Trivia / World of Warcraft

• Acclaimed Flop: Dragonflight received a much better reception compared to Battle for Azeroth and especially Shadowlands. However, the expansion's launch sales were significantly lower when compared to the two previous expansions'. It's suspected the main reasons for this is due to the very negative taste left by Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands, the real world controversies involving Activision Blizzard, and the game ceasing operations in China, which accounted for a significant amount of subs.
• Acting for Two: Many voice actors (both original and abroad) voiced several characters in the game, sometimes within the same expansion. This page might help spotting them.
  • To give a few, Michael McConnohie as the Lich King and spirit of Uther in Halls of Reflection. Also Chris Metzen as both Thrall and Varian.
• Ascended Fanon:
  • Before the new Alliance race was announced for The Burning Crusade, a supposed "leak" said it would be the people of Gilneas, transformed by the crazed wizard Arugal into bestial worgen. The new race was actually the draenei, but two expansions later we did get worgen... with a similar origin story as the faked leak. The leak may have also been real, as the draenei were a semi-hasty replacement for Alliance pandaren of all things (scrapped for having no reason to fight the Horde or go to Outland).
  • Boss Mida, found in the Goblin Slums of Orgrimmar, is a Shout-Out to the "Trade Princess Movement", a thread from the old community site requesting a female faction leader for the goblin race. Official faction leader Trade Prince Gallywix doesn't appear ingame after the starting zone, and Mida explains that she's been running the whole show while he's off picking wallpaper for his pleasure palace in Azshara.
  • Every faction leader from Cataclysm had a short story written about them...with the exception of Lor'themar Theron, whose short story is actually the 2009 Writing Contest winner "In the Shadow of the Sun". The writer of that fanfic, Sarah Pine, was also hired to write the Garrosh short story.
  • Jed'hin - the lost form of eredun ritual combat you can partake in on Argus - was actually created by draenei roleplayers on the Wyrmrest Accord server, and made official lore in patch 7.3 with the inclusion of the world quests about it.
• Content Leak: While Blizzard manages to keep this fairly under wraps, it's not uncommon for leaks of the expansion to show up on 4Chan or MMO-Champion's forums - however, the community has a habit of getting bored and also making fake leaks and flooding the same spaces, so ultimately which ones if any of them end up being real can only be confirmed in hindsight, assuming they're not just throwing everything at the wall waiting for something to stick.
  • In one example that happened in-game, before Cataclysm was properly announced, Blizzard added new masks to Hallow's End event of all the playable races... as well as Goblin and Worgen, with much higher details on the Goblin, a complete redesign for Worgen and as a uniquely gender-dimorphic female mask for the previously male-only Worgen, effectively outing next expansion's choice for playable races. Blizzard very quickly realized their mistake and added a bunch more "NPC" races as masks and making female versions of those ^note  nowhere near as convincingly, as the Ogre mask was just a male Ogre face with lipstick and eyeshadow and the female Murloc was just a pink recolor, but the staggering difference in quality (said masks were very clearly the model's textures ripped directly off their source and slapped onto the masks) made it too little, too late.
  • Another in-game example may have been one done unintentionally because of a Good Bad Bug: occasionally, a mob will be added that's mistagged as a tameable beast for hunters, whenever this happens Blizzard will usually fix the error, but let anyone who already tamed it keep the pet as-is as a Grandfather Clause. The exception was a Worgen in Howling Fjord who was disguised as a normal wolf, revealed during its relevant quest, who could be tamed by a very obtuse series of exploits - the fact that this was the only unintended tame in the game's history that Blizzard went out of their way to correct put Worgen on a lot of players' radars, since it smelled like avoiding the unsavory implications of having a player race being "Tame-able" in any capacity like an animal.
  • Battle for Azeroth was leaked by a user on MMO-Champion, who accurately called the introduction of allied races, the zones and settings, and several major plot threads - but was widely dismissed for one reason - the Void Elves - who sounded so out of left field and ridiculous that most people immediately called the leak fake, only to end up eating their words that Blizzcon when all of the details, Void Elves included, were revealed.
  • Shadowlands was originally leaked on 4Chan under the name "Wrath of Bolvar" and managed to accurately describe the lead-in of Sylvanas breaking the Helm of Domination and shattering reality, and described the Kyrian race. This one was a bit more readily believed due to how Battle for Azeroth's plot wrapped up, with most of the disbelief being agitation from people who didn't like the idea of a Sylvanas-focused expansion.
  • The Dragonflight expansion was leaked way before its formal April 19, 2022 announcement. New coding was datamined for the Battle.net shop listing normal, heroic and epic edition prepurchases for "WoW Dragonfight". Roughly two weeks before its proper announcement, a user known by "Scaleface" posted details on the expansion on MMO-Champion, including Evokers and Dracthyr (which, history repeating, was dismissed as being too out there) and roughly two day before the announcement, they returned with preview slides of the Dracthyr's character customizations that would be used in the presentation.
  • A minor example happened in Dragonflight regarding its Mythic + season 4. Much like the Worgen example above, many players noticed that a soon as the second season was over, Azure Vaults was changed so that you couldn't use the trick of doing careful jumps with slow fall to skip all the trash packs after second boss anymore. Why would the devs fix this particular trick when it was left alone and working for most of the season, especially now that Azure Vaults would be a leveling-only dungeon for a while ^note  according to Word of God, dungeons from the previous expansion aren't used because its too recent in the M+ rotation, meaning players wouldn't be likely to see Dragonflight dungeons again as part of M+ for at least 2 expansions, made people correctly guess that Azure Vault (and possibly several Dragonflight dungeons) were the most likely candidates for the next season of Dragonflight M+, which they were then proven correct when it was announced that all the Dragonflight dungeons, Azure Vaults included, would be used for the Season 4 of Dragonflight Mythic + rotation.
• Defictionalization:
  • After the South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" aired, the Sword of a Thousand Truths was added to Wrath of the Lich King, under the new name "Slayer of the Lifeless". A sword actually named "Sword of a Thousand Truths" did appear in the beta version of The Burning Crusade, but in the final version, it was replaced with the Gladiator's Slicer.
  • A Foxtrot comic featured the character playing "World of Warquest", and acquiring an epic mace named Doomulus Prime. Later, the 1.9 release of WoW added a mace named "Doomulus Prime" as a quest reward for adventuring in Ahn'Qiraj.
  • The model used for the "Sword of a Thousand Truths" already existed in WoW prior to the South Park episode. But it had a different name and different stats. It was a drop in the then-current 40-man Naxxramas raid instance, and was called "The Hungering Cold". It was a 1-handed sword intended for tanks.
• Demand Overload:
  • The launch of new expansions like Cataclysm or Warlords of Draenor used to be plagued by unstable servers, latency issues and massive login queues. There were several causes for this, but the primary one was the huge numbers of people trying to log in at the same time and bottlenecking in the same zone. In the words of a Community Manager:
    We obviously expected an increase in logins, and prepared for well above what we were expecting. The actual amount is far above even that.
  • Classic servers faced immediate overload during the first days after release, reaching their population cap and leaving many in queues that were hours long. Blizzard opened new servers to meet the demand only to see them also filled within a day.
• Descended Creator: Blizzard's VP of Creative Development Chris Metzen voices half the game, including Ragnaros, Thrall, Nefarian and Varian Wrynn. He's done many voices for Blizzard's other games as well.
• Dueling Works: Thanks to its longevity and popularity, WoW, in some way, has been in competition with just about every MMO to come out afterwards, as they inevitably try to ape its success, often by directly copying it, usually with disastrous results. By the late 2010s, though, the only game to really step up as a worthy rival to it has been Final Fantasy XIV, which has some interesting history with this trope:
  • Particularly, its infamous first release was, as far as anyone is aware, timed to beat the Cataclysm expansion to market, which resulted in FFXIV 1.0 being a rushed, unpolished mess. Its 2.0 A Realm Reborn relaunch ended up also happening on the same day as the final patch for Mists of Pandaria, which ended up setting something of a trend.
  • After Warlords of Draenor's launch in November 2014, the only major updates the game got for seven months were Twitter integration, a selfie contest, and the ability to buy tokens for more play-time, while FFXIV was leading up to the release of its first expansion Heavensward - only for WoW to drop patch 6.2, which added a new zone, a new raid, a new companion, and a major extension to Garrison Campaigns, on the same day as Heavensward.
  • Legion patch 7.0.3, which added the long-awaited Tomb of Sargeras raid, once again ended up launching only a single day before the launch of FFXIV's second expansion, Stormblood.
  • By 2019 and the lead-up to FFXIV's third expansion Shadowbringers, Blizzard had become acutely aware of the competition, as the reaction to changes brought with Battle of Azeroth had been surprisingly negative, and a good chunk of the playerbase was leaving the game to try out XIV as an alternative given the many positive-sounding changes it was promising. In response, Blizzard intentionally released patch 8.2 on June 25th of that year, three days ahead of the Early Access release for Shadowbringers and an entire week ahead of its full release.
  • The release of Shadowlands patch 9.1 was received extremely negatively by players. They saw more poorly-received design decisions and significantly controversial story beats in a game whose story was already divisive to begin with. The release of the patch proved to be The Last Straw, causing many to flock over to XIV. Further fueling the player migrations were prominent WoW streamers and content creators who decided to try the game, as well the state of California's lawsuit against Activision Blizzard over workplace practices. All of this resulted in a massive influx of new players to XIV, creating a Demand Overload. The bad reception to 9.1 has had a ripple effect well into the next WoW expansion, Dragonflight, which has even less players than Shadowlands despite the content enjoying a much better reception.
• Fandom Nod: Besides the countless Ascended Memes, the massive fan game/forum post "You Awaken in Razor Hill" became so well-known that Blizzard actually added the main character Tednuget (changed to Tednug for legal reasons) as an NPC.
• From Entertainment to Education: In 2005, the Zul Gurub raid dungeon was introduced. The end boss, Hakkar, could place a powerful disease, Corrupted Blood, on the players, which quickly killed them. Some enterprising "Petmaster" players realized that their pets could safely carry the disease out of the dungeon and into the cities to troll other players. A player-made epidemic swept the game; the central hubs were filled with corpses, the disease spreading "harmlessly" to NPCs who infected other players, healers attempted to cure the infected, eventually resulting in people abandoning the cities altogether. The servers eventually were shut down to force a fix preventing the disease from leaving the dungeon. The event is now known as the Corrupted Blood Incident and has been used by universities as a study of how epidemics spread (including COVID-19); how a disease from a remote region is brought to urban centers by asymptomatic carriers, how people respond to the threat- some deliberately seeking it out- and how the authorities react to such events. It has also received some attention as a study in terrorism, given that players deliberately infected cities and plotted how to cause as much damage as possible.
• Hey, It's That Sound!: Many enemies, especially humanoids, make a low dying moan that will be familiar to players of Doom; it's the death sound of a Pink Demon.
  • Even in 2018, players of classic, non-Blizzard RTS games will wonder why most Earth-like beasts from bears to rams sound like camels.
• I Knew It!: In the End Time instance, it is revealed that Murozond is Nozdormu's future self.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Players who want to keep playing specific older expansions with the gameplay as it was and not overlayed by the most recent expansion often turn to private "Blizzard-like" servers. The Classic re-releases are happening partly as a response to this (in addition to cashing in on the strong nostalgia for the early game).
  • Burning Crusade Classic servers were all updated to Wrath of the Lich King Classic upon the latter's launch due to a lack of players, meaning if one wants to play that expansion again without the Wrath changes one will have to turn to private servers.
• Lying Creator
  • When asked about the presence of Old Gods during a Q&A leading up to release, Ion said that Battle for Azeroth was about the faction war and that there were no Old Gods in BfA. Out of the five raids in BFA (Uldir, Crucible of Storms, Battle for Dazar'alor, Eternal Palace and Ny'alotha), only ONE (Battle for Dazar'alor) does not feature Old Gods in some form or another, and the final boss of the expansion is N'Zoth. In fact, patch 8.3 is almost entirely focused on combating N'Zoth and thwarting his visions of a corrupted and twisted Azeroth.
    • The "Faction War" also went off the rails to being about the Alliance and the Horde uniting against another corrupt Warchief as early as the first major content patch.
  • At the start of Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard repeatedly stated that Sylvanas would not become "Garrosh 2.0". She did. Technically, she became Arthas 2.0 as well.
  • During the PTR testing of patch 9.0, Ion said that prepatch stat and level squish would not decrease character power solo (not counting corruption) and players could otherwise still solo what was doable at 120 just fine. However, on the actual patch release, this was notthe caseat all, and this claim quickly grew infamous due to its inaccuracy.
  • Updates to customization for playable races were toted as a selling point of Shadowlands and were claimed to be an ongoing project for that expansion, only for a Q&A following the 9.1 announcement to say that Blizzard had nothing planned beyond the overhaul in 9.0 but players should give their feedback on what they want to see added, which they had already been doing for years. This came off as both deceptive and willfully ignorant and drew a lot of ire from players whose favorite races got stiffed with the updates in 9.0, especially nightborne, who used to have the absolute least amount of customization of any race by a wide margin. With 9.1.5 adding more options for nightborne, Lightforged draenei, and Highmountain tauren, it would appear this statement might once again be true.
  • A pretty infamous one in Shadowlands: It was previously confirmed, by both Steve Danuser and Ion, that if Arthas returned in Shadowlands, it would be a Wham Episode. Comes Sepulcher 9.2 raid, however, and this turned out to be a very fake statement, as Arthas' soul was used for Kingsmourne's forging to bind Anduin to the Jailer's will, and once the players defeat Anduin proper, whats left of his soul fades into nothingness. Needless to say, this one didn't amuse anyone.
• Memorial Character: As a tribute to the late Robin Williams, an avid player, the game added a permanent NPC, Robin the Entertainer, based on his role as the Genie.
• Make-A-Wish Contribution: 10-year-old boy Ezra "Ephoenix" Chatterton got this opportunity thanks to a Make-a-Wish foundation visit to Blizzard headquarters. He got an item named after him, and got to create a quest in the Tauren starting area. The quest even has you find a dog with the same name as his. The NPC has the rare honor of having unique voice acting, all clips done by Ezra, and surprisingly deep for a 10-year-old boy. The unexpected questioning of "Can you help me find my dog?" is known to frighten many a player. Thankfully, Blizzard had the foresight to make the NPC unkillable by Alliance players. Ezra passed away in October 2008. The Lunar Festival NPC in Thunder Bluff has been renamed Elder Ezra Wheathoof in his honor, Wheathoof being the name of the above questgiver. He is accompanied by a Phoenix Hatchling.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • Some old 40-player raids got revamped for anniversaries, such as Onyxia's Lair, which was remade for 10 and 25 players at level 80 in Wrath of the Lich King for the game's fifth anniversary in 2009, or Molten Core, which was (temporarily) remade for level 100 players in Warlords of Draenor for the 10th anniversary in 2014 (the 40-player limit was kept, which caused much chaos as coordination is pretty difficult to pull off on LFR mode).
  • The game's fifteenth anniversary allowed the players to play Alterac Valley battleground as it was when it was originally released (complete with downscaling characters to level 60 if they were higher). In addition, it also allowed players to replay some of the most iconic fights in the history of the game (such as Kael'thas, the Lich King or Cataclysm Ragnaros. Since it was also the tenth anniversary of Cataclysm, the event allowed players to get a flying mount resembling Deathwing.
  • The 25-player raid Black Temple was added as LFR to the "Timewalking" weekly event of the Outland dungeons in 2017, for the tenth anniversary of The Burning Crusade. It lowers the players' level to 70 and allows Demon Hunters who have Illidan's legendary Warglaives of Azzinoth to transmog them after Illidan is defeated.
  • World of Warcraft: Classic was released on August 27th, 2019, the year of WoW's 15th anniversary. It topped one million viewers on Twitch during its launch, to say nothing of its player queues.
• Orphaned Reference: The in-game map of Draenor has a second continent in the southwestern corner that is not named nor can it be highlighted (though it was referred to as an ogre continent in BlizzCon interviews). This continent scarcely appears on any map made later, not even in the Chronicles (where the closest thing to a reference is continent being pluralized in a couple of places). This is left over from an earlier draft of the story where the Gorian Empire was from another continent entirely instead of being based out of Highmaul in Nagrand. An article about the development of Nagrand reveals this to be a result of Blizzard wanting to offset the perception of "orc fatigue" by upping the presence of ogres in Nagrand (the official website for Warlords of Draenor still describes the original version of Nagrand sans Highmaul).
  • The Lords of War shorts were a victim of some of the same changes. While subtle, there are a couple of things that don't make much sense from the perspective of the final version of Warlords of Draenor. Most notably, Grommash appears to have been crucified in some desert, when the closest thing to such a location would be Gorgrond, nowhere near his home or the home of the ogres he was fighting. The other is that both the Kargath and Grommash shorts culminate in them killing an ogre who is implied to be the most important in the land. In the final version of the story, this would be the Imperator, but the timeline doesn't allow for them to have both taken down an Imperator. In hindsight, both of these are references to a draft of the expansion around the time of this early development map shown at BlizzCon. Nagrand is much larger vertically, with the southern half not being lush or green. Coupled with the description on the official website of Nagrand having seafaring ogres in the south, this is clearly where the ogres that Grommash was fighting were actually from. Also, instead of having the capital of the Gorian Empire, there are "ogre palaces" scattered across the world. The ogres that Grommash and Kargath killed were likely the leaders of their local palaces.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Arthas' first voice actor, Justin Gross, was replaced as Arthas for Wrath of the Lich King onward. His reason was that Blizzard offered him an "embarrassingly low" amount of money for his return. Patrick Seitz replaced him from then on, while Michael McConnohie played the Lich King.
  • Speaking of Michael McConnohie, he originally played Kel'Thuzad in Warcraft III and Vanilla, but was replaced by an unknown voice actor for Wrath of the Lich King. It is believed that because he switched to playing the Lich King, having him voice Kel'Thuzad and the Lich King would cause issues so he was replaced. Notably he still plays him outside of Wrath of the Lich King.
  • Jaina was originally voiced by Carrie Gordon Lowrey in Warcraft III, but when Jaina became important and needed voice acting in time for Wrath of the Lich King, she was instead voiced by Laura Bailey.
  • Illidan was originally voiced by Matthew Yang King in Warcraft III, and even did the now-infamous "You are not prepared!" line from the trailer/intro for The Burning Crusade, but within the game itself, was switched to Liam O'Brien.
  • Sylvanas had her voice actress switch from Piera Coppola to Patty Mattson. It is unknown when exactly this occurred however, as the differences were not clear at the time.
  • Tragically, Terenas Menethil's voice actor, Ted Whitney, passed away shortly after completing his voice work for Terenas in Warcraft III. Terenas was then voiced by Earl Boen when time came for him to have speaking lines for Wrath of the Lich King.
  • A complicated example with Medivh. He was originally voiced by Michael Bell in Warcraft III, but for the Burning Crusade, was instead voiced by Cam Clarke. When Medivh reappeared briefly in Legion, Bell returned to play him.
  • Sylvanas also got a new voice actress in French starting with Legion, Laurence Bréheret (who had already voiced several characters, including many female human NPCs since the beginnings of the game).
  • Illidan Stormrage has had three different voice actors in French over all the Warcraft universe games: an uncredited one in Warcraft III, Pierre Dourlens (who voiced Illidan's brother Malfurion in Warcraft III, amusingly) in The Burning Crusade, and Vincent Violette starting with Legion.
• Promoted Fanboy: Several fans have been immortalized by Blizzard by making references to them, sometimes in the TCG as Alamo and Leeroy Jenkins, whose antics are legendary amongst the fans; and sometimes in the game itself like Maghia and Volde, who were two of the best cosplayers at BlizzCon '09, with items named after them. Notable Fansite creators as well — Breanni, the Pet Shop NPC in Dalaran, is based on the character of the go-to site for Minipet info.
  • Toskk, a player known for creating a calculator for min-maxing feral druid DPS, had a pair of melee leather wristguards named after him.
  • Besides Toskk, 3 other players got the same treatment. Rogue theorycrafter Aldriana, Warrior theorycrafter Landsoul, and creator of a program called "Rawr" that allows all classes to explore item options, Astrylian, all got drops named after them in the Icecrown Citadel 25 raid instance. Better yet, all of these except Landsoul's helm were the best items for their item slot for many classes up until the Cataclysm expansion.
  • Phaelia, who wrote a resto druid blog for a while before retiring to focus on the baby she was expecting, was also referenced with a leather healing chestpiece.
  • The BRK-1000, in honor of the once (and again!) king of hunter-guide movies.
  • We can also add in Skosiris, ex-site director of Wowhead now in-game as Loremaster Skosiris.
  • And now, joining the Pantheon, is The Red Shirt Guy, who has now been immortalized in-game as the Wildhammer Fact Checker.
    • The Fact Checker even gets a cameo in the Dwarven Faction Leader short story, Fire and Iron. The story is about Kurdran Wildhammer stepping down from his position on the Council of Three Hammers and giving it to Falstad. Some people have theorized the story was written in lieu of Red Shirt Guy's pointing out of the mistake, and has thus made Kurdran's accidental promotion during the beta, as well as his replacement with Falstad, canon.
  • Youtube animator Hurricane046 is famous for his fan trailers of various WoW raids and expansions. Blizzard hired Hurricane to animate the official trailer celebrating the launch of Wrath of the Lich King Classic.
• Recycled Script:
  • The nightborne storyline in Legion is a beat for beat retread of the blood elves' storyline in The Burning Crusade; both races resided in massive capital cities cut off from the rest of the world (Suramar/Silvermoon); both drew magic from a massive font of power (Nightwell/Sunwell); both were plagued by an addiction to magic that caused them to devolve into mindless beasts if unsated or overindulged (Withered/Wretched); both broke out into civil war when they banded against their leader (Elisande/Kael'thas) after said leader made a bargain with the Legion before they were killed in a raid encounter (Nighthold/Tempest Keep); and both were ultimately freed of their addiction following the defeat of one of the leaders of the Legion (Gul'dan/Kil'jaeden). There's no wonder the two races and their leaders bond so well, outside of both being elvish races.
  • Also similar to the blood elves are the venthyr, who were betrayed by Denathrius when he sided with the Jailer and turn into feral ash ghouls when exposed to concentrated light.
  • Battle for Azeroth recycles elements of Cataclysm's plot with the player allying with a former faction leader (Magni/Thrall) to stabilize Azeroth when the planet is critically damaged by a major antagonist (Sargeras/Deathwing) and Mists of Pandaria's plot with the Alliance-Horde war being reignited following the unprovoked destruction of an Alliance city (Teldrassil/Theramore) and the Horde's leaders banding against their current Warchief (Sylvanas/Garrosh) who resorts to using an eldritch power (The Jailer's magic/The Heart of Y'Shaarj). The last similarity has received some flak after players were told that Sylvanas' story wouldn't fall to this trope.
    • Speaking of said expac, the ending also got much flak, partially due to N'Zoth's defeat copying the Cataclysm ending: a well-known mortal champion of Azeroth (the player/Thrall) destroys a super-powered entity who wishes to cause a Bad Future (N'Zoth/Deathwing), and they perform the deed by using a magic artifact (the Heart of Azeroth/the Dragon Soul) that's empowered by beams coming from a powerful source (the Titan forges/the Dragon Aspects). N'Zoth's way of death (explodes after all the above happens) is exactly the same as Deathwing.
  • The story of Mechagon, which involves a crazed (formerly organic but converted himself) mechagnome forcibly converting other (partially converted but still mostly organic) mechagnomes into full machines, plays out like a greatly expanded version of a questline from the Borean Tundra where a crazed (already fully-robotic) mechagnome was converting gnomes from a nearby Alliance encampment into more mechagnomes, although in that case, it was reversible.
  • The Chains of Domination patch involves the Covenants banding together to directly take the fight to the Jailer's forces, which is essentially what happened in the Tomb of Sargeras patch with the class orders uniting to battle the Legion on the Broken Shore.
• Release Date Change:
  • Shadowlands is the first expansion to have its release date changed from what was originally announced (from October 27 to November 24, 2020).
  • Dragonflight was prospectively announced for Spring 2023, only to be moved back earlier, to November 29, 2022.
• Renamed to Avoid Association:
  • In-game references to longtime developer Alex Afrasiabi have been removed (such as NPCs like "Fras Siabi", "Field Marshal Afrasiabi", "Lord Afrasastrasz", who have all been renamed). Afrasiabi is, so far, the biggest offender who's been cited in the allegations about widespread sexual harassment and sexism at Activision Blizzard that took the gaming world by storm in the summer of 2021.
  • It also happened with the characters and places named after Jesse McCree (such as "Mac'Aree", renamed "Eredath") in addition to the character once named after him in Overwatch. McCree was seen on the photo of the infamous Blizzcon hotel suite nicknamed "The Bill Cosby Suite" by Afrasiabi.
  • In addition to Afrasiabi and McCree, many other NPCs, quests, and items that referenced former Blizzard employees Luis Barriga and Jonathan LeCraft were renamed following their termination in 2021.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor:
  • Quinton Flynn, who had voiced Kael'thas Sunstrider since Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, was replaced in April 2021 due to allegations of sexual misconduct, despite a judge ruling the allegations came from an obsessive stalker.
  • It turned out longtime developer of the game Alex Afrasiabi quietly left Blizzard-Activision in 2020 due to his alleged sexual misconducts and sexism at Activision-Blizzard. Such accusations against figures of the company like him took the gaming world by storm in the summer of 2021.
  • Another longtime developer linked to the sexual misconducts and toxic workplace accusations, Jesse McCree, also left Blizzard, but this time amidst the lawsuit, in August 2021, though he worked mainly on Overwatch at the time.
• Trailer Delay: Early promotional materials for the game said that it would be released in 2003. It was not released until November of 2004.
• Troubled Production:
  • Warlords of Draenor is infamous for being the shortest expansion, only having one major patch that advanced the story in any way. This turned out to be the result of several major factors converging at the same time. Blizzard increased the size of the World of Warcraft team, but underestimated how much work it would take to train them and get them up to speed, slowing things down. The expansion also came with new models for (most) of the playable races (which tied up the art team), a completely reworked file structure, and a "stat squish" that required the entire game to be rebalanced (which had some major bugs which weren't solved until the expansion had been out for a little bit). The expansion launch also managed to bring back a good chunk of lapsed players, far exceeding expectations and causing further instability problems early on.
  • The COVID-19 Pandemic lockdown of 2020 has impacted the making of Shadowlands with Blizzard's teams having to work from home on it. Game director Ion Hazzikostas has called the thing "challenging". It's probably what caused the release date change (before that, neither the original game nor any of its expansions had ever been delayed), along with being one of the causes of 9.1 taking as long to release as it did (in addition to some big internal turmoils).
• What Could Have Been: Fantasizing about discarded, heavily altered, or repeatedly promised content is practically Azeroth's national pastime, so much it has its own page.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants:
  • In regards to writing for Garrosh, Blizzard's writers were essentially not given a clear idea of what seemed to be his end goal. While he was pitched as the Horde's Varian Wrynn, or a war-focused version of Thrall, it seems the only idea that somewhat seemed planned was that Garrosh would become the Big Bad of one of the expansions. The writers for the Stonetalon Mountain questline in Cataclysm for example wrote an entire questline about him disciplining an orc general who kills a bunch of innocent druids by throwing him to his death before speaking about honor, only to later find out later that Garrosh was apparently supposed to develop into the Big Bad of the next expansion.
  • Leaks from the writing team indicate this was what drove the abrupt story swerves in Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands. Then Senior Creative Director Alex Afrasiabi devised and championed the Burning of Teldrassil whose fallout has driven every plot development since then. The main intent seems to have been driving up player numbers for the new expansion by opening with a massively shocking moment. However he apparently had no plan for how the story would progress past this point and was removed from his position before developing one. The writing team was left trying to piece together a narrative to explain this for the next four years.