Why people hate Cataclysm - a thought.

[Vulcanasm]

Of course hard endgame content was the problem. Blizzard didn't need to listen to "whining" to see that. They could see who was, and who wasn't, quitting. It wasn't the hardcores. Remember this blue statement back in Cataclysm:

"By looking at actual stats, actual progression, time spent playing, where, and to what extent, we can see that most people are looking for more accessible raid content, so yes, we absolutely are able to tell without a doubt that the plan we’re enacting is actually what players playing the game want and need, and are not just listening to people on the forums."

The thing about this quote is that it makes Blizzard sound pathetic, and here's why: Their forums are a cesspool. I've played 8 MMORPGs and contributed to dozens of online communities (starting with 300 baud dialup chat/BBS, over 20 yrs ago); the WoW forums are almost the most toxic I've ever seen (the only worse community I've seen was AoC forums, post-launch). The WoW forums are the absolute last place I'd look for meaningful feedback. They're implicitly admitting that's their source of the Cataclysm decision-making process when they could have hired hundreds of people to collect meaningful feedback in ways that would've guaranteed a better game direction.

It took them six years to figure out that neck-bearded mouth-breathing basement-dwelling trust-fund-kiddie Mongos on the official WoW forums don't represent a majority of their community. I bet if you datamined the forums you'd find less than 5% of characters have ever posted there.

Now they're following the same Path of the Forum Mongo to make WoD dungeons "more challenging", blocking flying mounts, etc.

Face, meet wall.

[Anger78]

i really liked cata, too ... but the last patch just ruined it.

firelands was an really, really aweaome raid ...

Actually Firelands was the reason I quit Wow for the first time since Vanilla. I mean the best boss they could come up with was one we already defeated. Oh but wait he has legs now. /fail

[Osmeric]

Now they're following the same Path of the Forum Mongo to make WoD dungeons "more challenging".

Face, meet wall.

They've said the problem with H 5 mans in Cataclysm was they didn't work with LFD. And they want to make heroic 5 mans in WoD be about as hard as H Vortex Pinnacle was. That was by far the easiest heroic 5 man in Cataclysm.

I EXPECT they're going to have LFD go to normal 5 mans as the lead in to LFR, and have heroic 5 mans be on par with LFR lootwise. This could totally work; people who wanted to play with friends (or with manually formed pugs) could go to the more challenging heroic 5 mans and Flex.

But yeah, it's shocking that it took them this long to figure it out. It's almost as if they didn't WANT to figure it out. Game designers making a game they want to play, rather than what their average customer does. I think Kotick had a disparaging comment about game designers who do that.

[worstpvperus]

Cataclysm was horrible... these threads aren't good because every person played the game differently. Not everyone in here was hardcore PvE and PvP like me... I witnessed the pros and cons of each side. I never messed w/ casual stuff... From my perspective, cataclysm was when the game turned to shit... the game was already heading in a direction that I didn't care for, but when cataclysm hit, the game completely changed to this new style. If cataclysm was such a good expansion, why was PvP in its worst state ever? Why was there MMR glitching? Why were people able to face 1300 teams all the way to 2500~ rating and obtain gladiator? More importantly, why did blizzard not do anything about it for over an entire season? Did they enjoy watching noobs face gladiators? Why did blizzard hard reset everyones rating when they could have searched up teams w/ high ratings whose their history shows facing 1300~ teams only? Why remove rating requirement? Was there some balancing issue around PvP gear? In any serious PvP instance, was there not some form of MMR? Was there no MMR for arena/rated BGs? There was, so why did rating requirement get removed for the following reason: To make PvP an even playing field. Well I thought that's what I thought MMR was for... so that means PvP, rating requirement was taken out to balance PvP in RANDOM BATTLE GROUNDS????? You bet your ass they did. That's equivalent to blizzard scaling the difficulty on heroic 25 man raids to the difficulty of a heroic dungeon... "Oh well the lesser good people in the heroics want to obtain the same gear as heroic 25 raiders, so lets just make every raid boss have the same health as a heroic dungeon boss." Unless you PvP, you won't look at it from my standpoint which is why I put in the PvE version... if that happened, would you be sick to your stomach? Sure there's glory in killing the boss, but every kid and their mother knows that the real reward for killing a boss is getting new BiS gear. Now why shouldn't PvP have that same rewarding feeling? It used to w/ rating requirement because you had to work to obtain the rating so that you could get the gear, but now there's nothing. You get the rating and there's no pat on the back of anything... there's a cosmetic elite set, but what's the point when transmog makes it so you can never tell whose wearing what? IMO cataclysm was the worst period in WoW's history. The only somewhat challenging raid was Firelands, which IMO still wasn't that hard, just a lot of paying attention and remember quick acting mechanics, but not everyone was able to play like me, thus making the kill take so damn long.

That was a bug on release that they fixed later. They made t2 gear super expensive to stop exploiters from getting them. Weapons still required rating all of cataclysm. Pvp has gladiators mounts, Titles, and use to have weapons. Their were still rewards. All of T11 was bullshit it shitted all over wotlk difficulty wise except maybe ulduar.

They reset mmr in season 10 because it was fucked up and people just camped from the start of the season to the end of it. Hardly playing.

[Peacemoon]

Because the last patch (dragon soul) is one of the worst content ever in this game (if not THE worst) and we got stuck with it for a whole year, and that's what people will forever hold from the expansion.

Recently I leveled another alt and for the first time going back to that content since MoP came out. Vashj'ir, Deepholm and Uldum are, in my opinion, some of the best zones ever. Hyjal is ok and Twilight Highlands is a bit boring (and the last, so, like before, not good to keep good memories alive), but the rest of the Azeroth overhaul is superb.

That, launch raids (Bastion and Blackwing), Firelands (the whole patch, not only the raid) and the whole streamline of gameplay was some of the best things Blizz made for this game. Also, Cataclysm is my favorite WoW soundtrack so far.

Besides, the whole apocalyptic-fiery-violent and chaotic feeling to it just seemed right at the time (after the alien TBC and the Dark WotLK).

This is just a rambling on a underrated content, spoiled by the major failure that was 4.4.

Hope WoD will come soon enough so we dont get burned out by SoO aswell (i dont think that will hapen, though... we were stuck with ICC for a whole year aswell but it was awesome, instead).

Cataclysm just wasn't polished, or coherent. There were lots of things wrong with it in my opinion:

You could fly straight from level 85
The quests were too linear and scripted, the plots not very well executed
The ghastly nature of Uldum's questline which Blizzard has said will never be repeated
The lack of depth in the lore of anything introduced.
The Ram....cat people, who weren't even voiced and given a crap storyline
The zones weren't coherent
The raid content was very short, even Firelands which is hailed as a great raid only has 8 bosses, and Ragnaros' fortresss had space for at least two more wings. Compared to Throne of Thunder, well...
Dungeons were a nightmare. Blizzard still didnt understand the nature of matchmaking and couldn't figure out why challenge mode difficulty heroics was a bad idea with LFD PuGs.
Volatile Life/Fire/Water/etc
The mess that was the implementation of Deathwing and his final raid - which COULD have been awesome. But the whole premise of flying on his back and fighting him in the Maelstrom was bad.
The fact Vashjr unused after 4.0
The Troll dungeons which were just...completely random and annoying and im not sure why Blizzard thought it would be great for a whole content patch.
Reputations that were easily grinded with tabards, and no form of attachment to the actual reputation you were fighting for.
The annoying way you had to go to Orgrimmar or Stormwind for portals to the new zones.
The period where WoW simply became camping capitals waiting for queues and portals for lots of people.

Okay I'm done, for now.

[KeirAdish]

They're all opinions, and I will not tell you that you're wrong even if I disagree with you.

What makes me post in threads like these are people like the OP theorizing the final patch is the only reason Cataclysm has a poor legacy; that may well be the case for some people, but it is not true for everyone.

Oh I know.
Its just in topics like this(including this one.) OP tends to state their opinion as fact rather than their opinion...