Not gonna lie, I enjoyed MoP. It’s my favourite expansion out of all of them.
Ok so my take, I personally didn’t like the idea of mop, but looking back at it now i think only a moron would say mop wasn’t successful.
Now lets go over some facts!
Success has more than one metric, total sub count isn’t always everything.
You have to remember that when mop came out some players who were feverishly playing expansions prior will have out grown the interest in the game naturally, also something that was painfully obvious in cata was that very few new players were coming to wow from younger generation.
MoP came and no matter how anyone argues, mop 100% did bring a newer younger audience of players who otherwise wouldn’t of tried wow in the first place, many players now will be mop babys who joined around that time.
WotLK and cata were amazing at keeping player retention for current players but they wasn’t very friendly at bringing new blood into the game their was SO much lore and story for someone new to understand.
MoP didn’t have this flaw, it was completely new lore and unlike previous expansions the whole of mop could be understood for anyone playing without much or any past lore check ups.
I dont think mop was blizzards “best” expansion, but i do think its fair to say that mop served a purpose and it did that role very well. It was still good, inventive and most importantly fun for a large part of it
PS, class design was still arguably really good in mop, even the mistakes and overtuned abilities were good for the game. Mop truly was an ambitious expansion with blizzard testing ideas that served to set the standards we have today on balance. We will never have blood fear again because it was insanely OP in pvp, we’ll never have warlock drain tanks that could legit tank pve content (non raid)
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i enjoyed MoP a huge amount - still my favourite expansion
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Wrath-Cata-MoP was the pinnacle of WoW. Never to be repeated again. Sadly. You look and hit like a ponce with that gaslighting of yours op.
you are way too early .the mop classic is still a year away .
I liked MoP. Zones and atmosphere where amazing and raids (other than perhaps T1) where good.
It was also a nice change of pace from Cataclysm, since we where yet again (as with WotLk and TBC) given a new continent to explore where all the new content was concentrated.
I’d say MoP was the last genuinely good expansion in a bygone era.
After MoP we got the actual disaster; WoD. An expansion so bad in more or less every regard that it basically killed World of Warcraft as everyone knew it. The game that I had loved and enjoyed between 2005 to 2014 was basically gone, replaced with what was in essence a f2p game with timegated content (except that it wasn’t f2p) and the last remnant of people I had played with and known since vanilla fled and quit, never to return.
10 years and 5 expansions later and the game still hasn’t recuperated socially, and it never will.
I have very mixed feelings when it comes to Mists of Pandaria. I’m largely indifferent to Pandaren. I didn’t like that they were neutral as it meant one new playable race across both factions as opposed to two new playable races with a more distinct identity.
To their credit, they did end up being a lot more compelling during the story than I expected and I do like the zones themselves.
In terms of PvE/PvP…I quite liked how most classes played. Especially Warlocks, my main at the time.
The Purge of Dalaran, however, is what knocks a lot of points off of the expansion for me.
Vereesa should have been slain for the atrocities the Silver Covenant brought to bear against innocent Sunreaver civilians. Yet she’s still around even after multiple Horde characters have been hit with the villain bat and unceremoniously killed off - in many cases for the same crime of torturing civilians (amongst others) that Vereesa is excused of. A more sensible approach would have been to allow Thalen or Aethas to be slain by Alliance players and Vereesa to be put to the sword and killed by Horde players. Both factions get some payback for what happened during and before the Purge of Dalaran that way.
It was, on many fronts, an enjoyable expansion but also a major misstep in terms of how the Horde has been treated ever since. The Garrosh mistake was of course repeated in Battle for Azeroth but that came later, of course.
The only really bad thing for me in MoP was the concept of the Challenge modes and what they started.
Couldn’t give a rats butt about what people think but to me it was success because to me it was the best expansion Blizzard do because I liked it from coherent story, music, zones and activities.
To me it was fun expansion especially if i compare it to boring TBC and LFD dungeon spam wrath that are deemed universally “best” expansions.
Who the F cares atleast it wasn’t Sylvanas simp crap that we had to suffer for almost whole lifetime of wow.
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While I sort of agree with it being added to appeal to the likes of the Chinese market, I don’t see it as being outside of the Warcraft universe. As far as undiscovered landmasses go, Pandaria integrated pretty well in comparison to say, Khaz’Algar, the Broken Isles, or the Dragon Isles. The overall story of the expansion is one of the better ones (the best post-WotLK, in my opinion). And there was also the undercurrent of faction war, and what’s more Warcraft than that?
I’m curious about your opinion on WOD, an expansion that I only believe was only created to tie into and promote the Warcraft film.
And both were flat out horrible (except the Raids I suppose)
Movie. Lore error after lore error after lore error. Excuse: “Umm…ummm… ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSE!”. Ye sure bro. Whoever believes that rather than you lot proving as usual you forget your own lore the moment you’ve written it.
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Unpopular opinion, but WoD probably could of been a good expansion but suffered the harsh consequences of bad execution.
I’m like 95% sure that most players that did play in wod remember it for the eternity of content drought that plagued half the expansion, this made the garrison centric design more frustrating than it could of been.
We had an entire zone skipped off which annoyed a lot of players, people got bored of repeating the same content for so long.
Wod did however have potential, class design was good, pve encounters were overall getting better design. As much as everyone complains about the world pvp zone now it was actually pretty active during live expansion and had a ton of flavour.
It was still a disaster dont get me wrong, but wod ‘could’ of been alot better
Oh and i totally dont buy into the “mop was for the Chinese market”, i think it was more an attempt to appeal toa younger audiences and took advantage of the fact kung fu panda had hit cinema with its timing. Aka - young kids who liked kung fu panda were probably going to wanna be one in a game
I’ve played since 2006 and I can safely say that WoW lost subscribers during Cataclysm, Warlords of Draenor and Battle For Azeroth (perhaps Shadowlands too, but can’t say since I didn’t play that expansion).
If anything WoW gained subscribers during Mists of Pandaria. It is widely regarded as one of the best expansions in WoW and I’m not sure where you have heard that there are people who dislike it. If there really are people who think negatively about Mists of Pandaria it’s the doomsayers who spread hate and dislike, such as “Pandaren was a joke race”, and they should not be trusted at all because they are a vocal minority.
I loved Mists of Pandaria. At the time when it was current content it felt like a brand new game with its very well gameplay design. Examples:
- The story and lore is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in any expansions so far
- The continent is graphically extremely detailed, full of immersion and very well made
- Questing is brilliant and new-thinking
- The raids were short, but had quite complicated and difficult-to-master boss mechanics, although sometimes the trash was at the start of the raids a bit challenging as well such as the spirit beams at the bridges to the second boss in Throne of Thunder.
- Outside of raiding there was so much to do. Grinding reputation, farming rares, grinding Valor Points for epic gear etc.
- The Isle of Thunder, Isle of Giants and Timeless Isle are such as a good concepts of game design and are in my opinion one of the most successful contents to keep people busy in the history of WoW. The concept is so good that there has been several versions of them in expansions after Mists of Pandaria, and from what I’ve read and heard the new upcoming Siren Isle is also based on the same concept.
WoD was massive at launch, and the fact that it has arguably the greatest cinematic in WoW history absolutely helped. It might have fallen off fast but there can be no denying the major hype that was surrounding WoD.
This is actual insanity how there are graphs LITERALLY depicting a sub loss of over 3 million during MoP and people still come here and say other things.
Look, OP just made a statement and he’s correct. The game lost as much subscribers as Cataclysm if not more, and Cataclysm is hailed as the worst expansion out there.
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I think they just failed to sell the Pandaren as cool. That’s it, really.
When you dig into why the Pandaren are so calm and seemingly cuddly it very quickly becomes evident that you’ve stepped straight into a horrorshow, but people quit before they realized.
I also think that MoP changed the art style too much. Not because it’s Chinese, but rather because it’s a lot more smooth and the textures look completely different. Things are less spiky and more rounded. I’m sure many would like to believe that’s just a tech thing - hey more polygons - but I disagree. It was the first step to the modern WoW appearance, which is quite different from the appearance before it.
I agree 100%.
WoD suffered from 2 primary problems.
1 the garrisons, and with it the true beginning of the “stand around alone with your thumb up your bum and queue” era
2, the content it had was excellent. But there flat out just wasn´t enough of it to be sustainable.
all the chess pieces appeared to have been on the board, but somewhere in the pipeline things like Faralon, teh Ogre Island, and the Shattrath raid went awry and got axed. And then they pulled the resources off to work on legion… while in retrospect probably a good idea, it certainly didn´t help people´s perception of what COULD have been one of the best expanions because instead it absolutely cemented the lack of content as the expansion´s main feature.
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Like Wotlk MoP was the only expansion too see growth after release. Like literally the game was GOATED after Throne of thunder. One of the best raids ever made. The build up was also amazing, together with the patch. People also liked how everything played in MoP from pvp too PvE.
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I believe the case was that it managed to hold subs during it’s patch cadence better than previous xpacs, until dragonflight that is.
It will do, people report something bad? NEW STORE MOUNT TIME!
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