Mists of Pandaria Review

[JesterOfFire]

"I pay because it's cheap" is NOT actually a reason for your behavior at all. If you are only buying it because it's cheap, then you're claiming that you based your purchase and continued support of the game not on the qualities of the game itself, or the customer service you've received, but rather ENTIRELY on the price sticker on the box. You're basically describing yourself as the sort of person who buys everything they see when they go to the store, even stuff you don't need, just because "it's cheap". I'm pretty sure that most people don't actually MEAN that when they're saying it. When people say "I pay for it because it's cheap", they're not giving a reason for paying the subscription, they're making an excuse to rationalize the subscription. And it's either because they were struggling to come up with a way to express their actual reasons, or (for some reason) because they feel their behavior needs to be defended.

Allow me to turn this one around: "I only play games that are free because all I care about is that it's free, regardless of how good or bad the game is." I see this a lot in regards to The Secret World, which is not only a shame, but makes me scratch my head.

Tangent: Why is it that consoles are judged solely on their price point, games are judged by their graphics, and MMOs are judged by this (in my opinion) stupid calculation of hours played versus money spent? Whatever happened to judging a game by how much fun you have playing it (like Yahtzee tends to do)? Why the need for all these (again, in my opinion) pointless excuses for not liking something? Does the amount of money you spend on a hobby really matter if you ENJOY said hobby enough?

On-topic, MoP looks fun but I'm burned out on medieval fantasy games. I've got STO and TSW and that's enough for me.

 

[feycreature]

Ok, just to get it out of the way: orientalism. Comparatively benign (not nearly as racist as...well...everything about Trolls), and pretty minimal, but it's still worth keeping an eye on.

In terms of mechanics, I have a theory about what Blizzard is doing with the spec system and it goes like this: They've said they wanted to eliminate "cookie cutter builds" by making all talents viable and wholly dependent on how you personally want to play. The thing is, over the course of vanilla, dozens of updates and 3 expansions they've been tweaking the talent trees over and over again for years, cutting and replacing things. Problem is, if there are underlying causes for the cookie cutter effect (which it seems there were) you'll never get near them by simply pruning outlying branches. So they decided to go right to the core mechanics of the system and tear out everything that looked unnecessary or like it would confine player choice to certain talents and builds.

Here's the thing: if they're playing the long game (which after 4 expansions I'm gonna assume they are) then this shouldn't be intended to permanently remove all variation from the system. Having cut off all dead weight (and possibly a few good things that didn't seem good during the culling) they are now free to rebuild the spec mechanic with a better understanding of the mistakes they made the first time. If they can keep the element of choice and avoid creating new non-viable talents or builds, we can have the variation back plus the ability to modify our specialization to our own tastes without compromising our usefulness to parties, raids and guilds.

So that's my theory. I could be wrong, maybe it's just all dumbed down pap for the idiots and 12 year olds of the internet, but I'm gonna be optimistic on this one. The dev team has a pretty good track record for learning from their mistakes.

 

[SonOfMethuselah]

Now, for you PvE people, this really doesn't matter. However, I play Horde on Sargeras. It's PvP and the percentage of Alliance on our server is 90%. I have seen Horde players unable to continue questing because there are groups of Alliance that simply pounce on whatever Horde are around. Not because it's a group of people who are intentionally griefing Horde zones, but because when one Alliance decides that he's going to jump on Horde for a little PvP fun, 4 other Alliance are around and more than happy to gang up to get a free Honor Kill.

It's funny, because I play Alliance, and that EXACT SAME THING happens to us on my server! I play Bleeding Hollow, and while I don't think the Alliance/Horde ratio is that skewed for us, it's still impossible to push forward with questing sometimes due to being ambushed by random Horde. I'm not sure if it the same happens to the Horde, but I definitely agree: giving Ally and Horde the exact same quests and questgivers in the new zones was a bad idea.

Find it rather entertaining other than that, though. Although I only started playing last summer, so Cata is all I have to compare it to.