison) leading to a huge bottleneck of players in one small sub zone. Then the lag, then the phase breaking parts....For a good week and a half WoD was un-playable. Zone servers would crash and it took their team ages to scramble and upgrade their server hardware to accommodate the load. What the hell happened to the "Green Fire" type quest line they were planning!? If I recall, shamans were heavily implied to have a quest line like that. I even recall posts about potential "extra" legendaries that were for the "real raiders". Again, Shamans were thrown out there as a candidate (due to their "connection" with Draenor. All that shit, just straight up scrapped.
MoP had this great over-arching quest line through the patches where you'd see Garrosh's descent into madness. In WoD we have shitty garrison apexis quests which have very little plot/dialogue/purpose.
First we had Ghostcrawler leave, which people celebrated at the time. When Titan flopped, Rob Pardo came back to the WoW team and then HE left the company as well.
Some shit wen't down and I really want someone to release a book or do an interview about it.
