Reverse WoW exodus

[Y2K21]

Anyone remember hanging around WoW's General Discussion forums in early MoP when everyone was talking about how the dumb pandas were for babies and MoP was going to kill WoW? And how it's now one of the most beloved expansions and no one seems to recall how absolutely reviled it was at the time?

New expac bad, old expac good has been the meme for a while. Expect to see Shadowlands in a similar light (people already tried to do it in Dragonflight).

[Retsu90]

Except MoP was always bad. Dawntrail is only bad because SBI took over production.

[TDawnstar]

Except MoP was always bad. Dawntrail is only bad because SBI took over production.

What the heck did I just read?

[EdwinChucklenuts]

What the heck did I just read?

Hot takes from someone who's afraid of the word "woke" and a company.

[TDawnstar]

Hot takes from someone who's afraid of the word "woke" and a company.

I was more surprised at the assertion that MOP was bad, to be honest. The whole SBI allegation was just cherry on top.

[Isala]

The discourse was legitimately so bad during MoP that if I dug up old Metacritic reviews circa 2012 for it and told you they were for Dawntrail, you would believe me without a second thought.

MoP was the worst expansion (at the time) with my favorite class designs. I loved taking every single one of them into the Brawler's Guild. As for the rest of the expansion? Pass.

[Isala]

Out of curiosity, what did you dislike about it?

It had some good raiding (Throne of Thunder is still one of the best raid tiers of all time, I think) and a ton of side content, introduced CMs which laid the groundwork for M+, and to top it all off had a semi-cohesive story that was easy to follow.

IMO Cata had less going for it than MoP and was clearly less finished with Abyssal Maw and the Well of Eternity raid getting axed and the final raid, Dragon Soul, being a short raid full of copy pasted recycled boss models.

But if you go by user reception on Metacritic (not the only metric of user enjoyment at all, but I can't think of a better way to assess user sentiment for an expansion that came out more than a decade ago) it is rated the same as Cataclysm and tied for the lowest at the time (5.8) and slightly lower than The Burning Crusade (6.0).

I found that interesting, assuming it's mostly accurate I didn't realize TBC was so contentious as to be lumped in with the likes of Cata, MoP and... gasp... Dawntrail. Although the latter isn't a fair comparison because it's a different game and it's only been out for a month whereas the WoW expansions we're discussing here are 10-15+ years old.

The Dawntrail comparison is pretty on point, actually. Leveling through the zone with that story was pretty bad. We went from Deathwing to "There are monkeys in my brewery! Please fix" to yet again, sudden world ending threats. It was just tonally all over the place. And having to do that horrible slog of a grind for every character to get things unlocked was just a massive pain in the ass. As much as I loved the BG on my alts, there were just as many alts that stalled halfway through, especially around the time you dealt with the fish people and the constant RP as other characters.