The dragon in the room for WoW’s health

THE #1 worst problem of Shadowlands was the patch cadence.

Sure, the systems are still contrived, the story is awful, class balance is a joke, the world is uninspiring and 9.1 is probably among the worst major patches ever released.

But if we’d gotten another patch, we wouldn’t have had to endure 9.1 so long, and we probably wouldn’t have stayed in 9.0 long enough to stop liking it. We would have had another raid to enjoy, more outdoor content, a better-developed story (there are mountains of evidence that stuff was cut mid-expansion), etc. etc.

If we were playing 9.3 right now, the playerbase would probably be looking at Shadowlands as a bad expansion with one of the worst patches ever (9.1), but much more on the Cata tier (for us non-Cata lovers) than the “Worse than BfA” tier.

Unfortunately, patch cadence is not something they’ve touched on at all in their Dragonflight press tour, and not something they’ve told us they’re going to do better in the next expansion. They also haven’t done nearly enough rehiring from the mass layoffs of 2018-2020 and the mass resignations of 2021-2022 to be able to release content quickly.

For everyone getting their hopes up for Dragonflight: If these 7-8 month major patch cycles don’t change, the game will still be bad. And they have shown less than 0 indication that it will.