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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Blizzard had a fair amount of inertia. They had been working on Diablo III (2012) for years but it shows how quickly Activation destroyed what made Blizzard great. The problem was not really core gameplay mechanics at release, it was the final balancing being completely out of whack that destroyed the game. This meant early review where generally positive, but gamers quickly stopped playing as late game was simply broken.

Similarly, Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King are pure Blizzard. Cataclysm (2010) was controversial. On the other hand Mists of Pandaria (2012) was generally disliked, Warlords of Draenor (2014) was an inane mess.

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I'd disagree that Wrath of the Lich King was pure Blizzard, in fact I'd claim the final patches of Burning Crusade marked the beginning of the end for many players. IIrc, monetization efforts such as faction transfers[0,1] and pets were introduced during that expansion and "casual-friendly" tools such as the dungeon finder[2] and heirlooms[4] were developed to attract more players. All of these changes were already extremely controversial.

[0] https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Character_Transfer

[1] https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Faction_Change_service

[2] https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeon_Finder

[4] https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Heirloom

The merger was 7/8/08, years after character transfer from mid 2006.

[4] “The precursors to modern-day heirlooms were introduced in Vanilla/Classic World of Warcraft. Heirlooms up to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion were items that were sold by a specific battleground vendor. There were Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley heirlooms.”

[2] This depends on how you mark an expansion. IMO, after the initial bug fixes are put that’s the expansion. Everything after that like 3.3.0 is it’s own separate patch.

My bad, I mistook the character transfer with the faction change service. Still, I remember there being a push for it which seems to be confirmed by the wiki: "initially, there was a 6 month cooldown between character transfers. In late February 2008, the cooldown was reduced to 1 month. In July 2009, the cooldown was reduced to 3 days."

Regarding heirlooms, they were introduced in WotLK:

"Heirlooms that increase experience and scale based on character level were introduced in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion."

The line is blurry, but I believe that a trend was definitely noticeable even in late Burning Crusade. In particular, efforts to attract a broader player base. It is unfortunately surprisingly hard to track and timestamp all the controversial changes introduced to the game.

Mists of Pandaria was disliked upon release mostly due to the new elements added (Kung-fu panda "knockoff", pet battles, etc), but is now considered a very good if not great expansion based on the actual content and game play.

Legion went through the same thing where at the start it was considered even worse than Warlords, but is now considered a high water mark.

Personally, I disliked Pandora because of it’s poor story and gimmicks like farming. Our guild went from doing heroic raids in Cata to 1/2 the guild quitting the game within 3 months of expansion and many people never hitting the new max level.

I assume people that remain generally liked the changes, but from what I can tell the player base tanked.

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