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

[BeepBoo]

Then why did you play in the first place? There were plenty of Eastern themes in WoW before there was ever MoP.

Apparently no such thing as degrees or magnitude in your world. I hate orange, but a shirt with a few orange details on it can still look awesome and appealing to me. What you're engaging in is a false dichotomy, proposing I either have to like eastern stuff in whole, or not at all. The reality is I can like it in any amount I want. I can't tell you my exact limits for "wow being too eastern for my taste" but I CAN tell you MoP definitely hit it.

[melodramocracy]

The only two big drops in MoP were after the initial release and during the year-long drought pre-WoD. Compare to both Cata and Wod curves and you’ll see MoP had a lot of staying power. It even stopped Cata’s declining curve.

MoP was a net loss of a few million players over Cata's lowest point. (mid 2012 vs mid 2014). Any gains it made over Cata's lowest point were gone within the 4-6 months of release.

- - - Updated - - -

Imagine unsubbing cause of pandarens when we have spacecows and regular cowpeople in-game as well as cute gnomes.

Imagine reading this thread that points out flaws in MoP, and then trotting out this tired meme.

[Doffen]

ToT and SoO are two of my top 5 raids, it's weird when people call them bad lol.

ToT was decent, SoO... meh for me! :>

[TJ]

The Asian culture and Pandas were enough for me not to play, I really didn't like the focus/theme of the expansion. I did play at the end, though, to clear SoO. It wasn't bad, tbh, but not as good as Wrath/Cata.

[Onikaroshi]

ToT was decent, SoO... meh for me! :>

Granted, I loved TotC... I love the trashless experience of it. So my idea of good raid is probably far from most.

[Shiza]

It wasn't popular, it is just fondly remembered for its version of titanforging and its class design. Otherwise the questing zones where kinda good but nothing special, the open world content was all daily grinds and the raids where pretty okay.

[melodramocracy]

It wasn't popular, it is just fondly remembered for its version of titanforging and its class design.

Which is funny, because its class design was another notch in the downward spiral that started in Cata.

Of the few things I fondly recall of MoP, class design isn't one of them.

[Drusin]

At teh start of mop dailies were shit, people deuced.

[melodramocracy]

Granted, I loved TotC... I love the trashless experience of it. So my idea of good raid is probably far from most.

People complained loudly about how terrible trash was to deal with in raids, and Blizz answered with ToC. *shrug*

I have fond memories of pugging ToC, and watching folks flip out when mechanics were failed. Lots and lots of laughs, to be honest... seeing how many hunters didn't have tranq shot on their bars

[Gaidax]

MoP was great, but that insanely long SoO dry patch on top of releasing with like no content whatsoever same patch really hurt it.

[Drusin]

Im just pointing out hypocrisy, I dont think you know what meme means.

From what I recall

1. Pandas didn't exist in wow (just repeating what I've heard, I'm no lore nerd and don't care what exists or not)
2. Pandas are cute and friendly, Space Goats and Taurens are not

[dmitriy138]

I didn't play it because panda shit. I came back at the end to try it and I feel like I have missed out especially with the throne of thunder raid.

[Drusin]

MoP was great, but that insanely long SoO dry patch on top of releasing with like no content whatsoever same patch really hurt it.

This was my favorite thing I got so much done clearing SoO in one night and having nothing else to do.

I. Fucking. Loved. It.

[Knaar]

From what I recall

1. Pandas didn't exist in wow (just repeating what I've heard, I'm no lore nerd and don't care what exists or not)
2. Pandas are cute and friendly, Space Goats and Taurens are not

In World of warcraft they were new, yes.
But in Warcraft, we knew they existed since Chan (i think? whatever his name is) was in Warcraft 3

[sam86]

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

i honestly don't remember have no fly cripple me in anyway in MoP, since i started on new server and couldn't fly for a while, specially since i - stupidly - thought that i need epic flying first (or did unlock flying did need epic flying? don't know)

[Drusin]

People complained loudly about how terrible trash was to deal with in raids, and Blizz answered with ToC. *shrug*

I loved ToC because it had no trash <3 It'll always have a spot on my best raids list just because of that.

[BBellew]

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.

Very much this. WoW's subs graph is pretty typical of most product sales over a long period of time. Every expansion since WotLK could have been top-tier quality and the sub drops would likely have still happened, although possibly lessened. Here's a look at iPad sales over time that's pretty similar to WoW's subs.



Not everything follows this trend, but most products look similar. Newness wears off, enthusiasm fades, and sales drop. As pointed out above, as players were cancelling over the first half decade, enough new people were interested in trying it out to keep increasing subs or at least cause them to plateau. At a certain point that stopped. It would be far more interesting to see Blizzard's data on how many millions were cancelling during any given quarter, not total number of subs. Subs are only part of the story.

Additionally, WoW was old news after 6-7 years and people had a lot more options with not only MMOs, but other genres of games that were beginning to transition to the "service" model that encouraged logging in to play over not just months, but years.

It's incredibly rare to see any product maintaining sales or users at their peak and not drop off.

[sam86]

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.

i didn't play Cata for real, was too busy irl
while i stayed subbed for i think 3 months, but my play schedule was so chaotic that i played far more BFA in 1 month than entire Cata session
Also cata max lvl is 85 not 90, at least i remember that since it pissed me off the start of '5 lvls' idea, now blizz will squish lvls heh

[Video Games]

Mop started staggered release raids after launch for the first tiers, warforging, pet battles and welfare legendaries. I will always think its bad

[Drusin]

pet battles

While I don't like pet battles, as a collector I do enjoy anything that I can collect