Jagex acknowledges that cosmetics ruin immersion

[Norfleet]

WoW was utterly lost and ****** the second they decided to make the joke pandas a real thing.

I don't think that it can be pinned on just the pandas. A better game could have pulled off Pandamen.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I love Pandaren.

[Oyster Sauce]

Cooking...

[Tweed]

I liked the top hat I bought for my froggy on THJ.

[J1M]

WoW was utterly lost and ****** the second they decided to make the joke pandas a real thing.

Yep.

[sheet]

WoW lost me at Cataclysm (although I liked some changes to Stormwind).
I understand that just expanding bits of the world instead of overhauling everything probably didn't have sufficient ROI but it would have been nice to preserve the Classic world while filling in the gaps. Oh well.

[J1M]

WoW lost me at Cataclysm (although I liked some changes to Stormwind).
I understand that just expanding bits of the world instead of overhauling everything probably didn't have sufficient ROI but it would have been nice to preserve the Classic world while filling in the gaps. Oh well.

Yeah, the implied promise of deathwing blowing everything up was that players could heal the land or the world would continue to be dynamic every couple of expansions.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

WoW was utterly lost and ****** the second they decided to make the joke pandas a real thing.

Yep.

Bellular's stitched graph is not reliable as the leaked GDC graph did not show numbers on a Y axis. He was guessing where to stitch the graphs together, albeit we have tools to guestimate like raider.io participation but it's still guessing nonetheless.


EDIT: MoP was a great expansion.

It was the only expansion where that introduced an entire new continent of brand new never before seen races and cultures that felt appropriately Warcraft. The Shado-Pan, the Mogu, the Jinyu, the Saurok, Mantid, etc.

Pandaria feels very imaginative. It does not feel like a stereotypical China expy at all. There is no thick buercracy or imperial government or scholars or clerks and so on. It is very rural and anarchic, like the classic American midwest.

It gave you a humongous amount of content with 8 questing zones at launch, and many reputations which actually had their own questlines. The Jade Forest, Valley of the Four Winds, and the Dread Wastes remain amongst the best zones WoW has ever created.

It had three patch zones including Timeless Isle which is the best patch zone ever added to WoW, to the point that Blizzard's repeated attempts over the years to recapture the magic of TI with Tanaan Jungle/Broken Shore/Argus/Mechagon/Nazjatar/Korthia/Zereth Mortis/Zaralek Cavern/Emerald Dream/Undermine/Karesh keeps falling short of the OG.

Tied with WoD has having the soundtrack with the highest hitrate. Too many great tracks.

3 new battlegrounds (Silvershard Mines is one of the funnest RBG maps) and the best arena added, Tiger's Peak. And then TI's betrayal PvP where you could pledge yourself to Ordos and kill your own faction.

Brawler's guild.

Five raids including the best raid ever added, Throne of Thunder where it takes you only a journey through several different biomes and you face several different kinds of unit types with imaginative encounters like Horridon, Dark Animus, Megaera, Ion Qon, etc. Not to mention the unique asian dark magic and lightning magitek aesthetic. It was also the only other expansion to have a well executed story for the entire duration, from Wandering Isle and Jade Forest all the way through the Wrathion legendary campaign and then Siege of Orgrimmar.

It not only managed to introduce and conclude the MoP original Pandaria plot, but also managed to continue and conclude the faction war plot that began in Wrath. Every other expansion has only had parts of the story be decently executed but not the whole.


My only major issue with MoP is that the Pandaren model isn't that attractive. It has a beer belly that sticks out and gives him proportions leanings towards being a soft potato, and is combined with an overall unferocious face. Doesn't look like Wei Wang's/Bernie Kang's/Alex Horley's art which made them look threatening and powerful. You have to build transmogs around the very few pieces in the game that bulk up the upper body mass and draw attention away from the beer belly, and cover the face.

[asf]

it is liek avatars with santa hats on forums

[J1M]

WoW was utterly lost and ****** the second they decided to make the joke pandas a real thing.

Yep.

Bellular's stitched graph is not reliable as the leaked GDC graph did not show numbers on a Y axis. He was guessing where to stitch the graphs together, albeit we have tools to guestimate like raider.io participation but it's still guessing nonetheless.


EDIT: MoP was a great expansion.

It was the only expansion where that introduced an entire new continent of brand new never before seen races and cultures that felt appropriately Warcraft. The Shado-Pan, the Mogu, the Jinyu, the Saurok, Mantid, etc.

Pandaria feels very imaginative. It does not feel like a stereotypical China expy at all. There is no thick buercracy or imperial government or scholars or clerks and so on. It is very rural and anarchic, like the classic American midwest.

It gave you a humongous amount of content with 8 questing zones at launch, and many reputations which actually had their own questlines. The Jade Forest, Valley of the Four Winds, and the Dread Wastes remain amongst the best zones WoW has ever created.

It had three patch zones including Timeless Isle which is the best patch zone ever added to WoW, to the point that Blizzard's repeated attempts over the years to recapture the magic of TI with Tanaan Jungle/Broken Shore/Argus/Mechagon/Nazjatar/Korthia/Zereth Mortis/Zaralek Cavern/Emerald Dream/Undermine/Karesh keeps falling short of the OG.

Tied with WoD has having the soundtrack with the highest hitrate. Too many great tracks.

3 new battlegrounds (Silvershard Mines is one of the funnest RBG maps) and the best arena added, Tiger's Peak. And then TI's betrayal PvP where you could pledge yourself to Ordos and kill your own faction.

Brawler's guild.

Five raids including the best raid ever added, Throne of Thunder where it takes you only a journey through several different biomes and you face several different kinds of unit types with imaginative encounters like Horridon, Dark Animus, Megaera, Ion Qon, etc. Not to mention the unique asian dark magic and lightning magitek aesthetic. It was also the only other expansion to have a well executed story for the entire duration, from Wandering Isle and Jade Forest all the way through the Wrathion legendary campaign and then Siege of Orgrimmar.

It not only managed to introduce and conclude the MoP original Pandaria plot, but also managed to continue and conclude the faction war plot that began in Wrath. Every other expansion has only had parts of the story be decently executed but not the whole.


My only major issue with MoP is that the Pandaren model isn't that attractive. It has a beer belly that sticks out and gives him proportions leanings towards being a soft potato, and is combined with an overall unferocious face. Doesn't look like Wei Wang's/Bernie Kang's/Alex Horley's art which made them look threatening and powerful. You have to build transmogs around the very few pieces in the game that bulk up the upper body mass and draw attention away from the beer belly, and cover the face.

I made the chart. Look at those beautiful Paint.NET annotations. Notice how the underappreciated Warlords of Draenor is called out as more successful than pandemic Shadowlands and Dragonflight. It is accurate unless they used a non-linear scale. For which there is no evidence and wouldn't make sense for throwaway bragging at an industry conference.

Timeless Isle was great. But MoP was too samey with the zones all being "chinese countryside with farms on fire" and what they did to Garrosh is unforgiveable.

[Finarfin]

I love Pandaren.

Pandaren are awesome.

[rusty_shackleford]

WoW was utterly lost and ****** the second they decided to make the joke pandas a real thing.

Yep.

Peaked much earlier than people want to accept, it was TBC(specifically, the Sunwell patch.) It just took time for people to realize things were getting bad and not getting better, then time to react.
I think my first time thinking "wow, this is ******* ****" was having to do dailies. I can't remember if those were even in TBC at first.
[edit]
Dailies came with 2.1

They could only coast on polishing Everquest design combined with a high budget for so long.

[Vergil]

For all that they got wrong 343 had the solution to this (well, the real solution is none of this slop at all but) in the Master Chief Collection by adding a toggle that let you turn off everyone else's cosmetics on your screen so you don't have to play Halo 1 multiplayer with people who have hot pink assault rifles and other trash.

[sheet]

Dota 2 used to have set policies on cosmetics when they opened it up to indie devs to make them, that they had limited color schemes per hero and couldn't change the character geometry much.

That's slowly gone to **** and now every hero has sets that make them unrecognizable to returning players.