WoW Fail BlogTwenty-one years of World of Warcraft, and the decisions that shrank it
A desktop monitor in a darkened room showing the World of Warcraft retail UI during a raid encounter, the screen the only light source, an adult player's hands visible on the keyboard below

2004 → 2019 → 2024

Blizzard now sells you the same game twice, fifteen years apart

An independent record of World of Warcraft’s design and business decisions, from the 2004 release to the Worldsoul Saga — thirty-six pieces, every claim dated.

A raid night in progress. Twenty years on the picture has barely changed; almost everything behind it has.

Photo: UMUT 🆁🅰🆆 / Pexels

A camouflaged tank with a soldier standing in the turret amid smoke and sparks

The garrison was the most efficient thing in the expansion, and it meant the optimal way to play a massively multiplayer game was alone at a table for eight minutes a day.

Photo: Heroes & Generals / Steam

Expansions · the lead piece

The Garrison Gave Everyone a Fortress and Emptied the World

Warlords of Draenor's centrepiece feature promised a personal base and delivered exactly that — so efficiently it became the only place worth being.

Warlords of Draenor launched in November 2014 on the back of a record-breaking pre-order campaign and a launch-day server queue that became its own news cycle. The expansion returned players to an alternate-timeline version of the orc homeworld, a setting designed to feel weighty and consequential.

Read the piece

Section 01 · Expansions

Ten expansions, and the one they went back to

All eleven →

A dated record of every WoW expansion from vanilla through the Worldsoul Saga, and the decisions each one made that the next one had to live with.

Retired World of Warcraft server hardware displayed in glass cases with commemorative plaquesExpansionsWhat Actually Shipped on 23 November 2004Forty-day mount money, no flight between continents, and a talent tree with 51 points in it. Most of what players now call the game was not in the box.Box art for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King showing an armored figure gripping a frozen swordExpansionsTwelve Million Subscribers and Then the CliffTwelve million subscribers in October 2010 is the high-water mark, and it has never been approached again.Aerial view of a mountainous valley with terraced farmland and scattered villagesExpansionsCataclysm Deleted the Map Twelve Million Players KnewThe 2004 world was not extended in 2010. It was replaced, and the version eleven million players had learned stopped existing.Crowds gather outside a glass convention center lined with tall palm treesExpansionsThe War Within and the Three-Expansion Bet Blizzard Made at BlizzCon 2023Announced at BlizzCon in November 2023 as the first of three. Blizzard had never committed that far ahead before.

Section 02 · Systems

The systems that were supposed to fix it

All six →
Strategy map screen showing connected territory nodes and a battle unit sidebar in a war game

The gold price floats. That makes the subscription a commodity with a chart, and Blizzard the market maker.

Photo: Heroes & Generals / Steam

03

The Token Turned a Subscription into a Commodity with a Floating Price

Blizzard introduced the WoW Token in April 2015 to pull gold-for-time transactions from the grey market into the official economy. What it actually created was a subscription whose cost fluctuates with player demand — and a formalised link between real money and in-game currency that gold sellers had always been blamed for.

Section 03 · Business

12,000,000

October 2010 ↓ November 2015

5,500,000

$69bn, then 1,900 jobs, three months apart

Blizzard reported 5.5 million subscribers in November 2015 and has not published a figure since. Every number quoted about World of Warcraft in the eleven years after that is an estimate.

The silence began the quarter after Warlords of Draenor, an expansion that opened at ten million and lost nearly half of them inside six months.

The reporting record All five

A printed or whiteboard-drawn line graph showing a peak and decline curve, photographed on a desk with a hand pointing to the peak

Every subscriber figure quoted after November 2015 is somebody else’s estimate, drawn on somebody else’s chart.

Photo: https://kaboompics.com/ / Pexels

Ten expansions, eleven years of silence about the audience, and one re-release that outsold the argument for all of them.

Section 04 · Classic

The fix was the 2004 game

WoW Classic's launch in 2019, the Nostalrius shutdown that preceded it, layering and hardcore servers, and what it means that one subscription now buys both versions.

All of Classic →

Section 05 · The Genre

The genre around it

Final Fantasy XIV's 2021 moment, the failed MMOs that preceded it, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Old School RuneScape's polling system, and where the successors stand.

All of The Genre →

Section 06 · The Record · the long read

A Raid Boss Leaked a Disease into the Cities, and Epidemiologists Took Notes

Patch 1.7 introduced a debuff. It escaped. The public-health literature noticed.

The incident depended on a world where thousands of players stood in the same room, on the same realm, with no way to opt out of each other.

Read the record

Arched tunnel entrance carved into a steep, rocky mountainside

The incident depended on a world where thousands of players stood in the same room, on the same realm, with no way to opt out of each other.

Photo: Siarhei Nester / Pexels

Chronology
  1. 13 September 2005Patch 1.7 ships; Zul'Gurub and Hakkar the Soulflayer go live
  2. September 2005Corrupted Blood outbreak spreads to Orgrimmar, Stormwind City, and other major hubs over several days
  3. 2003SARS outbreak concludes, raising pandemic preparedness as a policy priority
  4. 2007Fefferman and Lofgren paper published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases
  5. 2007Balicer paper published in Epidemiology & Infection

Guild and studio affiliates.

Patch notes and patron names.

Principal supporters

Supporting