World of Warcraft has less content than ever before – and players have noticed. The direct comparison makes many angry.
World of Warcraft is currently far from soaring. Criticism of Blizzard is growing, not only due to the sexism scandal but also because of the content in the MMORPG. It has been rather poor for quite some time now. Players in the WoW subreddit have recently looked back and noted: We have had only one content patch per year.
Why are players so dissatisfied? There are several reasons for this. For one, World of Warcraft is still a “premium game.” It not only requires a subscription but also a new expansion that must be purchased approximately every two years.
The second point is that other games with a similar cost offer significantly more and provide two to three major content patches per year.
In a now locked Reddit thread, the user newaltair wrote:
When I informed myself about patch 9.1.5, I just realized that we have only received one content patch per year for the last two years. One was in January 2020 and one in June 2021. And if the rumors are true, then we will only get one in 2022. […]
I know a lot is going on at Blizzard right now, but what exactly are we currently paying a subscription for?
By “content patches,” they actually mean the major patches that bring real new features and content. The much smaller “X.5” patches are not included.
Then the statement is indeed correct. Patch 8.3 was released in January 2020, the Shadowlands expansion came out in November, and the only major content patch from Shadowlands was patch 9.1, which was released in June.
Another Reddit user, AmericanPicketFence, compares the patch speed of Shadowlands with the speed of updates from earlier expansions and paints a grim picture:
In Mists of Pandaria, patch 5.4 came out roughly at the same time that patch 9.1.5 is now being released.
Warlords of Draenor had patch 6.2.3 around the same time as patch 9.1.5 is now. […]
In Legion, a year after its launch, there was just the fourth raid tier with patch 7.3. At the same time, we are still in the second raid tier in Shadowlands and have no idea when 9.2 will come out.
Around the same time as patch 9.1.5, Battle for Azeroth released two much larger zones [than Korthia] and its third raid tier; it also introduced new crafting materials. Compare that to Shadowlands, where some professions simply stop at 75 because they couldn’t be bothered to provide more.
By the way, they charge €13 per month for that.
The mood remains rather bleak, and objectively speaking, there is simply too little happening in World of Warcraft right now compared to previous expansions.
Why is nothing happening in WoW right now? There are likely a number of reasons for this. For one, World of Warcraft has suffered massively due to the Covid pandemic. Even the release of Shadowlands had to be postponed because the developers couldn’t finish it on time. This delay has now been carried forward from patch to patch and is likely to extend into 2022 until the next WoW expansion is announced.
At the same time, the WoW team has struggled with harsh criticism of the available content. Many game contents were disliked by players, so a lot of time had to be invested in improvements. This too is likely to drastically delay the development of new content.
What is clear, however, is that loyal WoW fans are facing tough times in the coming months, and new content will take a while to arrive. Whether Blizzard will manage to give Shadowlands a worthy ending remains to be seen.
At least patch 9.1.5 has a release date – then the developers will hopefully finally have time to work on patch 9.2…
