Originally Posted by
M4D
Atonements gave some kind of use to dungeons while also making sure that a lot of people couldn't even do more than just that. Hence why they were so popular back then, LK offered a great deal of dungeons and they themselves admitted that they were vastly underused later in the expansion's life.
We're not talking zones available at the start of the expansions but overall content. So yes, compare everything you just pointed out. Vanilla and Cata will come out on top - of course - the 3 others have arguably the same amount of zones / questing.
Balancing NM and Heroic is way easier than balancing 10 with 25. Making a hard version and an easy version is easy but tuning 2 raid sizes to be almost identical in difficulty, when in their essence they aren't, is not an easy.
And this was one of their numerous arguments for mythical 20, having mythical raid will allow them to spend less time on tuning the hardest and most challenging difficulty the game has to offer. I would however take this with a grain of salt since NM and HM will be flexible and that feels like a hell of work to do.
And we have Flex. And we have CM. And we got 3 new BG's and an overwhelming number of dailies. And we had a legendary quest running it's course all expansion long. Along all the other extra stuff we've had that we both mentioned. On the additional content contest, MoP wins everyday hands down and by a large margin.
Once again you fail to see things out of your only perspective. I am not asking you anything other than acknowledging the existence of content which you are prone to dismiss as it doesn't suits your view of what the game shall be. However the content is there, it exists, no matter how loud you might claim otherwise.
I mean, the more I think about it what's your case here ? You are arguing that we didn't get as many 5man dungeons and that we're waiting 2more months than usually, right ? That's it ? And therefore you think those 5man dungeons clearly represented a work load vastly superior to the multitude of extra content MoP brought.
Even counting solely the PvE content I don't feel MoP is lacking in any shape or form, quite the contrary - I'll break it down very roughly, we lost around 6 dungeons in MoP while gaining 27 scenarios. We have 15 more bosses than in Cataclysm (yes 15, that's 50% more than in Cata) 6 less than in WotLK (I really shouldn't count Naxx at all but nvmd) and as many as in TBC. All the while being richer mechanic wise - thus more work demanding, and I'm not even talking about tuning 6 difficulties.
Even PvP wise we've had more new BGs than ever.
OT : Since your title changed, I'll address the question directly. Your logic is 2014's money > 2013's money, therefore cash shop is the reason they make more money, therefore they don't care about the game anymore just cash shop (I'm extrapolating but that the big lines)
But Blizzard is a company and their aim is to make money right ? So in any case, even if they make a crapton of money out of mount or not, their aim will be the have as many subscribers as possible. Making a mount is litterally 0 in ressources, do you really think that their mentality is the following ? "Hey since we're making so much money out of shitty mounts lets bring less content right ? I mean who cares about subscribers !" No, the 2 are not mutually exclusive, they 'could' have both, why would they feel less pressure when they could theoretically win a lot more ? Does that even make any sense ? That they make enough money with cash mounts that they stop caring about subs ?
We've got more WoW than ever, content wise, PR wise, news wise, you fail to realise it but they keep having more people working on WoW, why would that be ? To design a new cash mount you think ? It makes no sense business wise to have a draught. They lose subs and they get people angry, they know that, but it still happens, it's still an issue that they seem to have a hard time dealing with, and I'm pretty sure they don't go around in the office thinking "hey, it's alright guys we made money with the cash store, don't worry about those 3M loss"