Blizzard owns up to its own mistakes in World of Warcraft. This is well received by the fans, who would like to see many more such admissions in the future.
With almost 20 years under its belt, World of Warcraft is a pretty old MMORPG that has been through a lot. There were many great highlights, but not everything always went according to plan – sometimes things were even really bad. But in the past, Blizzard has often downplayed these errors. But not with Shadowlands. This honesty is well received by the community.
Where did Blizzard admit mistakes? At the Game Developer Conference (GDC), Blizzard talked about player numbers and also about the latest expansion, Shadowlands. A lot went wrong for many reasons, which Blizzard openly summarized as follows:
This open approach to several fields is a novelty that is also being discussed in the community.
What does the community say? The World of Warcraft subreddit talks about this admission of mistakes and the transparency that comes with it. This is generally well received, as Briciod writes:
Not once in the lifespan of WoW have I seen the developers stand by when an expansion fails, not even in WoD or BFA. It was actually the opposite with the latter, where they insisted on the terrible systems and told players “they wouldn’t see their vision” and that view carried over into Shadowlands, resulting in some of the worst years in WoW history. (…)
It’s nice to see that her attitude has changed and I hope we see more of that.
Rare_Ad_3871 also agrees with the basic Shadowlands statement:
Shadowlands has caused players to flock to try other MMOs. It was such a wild time and they know they screwed up. Dragonflight was a big improvement though.
Kievarra also believes that things are looking up in WoW after many years of making mistakes and not acknowledging them:
Each expansion has a pre-release interview where they say “We learned from our mistakes” as a selling point for the next expansion. ion [Hazzikostas] did this a lot, which is why it was hard for people to believe him when he did it again during the big talk before Dragonflight. The difference is, this time you can really see that they took it to heart, as Dragonflight had one of the drastic changes to the design philosophy from the previous expansion.
Does Blizzard often admit mistakes? Even if it is rare for Blizzard to openly admit mistakes in World of Warcraft, as is now the case with Shadowlands, this has certainly happened in the past. In various interviews, the developers repeatedly discuss negative aspects, such as the Azerite armor in Battle for Azeroth, which was subsequently viewed as a design error. The island expeditions and the war fronts also fell short of expectations – something that was also blamed on themselves and the communication with the players.
There was also a partial apology for Warlords of Draenor at the time, because the expansion was shortened by a whole patch and the story was even changed at short notice.
However, many in the community seem to be happy that Blizzard is dealing more openly with errors and is proof to some: They want to learn and do better. Dragonflight as a whole was probably a good step in the right direction.