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

[Eazy]

I didn't play at the beginning of MoP because the idea of pandas were just too much for me.

[Donald Hellscream]

The launch was fucking awful (almost as bad as WoD which still takes the cake for worst launch), the daily grind in early MOP was insane.. People bitch about time and rep gating in BFA, MOP was infinitely worse early on with reps being gated behind other reps, the amount of daily trivial tasks to do (dailies) probably broke many people.
It got better in later patches but 5.0 was rough.

And of course there probably were a few who thought it wasn't grimdark enough for their Warcraft.

[cparle87]

This is true. The game had a very edgy, dark theme until the point of MoP. Illidan and Arthas are both the kings of edge. Deathwing was metal af. Pandaria was very light-hearted at the start, faction war or not. This was a turn off for a lot of people, even before they even gave it a shot. Also, the dailies were really bad at the start.

MoP is my personal favorite expansion, and I went into it kind of skeptical. The raids were stellar, Throne of Thunder being my favorite raid of all time, and Lei Shen being my favorite end boss in a raid of all time. The Monk class was super fun. The story was actually very good as well. I had a blast on the timeless isle. It was also the end of 10 man difficult content, which was my favorite style of raiding.

Yeah, the demonic monsters that fed on your emotions and turned you into raging lunatics, paranoid maniacs, or depressed husks who just laid down and died; monster swarms of insects that slaughtered hundreds like clockwork every generation; entire species enslaved and put to labor to death; all backed up by the manipulations of a dead Old God. Totally rainbows and butterflies.

[LedZeppelin]

mop being good is furry propaganda

[oplawlz]

Yeah, the demonic monsters that fed on your emotions and turned you into raging lunatics, paranoid maniacs, or depressed husks who just laid down and died; monster swarms of insects that slaughtered hundreds like clockwork every generation; entire species enslaved and put to labor to death; all backed up by the manipulations of a dead Old God. Totally rainbows and butterflies.

When they're presented like villains from Jackie Chan adventures? Yeah, roughly as threatening as butterflies.

[shise]

Looks to me like you don´t know how to read a graphic. It tells you that people actually played MoP

First of all, check wow peak around WotLK. Before it, the trend is up, afterwards, the trend is down, right? OK, next:

Check every expansion except MoP, positive and negative trend. You can see how each has a solid trend quarter by quarter. Specially on the negative ones, you can see how the launch is a classic rise of interest, followed by continuous decline. Next and last:

Check MoP. It is in the middle of that negative trend part of the graphic. However, the quarters are not continuous at all. It starts with the classic rise, then it goes down, but before half way in, the trend becomes neutral and then it goes positive. Then it starts declining (slowly, much slower than on the surrounding Expansions), it goes down just as the expansion ends and there is not much more to do, but then a lot of people come back in the last patch, WoD pre-patch (still counts as MoP).

[Drusin]

To me mop was the best wow had been since I started playing in cata, I still think its the best expansion to date.

I always say mop class design was the best but as far as overall expansion I dunno. I'd have to sit and really think about each xpac's flow and features. MoP was really good though, besides bringing about gear *forging it did have one of my favorite gear progression systems with 0/2 and later 0/4 valor upgrades. I remember hating dailies at the start but I don't remember exactly what was wrong with them but they fixed that within the first month if memory serves me correct. Professions were still normal. MoP also brought one of my favorite rep systems with account wide double rep once you hit REVERED with a faction AND targeted rep bonus for doing random dungeons via ticking a star in your rep UI window. MoP was a really solid xpac and is probably a contender for best xpac based on how good all the systems were on top of stellar class design.

[wrynil]

Because a lot of people didnt give it a chance. Also it was right at the time where trolling and hating on the internet became a real thing.

[Kallisto]

Just like Mario, right? People sure got tired of jumping on those goombas after 30 years
The failures of wow are on development decisions and nothing else.

If you think the numbers of people playing Super Mario bros today is anywhere near as large as those playing it in the 80s I have a bridge to sell you. Outside of speed runners and those trying to push for "Let's make the most rage inducing level ever." the world moved on.

[Kalisandra]

Yeah, the demonic monsters that fed on your emotions and turned you into raging lunatics, paranoid maniacs, or depressed husks who just laid down and died; monster swarms of insects that slaughtered hundreds like clockwork every generation; entire species enslaved and put to labor to death; all backed up by the manipulations of a dead Old God. Totally rainbows and butterflies.

You have to pay attention to get that though. Not much attention, but too much for some, apparently.

Deeper under that, there was the way the leader of the Shado Pan's xenophobia and unwillingness to admit that any blame could be attached to Pandaria's natives made things worse. And the Pandaren's unspoken but clear assumption of their cultural superiority, and their paternalistic attitude towards other races on Pandaria. It was all quite interesting, if you paid attention.

[Relapses]

Wow, so you are saying that declines happen when the input is smaller than the output? Such a revolutionairy statement. You must be a legendary sage or something.

And yes, quality of a product has nothing to with attracting new people to use that product or causing previous users of that product to stop using that product. Who would even think something so insane?

Ridiculous sarcasm aside, churn is extremely relevant to this conversation and nobody on this forum seems to be particularly interested in discussing it. Mainly because people just want to make insipid useless, reductive observations like "LOL Pandas" and not actually fucking ~think~ about WoW's business model. It's a subscription model so it relies just as much on people joining the game as it does people leaving. But given that this is the internet, people only seem to be interested in the reasons they quit instead of the reasons people either stayed or decided to come back to play. And when you talk about the motives of people who pay for a subscription service, the quality of the game becomes massively less valuable in the grand scheme of things. (Despite what this forum will tell you, the LFG and the LFR are not the reason people quit the game.) Players incorrectly trend declines in subscriber levels with things they don't like and this thread is full of vapid surface level rebukes of MoP which have absolutely fuck all to do with the actual reason sub levels declined. (MMOs over the last decade have become less popular and there are fewer new players to replace the ones the game lost.)

[schwank05]

A game can have great gameplay and still be a shitty experience overall look at Anthem it had some of the best gameplay of any game in the last 5 years, but was regarded as a complete failure by most.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

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.

Absolute heresy.

Cata easily had the best 5mans ever designed in WoW, and Cata and MoP are undeniably the heights of WoW classdesign. Cata launch and t11 progress was one of the absolute high points of WoW.

[Khaza-R]

It depends of you see wow as a singular product or each expansion as a singular product.

If you look at each expansion as a product what you see in that graph is simply small uptake and shorter cycles from growth into decline. Each expansion release saw some growth in subs it's just pre cata the next expansion was out befor any decline could happen, vanilla, tbc, wotlk would hae declined eventualy of held in a perpetual state, but for some reason or likely a bunch of reasons post cata wow just didn't have the same levels of player retention.

There are definatly 4 phase's of wow Design. There the pre wotlk Design, the cata/mop design, the short lived wod design and the legion+ design. Each is really distinct enough to be seen speratly.

I mean, not really. An expansion isn't a new product. In business its considered a product extension. Fundamentally so with expansions because they build on the existing asset of the original and aren't stand alone games. So all they do it cause a temporary uptick in the game's popularity.

As for the rest of your post, I'm sorry but I think you're just seeing what you want to see.

[Onikaroshi]

The launch was fucking awful (almost as bad as WoD which still takes the cake for worst launch), the daily grind in early MOP was insane.. People bitch about time and rep gating in BFA, MOP was infinitely worse early on with reps being gated behind other reps, the amount of daily trivial tasks to do (dailies) probably broke many people.
It got better in later patches but 5.0 was rough.

And of course there probably were a few who thought it wasn't grimdark enough for their Warcraft.

I keep hearing the launch was bad, but I was on a full server and had zero issues /shrug I know alliance had a stupid bottleneck.

[Relapses]

As for the rest of your post, I'm sorry but I think you're just seeing what you want to see.

That's the fundamental issue I have with the graph and any discussion that comes from it. Players have absolutely no fucking idea why people actually quit the game and love to live in pretend worlds where if Blizzard had never changed anything from WotLK onward that WoW would have remained in a state of perpetual growth and the game would have 200 million subscribers today. It's an absolutely ludicrous thought process and I cannot for the life of me understand why so many people are so eager to accept the idea that the game was "worse" so it lost subscribers. Players have always quit WoW. Players quit WoW when it was in periods of growth. The only thing that changed from WotLK thru this expansion is that gaming, in general, moved away from MMOs. That's the only conclusive factual statement you can draw from the graph yet all anybody ever wants to talk about is "LOL Pandas" and other pointless surface level issues the expansion had.

[fathom81]

I keep hearing the launch was bad, but I was on a full server and had zero issues /shrug I know alliance had a stupid bottleneck.

Alliance where flying without buttons and no flight control, so spinning aimlessly around horde camp, but, a lot better then first Garrison days in WoD.

[cparle87]

You have to pay attention to get that though. Not much attention, but too much for some, apparently.

Deeper under that, there was the way the leader of the Shado Pan's xenophobia and unwillingness to admit that any blame could be attached to Pandaria's natives made things worse. And the Pandaren's unspoken but clear assumption of their cultural superiority, and their paternalistic attitude towards other races on Pandaria. It was all quite interesting, if you paid attention.

Yup, that too. It's revealed later that Pride was the one sin that Shaohao couldn't give up, and that's what caused his people's isolation for 10,000 years.

[Kithelle]

This is so untrue. The current game resembles the old game in name and premise only. Every single aspect other than the core loop of "hit mob, get gear" has changed beyond recognition. Why do you think Classic is a thing?

- - - Updated - - -



Pandaren were a joke like the cow level in Diablo. Making an entire expansion about them was therefore viewed as a joke by many

Well you're free to think what you want, fact of the matter is there were a lot of people calling it a Kung Fu Panda ripoff when Pandaren did exist well before that movie. They even did artwork of Pandaren before that movie came to be.

[OokOok]

TBC was clearly the most successful expansion, it grew in numbers the entire time. WOTLK kept it steady which just means it was good enough to keep everyone playing but not good enough to attract mass interest of new players,
WOD is the funniest shit ever, 3 million players get excited to for an expansion going back in time to fight the original Orc leaders on Dreanor -> Blizzard butchers an amazing potential story/content -> 3 million players quit.

Cata/MOP had ups and downs, I don't agree with all of it's hate. Cata had Firelands one of the best Raids ever released, Arena/pvp was in a decent place. But it also had the worst final tier raid ever made(imo) and butchered the Deathwing lore.
MOP had ToT which is also one of the best raids ever made(Ra-den was a failure), Once again PVP/Arena was in a pretty decent place. Siege of Org was actually a good raid too.

I think the issue is that these 2 expansions suffered from 1 year final raids, Timeless isle was a terrible design, Vashjir was also a terrible zone.