Warlords of Draenor

Warlords of Draenor is the expansion I think about when someone tells me WoW can't disappoint me anymore. It started as strong as any expansion ever has, and then it just stopped, and the way it stopped taught me something about what I actually want out of this game.

The opening was genuinely great. The intro on the Tanaan Peninsula, blowing through the Dark Portal in reverse, the leveling zones through Draenor, all of it hit. The old orc warlords were a fun hook, the questing was tight, and for a few weeks it felt like Blizzard had a real one on their hands.

Then there was the garrison. Your own base, your own little plot of Draenor, and on paper it sounded fantastic. In practice it quietly ate the game. Everything you needed came to your garrison. Materials, missions, followers doing the work for you while you watched a table. Why fly out to a zone when the zone comes to your doorstep? Why stand around in a city when your garrison has everything? I logged in, made my rounds like I was checking on a farm, made a ton of gold, and logged out having barely seen another player. The most social game I own turned me into a hermit, and it did it on purpose.

And then came the drought. Content dried up, the patches stopped landing, and we sat in that garrison for well over a year with nothing new before Legion finally showed up to bail everyone out. It was the longest stretch of nothing WoW had ever put me through. Some people feel the same way about Siege of Orgrimmar, but this one felt worse for me.  We've already talked about the insanity that I was trying during that particular long piece of content. 

A lot of people quit in that gap. I didn't fully quit, but I got as close as I've ever come, and I played a lot of other games.

My altoholism also made great strides during Warlords, and I was up to 20 different max-level alts by the end, and was very close to the goal of having a different character of each class AND each faction by the end.  I think it was just an alliance monk and an alliance warriro that I didn't finish.  But imagine having a garrison on all of those alts and doing all the various garrison chores on all of them every single day.  

Draenor is the cautionary tale. Great bones, a killer opening, and a flagship feature that isolated everybody and then left them there. I learned that I don't just want things to do in this game. I want reasons to bump into other people while I do them. Warlords is what it looks like when you take that away.

That's it for now!

Cheers!

Joar