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  1. #41
    Quote Originally Posted by cparle87 View Post
    And Arthas showing up in every zone to threaten you for killing his dude, or to even kill his dude himself for failing to kill you wasn't Saturday morning cartoon-y?
    Not sure where I wrote anything about cartoon-y? I said memecraft, because everything in Cata was a reference to some popculture stuff. Also having a villain that actually interacts with you was at least something. It ticked some of the most primitive checkboxes of writing, even if it is only on the level of highschool fanfics and saturday morning cartoons (the later arguably being better written than most of the rubbish today..). Still leagues above the current way story is not-told.
    Last edited by Cosmic Janitor; 2022-01-25 at 02:50 AM.
    You are welcome, Metzen. I hope you won't fuck up my underground expansion idea.

  2. #42
    Quote Originally Posted by Felis igneus View Post
    Not sure where I wrote anything about cartoon-y? I said memecraft, because everything in Cata was a reference to some popculture stuff. Also having a villain that actually interacts with you was at least something. It ticked some of the most primitive checkboxes of writing, even if it is only on the level of highschool fanfics and saturday morning cartoons (the later arguably being better written than most of the rubbish today..). Still leagues above the current way story is not-told.
    Considering the amount of spite you seem to have for the game maybe a vacation from it is in order. After all, it's not like you'll miss out on a story that's not being told.

    Also if you only noticed the pop culture references in Cataclysm you missed a few. 90% of WoW from day one is pop culture. Everything from the names of leggos in Legion to the cheat codes in WC1. Yet despite being ubiquitous to the franchise as a whole it's only brought up when it can be used a negative as part of someone's agenda.

    https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Lis...es_in_Warcraft
    Last edited by cparle87; 2022-01-25 at 03:08 AM.
    The most difficult thing to do is accept that there is nothing wrong with things you don't like and accept that people can like things you don't.

  3. #43
    Quote Originally Posted by Ethule View Post
    Was Cataclysm the best expansion?
    hell no. It had some good things, sure, but it was pretty lackluster in terms of max level content (disjointed zones), and it took away our old world giving us instead an uninspired on-rails leveling experience.

  4. #44
    Quote Originally Posted by cparle87 View Post
    Considering the amount of spite you seem to have for the game maybe a vacation from it is in order. After all, it's not like you'll miss out on a story that's not being told.

    Also if you only noticed the pop culture references in Cataclysm you missed a few. 90% of WoW from day one is pop culture. Everything from the names of leggos in Legion to the cheat codes in WC1. Yet despite being ubiquitous to the franchise as a whole it's only brought up when it can be used a negative as part of someone's agenda.

    https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Lis...es_in_Warcraft
    That you use Legion as an example in a discussion about an expansion that predates it by over half a decade kinda shows your hand. We are done here.
    You are welcome, Metzen. I hope you won't fuck up my underground expansion idea.

  5. #45
    I loved it. It had a great time with my guild. It brought exactly the enemies I was hoping to see more of. It remade the world. It gave us flying. It gave us Goblins. Great stuff.

    It wasn't perfect. It had a cancelled raid. They made Deathwing into a monster rather than a villain. Cho'gall was a great villain in his stead, but got killed off immediately, which left the main plot kind of feeling detached from the player. Some will site not liking the detached zones either, but I was cool with that. The last raid was disappointing. Not because I minded it taking place in already known zone, that was fine. But because the bosses were lazy in design. Outside Deathwing, they didn't even get their own recolors. Just model reuse. Honestly I'm even still displeased that the whole "Age of Mortals" and "Dragons are infertile now" plotlines that followed from the raid, never really led to anything substantial plotwise.

    Still though, it wasn't as bad as people claimed at the time. After the cut short WoD and the terribly told plotline of BfA (outside of Saurfang cinematics), I'd call it far from the worst.

  6. #46
    I started playing at the end of Wrath and dinged 80 the night cata went live. So cata is pretty much my first really played expansion.
    I liked:
    • the heroic dungeons. They were really challenging and it felt accomplishing to beat them
    • the currency system
    • the raids. Although in retrospec I only really like Firelands. Alysrazor ftw!
    • Vashir. Best zone in the game.
    • old lfr. Queue with 4 guildies, roll need together on every item your new alts needed. MoP's way of distributing loot killed lfr for me.
    • being able to play alts without much time investment.
    • flying in all of the game


    I disliked:
    • Molten Front. Daily timegates were and still are a plague. I never finished it to this day. And that was fine, since it was optional!
    • the destruction of the world. Most zones were beautiful before (especially because I JUST leveled in them at the time) and now they are not. I miss old Loch Modan...
    • The raid and dungeon design. Invisible Walls everywhere. TBC and Vanilla raids felt like more than just a cave for bosses. Cata (and WotLK) raids were just that. Except Firelands, kinda.



    Was it the best expansion?
    Maybe. It was the only expansion I played from start to finish without breaks. Maybe it was a very noob friendly expansion. Although MoP is even better in that regard, I think.

  7. #47
    Quote Originally Posted by Ethule View Post
    Threads are not allowed to be personal opinion so I pose the question to you all... Was Cataclysm the best expansion?

    I believe it was BUT THATS JUST MY OPINION. So what do you think?
    Pros:
    1) Great leveling, one of the best
    2) Free access to flying
    3) Implementation of 3 casual heroics and LFR in 4.3 = actually great time, if it wouldn't have been way too late

    Cons:
    1) Attempt to return Vanilla's class mechanics while not nerfing difficulty accordingly = extremely overtuned 84-85 leveling, dungeons and raids = death of pugging
    2) First "Raid or die" xpack in Wow's history, i.e. no other endgame, than hardcore raiding
    3) Tol Barad/Molten Front - first claustrophobic no-flying forever locations since end of TBC, only "casual" content out of raids, that obviously wasn't working. I guess, nobody even remembers, that this content ever existed.
    4) First xpack, where Blizzard became "We know it better" stubborn and refused to listen to feedback for long periods of time

    Result:
    Loss of 2.5M players = xpack, where death of Wow started
    Last edited by WowIsDead64; 2022-01-25 at 08:02 AM.

    I don't care about Wow 11.0, if it's not solo-MMO. No half-measures - just perfect xpack.

  8. #48
    All you arguing over sub numbers need to do some research and educate yourselves. Blizzard literally reported sub numbers during those times.

    Wrath leveled off, with a peak right before Cata, and then a steady decline.

    https://www.mmo-champion.com/content...er-at-Blizzcon

    https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Wor...bers_chart.png

  9. #49
    Scarab Lord Boricha's Avatar
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    Definitely not. I considered it the worst when it came out, although there are certainly expansions I would rank lower now. It had good class design and pvp, Firelands was good, but other raids were mediocre and there was a general lack of good content. More personally, I didn't care for the leveling zones either, other than doing Vashjir for the first time.

  10. #50
    Quote Originally Posted by Skalm View Post
    All you arguing over sub numbers need to do some research and educate yourselves. Blizzard literally reported sub numbers during those times.

    Wrath leveled off, with a peak right before Cata, and then a steady decline.

    https://www.mmo-champion.com/content...er-at-Blizzcon

    https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Wor...bers_chart.png
    Except all of those numbers are meaningless because we don't know how many new players were generated, nor do we know how many players stopped playing.

  11. #51
    Quote Originally Posted by Relapses View Post
    Except all of those numbers are meaningless because we don't know how many new players were generated, nor do we know how many players stopped playing.
    What makes them meaningless? They are accurate valid reported metrics. Just because you dont have a by the minute sub count, it invalidates it? The net changes show that Wrath is where the average sub count stagnated and 'plateued', and then the average sub count declined starting in Cata. Numbers dont lie.

  12. #52
    Quote Originally Posted by Ethule View Post
    Threads are not allowed to be personal opinion so I pose the question to you all... Was Cataclysm the best expansion?

    I believe it was BUT THATS JUST MY OPINION. So what do you think?
    there were a lot of things i liked about cata,including 2 of my favorite spec iterations ever,many QOL changes,spell tooltips actualy gave you accurate info,the block mechanic turned from a meme to an actual core mitigation system

    but it had many issues,they completly droped the ball by making the new buffed heroics a random que after the baby training wheels that was wrath

    the revamp was divisive,some liked it some hated it

    they completly messed up raid tuning for 10 man,i dont even know if it was pure incompetence or bugs,likely both

    and ofc the ending was the weakest end of expansion raid ever by a huge margin

  13. #53
    Thankfully some extremely shitty expansions such as WOD, BFA and SL exist so it won't be known as the worst.

  14. #54
    I am Murloc! Maljinwo's Avatar
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    Loved cata, but it ain't close to being the best

    MoP all the way
    This world don't give us nothing. It be our lot to suffer... and our duty to fight back.

  15. #55
    Quote Originally Posted by Shockzalot View Post
    Thankfully some extremely shitty expansions such as WOD, BFA and SL exist so it won't be known as the worst.
    Ain't that the truth.

  16. #56
    Quote Originally Posted by Shockzalot View Post
    Thankfully some extremely shitty expansions such as WOD, BFA and SL exist so it won't be known as the worst.
    atleast wod/bfa had consistantly good raids with no major issues and felt complete even with the cuts to wod

    cataclysm not only had the weakest end of expansion raid in DS but the first patch they completly messed up 10 man tuning to comical levels

  17. #57
    Quote Originally Posted by Skalm View Post
    What makes them meaningless? They are accurate valid reported metrics. Just because you dont have a by the minute sub count, it invalidates it? The net changes show that Wrath is where the average sub count stagnated and 'plateued', and then the average sub count declined starting in Cata. Numbers dont lie.
    I'd strongly encourage you to read the words I wrote next time. You're looking at one single, static number without any context. WotLK could have had five times the attrition as Cata, but if the new players joining was just as high as the number people quitting, the number on the chart would stay the same. You don't need a minute-by-minute update to understand that this is incomplete data. More likely, however, is that WotLK represented market saturation for WoW and players quit at the same rate from WotLK through Cata. Cata just marks the last time that new player generation started to ebb which is why subscribers generally trended downwards from then onwards. We really don't know because Blizzard has never made any of their player retention data public. In fact, as stated by one of the few people who've seen that WoW's retention data and spoken openly about it, the reasons that people quit WoW very rarely have anything to do with the game (or the quality of the expansion). Unfortunately, this boring reality doesn't make for very interesting forum content where people link the subscriber graphs you did and pretend like they've decoded the human genome by stating "sub number go down, game obviously bad."
    Last edited by Relapses; 2022-01-25 at 04:31 AM.

  18. #58
    Quote Originally Posted by Relapses View Post
    I'd strongly encourage you to read the words I wrote next time. You're looking at one single, static number without any context. WotLK could have had five times the attrition as Cata, but if the new players joining was just as high as the number people quitting, the number on the chart would stay the same. You don't need a minute-by-minute update to understand that this is incomplete data. More likely, however, is that WotLK represented market saturation for WoW and players quit at the same rate from WotLK through Cata. Cata just marks the last time that new player generation started to ebb which is why subscribers generally trended downwards from then onwards. We really don't know because Blizzard has never made any of their player retention public. In fact, as stated by one of the few people who've seen that WoW's retention data and spoken openly about it, the reasons that people quit WoW very rarely have anything to do with the game (or the quality of the expansion). Unfortunately, this boring reality doesn't make for very interesting forum content where people link the subscribers graphs you did and pretend like they've decoded the human genome by stating "sub number go down, game obviously bad."
    Telling me to 'read' what you wrote, and then turn around and accuse me of saying "sub numbers go down, game obviously bad". I never said anything of the sort. Nice try at a subtle insult though.

    And, while what you say may or may not have happened with subs going up and down, as you said there is no data to back that up and as such is just your opinion. However, the data I provided is valid reported data, not an opinion, and does show exactly what I stated it shows. That the average sub count, as reported by blizzard, stagnated during wrath and then went on a downward trend starting with Cata.

    I could also care less why people were unsubbing. I am sure that for just as many that quit because they didnt like the game, just as many quit because they could not afford the sub, found a different game, or any other number of reason.

  19. #59
    Loved the world revamp, though the long-term consequence was that it was impossible for new players to play the story chronologically. End game was very poor - nothing to do but sit in Org or SW and queue for dungeons. Archaeology, the system designed to get people out in the word, was tedious and unrewarding. Story-wise, 80-85 is probably my least favourite 'modern' expansion narrative, and yes, I think it is worse than Draenor and BFA stories (I haven't played a second Shadowlands but it looks pretty bad).

  20. #60
    Quote Originally Posted by Skalm View Post
    Telling me to 'read' what you wrote, and then turn around and accuse me of saying "sub numbers go down, game obviously bad". I never said anything of the sort. Nice try at a subtle insult though.

    And, while what you say may or may not have happened with subs going up and down, as you said there is no data to back that up and as such is just your opinion. However, the data I provided is valid reported data, not an opinion, and does show exactly what I stated it shows. That the average sub count, as reported by blizzard, stagnated during wrath and then went on a downward trend starting with Cata.

    I could also care less why people were unsubbing. I am sure that for just as many that quit because they didnt like the game, just as many quit because they could not afford the sub, found a different game, or any other number of reason.
    You're so close to getting it man. So, so very close.

    It's not about just the reasons people unsubscribe. It's also about the new players generated. It's a subscription model. Without knowing either the number of people quitting or the number of new players generated, looking at a data plot of number of people subscribed is completely, totally and utterly meaningless.

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