Here’s hoping that Blizz can whip up something as or even more interesting for the next expansion foray. Looking over the last several years, there was no content system in the game that excited me as much as this one did. I guess I wanted to say that I kind of liked garrisons and I miss them now that they’re defunct. And if Blizzard wanted more carrots to keep players motivated, well, then there was always ways to continually upgrade buildings to feature the current expansion’s mats and focus. Whether the garrison would have stayed put in Draenor or moved shop (via magic?) to the newer expansions, I don’t know, but there could have continued to be ways to tie it into the latest storylines. Mission frequency could have been tuned way down - which is, in fact, what Blizzard has done with mission tables elsewhere. Adding a lot more customization in terms of decoration and personal expression could have driven players to visit each other, especially if there was a rating system or the like in place. I think that Blizzard could have produced a far more elegant solution to continuing with garrisons while making changes to address those two common points of complaint. It was communal space in a game full of communal spaces. I found them to be a waste of space and definitely not as enjoyable as operating my own garrison - because it wasn’t mine. Order halls were supposed to be kind of the Garrisons 2.0, just less personal and more social but with a lot of functionality. Gold missions were nixed, the garrison system wasn’t supported past the expansion, and there were new systems designed to try to replace that role. The second is that constantly logging in to run follower missions became a tedious, frequent chore that you couldn’t escape due to the huge gold generation that it produced.īlizzard’s solution at the end of Draenor was planned obsolescence for garrisons. The first is that garrisons encouraged the community to be too insular and isolated, which is something I don’t buy that much people are as social or not as they want to be, even if they’re standing in the middle of a city square. Really, other than offering portals, your garrison could perform pretty much every city service need.īut what happened? There are two main complaints that seem to get circulated enough these days to be the “reality” of the garrison fallout, although I personally think that it was more complicated than that (and I hold to the opinion that there were a lot of folks like me that never *disliked* their garrisons and would have liked to see the system continue). Players could work on professions, gather mats, train up battle pets, and so on. They were also really useful, both as a home base and as a generator of resources. There was even a light degree of customization, as players could pick up music scrolls and holiday overlays to change it up from the default. There was a lot of carrots to chase with this system, a lot of potential rewards, and plenty of choices to be made. Finally, players had a spot of their own in the game and some sort of weird hybrid functional housing-base-thing. It’s hard to remember that now, but back in November 2014, it’s all anyone wanted to talk about. What’s weird is that, at the start of Draenor, everyone loved garrisons. But the thing you’ll hear players cursing the most, oddly enough, are garrisons. It introduced a storyline and continent that was at best a fantasy cul-de-sac, it suffered from some of the worst content drought that WoW ever had, and it had too little to do at the endgame. I don’t think a lot of World of Warcraft players look back at Warlords of Draenor with fondness.
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