Some background: I've been playing WoW since vanilla launch, raided in Vanilla, BC, and the beginning of WotLK. After that I got kind of burnt out and nowadays I'm pretty casual when it comes to endgame, if there's a part of the game I can't just pick up and play, I probably won't get to it (namely organized raids, or arenas). So when LFR came out in cata, I fell in love again. Leveling 4 characters to 85 and pimping them out in LFR gear. So I wondered what the game would be like if LFR existed for the first tier of content in an expansion. This is what ultimately lured me into MoP.
I was reluctant to pick up MoP at, the zones didn't look impressive, the raids all looked meh. And challenge modes seemed like a waste of development time. The pandas didn't bother me, they were in WC3 and they have their place. However, curiosity got the best of me and I upgraded my account. 30 minutes into the Jade forest I already regretted the purchase, the zone was as unmemorable as the screenshots lead me to believe, and the poo throwing monkeys were a slap in the face after the epic 2 encounter war my character waged on Deathwing. None the less, I thought "surely, this will get better." Then I got to the valley of the four winds where my character ran errands for farmers, exploring content that was barely qualified to be in this game at level 20. If you've done post-cata Stonetalon Mountains as horde and compare that to what this expansion considers content, it's clear what a waste of money this expansion is.
The later zones started to look more impressive, but it just got so repetitive. Kill monkeys, kill wannabe-taurens, kill mantids, now do it again 15 feet to the left. Before you go and say every expansion has been like that, take into consideration that those enemies from previous expansions at least felt threatening and you fought them several levels ago.
So finally, level 90. I recall Blizzard stating that they like to give players several options to advance their characters. At level 90, every gear path comes back to daily quests. Scenarios occasionally provide ilvl 463 gear, and always grant valor. Heroics, basically same thing, occasional 463 gear, Justice for 458 gear (wtf is that?), and Valor. LFR, once you've burnt yourself out gearing up in heroics and scenarios, Occasional epic gear and Valor. Challenge Modes, Valor. And of course, Daily Quests for more Valor. All of these different play styles give you valor, however valor is worthless without reputation, and unlike in the past where you could take multiple play style paths to gain reputation, in MoP Blizz decided the only way to gain rep is through daily quests. So in fact, no matter how you WANT to play, you will ALWAYS need to do daily quests to advance your character, completely contradicting Blizzards supposed design goal. What really amazes me though is that most of the people I've talked to in-game about this don't see how this is a bad thing. Some actually enjoy the daily quest grind, and I have to wonder what kind of personal life a person has to have to want to spend their free time on what boils down to be a boring, repetitive job.
I've been doing dailies, when I feel up to the grind (so not really every day), for the past 2 weeks watching that reputation bar slowly move up, and I was looking forward to tonight when I would finally hit revered with the Golden Lotus so I could spend some Valor or move on to another Rep. I did the quests, and then discovered I had in fact only hit Honored ( go ahead and laugh at me not paying attention, I deserve it). This revelation was the last straw in the haystack of letdowns MoP has been to me. Needless to say, this was the point that I cancelled my account.
Afterwards, I saw one of my friends log on using the trial version of MoP (he had Cata). I shared with him all of the disappointments of MoP, and how this wasn't the game we had fond memories of. After a short time playing the trial he described it as "Watching your character go through that rough patch in a movie. Where he gets drunk, falls down a flight of stairs, and kills a hooker." With the added perspective of MoP's endgame I can say that's too gracious of an analogy, a more accurate one might be "watching your character get a job at H&R block, and then it's ALWAYS tax season."
I hope if you're on the fence about getting MoP and happen to read this, you will learn from my mistakes and not buy this expansion. This is not the game you loved, that game died when Thrall killed Deathwing.