So, that time of year again. MoP is coming to a close with the excellent SoO raid on farm now for many of us. Time to look back at the expansion as a whole and try to decipher what we can from the successes, mistakes, and downright stupid decisions over the last 17 months.
I'll start this discussion off with one of my own.
Patch 5.0. Blizzard learned very, very quickly what players are willing to do for raid progression. If you put a carrot in front of a hardcore player, he/she is going to grind for that carrot whether they want to or not. Nothing is more important than the team, and not doing everything you possibly can to help improve that team, by improving your own character, is letting those people down. So, 5.0 dailies. The lessons we learned from this are many.
1. You cannot put such a hellacious grind into the game with no alternatives. Valor gear was locked behind this tremendous fortress (gate just doesn't do it justice!) of rep grinding through dailies. There was no other choice. There were no tabards, no rep from dungeons, no rep from raids. Just the daily grind which seemed to last an absolute eternity.
2. Gating content that is already gated is a really, really dumb decision. You had to do the Golden Lotus dailies whether you wanted anything from them or not, jut to gain access to some of the other reps.
3. Dailies are good content, but they quickly become VERY, VERY bad content when you give no alternatives. This was further compounded by the sheer amount of them that were available in 5.0. I spent literally 2-3 hours a day grinding dailies on 2 characters. I stopped having fun after about 3-4 days of this. The other 2 months were basically torture. Yet, I soldiered on because I wanted to be the best I could, both for my team and for my own ego.
What lessons do you think (or hope!) Blizzard has learned from Mists of Pandaria that can help them make the game better in the future?
Edit: Just to be clear, this thread is about lessons BLIZZARD learned from MoP, not you or the community as a whole. We don't need a thousandth thread regarding LFR or the like. Stay on topic as best you can. Thanks.