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The People's Score

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria according to Necrotaur
User Score 4
I saw a blog post the other day from another MMO developer which talked about how you shouldn't make drastic changes to an MMO after launch, specifically on 'streamlining' the experience. In it, he talks about changes that individuals felt were necessary, but wound up contributing to his game's ultimate decline and demise. That dev was Dan Rubenfield, writing about the NGE patch for Star Wars: Galaxies. Now, 5.0 wasn't on the level of NGE, but over the years, things have begun to accumulate that make me question the necessity. The most obvious is the talent point system. Mechanically, it works and I understand why they did it. It is actually nice to be 'viable' regardless of the spec you choose. However, A) you are making choices for your character every 20 levels as opposed to every 2 levels, taking a lot out of the feeling of excitement for levelling up. B) oftentimes it is difficult to decide not because things are so good, but because nothing really appeals to you. C) the change did absolutely nothing to get rid of cookie cutter builds. D) things are seriously, seriously unbalanced - it's like they didn't listen to the beta testers. Another terrible decision was the inclusion of Cross Realm Zones (CRZ). Currently these only affect pre-MoP areas, but they have introduced a host of new bugs and issues, including lag spikes which crash your connection and auto-dismount when crossing zone borders. I play on a full server, and I was blown away when I learned I would have to share space with not only people from my server, but at least 5 other high population servers! Quest mobs are constantly camped, and on pvp servers there is constant ganking by high level players. Absolutely terrible decision. You now get Valor Points for dailies, which on the surface seems like a possibly good change, until you realize rewards for running heroic dungeons are cut in half, and you can only get full rewards once a day. This essentially means daily quests are mandatory, forever. I am not able to play 24/7, so the idea of doing 30+ daily quests every day really turns me off. Anyway, this review isn't so much about Pandaria as it is about the changes that came out in 5.0. I struggled with scoring it because content wise, MoP is ok if a bit lackluster. There wasn't anything that blew my mind in MoP like there was in previous expansions, and the "new features" (pet battles, scenarios) feel tacked on. You will run 4 dungeons while levelling 85-90, then find only 2 new, heroic-only dungeons at 90 (the rest are heroic versions of vanilla dungeons - ugh). I don't like to be a 'sky is falling' type person, but the only thing that can kill WoW is WoW itself, and dammit, they're trying. I don't believe I will be renewing my subscription.… Read More »
52 users found this review helpful.
Average User Score for this Game: 4.4

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