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

[Lolites]

At one point in woltk, there was 100m account created, yet only 12m active, if vanila/tbc/wotlk were so great, how come 88 MILIONS people left during that time?

[Vargur]

Well, subscriber number means everything and while I enjoyed ToT, the rest of the expansion was childish and they still haven't implemented shortcuts in SoO, not to mention the fact that they still haven't removed pandas yet.
They're stupid and I hope they go extinct.

[Dapower]

It was great in gameplay, it a had a rich philosophical groundbase to the story on which I wrote a few essays in my university, plus it had a whole new style of art in wow. If wasnt the same copied environnement we see now as new designs. What you want to point out, it actually has to do with the saturation of market, MMO's were less important or on heat, we had DOTA2 and MoBA games, new consoles new gaming platforms new events etc...

[Evolixe]

MoP was bad, very very bad. Draenor was good.

I wholeheartedly agree

[Pheraz]

Because It wasn't

Exactly.
I think what mostly happens is that the art and level design is what people remember.
WoD had the horrible orc and time travel theme that everybody hates so this will probably never change.

You forget about patches, you forget about bugs but the level design and the artwork is mostly immortal in thought.
It's not like legion hadn't it's strange times.

Also... All people on the forums != All people playing wow

My personal experience was that there were two big waves of people leaving this game. One was in wotlk and the other one was in mop.

[qwe]

I remember that:
- panda theme,
- pruned talent trees,
- merged realms,
- pet battles,
- backstab/ambush hitting the same at 90 compared to 85 were the biggest reason of my dislike for mop and eventual quit after some time.

[Doffen]

My thought is that makes no sense. Everybody who likes Justin Bieber also likes shitty games? What? Do they also wear shitty clothes, eat shitty food and drive shitty cars? Live in shitty houses and watch shitty movies? Have a shitty character and vote shitty politicians.

Really? We only get shit games because of ppl who listen to Justin Bieber?

Yeah, cause thats exactly what I mean... I mean that young people are the future of gaming and that's most of his fans are. I didn't believe I had to explain it but I did.

Just to explain further because it seems I have to, people that like Justin Bieber might have different taste in games than you, or me, or the one I quoted who really don't think Justin Bieber is a good artist.

Point was, opinions are opinions.

[Mendzia]

Because It wasn't

That is good explanation.

[Mightytasty]

MoP was the original iteration of the pick 3 talent system, and it was awful. Instead of the current design of “choose between AoE ability, cleave ability, or ST passive”, the MoP talent trees stupidly gave players 3 AoE abilities in the same tier and players would pick the best one.

MoP dailies at launch were a disaster. I remember this being the #1 complaint on the forums, even more so than the “panda theme”.

Power creep throughout the expansion was insane. Trinkets were fucking nuts, I remember the Lei Shen trinket for example gave you 100% crit chance proc for 4 seconds. On top of that add raid wide damage abilities like war banner and storm lash totem, legendary cape procs, crazy powerful class cooldowns (who remembers MoP Ascendance?). By the end of the expansion they had to give Garrosh 3 health bars because the game engine couldn’t count to that high of an integer.

The Isle of Thunder & ToT was the best part of the expansion, but was sandwiched in between tier 14 raids (which were fairly weak) and Siege of Orgrimmar which lasted 14 months IIRC.

[Orwell7]

1; Warcraft 3 was in a really good place in it's time. No other game had this "core" fantasy attached to it. It had everything, demons, undead, dark areas, fun-bright areas.

2; And there was The Lord Of The Rings. Remember those went along nicely with Warcraft? If someone loved the movie, but wanted MORE of it? Warcraft.
No competition at all. 2002-2003-2004 were the 3 movies, then came WoW in 2005.

3; It's shocking, but WoW in itself WAS NOT THAT GOOD! Everquest 2 fked it up with tremendous system requirements, it was laggy as hell on most PCs, and it was a "higher" fantasy, not the childish fantasy we all love at our kid's heart.

4; at that time, the internet started to grow. No other company had the funds / resources / developers to even CONSIDER making a real big MMO. WoW had a "headstart" by having Warcraft 3, and they just modified it's engine. Battle.net in itself... So it was a GENIOUS coincidence.

5; with BC and Wotlk, we had defeated the big evils: demons and undead. Every D&D player, every LOTR fan, everyone who grew up with Dragonlance or.. any other fantasy book just flocked to WoW. Then we emerged as the hero. We won. The fantasy is done. That's all, folks! Then you wake up and go to work, be with your family.
It was a big-big adventure, but it was DONE. Finished.

Blizzard "fucked up" by giving us those big wins too early? Could be.

This phenomenon just couldn't be done again. It was sooo much "all the stars align" it's hideous to think about. If I were religious, I would say that only God himself could have created all those things to work together.

[Tomana]

14 months of siege of Orgrimmar didn't help.
Also, the initial daily quest bonanza was a bit overboard.

[Sliske]

A few reasons:

1. The same reason Cataclysm had a huge drop off at the start - the complete abandoning of casuals. Think about the entirety of WoTLK and what do you think? Casual gameplay. Now think about the start of Cataclysm. Exactly. They couldn't raid, heroics were harder than WoTLK raids and all of the inbetween was also insane. In MoP, you'd just come from Dragon Soul, a raid so easy you could pug it on Heroic (mythic) and clear it with ease. Now, in MoP, the raids are suddenly hard again, even in normal mode. Lots of people just tapped out.
2. Dailies. Many people were just tilted by how many dailies there were in MoP. The last time we had mandatory dailies was a long while before that. Maybe TBC.
3. A major feature of the expansion was Monk and Pandaren. Both of these, to this day, are the least played class by a wide margin and i believe the least played race, too. Imagine if in Legion, most people didnt like DH. Or in WoTLK, DKs.
4. Another major feature, pet battles, is something a very small amount of players do.
5. The new talent trees were divisive as fuck and a lot of people didn't like them at all.

So, the TL;DR:

Increased difficulty, increased time commitment, decreased the fun most people had with their classes, 3 of the selling points being failures in the eyes of the playerbase.

The end of MoP however, specifically TOT onwards, was fantastic. Most classes felt great to play. Dailies weren't a thing. Raids had the WoTLK style where normal mode was a joke, but heroic was very, very hard.

[Raelbo]

If you understand the mechanisms of sub losses, then you'd understand that the population didn't drop much.

Any game is going to lose players over time, so you'd expect sub numbers to continually drop off as a decaying exponential. Counteracting sub losses though are sub gains - new people joining the game.

This means there are two forces at work: Forces that retain players and forces that attract new players. How good an expansion is tends to affect the former, not the latter. Unless you understand how both those forces are working, using sub numbers alone to assess the quality of the game is never going to yield an accurate result.

What your graph shows us is that around the end of WotLK the game started to lose its appeal to new players. I would argue that this is primarily due to age.

• WoW is a pretty old game, making it hard to compete with the shininess of newer titles
• By now most people who were likely to try WoW out have tried it out (100M+)
• Because WoW has been around for so long, it's very daunting for new players to get into the game because they have to catch up 15 years

None of this speaks at all to how good/bad MoP was as an expansion though. In much the same way, the growing sub numbers of TBC and peak during WotLK don't speak to how good/bad they were as expansions because you have no real way of assessing, just looking at that graph, how good the game was at retaining existing subs because you have no idea how much new subscriptions were affecting the graph.

What I will say is this: Blizzard have told us that over 100M people have played WoW. And I would argue that most of those were before the end of WotLK. Which means that WoW lost 90M players between Vanilla and WotLK. While I don't know for sure how many people have started playing WoW since the start of MoP, I would guess that number is pretty low - less than 10M. Which means that WoW's losses since MoP have actually been very small relative to its younger years.

In short, MoP was a very good expansion and if you think that the sub numbers say otherwise, that simply means you don't understand what the numbers actually indicate.

[kranur]

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.

That is the main reason why I stopped playing for like half of it. I dislike them and don't feel like they are a good fit in WoW, it is just too childlish. And almost everything was about them.

Unreasonable? Sure, linking or disliking something does not necessarily need a reason.

[Super Kami Dende]

Because insecure Adult Children cried about Kungfu Panda something something.

[Dhrizzle]

A now defunct website used to track loads of MMOs and most of them followed a pretty similar arc, though the subs (or MAUs as the kids like to say nowadays) tend to level off rather than hit zero.

[cocomen2]

MOP was perfect, just most edgy players pre-judged expansion by "OH MAI GAWD, there PANDA-KUNG-FU", and blizzard finished it with making them neutral instead of going for 2nd race for alliance or horde.

Edgy-Evil-Emo kids dont wonna play anything that "Neutral"(same goes for monk class) +bonus pandarens have worst racial skills in game, so even if i love beastmen bears - still gonna pick almost useless gnomes over 100% useless panda racials.



1) time panda racial was useful for me, jumped off-clif at Arathi, enemy paladin fallowed me and died.....

So sorry if someone love panda racial skill, its just my personal opinion.

[Craaazyyy]

While MoP was obviously much better than anything that came after it, it still was worse than anything that came before it as well, not by a lot, but it was

[Osmeric]

For the first two tiers they told the average players their end game was LFR.

[Pakheth]

Based on experience with my friends MoP didn't have as huge success due to the following:
- Cata burnout. Players were tired of DS and the general unfriendly gameplay of Cata and didn't want to go through it again which I completely understand.
- Other more "modern" MMO's appeared, like Wildstar and Blade and Soul. There was a lot to choose from.
- The theme. I have had friends who laughed at the theme, skipped the expac and later have come to regret that decision dearly when they realised what they had missed. Especially with WoD being so shite.
- The lack of a big motivating villain, which to be honest I can understand as I felt the same in the start.
- The dailies grind. Rep gating can go fuck itself. Biggest pain in the ass of MoP imo. But I still prefer MoP style dailies over BfA WQs. Cloud Serpent dailies were fun, the farm was fun, it was just pulled down by the Golden Lotus rep gating.
- And I know this thing might be controversial but as a guild leader I felt a change in the way we gained guild members after the introduction to LFR. People left guild after 1-2 wipes on PROGRESSION fights and were in general not interested in raiding anymore. They had after all "already seen the raid in LFR". Flex came too late to the game imo and it hurt the raiding scene and made people I knew quit/take breaks much faster than they would usually have. I blame Cata for it though more than MoP but it did hurt MoP sadly.

But even with that the sub numbers evened out and even rose in MoP which in itself is a huge achievement considering Cata and WoD did the exact opposite.