Playing an expansion as current content has been a lacklustre MMO experience

[Jojoya]

They are, however, the only ones with any 'objectivity'. They cover a number of games and report on them using a set of standard criteria. Professional critics are good at telling you if it is worth your time to invest in playing a game.

Can you provide a link to that "standard criteria"? Because I'm not coming across any when I do a google search. I am finding a lot of variation on criteria that different review publications ask that their critics follow but they don't fall into a single standard. If it was truly standard, you would think it would be easy to find and that every review publication would point to it.

A professional critic is nothing more than someone who is paid to publish their opinion... and you can never be certain who is actually paying them. It's not uncommon for a professional critic to write a positive review based on their 10 hours of game play just to have the game get trashed by those who actually play the game as a player, not as a critic. It's not that much different from movie reviews. Just because a reviewer finds a movie technically brilliant doesn't mean the general audience is going to find it entertaining.

[Shurrikhan]

Can you provide a link to that "standard criteria"? Because I'm not coming across any when I do a google search. I am finding a lot of variation on criteria that different review publications ask that their critics follow but they don't fall into a single standard. If it was truly standard, you would think it would be easy to find and that every review publication would point to it.

A professional critic is nothing more than someone who is paid to publish their opinion... and you can never be certain who is actually paying them. It's not uncommon for a professional critic to write a positive review based on their 10 hours of game play just to have the game get trashed by those who actually play the game as a player, not as a critic. It's not that much different from movie reviews. Just because a reviewer finds a movie technically brilliant doesn't mean the general audience is going to find it entertaining.

A bit of a side-rant, but...

It's funny to me how consistent different broad-stroke classifications of "players", "immigrants", "critics", and the like can be in what they tend to hone in on in their reviews, however. I would have expected more person idiosyncrasy than their actually seems to typically be. Instead, the latter tend to be surprisingly (to me, at least) self-similar.

For instance, your Josh Strife Hayes style MMO Reviewer will tend to look at a checklist of fairly universal concerns:

• Does the game offer a significant degree of useful novelty (be that in setting, graphical beauty, customization, the forms of content offered, or even the results of its systems [e.g., how it handles catch-up as to be more intuitive and/or create a more precise positive outcome in terms of player behavior where it would later benefit average player perception and/or perception directly]?
• Does the game feel pay-to-win to a point that devolves the experience and/or worsens the engagement or perception of the game for non-paying players?
• Are there any stand-out annoyances in the early experience that might turn players otherwise likely retained for the time being?
• Do the game's [crafting, combat, use of world, etc.] mechanics seem to last a decent bit, or do they feel more like a pretense (high floor, low ceiling)?
• How long does it take for the game's gameplay to feel "mastered" for most players' purposes? (Time played will typically not be sufficient to answer this, but many can get to where they can at least understand enough to parse the opinions from interviews with more invested players.)
• How long does it take for the game to feel relative "complete" (insofar as a majority of players attracted to the bulk of the game, though not necessarily any single part nor the whole, would be interested in doing)?
• Etc.

(Now, given that those questions end up so interdependent, will most reviewers get to a decent answer to those questions, let alone find a good balance between answering them and just finding things 'naturally' to (dis)like? Probably not so much.
And that's already excluding the majority of Kotaku, Polygon, etc. articles which I... can't really call professional if the word is, however erroneously-but-usefully, used to refer to anyone who actually has to meet certain standards of quality that would cause readers/viewers to come back for their take.)

Whereas someone "coming over from X" tends to focus not just on the differences between the game left [A] and the new game in question [B], but also (depending on the degree of inadvertent bias) may tend to focus on features over their results. "[Game B] does {this cool thing} that's so different from how [Game A] does {the closest equivalent}"... even if the results, in their broader context, are largely the same. (Heck, many things that'd otherwise be taken as negatives can be framed as positives if only for being featurally different. See arguments that it's good that in XIV AoEs' timing have nothing to do with those AoEs' animations, for instance....)

/shrug