Verdict finally in: MoP is substantially worse than previous expansions

[Jawless Jones]

expert critics

seems like an oxymoron to me

[Ragedaug]

Some points people have raised and my response:

My thoughts on your responses.

- "It's impossible to judge this expansion until it's near the end, so the reviews don't matter"
- My response: You still have to pay full price for the expansion now, regardless of whether it's patch 5.3 or not, so reviews are valid.

It's not the validity people are questioning, it's the accuracy. If they can play a game from beginning to end before the review, that goes a long way to ensuring a more accurate review. When you are reviewing any recently released MMORPG, you have to base a good portion of your review on speculation.

- "Metacritic/IGN/gamespot suck(s), therefore you are wrong."
- My response: The theme of this post is the critics judgement of MoP. Also, if these reviewers had given extremely positive reviews of MoP, then I think a lot of people in this thread would have been defending them rather than attacking them.

Both the point and counterpoint are based on opinion and feeling, therefore neither are wrong. It's quite obvious that people will defend a review that they agree with and attack a review they disagree with. When a reviewer has a glaringly different reaction then the responder, and you have a responder who likes to be dramatic, it's natural to expect phrases like "they suck". I'm quite sure that well more then 99% of all people who have already formulated their own judgement on MoP will not be swayed by any reviewer, famed critic or otherwise.

- "MoP got 83%, why do you say MoP sucks?"
- My response: I'm not saying MoP sucks, I'm saying critical reception of MoP is far worse than previous expansions.

I would say "far worse" is also a leap. if 8 points is "far" what would you call a 20 point drop? how about a 40 point drop? 60 point drop? I hope you can see my point here, which is to say when you start using aggrandizements early on, you are stuck digging through a thesaurus in attempt to find words that are even stronger due to improper adverbs use. It also makes you look intellectually dishonest. Not trying to hate, just being real here. It's not in your best interest if you are actually going for words like 'factual' and 'truth'.

- "MoP is based on a 8 year old engine, ofc it's gonna be worse!"
- My response: Cataclysm was for a 6 year old game and it got rave reviews, do you really think 2 years should make such a drastic impact?

First of all, an 8 point drop is not "drastic" (see point above). Secondly, while Cataclysm was met with better reviews, it never lived up to the hype. The reviews of MoP, believe it or not, are based to a degree on the legacy that Cataclysm left behind. I think most people will say Cataclysm deserved a greater drop than 1% from it's predecessors, which kind of points out the utter silliness to judging an MMORPG based off reviews from a brand new Xpac.

- "All my friends think MoP is awesome, therefore it is awesome."
- My response: This is anecdotal evidence and as such invalid in the larger context.

Everything you have pointed out and everything on metacritic are anecdotal. So you shot your own point in the foot with that response.

[sac]

honestly this expansion isnt that bad..maybe if you took idk...a 9-10 month break after beating HDS the game would feel better. im 1 of the people who took a break for other mmo's..they all failed for me. wow feels good and new and has enough 90 content to keep me interested.

[Keile]

Lol...metacritic.

That is one of the most unreliable sources of a game rating you can look at.

[lewisderp]

The start of an expansion is always "WOW THIS IS FANTASTIC" because usually people are starved of content and welcome any old crap to allow them to do something with their £9 / $15 subscription. You only know if an expansion is good or not a few patches down the line when you see how many philosophy changes Blizzard developers have made since launch based on how much areas failed.

[Fullgore]

83% is to high it's 75% at best

[Baalb]

Even though I agree that the expansion has a superb visual quality (given the old engine) and not sufficient gameplay value (it's repetitive from day 1), I can't really see how 83/100 is a bad score. Also, 4.4/10 user score, based on 635 reviews seems kind of low. If 10000 people wrote a review it will be far more accurate, but 635 is just a portion of a drop in the sea. Also, the critics have rated Diablo3 at 88/100 which killed a lot of my faith in metacritic.

[Tyrannica]

Its stupid to rate a mmo expansion, on initial release cause it got maybe only 1/3 of the content. Most raids were locked and quite some features will be released via patches. There is nothing to rate here as a lot of stuff will get fixed and added, making the game expierence completely different. For example grindy dailies won't last long when time passes, more raids will be availible and so on.

That said, those critics rate mmos wrong showing me their lack of expierence on this field.

[ComputerNerd]

That is the opinion of critics, just a small portion of people who delight in criticism.
Much like this community.

People who have a gripe are more vocal about something than those who are happy.
Therefore you can't take any online community or view as being representative or accurate.

Every poll on this website has demonstrated that perfectly, in that it will skew numbers because of a lack of reasons for those who are happy to say anything.

YOU have a dislike of the expansion, but instead of providing real evidence you simply hop on the bandwagon and use someone else's "results" instead which have no basis to them.

[Lycefli]

Their opinion, YOUR opinion.

[Astray]

"Clearly, worst ______* ever!"

*Expansion
*Patch
*Hotfix

This happens every time single time anything is added or changed. And every time is much worse than before. Wow badness is like a dragonball power level, hyperexponential increase. I only ask myself why you keep playing a game that is 73.626.292.282.029.283.873% worse than something you critisized years ago.

[BreathTaker]

Yeah, MOP sux, and THAT's why i'm standing in a 3.5 k ppl queue right now and every single game.
Thanks you, critics

[MMOTotal]

People are still on this ?

The OP made a thread saying he missed Cataclysm. He has also posted this is one of the best expansions yet makes a thread about how it is the worse. He is screwing with you

[zoth00]

I could care less about these kind of reviews. The game could be the worst experience in mmo gaming of the last 20 years, if I like it, then the game is good (for me). Which is all that matters (or should matter) for each person.

[Pascal]

I'm sorry, but WoW is not a purely stat based combat system. Have you not noticed how much active response and movement there is in raiding? If you stand in one place and rely on stats and items to get the job done, you will die. Every time. And be called a noob (or worse) in the process.

WoW has an active combat system. It's just a little bit less active than other games, which is why the comparison is made. If it used a traditional stat based system (where your success or failure were determined by your stats), there'd be less of a comparison. But instead we have a system where I can avoid falling rocks, I can avoid meteors from the sky, I can avoid a huge number of specific attacks in raid combat... but I can't avoid the giant fist coming at my face by side-stepping it. It's jarring.



A new mechanic for every quest? What are you talking about? "Questing" in GW2 is just going to an area where something needs done, and doing it. It's as much learning a new mechanic as picking up new quests in WoW is. "Oh, I have to hit my interact button on these objects instead of those?" "Oh, I'm looking for sparkly apples instead of sparkly gears?"

And if you're referencing the random items/weapons you're sometimes given in GW2, they work exactly like any other weapon, just with different abilities. Nowhere near as jarring as the random vehicle bullshit (or did they not bring back any vehicle style quests in MoP? And even if they didn't, there were so many of them in Cata and revamped Old World I hardly think you can attack GW2 for this without attacking WoW for it).

You attack the reviewers for reviewing MoP without experiencing everything in it, but clearly you either did not play GW2 more than 10 minutes (if at all) or were so biased that you were just looking for things to criticize. But maybe you're right, maybe the renown hearts of GW2 are complicated. Let's read a sample one, shall we? I just logged into my warrior, went to a zone I hadn't been to before, and found the first renown heart I could find. It reads "Dispatch separatists, destroy their supplies, and steal explosive powder to give to Jahr Duskrend." I talk to the heart guy, and he describes the separatist camp just behind him, and offers to let me use his gear. I look at it, but it doesn't look all that useful so I decide to just run in with my greatsword and axe/shield. Sure enough, all I have to do is slaughter enemies and pick up sparkly things... just like WoW, except I don't have to kill specific quantities of named mobs ("Kill 10 bashers and 10 engineers, nevermind that there are 50 bashers and only 2 engineers...") So perhaps the problem is that unlike WoW, you can often choose not to use the special stuff they offer in GW2 and still progress?

My point isn't to turn this into a WoW vs GW2 debate, as I think those are silly (they really are very different games, and so shouldn't be directly compared, imo). My point is that your criticisms of GW2 sound, to me, as baseless and biased as the reviewers criticisms of WoW sound to you.

Edit: I won't post anything else about GW2 here, but I'd be happy to discuss it in PM if you want to continue the discussion.

Wow does not have an active combat system. Active combat system is a particular subset of a type of combat system that has a set definition. You can't just say "You have to move out of fire, so Wow has an active combat system." You can't actively dodge an attack, or riposte after successfully parrying. You don't aim your spells and arrows at the bosses, as long as it's targetted then you hit it (or don't, because of stats). If it HAS stats that directly affect your ability to strike an opponent, it's a stat based combat system. Moving out of AoE is not part of the 'combat' system as an AoE attack becomes an environmental effect after being cast or while being channeled.

And YOUR rampant bias toward GW2 is incredibly evident and I'm pretty sure the only things I said about it are that comparing it to WoW is dumb, that it has an active combat system, and that a lot of quests require or provide additional items or abilities that are relevant to only that one quest and that a lot of people have a gripe with that. I stated that an active combat system is not a revolutionary, amazing, end all be all that causes other games that don't use it to become cavemen, which is not particular to only GW2.

Seriously, reread exactly what I said about GW2. I didn't say it was a bad game, I didn't say it was shitty or bad compared to WoW. I said comparing the two is stupid. Not even joking, you put words into my mouth as if I said ANYTHING bad about GW2 except that people find issue with the quest system's habit of introducing new abilities and utilities into a large majority of quests. I say one negative thing about GW2 and you attack me and make assumptions. Hilarious, really.

[lazymangaka]

Critics are reviewing the game based on the leveling experience or--even worse--their experience in the beta. Nothing will judge an MMORPG release like the community, and I think the community has spoken for itself in declaring Mists of Pandaria a rousing success.

[Torgent]

It was downvoted by expert critics e.g. IGN, eurogamer etc.

IGN is less credible than a random person you find on a street. IGN accepts mad amounts of money to rate games higher than they really deserve. They have been caught countless times and yet people still eat up whatever they dish out.

[Immitis]

The fact of the matter is Wrath had Lich King (not Norse), who has nothing to do with Norse kings, as the main element, whereas panda expansion has pandas which are China's native panda bears as the whole world knows, and Pandaria, which is basically the Chinatown of WoW. Blizzard can have whatever they wish in the game, but everybody does not have to like it.

The fact that you are basically saying in your post that "Vikings had kings so Lich King may be Norse" makes me think you cannot be older than 12. It's an incredibly pathetic logic, actually it's not even logic.
Norse had kings =/= all kings, including the Lich King, are Norse. Jeez, I cannot believe I had to explain that...

have you even played the expansion? the pandaren have hardly anything to do with the story after 5.0. they are far from "the main part of the expansion" *spoilers*

5.0 is about the mantid, the sha, and the mogu/zandalari resurgence

5.1 alliance and horde warships show up on the shores of karasange wilds and proceed to rip the jungle apart anduin dies or Atleast garrosh beats him so badly everyone thinks he dies, varian takes his first trial of the high king and the night elves name him their high king, wrathion sends players to the black temple to recruit the black harvest to their faction, once jaina finds out about sunreavers sneaking troops into darnasus she kicks the blood elves out of dalaran and jails or kills any who defy her and then makes the kirin tor exclusively alliance. garrosh gets ahold of the divine bell and starts to figure out a way to try and control the sha. lor'themar breaks into dalaran and slaughters kirin tor until he gets to the prison and sets the sunreavers free he then learns of garroshs plots and basically says if this warchief is just like garithos we might reconsider joining the alliance

5.2 we dont know exactly what happens but things get worse

5.3

5.4?

5.5 siege of orgrimar, at some point garrosh does something so horrible everyone wants him dead so varian who at this point has finished the trials of the high king has hAd every race of the alliance name him their king and hes now leading a group of elite alliance solders and si:7 along with horde rebels into orgrimmar and dethrones the warchief.

now idk about you but i dont see one mention of the pandaren anywhere in 5.1 other then the fact that some of it takes place on pandaria. in fact the majority of it doesnt even take place there it takes place in northrend, kalimdor, and outlands.

so please go on and tell me how 5.1 and the entire expansion is about "fluffy cuddly pandas"

[Kangodo]

So those 'reviewers' played everything the game has to offer at this point? Riiiiight...

And a website that gives Cataclysm a higher score than MoP lost all credibility within seconds.

[davesurfer]

29 page successful troll. OP has had 16 out of his last 20 threads locked.