It's like the Witcher. People aren't going to respect your OC by fucking up a recognizable name, they will just find you incompetent

Bond and Dexter improved by straying from the source material (up to a point). Bourne trilogy is better for ignoring the disguise element.

But in general you are correct.

Uh Link please!

Or the fact people from Two Rivers are often identified by their physical look and way they speak, but the TV series starts out with every person from their tiny isolated village being ethnically diverse.

Everybody waits to see if it gets an ending...nobody watches...cancelled after first series.

Even people who hadn't read the books, realized how rushed things were in some cases, and then dragged out filler in others.

It was obvious they had the same issue as several other recent adaptations: The showrunner wants to make original content, and think it's so good that people wont care that it differs from the source or even changes the story and characters.

I couldn't make it past the first episode.

I'd like to see creators who own their rights put in contracts that the story must be told in full, and that whatever pacing is decided on (1 season per book for example) needs to be maintained. I know most studios would walk away, but I'd love for someone to have the balls to tell them that

You want to make my 10 book series into a TV show? Put your money where your mouth is and pony up 10 seasons worth

Similar to Netflix's approach, they most likely found that viewership drops sharply after the first 2 or 3 seasons, so more money to be made elsewhere.

It legit was getting good. The first season was rough. I loved the books so I'll watch it. Later episodes were getting better.

I have a sneaking suspicion amazon picked up wheel of time only because they wanted to fill a high fantasy slot in the portfolio. Now they have rings of power with built in IP recognition, typical executive brain will put focus there instead.

The show has a completely different tone and pacing from the books. The books are much closer to LotR (particularly the first one which is basically just alt. Fellowship) and spend a lot of time with the characters traveling and getting to know each other and the lore of the world. There's plenty of bickering, but the characters all like each other and get along decently. The show opted to cut most of the parts where you learn what's going on to instead focus on manufactured drama.

They also just changed things in really confusing ways like making Mat's parents deadbeats, among other things. Some of the plot restructuring makes sense given how much stuff there is to adapt. I don't think anyone reasonable can expect any book adaptation to keep 100% faithful unless it's getting crazy funding as a TV series. That said they just really took a knife to things.

Idk, as someone who loves the books despite their issues I wasn't particularly enamoured with the show. Some people liked it though.

If the world seemed interesting I'd recommend the audiobooks. Love Michael Kramer and Kate Reading.

I only watched the first season (big fan of the books as a kid). Imo, it is not worth your time. They took out what makes WoT special and produced some extremely generic, bland fantasy.

As someone who read the books, the highlight of the show is S3E4 where they (more or less) faithfully recreated one of the best sequences in fantasy on screen, and it was incredible.

Everything around it was soap opera romantasy. 90% of the characters had any meaningful personalities sanded off, entire arcs from the plot were tossed out the window in favor of glorified fan fiction, and as you noted the final product was just a mess in terms of trying to follow along even for people who didn't care about faithfulness of the adaptation. I won't mourn it being gone; maybe we'll get a decent animated adaptation in 10 years.