wow Expansion Quality Pendulum Theory Animated!

[Starym 3,800]

 

So the expansion quality pendulum theory has been around a while, and it states that every second expansion since Wrath of the Lich King has been bad and the one after it good. The theory skips Burning Crusade, as it presumes two development teams, the second of which supposedly only formed during WotLK and started working on Cataclysm, and from then on we get alternating bad and then good expansions. While the whole "good and bad" expansion side of this will never be agreed upon, there is at least something to the theory, and maybe if we go with "average/ok and better than average/good" more players could at least somewhat agree.

The theory certainly has its flaws as well, from the assumption of the two completely separate dev teams (although it is possible that there are separate expansion "prep" teams), to the specifics of which expansion is deemed good. There's also something to be said about the "good" expansions taking a lot more effort (Legion in particular), leaving devs exhausted, leading to somewhat lower quality expansion after that, and then that expansion getting cannibalized to some degree (like the pretty big degree of WoD) to get the next one to a higher level and so on.

All of this is to say "who knows", but the good news is that the theory is pointing to Shadowlands being one of the good ones, and the animation itself, made by Tikeyy_, is pretty funny in its own right!

If you don't see the video below just click on the title, as reddit embedding seems to be weird right now.

I animated pendulum theory from r/wow

[Razekiel 11]

Wishful thinking. The sad reality is that Activision does not care about this brand at all and the current (small) game design team is bad (unskilled). We will continuously get BFAs until something changes.

Shadowlands will not be good. It will not be a mess like 8.3 but still won't get close to any other "good" expansion. "Not that bad" is the best it will get.

Edited October 22, 2020 by Razekiel

[TheRagingwolf 258]

29 minutes ago, Razekiel said:

Wishful thinking. The sad reality is that Activision does not care about this brand at all and the current (small) game design team is bad (unskilled). We will continuously get BFAs until something changes.

Shadowlands will not be good. It will not be a mess like 8.3 but still won't get close to any other "good" expansion. "Not that bad" is the best it will get.

So, why are you here? Because, plenty of people have enjoyed BfA and Shadowlands looks to be a nice change given the theme of leaving the living world. I just don't understand this desire of people to claim they don't enjoy a game yet, they stick around the communities to trash everything. Plenty of other games out there, why bring the negativity here if you aren't happy?

[Lawrenz 105]

1 hour ago, Razekiel said:

Wishful thinking. The sad reality is that Activision does not care about this brand at all and the current (small) game design team is bad (unskilled). We will continuously get BFAs until something changes.

Shadowlands will not be good. It will not be a mess like 8.3 but still won't get close to any other "good" expansion. "Not that bad" is the best it will get.

If you are still here, you could tell exactly what is wrong, and what you would like having fixed.

 

37 minutes ago, Madyrn said:

(...) plenty of people have enjoyed BfA and Shadowlands looks to be a nice change given the theme of leaving the living world. (...)

exactly! I, for example, am a continuous subscriber since legion, since mythic+ exists. This gives me the motivation to continue playing in small teams, and not to rely on raids. Because of this, even BFA ist miles better to play than any expansion before legion. I liked legion more than BFA because of the legendaries and class campaigns, but i think shadowlands will compete with that and be really good.

Of course any new expansion will have fans and haters, but Blizz delaying the game shows me, that they at least have enough repect for a fine release. Yeah, it still needs a lot of tuning and fixing but that's always the case with any mmo release.

[Bobbis 208]

17 minutes ago, Lawrenz said:

I, for example, am a continuous subscriber since legion, since mythic+ exists. This gives me the motivation to continue playing in small teams, and not to rely on raids. Because of this, even BFA ist miles better to play than any expansion before legion

I think a lot of it comes to the divide between new(er) and older players. The older guard are seeing a perceived lack of quality, or it not living up to the nostalgia, or their lives and testes are changing and the one anchor is WoW.

I've played since end of Vanilla, taken some breaks and generally found something to enjoy. I get this good / bad pendulem thing but it all comes down to wanting WoW to be the best it can be. We've seen it grow or grown with it in many cases, through good and bad.

 

1 hour ago, Madyrn said:

So, why are you here?

A difficult one to answer, if nothing else, WoW is one hell of a drug and can be hard to break... Lawrenz had the better question.

[Ulzorn 29]

funny how the 1st half i have the exact opposite opinion on

wod was fine,too much cut content but was ok (raids were some of the best ever)

legion and bfa were ok for me,not awesome but not awful either

[MrOger 20]

3 hours ago, Madyrn said:

So, why are you here? Because, plenty of people have enjoyed BfA and Shadowlands looks to be a nice change given the theme of leaving the living world. I just don't understand this desire of people to claim they don't enjoy a game yet, they stick around the communities to trash everything. Plenty of other games out there, why bring the negativity here if you aren't happy?

So why to complain about anything? Surely there are people that enjoyed the abomination the warcraft 3 reforged was that even made the old version worse, just don't bring the negativity, move to other games! Why does it matter if they continuously *filtered* on something you love, find something else to love!

Because people care, you know? People care about something that they invested a lot of time and feelings into. And time after time we see how "small indie studio" blizzard *filtered* and *filtered* all over themselves we can do nothing but grieve over the times when they didn't, when they actually tried to do something cool, when they tried to push the limits. Nowadays it's just "Here is our new amazing system that will change how people play based on their choices! Will they choose between 30 versatility or %chance to get 15 critical strike? We are excited to see what combinations you will come up with!". Don't even get me started as our war against burning legion and Nzoth were crammed into not even an addon, but 1 content patch each and then for a new addon we get "oooooh, sppooookyyy theme that is just not connected to what was happening in no way or form, discover new, previously unknown lands that we just came up with after we woke up after sniffing a truck of drugs, ooooooh, exciting, unknown!", give me a break, because of *filtered* like this nobody trusts in Blizzard, they spent all their trust credit long time ago and still fail to even limp on anything good that remain in that studio. So why am i still here? I dunno, just to suffer i guess. Redemption is a thing, i still hold a silver of hope that blizz would remember who they were and actually try to do something good. Classic+ would be a nice place to start, but who am i kidding, they just probably going to mindlessly rotate addons without a single care in the world because it's a simple cashgrab, don't have to actually design something because it's so damn hard for "small indie company" Blizzard nowadays.

Edited October 22, 2020 by MrOger

[Nayrusa 50]

So it would be
Wrath good
Cata Good
MoP Bad
WoD Good
Legion Good
BFA Bad

does not hold up for me
because i dont liked cata, mop was okay, i am a rare person who says wod wasn't really bad it was just not enough content but that what we got was fine besides highmaul
okay legion was good
bfa was simple not good in terms of balance, azerite system and islands / Warfronts.
Raids and dungeons where okay

dont know what i should say about SL because i dont have beta access but what i have read gives me hopes that we could get a good one
or at least not a bad one as bfa in terms of new features screwed like the ones in bfa
at least that are my hopes

[SidonisAntares 290]

Wasn't aware that there was more generic name for it, my guildmates and I have just referred to it as WoW having the "Windows problem", BfA was mediocre, Legion was good, WoD was mediocre, MoP was good, Cata was mediocre. Windows 10 is good, Windows 8.x was mediocre, Windows 7 was good, Windows Vista was mediocre, Windows XP was good, Windows ME was mediocre, etc.

I hesitate to use the term 'excellent' or 'horrible' for any of the iterations of the game, because Blizzard never gets it 100% right or 100% wrong for anyone due to diversity in player types, and that's okay too. Some people clearly thought Classic was a better game, and now they're free to play it. Some people think TBC was the pinnacle of the game, and that is now in the works too. If TBC is a success at raising subscription levels, I'm sure at some point they will consider WotLK servers too, and some people will flock to that.

Some people lament the removal of the traditional talent trees going from Cata to MoP, others felt it allowed the dev team to focus on more meaningful talent choices (that aren't always gotten right of course), having played under both I tend to agree with the latter. If you always go 5/5 in a talent, you're not choosing a talent, you're manually selecting a damage/healing/survival increase as you level that will leave you behind other players if you don't. Baking it into the class spec aura at specific levels through passives removed a lot of bloat from the talent trees.

Some people won't like that Shadowlands is moving away from WQ providing LFR/BG/low M+ equivalent loot, removing Warforging/Titanforging, and funneling better loot rewards through the Great Vault that is replacing the M+ and Conquest chests, so to them BfA will have been better than Shadowlands will be. Some people have so little desire to raid, that they will never pick up all of their legendary powers to runecarve onto gear, because they have no desire to queue up for LFR to get the boss kills in that drop them.

Some people will absolutely be in love with Torghast, and become obsessed with how far they can push their progress in solo runs, and this will be the best thing since mage tables, others will not care for it whether solo or in a group.

I'll be the first to admit, that WoW is not as open world solo friendly at end game as games like FFXIV, but I enjoy dungeons and raids and the occasional bit of PvP, so I have a reason to play this game and continue paying for it. If you don't like the direction the game is going, don't pay for it, and say so (intelligently and preferably politely) when you cancel your subscription. If enough players quit for the same reason to noticeably impact their bottom line, then the direction of the game will change to reflect.

 

Edited October 22, 2020 by SidonisAntares

[ResoWho 68]

what if => good expansion => peopled hyped and gonna buy next expansion

mediocre expansion => people sad but its ok for most of them and they still play (like me for example, because there isnt really any mmo competition), people get hyped for the next expansion because  beta server stuff looks good.

so you can keep a standart which most likely always cost you the same amount of money and brings in good money.

if expections too high many people will be disappointed, if possible, some will refund and many will decline their abo, which most likely will result in making less money. less money means your budget for the next expansion will be lower then before, which means you will most likely disappoint people again, which might leads to your game dying in the long run

Edited October 22, 2020 by ResoWho

[Ragingwolf 310]

I believe that SL is just going to be a mixed bag of sorts for the playerbase.  The only reason why I stay sub to the game is because I really enjoy running Mythic+ as Tank and as DPS.  If Blizzard ever thought of removing that portion of the game I would probably cancel my sub and migrate to a different MMO and not even blink twice at the possibility of ever resubbing to WoW again.  

I'm just not that much of a Raider tbh and the lack of fluid story content can get really boring for me really fast.

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Nayrusa said:

So it would be
Wrath good
Cata Good
MoP Bad
WoD Good
Legion Good
BFA Bad

does not hold up for me
because i dont liked cata, mop was okay, i am a rare person who says wod wasn't really bad it was just not enough content but that what we got was fine besides highmaul
okay legion was good
bfa was simple not good in terms of balance, azerite system and islands / Warfronts.
Raids and dungeons where okay

dont know what i should say about SL because i dont have beta access but what i have read gives me hopes that we could get a good one
or at least not a bad one as bfa in terms of new features screwed like the ones in bfa
at least that are my hopes

No the proper sequence is listed as follows:

Wrath: good

Cata: bad

MoP: good 

Wod: bad

Legion: good

Bfa: bad

Shadowlands: going by how the sequence is should be good.

I also loved cata and WoD personally. MoP is still my forever favourite but things turned worse for me come the revamps in legion and bfa is just the worst iteration of the game. Insert homer Simpson meme, the worst iteration of the game so far lol.

Edited October 22, 2020 by Guest

[TheRagingwolf 258]

11 hours ago, Bobbis said:

Lawrenz had the better question.

I didn't see a question in that reply. Did you mean better answer? Or, did I overlook something?

[TheRagingwolf 258]

9 hours ago, MrOger said:

So why to complain about anything? 

...

Because people care, you know? 

That's such a stupid thing to say. Care? Really? About a video game? Look, I've played since vanilla so, don't throw the "you just don't get it" rhetoric out there. The question was honest and straight forward and you know it. And there is a big difference in saying "this xpac sucks, all the others sucked and the next will suck" versus saying "hey, these are the things that I saw wrong in this xpac" or "this thing didn't work like it was supposed to". 

If you're sole purpose is to complain without offering any detail regarding why you are complaining, what is the point? What is the point in being upset over a VIDEO GAME to the extent that you would rant on a community website but NOT offer any constructive information for WHY? It's an exercise in futility. 

People caring has nothing to do with the folks that come here or Reddit and just cry about things. The people that care are on the PTR reporting bugs, they're on the beta (if they're lucky enough) helping find problems. Those people actually care and are trying to make the game better. Complaining on what is essentially a fan site forum does nothing to improve the game, it just let's you vent.

[Bobbis 208]

54 minutes ago, Madyrn said:

I didn't see a question in that reply. Did you mean better answer? Or, did I overlook something?

It wasn't in my quote, but

 

13 hours ago, Lawrenz said:

If you are still here, you could tell exactly what is wrong, and what you would like having fixed.

 

[Razekiel 11]

On 10/22/2020 at 9:30 AM, Madyrn said:

So, why are you here?

One day you will hopefully grow up and then you will understand.

Edited October 28, 2020 by Razekiel

[Razekiel 11]

 

On 10/22/2020 at 10:14 AM, Lawrenz said:

If you are still here, you could tell exactly what is wrong, and what you would like having fixed.

Removal of all borrowed powers. That is the source of all problems. Blizzard is entangling itself with these systems and completely draining it's resources on getting them working and getting them balanced. Just look at Shadowlands and it's 4 borrowed power systems.

BTW I was originally commenting on the article that said that there might be a pattern that will magically make the next expansion good. I just stated that this is nonsense and it is just wishful thinking. That is my argument.

[TheRagingwolf 258]

On 10/28/2020 at 4:44 AM, Razekiel said:

One day you will hopefully grow up and then you will understand.

What does that even mean? Instead of just answering the question you attack the person asking? Are we in kindergarten now?