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

[Vampyr78]

The expansion was good but some people are just unreasonably hostile towards anything that is a little bit cute like Pandas for example and refused to play expansion about Pandas.

[Kalisandra]

2) First attempts to remove flying. All that claustrophobic no-flying isles from Korean MMOs were just big mistake.

Wintergrasp was original no-flying at all times, and only later relaxed to allow flight outside of battles. That was in LK. Then in Cataclysm we had Tol Barad, and the dailies zone there was never made flyable. Likewise the Firelands daily zone was a no-fly zone, and still is. MoP was not the first expansion to do this - Cata was. MoP had a number of places you needed flight to get to, and embraced flight. Hell, it had a whole set of dailies around getting a cloud serpent mount. That said, I do think that the Isle of Thunder could've been designed to allow flight and been the better for it. Timeless Isle, on the other hand, was very well designed but somehow they've managed to not carry the good bits of TI forward, but only the bad bits.

MoP's awful rep grinds in the first tier were a terrible mistake. Having to grind rep with one faction just to open up others was just awful, and putting currency purchases behind rep gates was really dumb. However, it didn't have Cata's "Heroics will now be hard like early BC again, and like LK we expect you to gear via them." heroics, so numbers didn't really drop off until burnout started.

[sam86]

because its shit start and its insane drought at end
MoP started REALLY bad, one of WORST starts in a wow exp, heck i can't think of a start worst than MoP one in all wow history

[Lorgar Aurelian]

MoP wasn't good. It was terrible. I think I played it for 3 weeks and was unsubbed.

Blizzard destroyed the in-game communities in late BC, and the damage was still eating away at the game through MoP. Introverted players that hate people LOVED MoP. But the game was hemorrhaging all of the extroverted players that actually liked talking to people and participating in group play.

In modern times, players FALSELY appear to look back at MoP as a great xpac. But that's only because the modern playerbase is a small fraction of the old one and its mostly comprised of introverts.

MoP was actually garbage.

WoW can get back up over 10 million subs, hell it could go over 20 million, but to get there they have to draw in the extroverts that left. And that means rebuilding the old in-game communities that existed in vanilla. And you are NOT going to bring back extroverts with antisocial gameplay like arenas, horrific visions, or torghast.

What were you smoking to think mop was an introvert expan?

It had the brawlers guild with a ton of people hanging out and talking while waiting for there turn.

Timeless isle with a ton of people grouping for rares and events.

Challenge modes were people would make groups instead of just using lfd which was common in cata.

Flex raiding so you could raid with more Then just your 10/25 core group.

Mop added a ton of community building stuff.

[Kalisandra]

Had some of the most readily available activities outside typical instance raid/pvp of any expansion...

I miss MoP's scenarios. Sure we have Islands today, but they've been infected with the same disease M+ has - you're effectively on a timer and it's all gogogogogo. Scenarios had a slight time factor, and you could in theory fail, but it didn't happen often. Because they weren't about gear and such they didn't have to be especially challenging, so they were great for a bit of low-key murder with a couple of friends, and because they did give some rewards, they stayed relevant in a way that doing non-heroic dungeons didn't. I miss them, and I miss having instanced content suitable for doing with very casual friends.

[MoanaLisa]

You really can't understand population/subscriber numbers without understanding how much churn there is, i.e. how many subscribing, unsubscribing and new players signing up. At some point there's more competition--a number of MMO's that were free-to-play were emerging at that point as either new games or the ruins of old games that couldn't sustain a subscription--and the game had been around long enough that most anyone who was going to try the game had done so. Subscribed players has something to do with quality of an expansion but it's not the be-all and end-all that people pretend it is. For a lot of people Wrath was the end of the story that had been followed since the Warcraft RTS days and Cataclysm was a good time to check things out and leave, especially with the "scary monster dragon" theme that was all through it.

Cataclysm was not a welcome change after the long content drought in Wrath and, so sorry to say this, the notion that a more difficult game requiring more skill and co-ordination was not welcomed at all. That was probably the biggest mistake which caused a lot of people to leave. So started the long steep slide and some of the PR magic came off the game.

Some came back for Mists but for various reasons, including the staggering quantity of dailies that had to be done for rep at the start of the expansion, didn't stay. And that's how it's been more or less since.

[sam86]

Wintergrasp was original no-flying at all times, and only later relaxed to allow flight outside of battles. That was in LK. Then in Cataclysm we had Tol Barad, and the dailies zone there was never made flyable. Likewise the Firelands daily zone was a no-fly zone, and still is. MoP was not the first expansion to do this - Cata was. MoP had a number of places you needed flight to get to, and embraced flight. Hell, it had a whole set of dailies around getting a cloud serpent mount. That said, I do think that the Isle of Thunder could've been designed to allow flight and been the better for it. Timeless Isle, on the other hand, was very well designed but somehow they've managed to not carry the good bits of TI forward, but only the bad bits.

MoP's awful rep grinds in the first tier were a terrible mistake. Having to grind rep with one faction just to open up others was just awful, and putting currency purchases behind rep gates was really dumb. However, it didn't have Cata's "Heroics will now be hard like early BC again, and like LK we expect you to gear via them." heroics, so numbers didn't really drop off until burnout started.

cloud serpent quests u can do without flying, i did them myself, started them while not able to fly
so no, i don't know any content that 'had' to have flying in MoP, except maybe the rare fire elemental mini pet battle thingy near the horde inn, but that's it

[Levogames]

My guild was stuck at Garalon HC, not even going to Sha of Fear NM because of a rest. Then we got to Primordius HC and we didn't go to Anima Golem.

The "problem" we found was the modernization. Some of the players had a hard time with the first 3 Raids at Cataclysm because they were hard AF, then everybody rested on Dragon Soul bc it had a monthly nerf.
That's when Pandaria came up and everybody thought that everything was going to be "easy" as always, but the game was modernized. Most of the players didn't know what the vengeance was and why was the burst phase so important.

A great amount of players realised that they will got to put a lot of effort in the game in order to clear the content so they just left.

To me, MoP was the best expansion but in my opinion the lack of rewarding to skilled players started just after ToT.

[PuppetShowJustice]

MoP was good for a year and then spent a year stuck on the SoO patch. Guess which part of that resulted in the biggest drop-off.

[Kalisandra]

because its shit start and its insane drought at end
MoP started REALLY bad, one of WORST starts in a wow exp, heck i can't think of a start worst than MoP one in all wow history

I can, easily. Cataclysm. Some specs were almost un-levelable. Then they were almost unplayable at L90. And then there was the way you had to gear for raids via heroics, and the heroics were almost Burning Crusade level hard (but you didn't have to gear via heroic 5-mans in BC - you could do early Kara in gear from the standard 5-mans and from rep).

For example, I found that I leveled faster as Prot than as Ret, because Prot didn't almost die from very ordinary sized pulls and did almost as much single target damage. It wasn't from AoE grinding, but simple questing that Prot leveled faster. In the end game, Tol Barad was just nasty as a Ret Pally - everything took ages to die, everything hit like a truck, because Ret was so badly designed that they had to redo the Mastery and Holy Power completely. It ended up good, but at the start it was awful.

Then there was Elemental, which got emergency number boosting because it did so little damage that it simply wasn't useful in raids at all. And Resto had terrible mana problems, not helped by its direct heals being too small so they had to be spammed LK-style. Some heroic 5-mans were unhealable by Resto Shamans even when everyone had heroic-level gear unless everyone played perfectly and you had a hybrid with off-healing help out.

Oh, and remember 'Captain Planet'? Remember doing him as melee? Or rather, being sat for him because you were melee? Because the fight was so well designed and took Melee Hate to new levels?

So no, from my I and many others' perspective MoP's start was not the worst in WoW's history. MoP didn't drag for me until well into the first raid tier, when I burned out on all those bloody dailies and reps. I was, for the first time since I started playing mid-BC, under-geared in Heart of Fear, Terrace, and early Throne of Thunder because I slacked off on the dailies. For me, MoP started strong, and then lagged, something WoD repeated (I thought it would suck, was pleasantly surprised to start, and then discovered it was simply lacking once you'd done levelling), as has BfA.

[DemonDays]

The game was already on a downward turn during Cataclysm and all the turbo nerds were like "lolpandas" and "lolchina". MoP also started quite rough but improved drastically as the expansion went on.

What's the point of this thread exactly?

The reason MoP is looked upon so fondly now is we just didn't know how bad it could possibly get.

Class Design destroyed after MoP. Reforging removed. Titan forging dialed up to 100. Point systems removed. Customization removed. RNG dialled up to 100.

[Kalisandra]

cloud serpent quests u can do without flying, i did them myself, started them while not able to fly

I didn't say you did, though it was definitely faster with flight so you could farm the eggs.

so no, i don't know any content that 'had' to have flying in MoP, except maybe the rare fire elemental mini pet battle thingy near the horde inn, but that's it

A bunch of the cooking dailies.

[WowIsDead64]

Wintergrasp was original no-flying at all times, and only later relaxed to allow flight outside of battles. That was in LK. Then in Cataclysm we had Tol Barad, and the dailies zone there was never made flyable. Likewise the Firelands daily zone was a no-fly zone, and still is. MoP was not the first expansion to do this - Cata was. MoP had a number of places you needed flight to get to, and embraced flight. Hell, it had a whole set of dailies around getting a cloud serpent mount. That said, I do think that the Isle of Thunder could've been designed to allow flight and been the better for it. Timeless Isle, on the other hand, was very well designed but somehow they've managed to not carry the good bits of TI forward, but only the bad bits.

MoP's awful rep grinds in the first tier were a terrible mistake. Having to grind rep with one faction just to open up others was just awful, and putting currency purchases behind rep gates was really dumb. However, it didn't have Cata's "Heroics will now be hard like early BC again, and like LK we expect you to gear via them." heroics, so numbers didn't really drop off until burnout started.

Yeah, there were no-flying zones. But they were optional and mostly PVP-related. I.e. it was actually right design. If you want PVP and don't want flying - here is dedicated no-flying zone for you. And "attempt to remove flying" - is attempt to COMPLETELY remove flying from game, i.e. design game around no flying at all. This was big shift in direction of development. From classic open world MMO towards some "instanced" Korean MMOs, like GW2, i.e. stealing many their features, like dynamic events aka WQs, jump-puzzles, vistas, scaling, CRZ, etc.

I.e. Wintergrasp and Tol-Barad - actually classic PVP zones, where dailies are used as bait to bring harmless PVEers to there for PVPers to have their ganking victims. Firelands... Yeah, but I was unsubbed during that moment anyway due to 0 content outside of way too hardcore raids. And MOP isles were first signs of turning whole world into one big TI on WOD.

And about reps. Yeah. At the end Blizzard have achieved their goal. We have 100500 times worse rep grinds now, so MOP rep grinds look like joke now. But at that time forced rep grinds were just terrible. After WotLK, where may be Hodyrs were mandatory, but had optional ways of rep grinding, including items from 5pps, everything else was optional and required just 3 easy dailies a day. After Cata, where all reps were mandatory, but it had rep tabards to obtain all reps via content, you were doing anyway. Gating all meaningful rewards behind rep grinds was just terrible move, that caused dramatic burnout and unsubbing.

[A Chozo]

If milkshakes are so good, why can't I drink those nonstop without puking?

MoP is still WoW, and WoW is old. People can only play it so much.

[MasterHamster]

8 years and 4 expansions after the original game release, you don't measure success or quality by increase in subs, but rather retention.

Let's see what we can "judge" from that graph that never ceases to produce dumb arguments.

BC was crap because it couldn't keep vanillas sub increases rolling
WotLK was awful because subs flatlined, it couldn't bring in more people than were leaving
Cataclysm was absolute trash because it actually lost subs in absolute numbers
MoP was awful because what I said above
WoD was garbage because it's main marketing was "no pandas", gained a lot of returners and then lost everyone again.


Please stop using this graph, it says very little about actual quality of the content itself.

[God Save The King]

While it's tempting to just look at the total subscriber numbers and blindly say that the game was the best at high numbers and the worst at low, that's not really how it works.

No one knows the exact number, but we know that before LFR very few people raided and a small minority of people who ever tried WoW reached max level. What would actually be interesting to see is the proportional retention rate for accounts with max level characters over each expansion. An expansion where 30% of max level players quit would be better than one where only 20% quit.

Using TBC as an example, it's totally possible that, say, over the expansion 10 million people tried the game, 7 million quit. That would be make TBC worse than say, Mists, who maybe had 1 million people try the game and only 3.5 million quit. If you make those proportional to the peak sub of the expansion, TBC would have lost 70% of its subscribers whereas Mists only lost 35%. It would be hard to argue that TBC was a better expansion when twice the number of players quit. (These are example numbers to illustrate the concept).

To more directly answer your question, there are lots of possible answers. One, the one I tend to believe and favor, is that the game was aging and begun to approach the maximum number of people who would ever try the game. Furthermore, as accounts and players matured, the number of people leveling and enjoying the "base" game was rapidly shrinking. WoW is quite different at max level and I am sure quite a few people quit once they realize they need to group and join a guild and follow a schedule to play (this is lessened overtime however). The equation flipped and the number of new people trying the game had finally fallen below the number of people quitting the game.

This is basically true for any new product. A large surge of initial consumers, a peak, and then a slow decline. That peak is basically when the highest number of people are interested in trying the product at once. So you could say that the "hype" for WoW in the marketplace peaked during WotLK and begun to decline. Subscription numbers wouldn't reflect the actual quality of the product though. That number is going to be really determined by retention rates of new and old players (numbers we do not have).

Another aspect is that MoP is considered good by current players only. People who quit the game generally do not continue to follow it and would not voice their opinions on the subject. People who currently play would generally have a positive opinion of all the expansions, or else they would have quit. There would be a subset who returned, but that will always be a much smaller chunk than the people who quit the game during MoP.

It's a complicated question and we do not have a lot of necessary data to draw the meaningful conclusions. I've excluded a lot of nuance and further considerations that muddy the waters, but this post is already getting long enough. Suffice to say, if you want to be honest about the situation, you cannot really draw much meaningful information from the subscription counts at the time.

[glycerethe]

Look at Cata, that's the first drop, that's the one you should be looking at. Cata actually had no increase in players even when/after launch, MoP had 2 periods with increase.

[Keyblader]

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.

I forgot about the lag, and server issues, I remember the launch, and me and my younger brother staying at my Grandma's for launch day, and not being able to get past queue, and taking naps on the floor, and having to wake up and check if we got in lol.

[glycerethe]

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.

I have to point out 1 thing, pvp as Horde sucked a bit, as the arena queue masters are 'further' and you have to basically suffer when you fly over Alliance queue area.

[Revamp Man]

Daily burn out which wasn’t fixed until 5.2 or so

People actually pissy about pandas but they were spergs

No patch dungeons

Lfr (not the problem you expect but ppl were actually pissed about drop rate)

Legendary cloak grind required pvp

Half the patches gave nothing in terms of long term content

Professions heavily gated by daily cd and stuff you couldn’t sell

CM being retardedly tuned

The farmers