Archive
Everything on this site, in one register
All thirty-six pieces, grouped by section. This is the complete roster — the front page carries an edit of it.
36 pieces · 6 sections
Ten expansions on a shelf. Blizzard’s most successful answer to all of them was the 2004 build, reissued.
Photo: Azeroth in World of Warcraft 2021 · Wikimedia Commons
Expansions
Ten expansions, and the one they went back to
| Image | Piece | Section |
|---|---|---|
 | What Actually Shipped on 23 November 2004 Forty-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. | Expansions |
 | Outland Was a Corridor, and That Was the Point Outland replaced the open continent with a sequence of gated zones. Every expansion since has argued about how linear to be. | Expansions |
 | Twelve Million Subscribers and Then the Cliff Twelve million subscribers in October 2010 is the high-water mark, and it has never been approached again. | Expansions |
 | Cataclysm Deleted the Map Twelve Million Players Knew The 2004 world was not extended in 2010. It was replaced, and the version eleven million players had learned stopped existing. | Expansions |
 | Mists of Pandaria and the Expansion That Took Ten Years to Win Dismissed on announcement, praised a decade later. The reversal is documented in the same outlets that panned it. | Expansions |
 | The Garrison Gave Everyone a Fortress and Emptied the World 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. | Expansions |
 | Legion's Artifact Weapons: Power That Expired by Design Artifact weapons were designed to be taken away. That was the point, and it became the template. | Expansions |
 | Azerite Armour and the System That Required Three Revisions Three structural revisions in three patches: 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3. The revision history is the record. | Expansions |
 | Shadowlands: Four Covenants and a Decision You Could Not Undo Four Covenants, one choice, and a switching cost high enough that patch 9.1.5 had to undo it. | Expansions |
 | Dragonflight Brought Back the Talent Tree Warlords Removed The tree Cataclysm stripped to six passive choices came back in 2022 with more nodes than the original had. | Expansions |
 | The War Within and the Three-Expansion Bet Blizzard Made at BlizzCon 2023 Announced at BlizzCon in November 2023 as the first of three. Blizzard had never committed that far ahead before. | Expansions |
Systems
The systems that were supposed to fix it
| Image | Piece | Section |
|---|---|---|
 | Mythic+ Put a Clock on the Dungeon, and the Clock Never Came Off A visible countdown and a public score. The score became the thing you are judged on before you are invited. | Systems |
 | From Titanforging to the Great Vault: Trading One Complaint for Another Titanforging was random and disliked. The Vault is deterministic and also disliked, for the opposite reason. | Systems |
 | Looking for Raid and What Happened When the Server Stopped Mattering Patch 4.3 made the raid available to everyone and made the server stop mattering. Both were the same change. | Systems |
 | The Token Turned a Subscription into a Commodity with a Floating Price The gold price floats. That makes the subscription a commodity with a chart, and Blizzard the market maker. | Systems |
 | WeakAuras and the Interface the Game Doesn't Ship With The interface the game is balanced around is not shipped by Blizzard. | Systems |
 | The GDKP Ban: A Policy History Banned in April 2024, after running for years in plain sight. | Systems |
Business
$69bn, then 1,900 jobs, three months apart
| Image | Piece | Section |
|---|---|---|
 | $69bn, then 1,900 Jobs, Three Months Apart The acquisition closed in October 2023 after twenty-one months of regulatory review. The 1,900 redundancies were announced in January 2024. | Business |
 | Blizzard Reported 5.5 Million Subscribers in 2015 and Has Not Published a Figure Since The last published figure is 5.5 million, in November 2015. Everything quoted since is an estimate. | Business |
 | The NetEase Deal Lapsed in January 2023 and Came Back in July 2024 Eighteen months dark in mainland China, then a new agreement in 2024. | Business |
 | The 2021 California Suit: The Filing, the Settlements, the Dates Filed July 2021. An $18m federal settlement in March 2022, and $54m with the state in December 2023. | Business |
 | The Blizzard Albany QA Union and the Recognition That Followed Microsoft recognised the Albany QA unit in May 2023 — the first in the company. | Business |
Classic
The fix was the 2004 game
| Image | Piece | Section |
|---|---|---|
 | Nostalrius Ran for Two Years Before Blizzard Sent the Letter Shut down by legal notice in April 2016. Its team met Blizzard that June, and Classic shipped three years later. | Classic |
 | Classic Launched with Layering, and Players Were Not Happy About It Layering made the launch playable by making the realm not one place — the exact thing Classic existed to restore. | Classic |
 | Hardcore Classic and the One Rule That Changes Everything One rule, applied to a game players already knew by heart, changed how all of it is played. | Classic |
 | One Subscription, Two Games, and the Argument That Implies One payment, two versions, fifteen years apart. The pricing is the argument. | Classic |
The Genre
The genre around it
| Image | Piece | Section |
|---|---|---|
 | Final Fantasy XIV in 2021: The Overflow Queue That Became a Story Square Enix stopped selling the game in 2021 because too many people were trying to buy it. | The Genre |
 | WildStar, Warhammer Online, The Matrix Online: What Closed Them Warhammer Online closed in 2013, The Matrix Online in 2009, WildStar in 2018. Each launched into a space WoW already occupied. | The Genre |
 | EVE Online's Economy Is Monitored by a Real Economist CCP hired an economist and published quarterly reports. No other game has treated its own market as a subject of study. | The Genre |
 | Old School RuneScape Votes on Its Own Updates Content needs 75% player approval to ship. Nothing in WoW has ever required a vote. | The Genre |
 | The Successors Are Still Loading In development since 2016, and still not released. The successor problem turns out to be a scheduling problem. | The Genre |
 | The Game EverQuest Built and Blizzard Sold to Fifty Times as Many People Server communities, raid progression, gear dependency. WoW inherited the vocabulary and sold it to fifty times as many people. | The Genre |
The Record
A raid boss leaked a disease
| Image | Piece | Section |
|---|---|---|
 | A Raid Boss Leaked a Disease into the Cities, and Epidemiologists Took Notes 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. | The Record |
 | Leeroy Jenkins: The Video, the Date, and What It Actually Was Posted to Warcraft Movies in May 2005, and probably staged. Both facts are part of the record. | The Record |
 | Method, Echo, and the Race That Became a Broadcast Event A forum thread in 2006; a 200,000-viewer broadcast by 2019. The race did not change, the audience did. | The Record |
 | Warcraft Movies and the Era Before YouTube Before YouTube there was one site, and a generation of player-made film on it. | The Record |