The Reforged fiasco makes me honestly fear for Shadowlands.

While Battle for Azeroth had its own fair share of issues, most would agree that they largely resulted from misguided development process rather than genuine lack of effort and quality control.However, in the past few days it has become apparent that a game released by Blizzard Entertainment in 2020 may easily suffer from a massive array of formerly unprecedented problems drastically affecting overall production value:Actually lacking presentation compared to announcement trailers. One trait of Blizzard games that was /never/ compromised upon is attention to visuals, audio and theatrical directing. Today, this tradition has been violated with the visual aspects of Reforged being inconsistent and not true to original.Copious networking and performance issues. Throughout the entire Battle for Azeroth and particularly from Nazjatar onwards, players often experience server lag and stability issues in multiple scenarios where it's not warranted by any means, something that was not a case in Legion. Further lack of attention to the technical side of an MMO can be hazardous.Features cut out or drastically reduced in scope and extensive "technically legal" disclaimers applied. Shadowlands does not have many features announced to begin with, and certainly nothing that seems radically different to current content, but it doesn't mean they cannot be scaled back further. Torghast, for example, may easily end up a minor activity done once a week without any real variety to it, on the scale of horrifying visions which were an interesting experiment but by no means an expansion-defining feature.Changes to the EULA to inhibit user-created content and forcibly claim ownership of it. Of course, World of Warcraft does not have level editors, but such policy in terms of an MMO might expand to video coverage of the game, fan art, or criticism. Addons may also be impacted adversely: imagine Blizzard directly appropriating and integrating crucial interface mods without consent of their creators.Negatively affecting experience in legacy content. We already see how entire systems and major questlines get purged from previous expansion packs because the developers are unwilling to support them. Levelling squish may easily become an excuse to gradually purge old unsupported content of previous expansions entirely, as was the case with classic client for Warcraft III, completely displaced by the new one with drastically reduced amount of features even for users who have not bought Reforged.Outsourcing of various aspects of development and quality assurance. While not necessarily a bad decision in its own right, it takes extra effort and supervision to verify that different teams working on the same project do, in fact, coordinate their efforts properly, otherwise the project will become a disjointed Frankenstein's monster of parts that do not mesh well together.Drastically shortened external testing and rushed development time to meet deadline. BfA had a prolonged beta test which, however, suffered from not being able to actually take critical user feedback into account. Now imagine a situation similar to Reforged, in which critical features are introduced literally weeks before launch. Needless to say, I personally will watch the beta testing very closely, and would not hesitate to raise an alarm in any case of obvious negligence.