So, what didn't work this expansion?

[Paximus]

So, it didn't murder anything, but just did things you don't like?
Seems fair.

Given that this is an opinion thread and my playstyles indeed no longer work, yes.

Yes it is fair.

[Magpai]

MoP has been more "alt friendly" than ever. Look how easy it is to gear up.... it's almost too fast.

There is no reason to do all those dailies again unless you want to.

If anything MoP's only problem with alts is that you too quickly run out of things to do.

Maybe if you won the lottery and never have to work and never do anything but WoW...

Definitely the alt friendliness for reasons already detailed. Most of the other "problems" in MoP are PEBCAK problems. "I feel like I have to do X even though I don't want to!" complaints are the most hilarious. To think that people publicly admit to being so weak-minded and helpless with their own time.

[Ihnasir]

-It wasn't alt-friendly at the start
-LFR necessary for catch-up and progression
-Dailies feeling like a requirement

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

Here's how it goes.
Patch comes 8-9m players.
Patch gets old, 7-8m players.
Patch comes 8-9m players.
Patch gets old 7-8m players.
Patch comes 8-9m players.
New expansion 10m players.
~

Where before you actually had to spend a month or two (even as a non raider) to get around to do everything (to see it) you now can do in less than 1 month, the game doesn't "lack" content, it's simply too easy and available which makes the game a lot less interesting and entertaining after you've done them couple times.
And yeah you say MoP is less alt friendly, but what's wrong with that? I mean I like to level alts and so on but I'm never gonna invest the same time into them as my main. I don't mind at all that alt activity is as tedious and "boring" as it was on my main, if anything that makes me care more about my alt and maybe give a sense of accomplishment when (if) I chose to take it up to alt raids and so on.

Blizzard aimed very well and shot themselves in the leg when they introduced LFR, Flex should've been what LFR is today. It's completely retarded (not from an elitist pov) that you can jump into a group of 24 strangers, not talk to anyone (or very limited if any) and then proceed to kill every single boss that there is.
I'm hoping that Flex somehow isn't going to be brain-dead activity and that people actually start enjoying raiding on a casual level again, I also hope LFR and Flex shares lockout if they don't remove LFR. Yeah I'm a hater of LFR, it's the single most retarded thing to come to wow since resilience in pvp... fucking game breaker introductions...

[pfbe]

I played during the beta. Beta was a rather different environment, and playing it ruined the live version in two respects: I'd already done most of the content in the beta and a lot of stuff (including drop rates) were nerfed for live.

This expansion had a ton of promise for solo play and alts. The rares, the treasures, the overpowered 80-85 twink gear, etc. They nerfed it all: a lot of the items dropped by the rares got the "only usable in Pandaria" tag, all the BOA twink armor got bumped to level 86, even the scaling enchants this patch were a nerf to twinks.

Then there were the reputation grinds. They felt like the worst reputation grinds of any expansion. I only got to exalted with any of the reputations when they added the zandalari scouts/warbringers.

Dungeons were boring. For whatever reason the attempt to give the dungeons a "busy" feeling, by having waves of npc's fighting each other or bosses crashing in or whatever just felt poorly done.

Raiding was unimpressive. I stopped raiding early on, though, and can't comment on the later raid instances.

And then there was the absolute waste of time and resources on useless shit nobody had asked for, like pet battles and CRZ.

[SL1200]

One of my complaints is where the portals in pandaria are located. The portal to pandaria from org is as far north east as it can be, and the portal to IOT is almost at the furthest western point of the continent. I guess they think a 10 minute flight is fun. Its not, I tab out and catch up on what's being said on mmo-champ instead.

I do not like to see them go out of their way to inconvenience me, and they did that a lot in MOP.

[Sky High]

One of my complaints is where the portals in pandaria are located. The portal to pandaria from org is as far north east as it can be, and the portal to IOT is almost at the furthest western point of the continent. I guess they think a 10 minute flight is fun. Its not, I tab out and catch up on what's being said on mmo-champ instead.

I do not like to see them go out of their way to inconvenience me, and they did that a lot in MOP.

and the gear vendors are even MORE out of the way in the god damn Ox temple for whatever reason. the hell are they not in the faction capital or main city of the Expac as they have been in the past? the mind boggles.

[Sithalos]

I don't like the theme.
Most (If not all) of the PvP changes have been negative across the board.
CRZ is a stupid system, and a band aid fix for a bigger problem.
It's hard to find a good raiding guild anymore, because most people just do LOLFR and call it good.
Mountains of dailies is their grand solution to the "not enough end game content" problem.

I think it would be easier to list the things Mists got right. Let me think.. OH! I can play a ghetto version of Pokemon. That's just great.

[Chrispotter]

Because spamming the same dungeons over and over again is some how different.

No 20 minute queues, no 15 people AFK, and most importantly, you can control 1/5 of the outcome of the group.. in lfr you are just 1 of many and it can be very boring for so many to play with a bunch of retards that wouldnt kill Jin Rohk on normal mode.

[Robert3620]

The tuning of the raids was a failure. It destroyed the social and lower tier guilds. This is a mmo and people do play it for the social ties, those people got slapped down and told to do lfr. That's not what many of them were wanting. Their guilds broke up and those people quit.

The main problem with this expansion is that they bought into everything the hardcore told them and did all they could to please them. As nice as the raids have been in this expansion they have been failures due to tuning. Dragon Soul was small and out for far too long yet managed to keep people playing because it allowed people in it's doors. Now most people are locked out and outside of raids there has been a lack of content.

[Frogged]

The main problem with this expansion is that they bought into everything the hardcore told them and did all they could to please them.

They didn't, though. I feel just as neglected as everyone else on this forum. If they bought into everything hardcores had told them, they would remove all raid difficulties except heroic, remove LFR, remove LFD, etc. MoP is hardly a hardcore-focused expansion.

What it did do was cut out the middle class players. It's a binary expansion, like Osmeric pointed out, of completely solo play or hardcore play. That's the problem, not some imagined focus on hardcore whining. Hardcores didn't get catered to, they simply got left alone while middle-class players were shut down in favor of solo play via LFR.

Ironically, this sucks for hardcore guilds as they no longer have middle-class players filtering up into their guilds for recruitment. This has led to a gradual population decline that isn't very good for long-term heroic raiding. Yay for Flex Raiding.

[lostdrewid]

Dailies. A lot of people feel like they have to do all the things, and dailies made that nearly impossible this expansion. Before I self-moderated, I was burning out, hard. Finances forced me on a leave of absence from the game, and when I came back I almost entirely ignored dailies, except for an alt who just hit 90 -- and then, I only do dailies for the rep he needs for his profession. To hell with the rest. Burn out kills subs, and they gave people too much to do.

On the opposite hand, they also killed dungeons in favor of scenarios, and not everyone likes that change. Personally I adore scenarios and never much like dungeons, but I know I'm in the minority. I know people didn't like this decision, and that too killed subs.

[Eon Drache]

I'm still playing. I did take a 4 month break because (Thunder king wasn't so much a hold for me) but I'm back and enjoying the content. However, for me, there just were 0 5 man mounts to go for. Cataclysm I had Stonecore, Vortex Pinnacle, and Phosphorent to go for. Wrath I had Time-Lost, AND a bunch of raid mounts. Now, all I have to go for Is Elegon and Horridon...

[Frogged]

Dailies. A lot of people feel like they have to do all the things, and dailies made that nearly impossible this expansion. Before I self-moderated, I was burning out, hard. Finances forced me on a leave of absence from the game, and when I came back I almost entirely ignored dailies, except for an alt who just hit 90 -- and then, I only do dailies for the rep he needs for his profession. To hell with the rest. Burn out kills subs, and they gave people too much to do.

I don't see how dailies are negative to the game. In fact, I added them to my list in what went right. You mention yourself in this very paragraph that dailies are optional, as you intentionally skipped them and as far as I can tell, you're still alive. Why should optional content that some people like be a negative to the game? Why not just ignore it? Why is Blizzard responsible for you burning yourself out on content you don't enjoy? At some point, they have to add another piece of content that you don't find fun. Will you burn yourself out on that as well and ask them to remove it? The game is for everyone, not just yourself. If the content is optional, treat it as such and leave it alone for people who want it.

[Tyraena]

I love my main but I get bored of playing the same class or characters all the time, so, like in wrath and cata, I like to play alts.. then remember.. jesus, I need to grind months of dailies to get anything on him/her.

Gonna disagree. Leveled a new horde to 90 over the last couple weeks. W/o access to my other 18 alliance chars and professions, still managed to get the iLvl to get into MSV in 3 days, and HoF/ToES in 6.

[Wazooty]

How can anyone possibly be complaining about catchup mechanics? It takes 3 weeks maybe to catch up. Unless you believe every single alt should be geared to the gills with a legendary cloaks after 3 weeks.

[Paximus]

How can anyone possibly be complaining about catchup mechanics? It takes 3 weeks maybe to catch up. Unless you believe every single alt should be geared to the gills with a legendary cloaks after 3 weeks.

Easily. I liked Cata and Wrath's much better.

[Deleted]

So rather then mixing it into another thread based on 'omg 7.7 subs wow is dying', I'd like to simply ask what people think happened in mists that caused such a surge of losses in such a short space of time.

If you are looking for reasons within the game, then most plausible ones have already been mentioned.

Many players have/will hit a wall in MoP where they can't really progress anymore with their main character, but can't face up to the grind of having to do everything they already did again on an alt (or alts). Whether it's mostly solo players getting bored senseless out of LFR or casual raiders struggling with normal modes and longstanding guilds threatening to fall apart, I expect that many players will have felt at one point or another that they can't go forward but don't want to go back (on an alt) either.

But I don't think the sub losses can just be attributed to issues with WoW or MoP specifically. Players do get bored or attracted by the next "new thing" and will move on. Over the last 24 months F2P really has come into its own; there are plenty of quality games out there offering a fresh experience for free (or at least for however much you want to pay in the cash shop). No single game may have lived up to its hype as "WoW-killer", but overall the industry is moving on and this is beginning to show. If anything, I think it's impressive that WoW still has 7.7m subscribers.

[Glorious Leader]

Always easy to talk about players who walked away, not thinking about what'd happen if Mists continued this atrocious idea that you should be able to cap a characters progression for a week in 1-2 hours of doing 5man content and a LFR run. Mists still award those people, but no. Not to the same extent as 4.3 did.



You should really look up some 4.3 threads, because this is just disconnected from reality. Tabards made dungeons too rewarding. Dungeons added over time made you have less variance. Instant catch up made people bored out of their minds. But hey, I'm still seeing plenty of catch up mechanics in Mists. They're just not instant. And again, the backlash of 4.3 was so great that they did such a big change in Mists. Nope, it's not working for everyone, but damn if there's anything I can say with absolute certainty, it's that if Mists continued like 4.3, the exodus of players would be tremendous.



I have never understood how an expansion that keeps people busy, instead of making them cap a character in an hour, can be regarded as a colossal failure. Then again, what patch or expansion hasn't been called a colossal failure in some regard. Yup, that includes BC.
MoP has its issues. 4.3 was a clusterfuck.

Because keep players busy should not be the primary goal of the developer. Entertaining their audience should be. If I wanted busy work I'd stay at my job and take on other peoples work. MoP is a COLLOSAL failure, it was a cure for a disease (4.3) that really wasn't a disease and was worse than the disease. It didn't work as a tool for subscriber retention (according to the developer people still sub and unsub between patches) and the cost was that the casual experience was sacrificed.

Instant catch up MADE SOME PEOPLE bored but I would submit that group of vocal bored forums guys are the ones disconnected from reality. Playing 20-30 hours week on one guy is unsustainable and unsupportable and if the developers had any sense they'd tell you exactly that. Instead they did everything in their power to make sure you could do exactly that.

Your supposition about the continued exodus of players is exactly that just a supposition. It is equally possible that Mists would have kept even more players if they went with a far more forgiving catch up model, far closer to instant what we have today. It's better than it was in 5.0 no doubt but it's still terrible and still not very casual friendly. You can't say it with certainty but we can say with certainty (because the developers have said as much) that casuals weren't engaged this expansion well I think it's obvious why that is.

- - - Updated - - -

Rail against it all you like, but mmo's fall flat on their faces without these elements, and they always will.

Right. Okay. Don't call WoW an MMO then. I could care less. Everything that wow did and what made wow a success was totally and completely the opposite of every mmo standard in the universe. Flying is on EXCELLENT example of this.

- - - Updated - - -

for me at least I didn't have 9 fully geared alts because I wanted them...I was so god damn bored I either do that or quit the game. Cata near the end there was the time I could have walked away from the game and never come back. buuuuuut with MoP and the annual pass I had to have some reason to keep playing, my guild nuked DS so most either had numerous alt runs or just quit tell MoP, Alts were the one thing that at the least killed time for me. thats all it did, fill up time until the next Expac. THERE, an argument. it's not a criticism of having alts it's a criticism of the lack of end game that was in Cata.

but you didn't lack an end game. You had one. It was called Alts. Now the people who can only play for like 2-3 hours a week DO LACK an end game, an end game they can have any meaningful progress in. SO that you could have more to do and not be bored because you play like 15+ hours a week or whatever.

[Milchshake]

there's some truth to this but players have to try to get better. some guilds i know of broke up because the gm couldn't master attenuation and wouldn't sit for that fight. he wouldn't listen either. others got stuck on elegon because dummies couldn't set or reset their stacks or find a way to down 4 orbs each time.

that's not blizzard's fault, it bad players that make that happen. Horridon wasn't that hard before nerf imo. people just didn't focus properly.

Hardly. If Blizzard wants my gaming dollars they have to get better. My friends and I play just fine. I dont care much about loot, i dont need to brag about downing imaginary heroic bosses.
What I'd like is to be able to learn a boss fight within a 2 hour play session. Just a sense of progress and camaraderie with my friends.
We have no delusions about downing heroic content, none of us care to commit that much time of our lives to it. If its billed as "heroic" it should be that way. But raids billed as "normal", felt anything but.

Over tuned "normal" raids feel like false advertising. When i do a normal raid i hope to have a little fun. Not get punched in the face by stone guards, vizier, garalon for 2 hours straight. If someone invited me over to a party, then punched me in the face. I'd leave, my friends would leave.



And no, I dont consider LFR to be a raiding experience. Its like riding through Yosemite on a tour bus packed with people. Totally different than hiking or camping with some friends in Yosemite.