WoD and BFA were bad for opposite reasons.
WoD had fun gameplay, but not much to do with it.
BFA had loads to do, but it wasn’t fun to play.
2 Likes
The difference there is that those three all tie into existing lore, be that void, legion or dragons.
MoP was entirely tied to oriental stories. Whilst that in itself isn’t a bad thing, I just felt it was a push trying to place it into WoW’s universe.
As for WOD, I didn’t play WoW between the end of Cata and Dec last year. However, I have gone back and played the expansions and apart from a general dislike of alternate universe stories, I wouldn’t say it bad story-wise and I enjoyed the garrison gameplay even at max level. But, as I didn’t play it at the time, perhaps I’m missing the point. I suppose I’m saying that I don’t mind what the motive behind an expansion is, so long as it fits into the WoW universe, which WoD clearly did.
It was unplayable at launch 
I didn’t say that it was playable. I said that it was massive. Not sure why I need to elaborate but I mean in terms of hype and subs for launch.
WoD was the last time that 10 million people bought the expansion during opening week, or at least, it’s the last time Blizzard told us this, there might have been bigger openers since then.
But based on this number, WoD was doing very well until they decided to kill one of the raid tiers.
I remember the launch of WoD, I was on Silvermoon, hardly a small server, and despite the server being DDoS’d during the launch window, I still managed to login and play some of it. So it was no worse than any previous expansion release for me.
2 Likes
Yeah the WoD-launch is by far the worst expansion-launch Blizzard has ever pulled off.
The game wasn’t unplayable for a day - it was unplayable for a week. Literally.
1 Like
Mop wasn’t bad, in retrospective is one if the best addons storrz wise, the difference lebel zones, thw camapnge, even the pandaren as new racw-witj mobk get a huge amount of lore, which is even today one the best new race introduction , and beautiful zones.
And the story climax with SoO , one if the better raids in WoW.
It got at the beginning hated and demoted because “muh pandaren, kung-fu panfa, its childish”
But when you play it you see how many effort Blizzard put into thos and dud man things right, see many examples above.
Today after yeas its in the (German) rp comm one of the most beloved expansion of WoW.
I don’t remember what server I was on back then (maybe Frostmane), but I remember that it took more than a week before you could actually play, let alone leave your garrison. By far the worst launch that server has experienced, and I know our server wasn’t the only one affected.
I mean, Blizzard was not prepared
muhaha
Because it’s one of the best WoW ever had.
-Story interesting enough to keep people hooked (yeah it wasn’t great but good enough by WoW’s standards)
-One of if not the best class design and class balance we have ever seen in PvE (I don’t play PvP so I can’t tell)
-Two of the best raids in the history of WoW released back to back, Throne of Thunder then Siege of Orgrimmar
-The introduction of challenge modes which were already good but most importantly gave birth to Mythic+ later on which is now part of the main content of the game
It’s hard to find negatives really.
No it’s not lmao and this is part of why I can’t take very seriously arguments based on sub numbers. If people are going to quit the game over this their opinions are of really low value.
Because Cataclysm was not.
Most of it’s sub numbers are because it came just after WotLK which is arguably the absolute peak of the game. Obviously all those millions of players who just witnessed the greatest version of WoW aren’t gonna just disappear the next xpac.
Yet just an other reason why sub numbers isn’t a very serious criteria to judge the quality of an xpac.
MoP was a success.
The most beautiful zones in wow, great class design in both pve and pvp, good story and lore, and the best talent system reform in wow.
Unfortunately, now Blizzard went back to the unnecessarily over-complicated talent trees, which will inevitably fail again.
Also, I will say regarding Cataclysm, that while Cataclysm overall was a good expansion (especially pre heroic-nerf), Blizzard really dropped the ball with patch 4.3 ‘Hour of Twilight’ aka. Dragon Soul, to the point that when I rate WoW Expansions I usually split Cataclysm in two and rate them separately.
Not only was Dragon Sould the worst endgame raid/tier Blizzard had ever released up to that point by a mile (and arguably, the worst endgame raid Blizzard has ever released period), it was released in november 2011, while MoP was released in… september 2012.
Thats 10 months of the same content, which was in itself terrible. Talk about drought, and people complain about content patches being 6 months between nowadays…
No wonder the players who left Cata (and returned for MoP) was sceptical and left at first sign of “uh oh”.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I enjoyed leveling during MoP. Leveling gets less and less attention these days, but for me it belongs to a RPG.
The zones and the music were beautiful, I also liked these farm dailies. But I agree on the endgame, it was flawed in MoP. Legion was way better and diverse in this case.
MOP is what killed WOW.
I personally never liked MoP. The overall theme of the expansion never sat very well with me and I never felt “at home” in Pandaria.
It’s also the only time for as long as I have played that I took a several month long break from the game where I did not log in at all.
(I am missing the WoW’s 9th Anniversary FoS because of that - completely forgot to even login once on a char… grrr)
But, from what I gather, the most hated thing about MoP was the loooong draught between the last patch and the next expansion.
But MOP is a really good expansion that aged incredibly well.
Most of the debate around it was “mimimi pandas bad” and rarely you seen a decent argument other than subs going down. But that hardly means the expansion was bad.
It just meant a whole different direction for the game but saying it clearly lost so many subs and comparing with WOD is just… delusion. You either don’t understand data charts or you got a wrong data chart.
The entire stretch of Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor was very unsatisfying for many Horde players.
It was when the Horde was hit with the villain bat with greater frequency and very few - if any - concessions were made in regards to the Alliance’s shadier actions.
Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad if Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands had not gone in that exact same direction with another Horde leader and had instead shook it up by having an Alliance aligned character go off of the deep end instead.
1 Like
Mop was literally when the first updated models of retsil wow apprared in pandaren form thsts one of the reasons some may think it was succesful.
Why are you gaslighting that MoP was no a succes?
I joined official WoW in WoD.
But i did heard many MANY people saying MoP was great. In fact i would argue it’s like 50% of people saying MoP was bad, because pvp sucked because every class had everything or whatever. But another 50% saying it was great.
I myself tried for the first time MoP expansion few months ago. I was stunned how beautiful the zone is. How relaxing it is to be there and play on that island.
So to the true question is, why are YOU projecting YOUR subjective opinion op people and try it to hide it behind “gaslight”?
The new panda models are the first retailesque models in wow history, thats probably why it was loved.
The fact is in.my opinion wows hayday was seen in wrath.
Wrath is the purest form of balance in wow history, right after itbended hunters got moved across from mana based system to focus which is more spam your steady shot to recuperate based.
Dont get me wrong here i didnt mind mop that much but it rly didnt bring that much to the table.
Whichnis why i specifically mentioned pandarans, its also when the old reforge option got removed bc blizz stated having to bakance hit and expertise is mot really optimising your gear and those 2 stas got removed.
If i recall that occured in the prepatch for dranor so technically not pandaria era but it still happened whilst we were playing seige of ogrimmar so it counts.
Then we started getting teirtary ststs added and the tank stats got changed into crit etc which btw was stupid and in retail still is stupid.
So back to reforging blizz said its not optimising gear if u constantly have to alter hit expertise at the cost of otherstats then they removed hit expertise and reforging too ???
Yh ok remove the hit expertise but the reforge process still had life in it ppl could have optimised gear for real and they just binned the idea which wasnt reused until BFA!! Even then it was a mere shadow of uts former self.
Pandaria was also the expac where the first… are you ready ?? STAT SQUISH. occurred bc blizz stated numbers were just getting silly.
For eg my deathknight had judt under a fat and juicy 1 million hp then tadaaaaaa less than 200k the following day after the squish. Just think about that for a min.
Wows had 2 squishes on retail ok just imagine if you would how much more health and damage would be shown without them, ppl would be hitting for over 100m damage on a non crit ( just guessing here btw ) without the squish x2 that retail has had. Now that to me sounds like we had earned the right to hit that hard but blizz stated NO! Bc of parsing issues at the time.
Anyway sorry for the really long winded reply this is my take on why pandaria was both good and in otherways really sucked.