Why did MoP sell so little compared to previous expansions?

[Feel The Power]

INC 43 pages of people repeating over and over "pandas" haha.

[Kazgrel]

The lowest they got in cataclysm was 9.1m subs. MoP ended at about 7.5m.

Yup, correct; just pulled it up on my phone. Not sure why I had the numbers so poorly misremembered.

[Wingspan]

i kind of get it, the whole look of pandas and the way they act is a lot more whimsical than tauren or draenei, they are still animal races but they act a lot more serious, i liked MoP, but think the pandas would be better if they didn't seem like such a joke for a lot of the expansion, taran'zhu was pretty good, needs more pandas like him

While most of my favorite individual zones in WoW are not in MoP, I actually consider MoP as the best at overall story quality throughout an expansion.

The expansion was kind of duo-toned though, jumping from whimsy to evil incarnate based on location, so I can see that confusing some people.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

There was never a whole expansion where the entire theme and advertising campaign were almost completely based on those Cow-people or Dog-people (Draenei are more like aliens than anything). Not only that, but the Kung-Fu Panda Asian theme really didn't help it out that much.

I mean like it or not, that type of theme doesn't really appeal to as many people as a demonic army invading to murder everyone.

The "lol pandas" really was a big part of it, that and well Burn out via Siege of Orgrimmar.

[Hexxidecimal]

Flying at release.
Pandas.
Coming out after the worst expac in the history of WOW(yes, worse than WOD).
Coming out after the worst raid in WOW.
LFR.

Oh for fucks sake, please elaborate would you? I would love to see how you came up with this.

[Traveler Voltin]

If mop had picked a different them it would have done fine. I think panda would've gone over better if they didn't come straight out of a pixar film.

people who believe this still exist?
wow

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

It was just how LFR was handled at first. How mythic(heroic at the time) guilds were exploiting it to gear up fast and stuff, it made gearing really awkward and awful. It also made dungeons irrelevant when they were harder than LFR

Looking for raid doesn't make dungeons irrelevant a lack of valor and justice point gear did that because once you've gotten geared from dungeons there no reason to go back. Valor points and Justice points gave you a reason but blizzard removed them for no reason and then replaced them with nothing.

[Kazgrel]

Oh for fucks sake, please elaborate would you? I would love to see how you came up with this.

You mean you don't remember the hundreds upon thousands of posts on various forums from people bitching about being able to fly once they reached level cap and paid 2k gold or whatever it was?

Yeah, neither do I.

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

people who believe this still exist?
wow

Look at the mist of pandara trailer like/dislike ratio. I don't care about panda but the expansion pushed people away with that shit because they're wannabe edgelords who can't bother to research a game.

Mist was considered a failure and warlords gained more subscribers at the launch than mist.

[Azlo]

So sad that "lolpandas" was a reason that a lot of people missed out on arguably the best expansion of WoW (probably equal or slightly below Wrath).

Humans are weird, irrational creatures. Orcs, ogres, cow-people, purple skinned elves, shapeshifting into a dolphin are all fine. Pandaren are not.

[Sesto]

The people who mention Pandas, along with the culture specific to the expansion, are either biased or ignorant to the fact that the Warcraft lore had anthropomorphic races since the dawn of times. It's actually disheartening, seeing all the hate against the pandas. If WoW launched now, I bet the community would be in an uproar about worgen/tauren and be all like f*cking furries or who knows what other ridiculous argument.

No, the pandas aren't the reason MoP didn't sell in big numbers. It's because it came out after the wrong expansion, at the wrong time. A lot of people quit after the failure of a patch that the Dragonsoul one was, so it's only natural skeptics chose not to jump in the hype bandwagon. If Legion didn't continue the story that WoD started and chose to tackle a different antagonist and a different story, it would have tanked big time as well, regardless of the features/promises it brings. As it stands, Blizzard played it smart and decided to have Legion pick up the scraps of WoD, which made a lot of people want to see how this whole demonic invasion thing pans out.

Mate it doesn't matter if you personally liked Pandas or not. I don't mind them, and I thought MoP was amazing, but it doesn't change the fact that a lot of people didn't like the idea of Pandas and weren't too interested in an expansion about them.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

You mean you don't remember the hundreds upon thousands of posts on various forums from people bitching about being able to fly once they reached level cap and paid 2k gold or whatever it was?

Yeah, neither do I.

I don't remember it either. I remember when WoD was announced how flying wouldn't be available in WoD.


Pepridge farm remembers. >.>


Edit: Woops I am wrong.

[Tijuana]

The "lol pandas" really was a big part of it, that and well Burn out via Siege of Orgrimmar.

How did SoO impact initial MoP sales? The OP is not about subs, it's about first day box sales.

[callipygoustp]

So with the new sale figures, I noticed that 3 expansions after WotLK sold just as much during tis first day... with the one exception of MoP, which did far worse. 3.3M first day versus 2.7M first WEEK:



What could have halted this expansion from doing as good as the others? Is it just the pandaren theme which people may find ''childish'', or is there more to it? Maybe patch 4.3 performed so bad that people massively lost interest, but then I could say the same thing for patch 6.2, but apparently Legion still managed to perform just as good for its first day.

One reason : the later part of Cata (post 4.2.2) was, in fact, THAT bad.

[Deleted]

Probably because MoP was the first expansion to be "pre-purchased with special items" but people didn't wanna be fooled again so they waited to see if Blizzard kept their promises? :>

[Kazgrel]

i bought both at launch, GW2 was very popular at the start so i wouldn't be surprised if a big chunk of people did buy that initially over MoP due to cata burnout

I was one of those folks; I didn't play MoP until November of that year as a result of playing GW2...and I probably would've kept playing GW2 longer had they not introduced ascended gear within 3 months of the game's release, despite all the "we don't want vertical progression" dev statements they made leading up to release.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

How did SoO impact initial MoP sales? The OP is not about subs, it's about first day box sales.

Brain fart. >_<

[l33t]

Dunno, I loved MoP since day 1. Locations were brilliant, the theme was awesome, and before Hitler garrosh hit the servers with his bad acting and fucking orcs people had enough already, it had actually grim, dark and very interesting story. Certainly much better than Warlords of We're cutting development costs, that's for sure.

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

I think Panda and having the expansion launch focus on them so much was one of the major factors that made people reconsider picking the game up but that's my opinion.

Inb4 must be panda hater I love male pandaren and I have two but edgelord gonna edgelord.

[Kazgrel]

I don't remember it either. I remember when WoD was announced how flying wouldn't be available in WoD.


Pepridge farm remembers. >.>

Pepperidge*

Not to mention the thread that the WoD flying announcement spawned on this forum...all 20k some odd pages of it.