T w e n t y S i d e d

Because of my quest to play “collector” in World of Warcraft (and I know this has been a month of World of Warcraft; my apologies…I get tunnel vision sometimes) I have been on a bit of an adventure. Playing on my laptop with its older graphics processor, a unified architecture Ryzen 7/Vega 3 (and its currently limited RAM) causes some issues. I was never able to get WoW retail running. Under a Wine install I would experience random shutdowns during the install. About one out of forty times the Battle.net install would complete, but then Battle.net would not operate fully. I couldn’t install any Battle.net game, because it kept telling me I was “offline.” Don’t go checking for solutions to that problem explicitly, by the way; you will find a lot of people telling you “well, *of course* you can’t install…*you’re offline*. Go online and then it will work.” You can just picture your favorite “head smacking/are you stupid” reaction gif now. I did read a few references that sometime in Summer 2025 Blizzard changed “something” that has disabled or at least greatly hampered Linux installs. To be sure the only success stories I found predated this past summer. But given my available hardware, I would not be surprised if it was possible.

There are, at this point, *many* recommendations to install World of Warcraft through Steam. This isn’t 100% straightforward; by the traditional instructions you have to run the Battle.net installer, cancel it out when it asks to log-in (something that is part of the Wine instructions as well), then change the configuration to point to the just-installed Battle.net rather than the installer, which will now run under Steam’s Wine overlay Proton, and successfully install World of Warcraft. Here’s the first thing, though: after the Battle.net install completed, I couldn’t ever find where it installed. *Every other game* I ever installed through Steam *and ran,* which may be the important part, is in my Steam archive folder. What *did* work is doing the Wine install (which can fail often, remember) then adding *that* installed Battle.net to Steam. This is when I hit the second issue: World of Warcraft would only install to the internal hard drive, the one that’s only 256 gigabytes and about 2/3 full. I *should* be able to change to any of my external drives, but it couldn’t see them. I’m sure this has something to do with pretending to install through Windows, and there is probably a legitimate explanation…but I don’t currently know what it is.

What *did* work, as I talked about a couple of weeks ago, was installing a private World of Warcraft client for Turtle WoW. In fact, this runs incredibly well. I can have WoW going while I’m playing videos on YouTube in the background. Now, I really like Vanilla World of Warcraft. The Burning Crusade (the first expansion and *very* similar to Vanilla in most respects) is one of my two favorite expansions, maybe even my single favorite if you consider everything. BUT I’m not the biggest fan of playing it with the mechanics that were part of the game at that time. My favorite *implementation* of the mechanics comes later. I am very much a “solo era” player and most enjoy the game-play utilized when (it was perceived by the player-base, anyway) Blizzard was supporting that play-style more. This really started with the Mists of Pandaria expansion, and continued to Warlords of Draenor and Legion. I mean, technically this has continued on to the current day, but I would argue that the expansions following Legion and starting with Battle For Azeroth are more known for their core story changes than the mechanics, but that’s a whole argument. In fact, all of this is JUST LOADED with caveats.

That’s a long way around the barn to get to this: I found a Legion private server. In fact, there are many; Legion seems to be the current “most recent” private server. I won’t name it, as the private server’s best friend is anonymity, at least as far as Blizzard is concerned. And to be fair, the most populous private Legion server I found claims only a few thousand players. Installing the private Legion client was the adventure, as unlike Turtle WoW no one had (talked about) getting it running on Linux, let alone published a Linux client install. I downloaded their torrent, but that didn’t actually include the client executables, just the data. So I downloaded the exe and ran it through Wine. I got a black screen, but it wasn’t locked up…it was clearly running and downloading. If I checked its folder it constantly but slowly grew in size. Because I *thought* I knew what it was doing, and because of the black screen, I did eventually close it. Then I copied the data from the torrent download (none of this was detailed in the minimal instructions, but I didn’t see why it wouldn’t work.) ((NOTE INSERTION FROM A FEW WEEKS LATER: I finally joined the server’s Discord and in the installations instructions THERE, this is EXACTLY what they say to do. Mea Culpa. I mean, the Linux part was still on me, but fair cop.)) After that I restarted the exe and got the black screen again. The client didn’t seem to be downloading anything, though. At this point I shut it down and decided to manually add the game to Lutris. I don’t like doing this, especially if I don’t have a reference from someone who has done it before…so I just specified the minimum things I knew about. The exe, the running directory, the use of Wine, and its version…several references had been made to using GE 10-15. And it worked. First try. In fact, my Destro Warlock is currently at level 30, and I’ve had no problems whatsoever.

Considering Battle For Azeroth is (was, when I played last year) the current “baseline” version of World of Warcraft (with some things still starting with a Cataclysm story, and Chromie-time leveling being added in Shadowlands), Legion could be considered the newest pre-modern World of Warcraft. This is an arbitrary view I (as far as I know) only recently made up, but it’s part of the framing narrative. The last expansion I was actually interested in was Battle For Azeroth, although I didn’t see how the story as it was advertised proceeded from the story as I understood it from Warlords of Draenor…probably because I had never played Legion (it’s just The Burning Crusade again, right? I had missed A LOT of story) But as I was a primary Forsaken player and a Sylvanas fan I was certainly interested, considering the trailer showed the human-led Alliance attacking the Forsaken-led Horde just outside the Forsaken capital of Lordaeron (yes, the Forsaken capital is actually UNDER the *ruins* of Lordaeron, but you get the idea). However, just as I never played Legion, I never played Battle For Azeroth either…I came back to the game in Shadowlands partly because I wanted some nostalgic game-play and I thought the newly-introduced “Chromie-time” might facilitate that (turns out it was unnecessary) and eventually because I wanted to get the game running on Linux, just to prove I could.

So…I have a clearly-demonstrated preference for how to play the game and which expansions I enjoy. I’m not interested in the newest expansion *at all*. I did eventually (as I’ve talked about before) catch up on the lore from Battle For Azeroth and Shadowlands; a little bit less on Dragonflight and The War Within. I didn’t really like much of the BFA story, and then Shadowlands just threw everything in a blender, in my opinion. This is a version of “jumping the shark” for me. While the concept is, of course, pointed at ONE particular moment; that moment can easily be construed to be exemplary of a suite or complex of changes that fundamentally alter the nature of a product. Fonzie jumping a shark on skis (Fonzie was on skis, not the shark) stands out, but it was completely consistent with the flanderization of the Fonzie character in the sitcom Happy Days. That is, Fonzie jumping a shark led to much of the audience realizing the show had become so silly and absurd it wasn’t worth their time anymore. I will note there is a level of hindsight to the “jumping the shark” characterization…an idea I would agree with. I can take note of things about World of Warcraft I have disliked for years, but I still would have given the retail version another go if I could have installed it. NOT being able to install it, and experiencing the unbelievable performance of the Legion private server (it runs just as well as Turtle WoW) has resulted in my complete lack of interest in getting the live version working anymore. It has nothing to offer me. Clearly others have reached that point before me.

When did World of Warcraft jump the shark? Obviously at different times for different people, but there are clearly several specific moments we can point to now. The single biggest claimant is the launch of the third expansion Cataclysm. It had less content, or at least felt like it had less content, than the second and third expansions The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. While both of those expansions added an entire continent to the map, facilitated ten more levels and added new end-game content beyond that, Cataclysm only brought six new zones and allowed for five levels of advancement. There was some consternation that some of the new zones had actually been part of the existing game map from the launch of World of Warcraft in 2004, in various states of completion. Likewise the two new races introduced, Goblins and Worgen; had *always* been in the game. To be fair on that point, the two new races of The Burning Crusade had technically always been in the game, too. While the Dranei received a significant retcon to go with their introduction the Blood Elves were literally just a relabeling of the High Elves that had been a central part of the Warcraft story all along. Similarly the hero class Death Knight added in Wrath of the Lich King had been introduced in the RTS games years before. While there were complaints about changing mechanics, the largest red flag seems to be the one thing Blizzard thought would be the biggest selling point: they remodeled the entire map of Azeroth (not the expansion maps for TBC and WotLK) and re-did the quest structure throughout these areas. If you start a new character today on the live server and choose the oldest content to level with, you are beginning with quest lines written or re-written for Cataclysm. The original iteration of the game, what is commonly called “Vanilla,” was gone forever. Until private servers started popping up, of course. This resulted in, anecdotally and with *some* evidence, the largest group of player abandonment in WoW‘s history. You will still find this expansion cited more than any other change or event as the reason people stopped playing the retail version of the game.

Opinions vary more after this. I remember Mists of Pandaria causing a great deal of ridicule, inviting comparisons to the very popular animated films Kung Fu Panda and Kung Fu Panda 2. Thousands promised to not play this expansion, but its reputation has steadily improved during the last decade. I suspect a lot of the early complaints about MoP were bandwagon in nature, as the general opinion now seems to indicate it is a solid expansion despite any number of specific complaints. This is another “short” expansion despite introducing an entire continent. You don’t realize it early on as the first couple of zones make up so much of the game. There’s an entire zone that is effectively dead now, as it was the setting for a significant live story element. There are ways to replay this area, at least parts of it; but if you’re just grinding through levels, you will only fly through this zone on the way to the next expansion. Mists of Pandaria also played a part in a larger narrative that a significant portion of the player base disliked (significant, although from my perception still a minority): the transition of Horde Warchief Garrosh Hellscream to a villain. Many players *did not* like this *at all*. How much of this “heel turn” was telegraphed in Cataclysm is a separate argument (that is, I think it was clearly coming; many don’t and probably would disagree with it more if so), and I doubt it led to many players leaving the game. But it could be included in the long list of story elements players didn’t like that could culminate in more extreme dissatisfaction. I will also include here that Cataclysm/Mists of Pandaria is when players started seeing a huge increase in pop culture references. Prior to these expansions there were obviously still humorous or oblique references in the game, both cultural and self-referencing. But the writers started, well; using social media memes, to put it bluntly. The most obvious were references to other popular games. “I used to be an adventurer, but I took an arrow to the knee” in a quest dialogue, for example. The introduction of the “Peacebloom Vs. Ghouls” mini-game, a reference to the PopCap hit “Plants Vs. Zombies.” Mists of Pandaria being a reference to Kung Fu Panda. Again, I don’t know if this caused many people to leave the game, but I have heard multiple recitations of players noting this specific concept as detrimental to their playing experience.

As of 2025, the next expansion, Warlords of Draenor, is considered the least popular. Many players have referenced technical problems with new game-play mechanics, and the time-travel nature of the story, which goes along with the “it’s an alternate timeline, not the original timeline” element which ends up only confusing things as the two different timelines merge later on. This was also the last time the player base got any kind of accurate World of Warcraft player count which, along with an unused-account purge, indicated a massive decrease in the player base during Warlords of Draenor. Despite this being one of my favorite expansions, I don’t doubt there is quite a bit of reality behind this. While surveying private servers the last few weeks, I noticed Warlords of Draenor seems to be not represented at all. And people (besides me) *do ask* about it in forums. The unanimous response is “why focus a server on the least popular expansion? Considering Legion (the following release) is one of the most popular, and will by nature include Warlords of Draenor, just play a Legion server.”

That answers the question for both of those expansions: WoD lost players, seemingly genuinely; and Legion got at least many of them back. It’s *after* Legion that opinions remain consistent even as they differ on details. Battle For Azeroth appears to have been a wash; players disliked many story elements even while liking some particular location or design. The beginning of Sylvanas’ final story annoyed almost as many people as the Garrosh evolution. Especially at its conclusion in Shadowlands. I’ve mentioned before I was excited to see what Blizzard did with the Forsaken post-Sylvanas, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Sylvanas story was horribly mangled and they ended up Agatha Christie-ing in a new character to be a Sylvanas substitution as part of the new ruling council. The Forsaken aren’t the only faction affected by bad choices. Of course you have Orc sometimes-Warchief Uber-shaman Thrall getting element-lock every other expansion to keep him from “fixing” everything. In the same vein the Night Elf Arch-druid Malfurion needs his nap right friggin’ now as the world falls apart. AND THEN you have Night Elf leader Tyrande becoming a superhero probably to address the problem of having Malfurion come and save her every time he wakes up (a legitimate story and character problem) and that doesn’t even include Blizzard’s favorite misunderstood Bad Boy Illidan Stormrage.

Since 2018, World of Warcraft has kind of meandered along. No one has been particularly excited by anything. Shadowlands does get a lot of talk as being nearly as bad as Warlords of Draenor, with some even saying it’s worse. Dragonflight and The War Within have not garnered any real praise. Dragonflight is most noted for introducing new mechanics for flying mounts (that not everyone liked, so much so that Blizzard had to re-instate the original mechanics “as an option.”). Some people liked the dragon-centric story. I haven’t heard much about The War Within, but that could be because it’s still fairly recent. All anyone talks about in the new expansion Midnight is the introduction of player housing. And I’ve started seeing negative comments and videos just the past week as players start encountering the limits of the system and things that don’t work. I have yet to see anyone talk about the story. I’m sure that information is available. But as to the topic I’m talking about, surprisingly I have seen *a lot* of people declare that the introduction of player housing is WoW “jumping the shark.” This (they say) is the proof Blizzard have nothing left to give the game and are throwing things at the wall to see what will keep people around a few more years. Player housing is typically a major game mechanic in MMO’s, BUT it’s usually not a feature added twenty years after a game is published. Especially when you consider it was meant to be included at launch. I mean, I could make an argument for why player housing in World of Warcraft is different, but I’m not interested. *I* won’t ever try it. It’s not a feature I like anyway, and from what I’m reading a lot of players consider this “too little, too late.” The dozens, if not hundreds, of prior missteps have led them to leave the live version of the game. *Now* a lot of them are even leaving Classic, saying Blizzard has made too many changes to THAT version of the game.

So has World of Warcraft finally jumped the shark for good? Will the shorthand in the future be that “player housing” killed the game? Probably not; it’s been around too long. More likely people will understand that WoW started dying when Blizzard messed with the game too much, which started in 2010. But the game was so uniquely popular it took another fifteen years for the rot to set in.

That’s it for now; see you later!

Paige Francis He/him