to expound further on Ghastly's point:
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www.examiner.com/review/ ··· pandariaCopypasta for those that cant open:
The latest expansion pack to the widely known MMO, World of Warcraft has been out for a little over a week, but how are players taking it? Well according to metacritic, not well. Although many gaming outlets such as G4 and IGN have given fairly good reviews of the new expansion pack, many players who have rated the game tend to disagree.
Mist of Pandaria adds a new playable race, the Pandarian, that can join either the horde or alliance, raises the level cap to 90, and adds a variety of other changes such as revised talent trees, and add areas to explore. Its basically the same thing that Blizzard has been doing from the get go, raise the level cap, add some new shiny toys and keep the grind going.
Blizzard has lost over a million subscribers over the last fiscal year and with the new expansion has tried to get current subscribers to advertise for them with a little bribe; get your buddy to reactivate get a character boosted to level 80. While this may have had some success, how much will it really do to save the companies cash cow from continuing to bleed subscriptions? Only time will truly tell.
So, what did metacritic users have to say about the new expansion?
"Poor design, poorly planned out, causal-ized skills, bad launch. This xpac will be the downfall of WoW. Crossrealm is interesting, however it's lead to camp-the-spawn world PVP. Piles of bones at spawn and portal points. The expansion quests - mobbed with players trying to do "spawns once every 10 minutes" destroyable objects. Severe bottleneck quests that have long cinematic scenes, and require certain objects to be destroyed. Seriously, you'd think blizzard - with hundreds of millions in revenue, near a decade of running an MMO ... would they know how to design and run one? It's falling apart, it's like they want to destroy it. I didn't think there could be a step down from Cata, but there IS. And Mists of Pandaria - is it. Don't buy it if you haven't bought it. It's bad." ~kyanwan Rating: 0
"Ok, I have to admit, I hated the game on day one, but that was because of technical problems that appear to have been resolved. I have played through all the zones and leveled from 85-90 and it's actually the best leveling experience in the franchise. Fun, not too hard, and full of stories. It's not that I like easy games, but the challenges come from end game pvp and pve content, and complicated quests that make you 5 minutes running from one end of the map to the other are just not compelling gameplay, regardless of the game. I hate it when it happens in GTA, and I hate it in MMO's" ~subbed Rating: 10
"Blizzard creates good games. But at some point in the last 5 yeas they stopped caring for the playerbase and instead are only thinking profit and money. MOP is not a bad expansion per say. But its just not good enough in terms of 10 million subscriber based game that should be delivering content regularly and with full focus on improving every aspect of the game. Blizzard is not doing that. For the last 5 years most of the money they got for WOW has gone into other games they are making and WOW is suffering because of it. It has been left to rot - just like 8 months of last raiding tier in Cata goes to show. They didn't even have an active Live content crew on the game to keep the subscribers intrested. Instead they created Annual pass so ppl could SUB for MOP beta. Just bad all around. Im playing and leveling - but the bitterness of how BLizzard is doing their buisness these days is hard to swallow." ~deadalon Rating: 5
So there is a bad, a good, and an OK rating, although as you look through the user ratings, the majority are much more on the bad side. The ratings as of this writing are 225 positive, 15 "mixed" 310 negative. All in all, more players have mixed and negative feelings about the new expansion that good. Many players seem to be upset with further "casualization" of the game, over simplification of many aspects, and tend to show an overall fatigue. While World of Warcraft has had eight years of glory, it may finally be winding down to being a memory.