What awesome mmorpg was made to suck by its own expansion?

Amathe

I think the best example is SWG and the New Game Experience.

Another would be Planes of Power in Everquest.

What ones do you think?

NorseGod

Damn OP, you mentioned two of the ones that I thought of.

tawess

NGE was not really an expansion per se... It also did not really make the game suck... just made something that suck.. well..  suck in a different way. 

To be fair i can not really think of one that really fucked a game up. But then again i did not really play ALL mmo´s either so i am sure there are some out there. 

In a way i guess i could add Going Rogue for CoH... But the writing was on the wall anyway at that point... The devs had no real idea on how to expand the game... 

Amathe

tawess said:

NGE was not really an expansion per se... 

I would accept as an amendment "ice pick to the forehead" instead of "expansion."

tawess

Well it was a systems revamp... Jump to Lightspeed was a expansion.. and it was fairly good. 

NGE was both needed and implemented in the most daft and backwards way one could think of. 

alkarionlog

by expansion I will consider a update teh devs made who fucked they game.

if so arche age and RFonline

Kyleran

DAOCs TOA gets my vote for the 15th year in a row.

EVE Online's Ascension expansion in Nov 2016 disrupted the activity (null sec mining)  I had spent almost 3 yrs perfecting.

My friends and I all quit at the time and haven't found good reason to return.

Rageahol

As much as I want to hate on DAoC because now that I am older I understand just how it changed the game for all the wrong reasons....I had a lot of fun doing the Atlantis content.

For lack of a better choice HoT for Guild Wars 2 really pushed me away from the game, in one of my most treasured worlds. It not that the content was that awful but I have not had the desire to return to the game, even though the game is free and I keep it updated (It almost gets a pass due to the Heart of Thorns Theme being such a great piece of music, worthy of the grandness that is the Guild Wars franchise music)

NGE sure was not an expansion but it was a complete game overhaul, not just some systems, it became a whole different game with the skin of the old one underneath it.

mikeb0817

UO - Trammel
DAoC - ToA
WoW - Panda and beyond
Bless - Launch

AlBQuirky

I don't know what expansion it was in World of Warcraft, but I came back to play a year or so ago and all the cool little "class quests" were gone. Hunters no longer had to learn to tame pets (I think they even start with one now), Druids auto-received their forms, all spells are now auto-learned. This made "the journey" non-existent for me.

madazz

UO: Renaissance. Stupid Trammel piece of crap. Screw you guys. The game was steadily growing year after year. It grew for about 3-5 months after Trammel and went on a sharp decline right after. People say otherwise until you show them the graphs.

DAOC: Trials of Atlantis. Having my heart broken twice.... sigh... 

SWG is pretty obvious. But it didn't bother me as much as the others.

As a side note, Crowfall has the guy who brought Trammel into UO, and the guy who destroyed SWG too! Good luck with that game! You have 2 epic fails behind that one.

Mendel

While most people loved the Vellious expansion to EQ1, it was the first time I took an extended break from the game.  Why?  The addition (and liberal usage of) the Unmezzable, Uncharmable and Unstunnable flags.  Previously, my enchanter had thrived on in camp crowd control and was considered by many among the best at that task.  With those infernal flags, I was reduced very quickly to a third rate Wizard with a slow.  Even to this day, I tend to avoid the Vellious expansion on principle.

TheScavenger

Well, for new MMOs...WoW BFA has more "I quit" "this sucks" "wtf is this expansion" posts than I ever saw in WoD during the same time frame of expansion release. People at least enjoyed WoD for a month or two...BFA people got unhappy within weeks. And its so bad that they are doing the opposite of the FFXIV developers and doubling down and insulting their own players, instead of doing what the FFXIV guys did and apologizing and getting down to make a great MMO.

People did often say only WoW would kill WoW :P 

Octagon7711

After Marvel Heroes started neglecting PC gamers to work on a console release.  

Kyleran

madazz said:

UO: Renaissance. Stupid Trammel piece of crap. Screw you guys. The game was steadily growing year after year. It grew for about 3-5 months after Trammel and went on a sharp decline right after. People say otherwise until you show them the graphs.

DAOC: Trials of Atlantis. Having my heart broken twice.... sigh... 

SWG is pretty obvious. But it didn't bother me as much as the others.

As a side note, Crowfall has the guy who brought Trammel into UO, and the guy who destroyed SWG too! Good luck with that game! You have 2 epic fails behind that one.

Doesn't Crowfall have some former SB devs as well? Would make them triple losers.

(I  enjoyed SB but hated the poor execution.)

QuarterStack

Abyssea for FFXI.

Goddess of Destruction for Lineage 2.

Ungood

Humm this is a great question.

For me, the one Expansion that truly ruined the game for me, was Heart of Thorns for GW2.

I mean GW2 is still doing well, and didn't flop for it, but, it totally ruined the game for me.

Wizardry

Well one has really stuck with me over several years as being the most painful and ruining years of fun gaming.
It was the expansions known as Abyssea in FFXI.I can say i was not alone in the anger or disappointed department.Not only was this a complete turnaround for the game they went so far as to divide the expansion into 3 parts to triple the profits.Square began a slew of cheaper looking expansions and soon became the realization they were soaking a fanbase that adored the game to support the failures of developing FFXIV.
So there were a lot of bad business practices and treating a loyal fanbase terrible along with a bad direction in game design just really ruined the whole experience for me.

Making it even worse was the realization that there was no other mmorpg that i wanted to play,so i had to begin to look elsewhere ,other genres and go back to playing some older games i loved.

Hatefull

tawess said:

Well it was a systems revamp... Jump to Lightspeed was a expansion.. and it was fairly good. 

NGE was both needed and implemented in the most daft and backwards way one could think of. 

NGE was absolutely NOT needed in any way shape or form. The Jedi system needed to be sorted, the Knight trials needed to be sorted, and about a billion bugs needed to be squashed. I agree,  not the NGE. The NGE was the death knell for that game.

I suggested back then, and I will say it here, becoming a Jedi needed to be harder, so did becoming a BH, or any of the what should have been considered "elite" classes and it should have been limited to a percentage of the server population. Bad business, I know but better than the NGE. Used toilet paper is better than the NGE.

/rant

Ungood

What is funny, is that Amathe said:

I think the best example is SWG and the New Game Experience.

Another would be Planes of Power in Everquest.

What ones do you think?

I have mixed feelings on "Bad Expansions" vs "Game Destroying Expansions"

Like for example, Planes of Power, I don't think destroyed EQ, but, I simply did not like it, and I quit playing when it came out, but it was not game changing really, I mean it was the same game, it felt like the same game, and played like the same game, just with more levels and power creep, and a few minor changes, but they didn't try to change the nature of game.

Unlike NGE, which changed the whole nature of how the game was played, it revamped the entire game so much so, that it didn't seem like the same game anymore, and truth was, it wasn't.

In that regard.

I still feel that HoT, really ruined GW2m because it changed the whole way the game ended up being played.

Menace of the Underdark for DDO, I thought was a, annoying expansion, I didn't like a good chunk of the changes they made to the game, but, it was really their douche bag attitude and the way they treated their players after the expansion, with massive nerfs to raid gear and classes, and just flipped the bird at anyone that got screwed over, that really soured the whole game for me. So in that sense, it was not MotU that was the problem, it was their antics after the fact that were.

The same could be said for some other games as well, but truth be told, very few MMO's really held me for a long time. 

Ungood

Kyleran said:

madazz said:

UO: Renaissance. Stupid Trammel piece of crap. Screw you guys. The game was steadily growing year after year. It grew for about 3-5 months after Trammel and went on a sharp decline right after. People say otherwise until you show them the graphs.

DAOC: Trials of Atlantis. Having my heart broken twice.... sigh... 

SWG is pretty obvious. But it didn't bother me as much as the others.

As a side note, Crowfall has the guy who brought Trammel into UO, and the guy who destroyed SWG too! Good luck with that game! You have 2 epic fails behind that one.

Doesn't Crowfall have some former SB devs as well? Would make them triple losers.

(I  enjoyed SB but hated the poor execution.)

We shall see.. maybe they learned from their past mistakes.

Myrdynn

while I liked the addition of Storm Legion to Rift for more classes and stuff, it just reconfirmed that they wanted to be like wow, expansion, raise level cap, farm more gear, rinse repeat

GeezerGamer

Stizzled said:

Unpopular opinion, but Wrath of the Lich King for WoW. The cinematic was great and Arthas was my favorite character from Warcraft 3, like many (or most), but I'll never understand why people hold this expansion in such high regard.

It was the start of cut-scenes and story, bringing with it phasing that separated people based on what part of the story they were on. It started the AoE fest, go, go, go style of dungeon running. 

It also brought achievements, which on their own weren't bad, but the community used them to weed out who they would and would not invite to groups. Worst of all it brought the dungeon finder. It seemed like a good idea, and it is convenient, but it's ruined the social part of the game and trivialized the expansive world.

Many will blame the fall of WoW on later expansions, for me, it was WotLK.

GEERSKORZ YO!
Most BS mechanic ever implemented IMO.

Interitus

tawess said:

NGE was not really an expansion per se...

Honestly, the NGE came out a week after the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion. I always consider the two as part of the same thing.

ceratop001

Every expansion failed. This is why we play games. If there was a perfect game nobody would be on this website commenting.

Darksworm

Mendel said:

While most people loved the Vellious expansion to EQ1, it was the first time I took an extended break from the game.  Why?  The addition (and liberal usage of) the Unmezzable, Uncharmable and Unstunnable flags.  Previously, my enchanter had thrived on in camp crowd control and was considered by many among the best at that task.  With those infernal flags, I was reduced very quickly to a third rate Wizard with a slow.  Even to this day, I tend to avoid the Vellious expansion on principle.

So your ENC wasn't OP beyond believe and able to destroy content difficulty with Mass Mezz, Mass Stun, Mass Passify, and the ability to charm some of the most powerful MOBs in the zone?

Velious was fine.

Gates of Discord, on the other hand... pretty much single handedly drove half the player base to quite (or to WoW Betas/Launch)...

Enchanters had a lot more than just a slow.  They had the best Mana Regen Buff in the game, the best Haste Buff in the game, and they had an unresistable Mana Resist Debuff that stacked with everything - and which a lot of other classes basically depended on to land crucial debuts and spells on MOBs (like snares, Nukes, stuns, etc.).  They also had an AC buff that stacked with almost everything.

I think people get so tied up in being omnipotent on certain classes (and frankly, the Holy Trinity was pretty much uncontested and OP up through Luclin, for the most part) that they fail to appreciate just how deep those classes were.  Enchanters were, almost always, in a better place than Clerics and Warriors when you factor in their viability outside of their primary role.

That's why Enchanters weren't staging protests in PoK.  Clerics and Warriors were.

----- -----

GoD was definitely a bad expansion, especially the launch.

Vxed and Tipt were absolutely impossible for a lot of people (especially casuals) to do, unless you got an Enchanter to charm one of the mobs and completely steamroll the zone.  For weeks, people were camping the entrance begging Enchanters to run them through it.  Enchanters, Warriors, and Clerics grew tired of running that zone over and over again.

Once you got past those, you had to deal with MOBs with massive agro ranges, could not be snared, did massive damage, and they added Snare/Slow mitigation into the game.

Lots of guilds quit when they got to Uqua.  It was impossible for most guilds to get through in its "launch form."  We beat it right before it was nerfed...  One trash MOB uncontrolled could wipe your entire raid.  The zone wide debuff/damage was ridiculous.  You needed to farm the crap out of PoTime just to have a chance, and this hurt top guilds as many of their players actually weren't that amazingly geared...

Guilds like Fires of Heaven still had many players wearing pieces of PoTranq quest gear, for example.  They didn't even have full elemental gear.  Just the top "famous" guild members were top geared (and amazingly so), and often got dibs on the best drops.  I think the clans that were able to persevere were those who had a more egalitarian loot policy:  Township Rebellion, Realm of Insanity, Cestus Dei, Triton, etc.

A lot of guilds that didn't operate in that way tended to die off as players got bored of farming Plane of Time and the gear distribution across the guild was too bad to cope with Uqua.  The guilds eventually quit, or most broke up and a few members merged into those other guilds.

That really damaged EQ, moving forwards, IMO...  And a lot fo those tope players were Beta'ing WoW and actively promoting it - singing its praises.  I think that was during the Omens of War Beta period when WoW Beta became a thing; IIRC (I remember trying it, and the EQ GMs ran raid events in the OoW Beta - so that was memorable and fun).

OoW was better, than GoD, but the damage had been done by then (still full of Mitigation, Mezz/Snare Immunity, etc. but the players and classes had grown accustomed to it; or changed to accommodate it).

----- -----

PoP was also derided for its flagging system, as well.  You really felt left behind if you weren't on the cutting edge soon after that expansion launched and the raiders moved to Tier 2 planes (Bastion of Thunder, Crypt of Decay, etc.).

They nerfed the flagging and made, at least, Tier 2 planes more open; though.