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

[marcinek]

This topic is just a next joke, mop wasnt good. Mop begin era useless stuff like pets etc and next wod and now bfa. Wow just slowly dying after cata

[Dakara]

Because the game was already in decline after OMG Illidan! and OMG Lich King!

[Tyrannica]

Thats... pretty solid logic.

Tho blizzard should make carrots non gear because every gear sooner or later will become a garbage.

But, tbh, BfA is just about RNG the carrot is a RNG and maybe you win the lottery or not, in that regard corruption gear is even worser than titanforging.

Makes me wonder why devs did not add something like wakening essences for corruption effects, that you could get by purging unwanted ones or scrapping the gear.

At least legion tried to keep the RNG in check with its last content patch, BfA did not even try.

[Sansnom]

Why do you think they stopped tracking at that point in WoD? What do you think happened during Legion and BfA? And, most importantly, if the number of sustained subscribers went up to MoP levels or higher, what do you think Blizzard would do?

Why should you even care? Why should I care?

The health of the game? Why should you care if 100k, 500k, 1M, 5M, 1B, 5B are playing the game?

Why the obsession?

All I care about is whether the game is fun for me and worth my time and money. I do not care about how there are xxx numbers of player are playing or the yyy players that are no longer playing. I am not going to meet a fraction of them.

Just because so many people do or not play it means I should also follow suit? No. I can make my own decision and do not need to be a sheep and follow the crowd.

Take Real Madrid. They considered the best football team and has probably biggest world following. Should I also support them? No. I frankly hate that team.

[Elias01]

Why should you even care? Why should I care?

The health of the game? Why should you care if 100k, 500k, 1M, 5M, 1B, 5B are playing the game?

Why the obsession?

All I care about is whether the game is fun for me and worth my time and money. I do not care about how there are xxx numbers of player are playing or the yyy players that are no longer playing. I am not going to meet a fraction of them.

Just because so many people do or not play it means I should also follow suit? No. I can make my own decision and do not need to be a sheep and follow the crowd.

Take Real Madrid. They considered the best football team and has probably biggest world following. Should I also support them? No. I frankly hate that team.

Becouse it affects quality of game? It same nonsense when people say that if people buy store mounts it doesnt affect them at all. Fact is if enough people buy store mounts Blizz can afford to cut content (cut content = saved money on develompent) and even if people will quit game their income is actualy higher becouse they sold mount and save tons of money on development. So yes. Other players and active subs actualy have impact on your fun.

Thats how productivity work. You create more products for same amounth of money. Or you create same amounth of products for less money. In this Blizz wins by createing less content for more money thanks to store mounts.

[ati87]

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.

Even if a day old I just had to respond to this.
You are literally describing every god dam expansion and including the original release of WoW.

There is no bloody reason why WoW population dropped other than the age of the game, 15 plus years is a long time for a game that is still running strong by any standard.

I can only imagine a single developers that doesn't envy Blizzard and that would be Rockstar.

[munkeyinorbit]

Because most people saw pandas and checked out before giving it a shot.

MoP had some of the best class balance and playstyle in the history of the game. The raids well all good to excellent.

Honestly the only negative aspect was 5.3.

What about the daily system? What about the rep system? Just these two destroyed the game for millions. They were 'fixed' in a later patch but by then it was too late.

5.3 saved the game. We had Valor points, the isle, flex raiding and desirable heirloom. All of these things have been lauded by the majority of players.

[Kithelle]

The popularity of Kung Fu Panda certainly helped influence Blizzard into doing a panda expansion. Personally I hate it because it didn't fit with the WoW world of the time and there's no real basis for them other than Chen. Who didn't really fit in WC3 either.

Imo clearly an attempt to win favour in China, who we know Blizz will bend over backwards for.

If you or anyone else want to hate it you're free to hate it...like I said the thing that really bothered me was how sooo many people parroted it was a ripoff when Chen was in WC3. Memes can be annoying enough when people use them over and over and over...but it can be really annoying when the meme is wrong and used by ignorant people who can't be bothered to spend a whole minute on google.

[Jastall]

over every other dps class you mean.

because if your tank wasn't first on dps, he wasn't playing properly.

Also he should be first on hps.

Ah, sweet old Vengeance. May we never see your like again.

[cordrann]

As someone who was playing a tank at time I really enjoyed the raiding in MoP. The last fight in MSV is one of my favorites.

[Oakshana]

People need to stop stating their opinions arrogantly like it's gospel. Just because YOU didn't like MoP or Pandas doesn't mean it was garbage. And just because you loved it didn't make it amazing. Everyones thoughts on it are subjective and just as there are both good and bad things about MoP, there are people being assholes on both sides of the opinion.

Learn to state your thoughts as opinion, not as if what you feel is accurate to everyone.

As for the OPs question, it didn't fail, it was well received for the most part. My feeling is that it had a mostly decent story, the leveling had good replayability, it had decent raids with good boss encounters. I cannot comment to the PVP aspect, because I had mostly quit PVP at that time. The slight decline, and it WAS a slight decline was a result of too many burned out from Cata (which was not a high point in expansions for many) and I think that the Panda theme made it hard to bring new people in at the time. But overall, it seems like most that played it enjoyed it, and many returned for it.

But, according to my own rules above, thats my two cents YMMV.

[Socialhealer]

Ah, sweet old Vengeance. May we never see your like again.

We basically did in Legion in world pvp, you dare challenge a geared prot warrior? your funeral hope you enjoy the damage of a dps, with the control of a tank the survival of a tank + healer and oh shit nvm i died already the warrior is actually above 100% health now with ignore pain.

[Sansnom]

Becouse it affects quality of game?

That is rather subjective.

It same nonsense when people say that if people buy store mounts it doesnt affect them at all. Fact is if enough people buy store mounts Blizz can afford to cut content (cut content = saved money on develompent)

Fact? Really?

and even if people will quit game their income is actualy higher becouse they sold mount and save tons of money on development. So yes. Other players and active subs actualy have impact on your fun.

You know or are you speculating?

Thats how productivity work. You create more products for same amounth of money. Or you create same amounth of products for less money. In this Blizz wins by createing less content for more money thanks to store mounts.

You either know, which means you know people inside, or you are just speculating.

I have no ideas how Blizzard works. I have no idea how they arrange their teams. I have no idea if they are diverting people from WoW to create store mounts. But you do, I presume.

Have they created less content? How do we measure this content thing? Number of quests? Dungeons? Raids? Have any of these been reduced by a significant amount compared to past expansions?

Again I have no idea because I do not count these things. Do you?

[kaminaris]

But, tbh, BfA is just about RNG the carrot is a RNG and maybe you win the lottery or not, in that regard corruption gear is even worser than titanforging.

Makes me wonder why devs did not add something like wakening essences for corruption effects, that you could get by purging unwanted ones or scrapping the gear.

At least legion tried to keep the RNG in check with its last content patch, BfA did not even try.

Nothing ever beats legiondaries in terms of garbage RNG.
They didn't add waking essences because you get showered by corrupted gear right and left. It's not like legiondary system where if you got shit leggo, you wouldn't see next one after a month or two.

And I never considered gear as a reward. Permanent rewards are mounts/titles/pets/transmogs. Gear is gonna be sold next patch.

[Jastall]

We basically did in Legion in world pvp, you dare challenge a geared prot warrior? your funeral hope you enjoy the damage of a dps, with the control of a tank the survival of a tank + healer and oh shit nvm i died already the warrior is actually above 100% health now with ignore pain.

True that. I also enjoyed gibbing the hell out of people with my Draught of Souls. Rest in peace, trinket that I both loved and detested.

Still, at least world PvP is meant to be an unbalanced mess. Seeing prot warriors/pallies/monks top every chart because of that insanely stupid mechanic was kind of funny, but mostly sad. It's one of the biggest reason I can't take the whole "Mists had the best class design ever!!' shtick seriously even if I like the xpack a lot.

[Socialhealer]

True that. I also enjoyed gibbing the hell out of people with my Draught of Souls. Rest in peace, trinket that I both loved and detested.

Still, at least world PvP is meant to be an unbalanced mess. Seeing prot warriors/pallies/monks top every chart because of that insanely stupid mechanic was kind of funny, but mostly sad. It's one of the biggest reason I can't take the whole "Mists had the best class design ever!!' shtick seriously even if I like the xpack a lot.

Oh class design was great, vengeance was dumb, be they could've just continued with specs working as they did in MoP and remove veng, instead as elemental i basically lost every cooldown i had, hell even if i talented into ascendance it now put me along side the holy pala bursting instead of fucking #1 dps on the meter in a 25man raid. i'd put up with vengeance again if it meant my spec was actually fun and mobile, now trying to AoE as elemental feels like police asking a blind person, so do you know what the suspect looked like? can you describe him to me? no sorry officer chain lightning does zero damage and no the mobs aren't standing still all fight in earthquake like nice little mobs and if they did virtually every other spec does better aoe anyway.

[Jastall]

Oh class design was great, vengeance was dumb, be they could've just continued with specs working as they did in MoP and remove veng, instead as elemental i basically lost every cooldown i had, hell even if i talented into ascendance it now put me along side the holy pala bursting instead of fucking #1 dps on the meter in a 25man raid. i'd put up with vengeance again if it meant my spec was actually fun and mobile, now trying to AoE as elemental feels like police asking a blind person, so do you know what the suspect looked like? can you describe him to me? no sorry officer chain lightning does zero damage and no the mobs aren't standing still all fight in earthquake like nice little mobs and if they did virtually every other spec does better aoe anyway.

I mean if it's about DPS, Ele was great from BDA to EP. But yeah, I do think the disparity in AoE damage is a concern.

[Kallisto]

Why do you think they stopped tracking at that point in WoD? What do you think happened during Legion and BfA? And, most importantly, if the number of sustained subscribers went up to MoP levels or higher, what do you think Blizzard would do?

Answers (in order):
- Subscriptions plummeted dramatically after WoD launch, and continued to drop after the last report.
- Legion almost certainly did better than WoD, but possibly not as well as MoP even. BfA numbers have plummeted to at least WoD levels, if not lower.
- Blizz would be reporting numbers like they used to, and talking about them constantly.

Here is why MoP is considered good from this chart (focused solely on this chart since this is what the OP wants to point to):
- Vanilla was solid growth - Excellent
- BC was solid growth - Excellent
- Wrath was steady state - Good to Excellent
- Cata was a significant drop - Good to Average
- MoP was a consistent drop compared to Cata - Good (at least they didn't accelerate the losses)
- WoD dropped like a rock - Bad
- Legion possibly gained some back - Good to Average
- BfA dropped like a rock - Bad

If this conspiracy is true why did they stop reporting when the WoD sub numbers levelled or do we ignore that part to keep our fantasies alive?

[Nathreim]

What about the daily system? What about the rep system? Just these two destroyed the game for millions. They were 'fixed' in a later patch but by then it was too late.

5.3 saved the game. We had Valor points, the isle, flex raiding and desirable heirloom. All of these things have been lauded by the majority of players.

The Daily system was no different than any other expansion before it you cant honestly blame MoP for the same system that had been in the game since BC.

[Depakote]

The sad thing was, you could do no more than 5 dailies each day and stay totally caught up ... there was never any need to knock out every single daily every single day.

That's a lie.