If MOP was so good, then why did the population drop so much?

[Worgenmaniac]

[Aggrophobic]

Yeah, becuase you can't find like hundreds if not thousands of posts about this already?
Nice try though.

[Jibbler]

MoP had a rough start. Lots of lag and not much content. By Throne of Thunder it was quite good, maybe not as good as other expansions but better than we've had in a long time.

[Seasz]

Because It wasn't

[alduron]

Because "ermagerd furries" and "ermagerd kung-fu panda".

[Dracullus]

It has less to do with quality of expansion and more to do with age of game. During Vanilla/BC/Wrath people quit WoW as well, but they were quickly replaced by flood of new players curious about WoW.

[Onikaroshi]

A lot of people liked it, a lot didn't /shrug

[Laqweeta]

I thought MoP was pretty good, pve and PvP wise.

The downhill trend started though, and it could’ve been brought back, but they cheapened out and went with a new method during WoD to gauge interest.

Time played metrics.

[yani9841]

probably because the game was past saturation limits for the MMO genre in Wrath?

I don't think 10mil+ players was exactly the norm for individual online games...

[Hobbidaggy]

I was one of them (but came back) it was burn out. You had so many dailies to do that gave little rep and there wasn’t much else to do at the time. It got better once the patches started and they made changes to the rep grind. Throne also helped greatly but the decline had already started and once your guild has 10 or so people leave or quit things can escalate rather quickly and people get bored playing alone

[NoiseTank13]

I was one of them (but came back) it was burn out. You had so many dailies to do that gave little rep and there wasn’t much else to do at the time. It got better once the patches started and they made changes to the rep grind. Throne also helped greatly but the decline had already started and once your guild has 10 or so people leave or quit things can escalate rather quickly and people get bored playing alone

I'd also argue that the Golden Lotus bottleneck daily was a fucking terrible idea that contributed to the burnout. You had to get Revered(?) to get started on the rep you wanted.

[Nurvus]

MoP wasn't really that good - it felt like a filler expansion, just like Warlords of Draenor.

It was mildly successful due to Pet System, and then only Timeless Isle brought back some more people; and then Siege of Orgrimmar.

I felt like the setting - Pandaria, both as a location and mix of cultural references - despite having great potential, ultimately ended up being a handicap.

[Florena]

I don't judge expansion quality by the number of people playing during it, but rather by how much I enjoyed said expansion.

[Hobbidaggy]

I'd also argue that the Golden Lotus bottleneck daily was a fucking terrible idea that contributed to the burnout. You had to get Revered(?) to get started on the rep you wanted.

Yeah it really wasn’t the best design. Glad they changed it later on and added the farm rep boosts as well

[Kyphael]

I'm seeing a lot of posts that make sense, and didn't have to do with MoP's quality per say, which in retrospect was very high.

Age of game, disconnect with the theme (Pandaren), and at launch it wasn't anything special; MoP stands out for the quality as a sum of all its parts, not a brilliant roll out. Look at Cataclysm, exciting roll out, but when you put it all together, sub-par execution. I myself was experiencing burn out after playing all of Wrath and Cataclysm pretty hardcore. Having missed out on Burning Crusade, I was really looking forward to a Legion expansion. When I got... Pandas instead, I was disappointed, as I wasn't familiar with Old God lore, so the Sha didn't seem interesting. It felt like a vacation expansion, just biding time before another Legion invasion, so I was on auto pilot all expansion. The last six months I might as well have unsubbed, I was just paying and not playing. Looking back on it, if I knew as much lore today as I did back then, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. It's possible a lot of the players who unsubbed felt similarly.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Around the end of wrath the game stoped picking up new players with only about 30% of new players getting past level 10. If we guess and say that the cata changes didn’t fix that problem that it’s likely that the growth that had classic-wrath in the positive was gone meaning that it would move down until reading its actual base number if content stayed good.

[wombinator04]

So all the MoP haters show up here huh.

[majinzeni]

Because for so many people it wasn't. Many people I've spoken to that regard MoP highly are doing so because they're comparing it to the current expansions. MoP was arguably better than WoD and BfA so I think it gives people this false memory of MoP being one of the best expansions ever released. There are redeeming qualities of MoP and I understand why someone would say they enjoyed it greatly, but overall I think the fact that the recent expansions haven't done well is what causes people to feel this way about MoP.

[Kallisto]

Old game is old. Nothing has everlasting growth and a game was bound to have people leave. Vanilla - Wrath was having people leave in droves, by the time Arthas had fallen and Deathwing became the main threat at the start of Cataclysm 100m different accounts had been made with around 12 million playing at that point. For every account that was playing at that point in time, there were 8 that started the game and went "You know what, this game isn't for me/sucks/whatever." and left.

As the game aged fewer people were joining but people were still leaving. New expansions/patches have people come back for a look but in reality, the game we are playing now, is 99% the game people were playing in vanilla/classic. It's the same go to a mob, do your rotation, pick up from mob or collect and be done. It's changed less than an EA sports franchise had between two years. People come back to expect change, no change in reality happens so people leave again. That explains the peaks that take away from what was a curve going down since Arthas said he saw only darkness.

[Sansnom]

The graph only shows the number of the players playing. It does not some important details like how many players left, how many players joined, how many players are long term, short term etc.

I think most people assumes people stayed in the game for the long term. This type of thinking is not restricted to the interpretation of the graph but also how people play the game. It is understandable. We all player the same game so we must all like the same thing and do the same thing. But I think this is actually wrong.

It is possible WoW has been suffering significant player lost throughout its life but at the initial phase, the rate of new players outpaced player lost, thus giving a positive increase in terms of players. Over the years, the rate of player lost may probably have increased while the rate of new players have decreased.

I think Blizzard once said they had over 100 millions accounts although I do not know if this included the trial accounts. Regardless, it still a represent a rather low retention rate that I expected.