WoW: 2 content patches in 2 years – players get angry

World of Warcraft brings less content than ever – and that’s what the players noticed. The direct comparison makes many angry.

World of Warcraft is far from being on the rise at the moment. The criticism of Blizzard continues to grow and that is not only due to the sexism scandal, but also to the content in the MMORPG. It’s been pretty poor for a while now. In the WoW subreddit, the players have now looked back and noted: We only had one content patch per year.

Why are players so dissatisfied? There are several reasons for this. For one thing, World of Warcraft is still a “premium game”. Not only does it require a subscription, but also a new extension every 2 years, which must also be purchased.

The second point is that other games at a similar cost offer significantly more and bring two to three major content patches per year.

In a now blocked Reddit thread, the user newaltair wrote:

When I found out about Patch 9.1.5, I just realized that we’ve only received one content patch per year for the past two years. One was in January 2020 and one in June 2021. And if the rumors are true, we will only get one in 2022. I know there’s a lot going on at Blizzard right now, but what exactly are we paying for?

In this case, “content patches” actually mean the large patches that really bring innovations in the form of game content and content. This does not mean the much smaller “X.5” patches.

Then the statement is actually true. Patch 8.3 was released in January 2020, the Shadowlands expansion was released in November, and the only major Shadowlands content patch 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 previous expansions and paints a bleak picture:

In Mists of Pandaria, Patch 5.4 was released around the same time that Patch 9.1.5 is now released. Warlords of Draenor had patch 6.2.3 around the same time as patch 9.1.5 now. In Legion, a year after its launch, there was just the fourth raid tier with patch 7.3. At the same time, we’re still in the second raid in Shadowlands and have no idea when 9.2 is coming 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 brought new crafting materials. Compare that to Shadowlands, where some professions just stop at 75 because they were too lazy to bring any more. By the way, they charge € 13 per month for this.

So the mood is still quite gloomy and objectively too little is happening in World of Warcraft at the moment when you compare it with previous expansions.

Why is nothing coming up with WoW at the moment? There should be a number of reasons for this. On the one hand, World of Warcraft has suffered massively from the Covid pandemic. Even the release of Shadowlands had to be postponed because the developers didn’t finish in time. This delay is now being dragged out from patch to patch and is likely to drag on through 2022 until the next WoW expansion is announced.

At the same time, the WoW team struggled with harsh criticism of the available content. The players did not like a lot of the game content, so that a lot of time had to be invested in the improvement. That, too, is likely to drastically delay the development of new content.

However, it seems clear that loyal WoW fans will face difficult times in the coming months and that new content will still be a while in coming. It remains to be seen whether Blizzard will manage to bring Shadowlands to a worthy end.

At least patch 9.1.5 has a release date – then the developers will finally have time to work on patch 9.2 …