So, what didn't work this expansion?

[serenka]

I would say the game just doesn't feel like wow anymore. Mope was just too childish and fisher price.

wat does the "e" stand for exactly?

[SDMF]

- The Theme and Story

I don't care for Asian landscapes, architecture and pandas. Also, wasn't this expansion supposed to be all about the war between Alliance and Horde, why the fuck are they working together now?

- Challenge Modes

I absolutely hate time trials. I would have greatly preferred an insanely hard dungeon. Think TBC heroics in mediocre gear, then double it.

- Scenarios

Considering they're only available to level 90s, what purpose do they exactly serve? The concept is alright but the execution is flat out horrible. They should learn from GW2s solo missions. I really enjoyed those.

- Dailys

Way too much emphasis on dailys at the launch. Either you did them or you you were locked out of valor gear and bonus rolls.

[Ateista]

Thankfully, you aren't the sole arbiter of what the community wants or needs. Some people feel that certain game elements don't work to their liking. The fact that you disagree with them doesn't make their complaints invalid.

i still see 6.2 million people that are perfectly fine with this game. the rest complain about the most innate crap it's maddening. i'd rather them quit, than hear the blabber day in and day out in /2. i'm sorry, but the ones that do nothing but complain are not good for the community. so, i'll say again, good riddance.

not to mention some of the things people complain about, whether i agree or disagree, come on?

edit* a number.

[Deleted]

What didnt work? Mists of Pandaria is nothing more than a clean up team trying to clean the mess that Cataclysm created

It is no coincidence that people fumed during Cata how much they hated it, and the numbers back that up, that is when subscriber numbers started to nosedive.

It has had a profoundly negative effect on WoW, and despite a few successful good additions in MoP, they have been unable to cleanse the game of Cata's stench, i am not even sure such a thing can even be done anymore, at least not by this dev team. Its not that MoP is a good expansion, its that Cata was a terrible one, so anything following that made it look better by comparison.

To the people who say "We dont care about subs going down", who are you kidding here? Of course you care, otherwise these threads would not be full of your ilk telling everyone how little you care. If you truly did not care then you would show just that. It bothers you that your own server has become a ghost town. This is a game you have invested countless hours, days, months if not years into, of course your care.

[Ateista]

wat does the "e" stand for exactly?

maybe we "mope" around in mop? other than that, iono.

[Dabrix32]

I played one for a while and loved it. It did have one major problem though - no-one else knew how Monks functioned,

This. As soon as my Monk hit 90 I respecced Mistweaver and started doing RBGs with only like 340k health. I was doing top heals and could even live through a focus. In regular pug BGs I rule them. I never die, do top heals, and have 3-4 killing blows.

[H3llhog]

- The Tier sets:

Seriously, I find myself using transmog to change my gear in all the characters I have. I didn't find any of the tier sets looks good enough, I think even Catacylsm had better looks than these ones. The same can be said for PvP gear.

- Not alt friendly:

Especially at the beginning at the expansion, it is really difficult to level up another character.

- Dailies.

Enough said. For me, this is probably the worst thing that happened to the expansion. They're sorta trying to fix it, though, with the Barrens and soon Timeless Isle...

Other stuff, like the story, battle pets, LFR and Scenarios, were okay for me. I did like the new raids, way better than Cataclysm ones.

[reemi]

i still see 6.2 million people that are perfectly fine with this game. the rest complain about the most innate crap it's maddening. i'd rather them quit, than hear the blabber day in and day out in /2. i'm sorry, but the ones that do nothing but complain are not good for the community. so, i'll say again, good riddance.

not to mention some of the things people complain about, whether i agree or disagree, come on?

edit* a number.

Never said it was the reasons why people left. Just saying what I hated from this expansion.

Farming rep on my 10 level 90 is not something I enjoy, Wasting my time in heroic dungeon getting justice useless points I cannot use because I don't want to do dailies or quests is not something I enjoy.

I do not like the story and graphic and it's just me maybe, but it very important to me. I understand we cant all be happy with that.

Because there's 6.2 millions player don't mean they all like the game, this game is addictive and lot players can't leave. When more than 30% of the player leave it's not good usually, for the game, for Blizzard and for you, because without money this game will be worst.

Not crying, but WoW is my favorite game of all time, and I feel like I need to boycott Blizzard till they understand I'm not happy. But I guess they won't care.

[DrMcNinja]

What I thought was very lacking, is that there was no direct threat to the world.

In Cata, you had armies running about trying to beat eachother and Deathwing just about everywhere (With the exception of Uldum which was just some 'discovery' for the Indiana Jones crew)
In BC, you had outposts fighting demons on their borders
In Wrath, you had fucking undead and MASSIVE (See Warsong Hold) outposts fighting undead and other races loyal to Arthas all over the place.....

In MoP, we have 2 large threats: The Mogu and Mantid. And what do they do? The Mantid have an army that sits idle basically slapping you in the face if you run into them. Why aren't they fighting the Klaxxi? Their air forces get shot down every time I fly to the Dread Wastes.

The mogu, a nice big empire with an island that has fucking lightning striking down wherever Lei Shen wants, with an army in their courtyard. And just like that, Blood Elves and Kirin Tor stand on his doorstep as if he doesn't notice them. Where is the warcraft? Where is the direct confrontation? The only real Warcraft we get this expansion is in the Jade Forest in a cutscene, and in a raid which is called Siege of Orgrimmar.

The most fun I had in the expansion, was in 5.1 where both factions had some decent lore involving one another. But now.... there is... Horde attacking Orgrimmar and Alliance pop out of nowhere to the rescue....

[SL1200]

i still see 6.2 million people that are perfectly fine with this game. the rest complain about the most innate crap it's maddening. i'd rather them quit, than hear the blabber day in and day out in /2. i'm sorry, but the ones that do nothing but complain are not good for the community. so, i'll say again, good riddance.

not to mention some of the things people complain about, whether i agree or disagree, come on?

edit* a number.

If people's complaints about wow make you so angry, why would you come into a "what didn't work about this expansion" thread?
Perhaps you would be happier in the "what worked" thread.

[Glorious Leader]

The whole war thing is problematic anyway. Where are the armies? Where are the big battles? None of that is in the game, or realistically can be in the game. The engine does not support it. It's handled best if it's all kept off stage, where our imaginations can fill in the details that the game cannot.

All the focus on the world, and on war, does is emphasize how much like Disneyland the whole environment is.

In war their is consequence. It's hard to have meaningful consequence when the game is built on the framework of a persistent world. I mean they could change the old world all over again but that would just mean less raids right? The entire war ends up feeling so phony. Exactly like Disney world.

[Autumn]

I feel way too much time/resources went into making LFR and LFD which means that there are less resources available for challenging questlines, 5-mans & heroics, raids of Ulduar quality.
Zones are out-levelled and trivialised far too quickly and there is literally no difficulty to levelling, which means levelling is just a chore to be done as fast as possible instead of a challenging journey.
I don't think Blizzard understands that back in TBC etc many people didn't raid because they didn't want to, not because there was no LFR.

[Eliot123]

My list -

1) Terrible gating. Do dailies for rep to buy items you've already got better than from 5 man HCs? Poor design. Epics were ok but again, gating that could only be got past by dailies. Capping the amount of rep per day but allowing multiple ways to get it would have been better.

2) Too much to do. I've still not done all the challenge modes, even though I love that shit because it's too difficult for more casual players to organise AND get all the more mandatory stuff out of the way each week. Need to farm 50 coins, get the rep and the valor so not a liability for the raid and now I am free .... annnnnd it's tuesday ....start again. Previous expacs I've managed to get loremaster. I haven't even finished jade forest this time around, too much to do syndrome strikes again.

3) Scenarios. Ok for telling a story, terrible as a repeatable playing experience. The heroics ones are alright though as you need to be awake for them.

4) Ludicrously overtuned normal raids. T14 especially was utterly brutal, and after the near perfect difficulty spread of DS, nuked a lot of guilds and caused a lot of drama. Lets not even mention garalon. What the fuck were they thinking!

5) Use of LFR to replace actual group content. LFR isn't a proper group playing experience, you are hardly ever going to meet anyone doing it. In LFR there is no way to shine as a player and no way to interact with anyone in order to make friends. It's great for seeing the content tho, so GJ there.

6) Flight time isn't a playing experience. Having to fly around the world is an auto run engaged while watching youtube experience. They should knock it off already. Removing mass summon was just retarded. Busywork isn't engagement!

7) Going back to the caaclysm mistake of catering to the super high end of the playerbase. Blizzard, old buddy, it doesn't matter what you put in front of the top tier raiding community, they will sit through it 24/7 and down it in no time anyway. All trying to tune stuff for specifically them does is exclude everyone else.

Theres loads of positives tho

I agree with all these points, basically.

Would like to add one more - ridiculously insanely easy and boring heroic instances. I like doing heroics even when I far outgear them but the ones we have in MoP have been AoE faceroll since day one. There was never, ever any challenge, not even for like, a day.

[Deleted]

One of my favorite things in wrath and cata was the last tier 5man that they added. i loved those dungeons and they were awesome to gear up new alts, and it makes me kinda sad that instead of adding more heroics they focus on scenarios which might just be the most lame thing in the history of gaming.

[DrMcNinja]

I feel way too much time/resources went into making LFR and LFD which means that there are less resources available for challenging questlines, 5-mans & heroics, raids of Ulduar quality.
Zones are out-levelled and trivialised far too quickly and there is literally no difficulty to levelling, which means levelling is just a chore to be done as fast as possible instead of a challenging journey.
I don't think Blizzard understands that back in TBC etc many people didn't raid because they didn't want to, not because there was no LFR.

And in TBC there wasn't the gear treadmill, at least not to the same extend as these days. Gear wasn't something 'you had to have' in order to do something like a simple raid or a 5-man Heroic. These days for example, people DEMAND gear at raiding levels in order to do a Heroic scenario, which is accessible at a much lower ilvl.

[klmg8]

The issue is it's too casual (I wouldn't even call it casual more like it's too mindless) not that there is too much to do. You do not have to grind rep anymore at all. You can go straight from 90 to scenarios and dungeons to LFR with boss fights that have no mechanics or ones that can be ignored.

For the most part you can do very little damage and play poorly with no feedback from anyone in any run as to if you're bad or good.

The only time you will face any kind of backlash is if you wipe a few times in LFR when the frustration of wiping overcomes the extreme apathy of everyone involved.

You can see the end boss Lei Shen within a short amount of time with little effort. You can get 4 pieces and all the gear you want to deal with every single mob in the game easily with little effort.

10mans + shared lock out + LFR + LFD (to some extent) ruined this game.

What keeps new players interested?
What keeps returning players interested?

The answer absolutely nothing. I used to go onto my server and see 3 or more pug groups running during wrath for 25man and especially GDKP runs now trade is trolling.

[Glorious Leader]

The issue is it's too casual (I wouldn't even call it casual more like it's too mindless) not that there is too much to do.

Not relative to cataclysm or wotlk it isn't. It's far to casual unfriendly. You people seem to think seeing lei shen is some huge game changing event and if people were denied access to him they'd just continue to sub for the award winning story? I don't get it. Honest. People stuck around in WoTLK and farmed icc for a year. Finishing a raid obviously doesn't mean the end of it's use otherwise this game wouldn't work.

What keeps new players interested? The same thing that did before. Character progression which has been made VERY uncasual friendly this expansion
What keeps returning players interested? The same thing as above.

What turns both groups off? No catch up, rep grinds, shitty valor gains, Being shoved into lfr, very alt unfriendly, all the uncasual friendly crap they did in this game. It's not hard to see why casuals weren't engaged. Their is little in mists that engages them either from a difficulty stand point (normal raids are far to prohibitive) or just form a time consuming stand point. ICC and 4.3 were far more casual friendly.

[Deleted]

Nothing worked out except for the above average raid quality and the amount of bosses in them. Everything else screamed like a "leap expansion" for me. The theme and the lack of the threat to the world, as one above poster also mentioned, stand out as main reasons why its a huge flop.

Also, just because 7.7m people still play it, doesnt mean they like the game. They are hoping for better times while succumbing to LFR grinds against their own will because of the time they have put in the game and the addiction.

They need a revolution and something COMPLETELY game-changing. So far the changes implemented have either been extremely populist and accessibility-oriented or outright conservative, as if they were hesitant to add some groundbreaking changes to the game.

Number 1 reason for my quitting though is the community. It has become rotten and self-destructive. Some people (in this thread even!) have even defended the notion of WoW needing to be more single-player oriented than a game which encourages spontaneous grouping with strangers in the world and working their way around obstacles. It used to be just that though. At least to an overwhelming degree.

[Djuntas]

I know what didn't work for me:

Same old, same old. Been there, done that.

Fealing like I have no goals left inn the game etc.

[xixixviixiiii]

1) Scenarios should be solo experiences for story, not group content.

2) LFR should drop last tier normal ilevel. People should not feel compelled to run LFR every week for upgrades if they run normal.

3) Need more 5-man's. They should also be a bit harder. Not everything should be so easy that any and every group that attempts them can faceroll through it.

4) Need more coherent & better story telling. The story in MoP is awful, terrible, garbage nonsense. 2 minutes of lead-up for Lei Shen is ridiculous. Still couldn't explain WTF we're supposed to be doing in half of the 5-man dungeons.

5) Justice & Valor Points need to be reworked and detached from dailies & all of that time sink bullshit.

6) Less brain-dead design decisions (largely concerning talent trees, how specs play & PvP "balance").

7) Normal mode raids need to be better tuned & have better progressive difficulty curves. The difficulty in T14 & T15 has been all over the place.

8) Pandaren. 'Nuff said.

9) Too much of the same old shit. Need more crafting fun stuff like armor dyes and whatever. More choices. More character progression stuff.