Verdict finally in: MoP is substantially worse than previous expansions

[Dirgon]

Debatable. Valor-capping gives you a buff to your alts' valor on that server, and they're working on bringing in a way to increase rep gains for your alts when you hit Revered with a given faction in response to criticisms about how long rep grinding takes in 5.1.

The buff doesn't do a damn bit of good when it takes you nearly the entire week to valor cap one character. The buff itself doesn't even do a whole lot of good as all it does it make it so you (only) have to do 133 dailies or 23 dungeons.

[MoanaLisa]

Unless they're positive about WoW right? then its good and trustworthy!

Metacritic is useless for video games (and most anything else) under any circumstances. The reality is that crowd-sourced reviews are generally not very useful since they're subject to trolling, fake bad reviews by competitors and various other kinds of mischief and nonsense.

The best thing to do at sites like that is to find a dozen or so people that you think are actually attempting to do right by their reviews, follow them and ignore the rest.

[StationaryHawk]

Verdict finally in: critic reviews don't always represent the player population's opinions.

And even so, I'll take a score of 83.

[MikeBogina]

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

pfft ign gave Cataclysm a 90, Eurogamer gave it a 100 on there... expert critics mhmm or just lazy gamers who never got a real job, but still feel like their opinion 'unbiased' opinion should matter.

[MoanaLisa]

Mop is fun, unless you're a PvPer. Then it sucks.

Shadow priest here. PVP is fine from what I hear

[Pascal]

Hang on, since when is metacritic "factual data"?

Since when is any review score "factual"?

There have been countless threads explaining why review scores are useless.

Let's take some snippits from these "critic reviews":

82 "Previous World of Warcraft releases have been genuine events. This one is simply an expansion pack." - ... What? I'm not sure what this person is even trying to drive at. How is Cataclysm's revamp of old world and five new zones focusing around the end of the world anymore of an event than finding an entirely new continent? I'm pretty sure that is an "event".

80 "Mists of Pandaria is in no way a revolution and brings no radical changes to World of Warcraft. " - I consider drastically improving game quality a pretty radical change. I consider them finally finding ways to promote players staying out in the world a revolution. They changed nearly fucking everything and this guy sits here and says "Nope, nothing's changed." All I read here is "I didn't play after I hit 90."

80 "The rigid quest structure and age-old combat system feel archaic when measured up against the new kid on the block Guild Wars 2, and the new features that the Mists of Pandaria brings aren't quite enough to recommend it to MMORPG newcomers over the NCsoft title." - Oh boy, another GW2 comparison. Let's apple and oranges everything when writing an objective review for a game and call it a day. We had enough discussion over why this kind of comparison is stupid with our last thread about the Kotaku article where the author does nothing but compare WoW to GW2 and call it bad after playing for 4 hours. There are THREE games that use active fight style, GW2, Terra, and one other that I don't even remember the name for because who the fuck cares if you have active combat. A statistic based combat system is fucking classic. I enjoy games where I can actively fight by moving in a completely different way than I enjoy games that rely on your stats. WoW sticks to its roots in the RPG niche by not transitioning to an active fighting system, plus the way classes work, combat works, everything would have to be completely overhauled in such a way that, imagine how long you guys have to wait before you start whining about new content, imagine waiting three times as long and the only change that occurs is a combat system revamp. I'd be furious.

And let's not forget one of the biggest gripes about GW2's quest system - you have a new mechanic to learn how to use for nearly every quest, that is never used again after that quest. I think the quest structure that WoW follows is classic and enjoyable in the same way the statistic combat system is. Any good old RPG's questing system is pretty much like this - I'm not sure what you really expect to happen if we stop collecting bear asses. Every quest is a complex, complicated event where you have to use new abilities and different tools to accomplish something? Each quest takes ten minutes? What exactly are you looking for? Sometimes a dude just needs some fucking bear asses. There are fucking tons of unique quests now where you use vehicles and the extra action button to accomplish things, and I'll be honest, when I get those I think, goddamnit I just want to get you some bear asses.

The rest of the reviews follow suit in what I see as little more than old jaded players being overly scrutinizing about a fantastic expansion to an ancient game that still holds its own against the rest.

Not to mention, written long before probably all of these writers have experienced what there is to experience.

[Deleted]

do i get a cookie for saying it would be between 80-84% ?

[Thage]

The buff doesn't do a damn bit of good when it takes you nearly the entire week to valor cap one character. The buff itself doesn't even do a whole lot of good as all it does it make it so you (only) have to do 133 dailies or 23 dungeons.

Then... don't? Unless you're a hardcore raider pushing for realm firsts or world firsts, valor-capping is optional--and as a Blue said in today's blue posts on the front page, if you're a hardcore raider there's going to be drawbacks to that lifestyle that require that extra effort.

[Eldar45]

While MoP most certainly isn't the end all be all expansion, it isn't bad. The only thing that made Cataclysm bad was 4.3, which added in the most pathetic of heroics and a completely boring raid *Hell, I liked ToC more than DS* and the fact that there weren't any good new out of the box features with its release.

You may hate the "Farmville and Pokemon" stuff, but it is new and somewhat interesting features that players can do in the game, so in my eyes, this expansion is definitely better than Cataclysm.


And after what "professional reviewers" did to Resident Evil 6, which was a solid game in my eyes, I lost all faith in the video game critics.

You also have to remember that to these reviewers, 80-89 is a great game. 90-99 is an excellent game.

[Suikoden]

do i get a cookie for saying it would be between 80-84% ?

Yes you get one even just for being positive!

[alba007]

Not surprised at all that panda expansion is getting worse reviews than all other expansions that preceded it.

If you come up with an expansion with the purpose of catering to Chinese market instead of doing something good for everybody including Chinese, you may end up with bad reviews.

[Hippodotimus]

i dont have enough time to do everything i want to do this expansion how is that bad? Other expansions never did that to me

[Orby]

lol Metacritic, lol

People actually still read that site?

[Suikoden]

lol Metacritic, lol

People actually still read that site?

T'would seem so.

[Thage]

Not surprised at all that panda expansion is getting worse reviews than all other expansions that preceded it.

If you come up with an expansion with the purpose of catering to Chinese market instead of doing something good for everybody including Chinese, you may end up with bad reviews.

Asiatic theme != catering to the Chinese market. If MoP catered to the Chinese market it would have been designed more like Perfect World, which is enormously successful over there.

If MoP (rife with chop-sockey stereotypes) is catering to the Chinese market, then do you also think Wrath brought in a surge of Norwegian subs?

[Eon Drache]

Its the best one if you ask me. Even with the horrible rep grinds. The game keeps me busy and doing them.

[Tart]

Its what i expected tbh, no different to Cata in terms of enjoyment.

The thing that has killed Warcraft is it popularity, its became the creator of its own demise in eyes other then the profiteers.

[Deleted]

Some people will have down-voted it just because they could. Some of the players won't even have actuall experienced the content yet and some probably down-voted it just because they were cry babies who couldn't stand server queues

Yet people do that with every game and every expansion. Why is this rated so much lower? Hmm?

[Deleted]

A few months ago I posted a thread asking people to predict review scores for MoP:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-review-scores

The results were indisputable, most people predicted MoP would score 90-94%.

Now look at the score on metacritic: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/wo...ts-of-pandaria



It is around 83%. This is the worst score a WoW expansion has ever had, and way below the expectations of what people predicted.

I'm not trying to start a war of words here, I'm pointed out factual data we now have regarding the quality of the expansion.

EDIT: We're not talking about the USER SUBMITTED REVIEWS on metacritic here (which can be ignored), we're talking about the actual CRITIC Reviews from respected people like IGN, eurogamer and gamespot.

Worst expansion......no, cata sucked balls.

In some ways mop is better than wrath, in others it's worse. Endless dailies, gear locked behind not only vp caps but also rep grinds, and soul bound hard to obtain crafting mats. Also crz is pants. But generally the expansion is a positive improvement for wow.

Better than tbc by miles. I liked tbc, but massively grindy and inaccessible. Nice theme though.

[cherb]

Only ignorant people will decide to play/not play a game based on a review, rather than trying it for themselves. How can you decide if a game is good or not based on someone elses opinion, unless you like being told what to enjoy.