Wotlk>Mop, why?

[zophir]

From most players, and for me, it boils down to a matter of difficulty/perceived quality of content. The game does feel considerably dumbed down after every expansion.

I also agree with what was said about the MoP aesthetic. Wasn't for me, or for a lot of players. I'm a big fan of TBC and WOTLK, but I would pick TBC over WOTLK. Ties in with my final complaint which is recycling content. Begins in WOTLK with Naxx, and it never ends. To me, it feels like TBC was the last xpac with wholly new content, and from there they being recycling and watering down the game. That's fine, but it's not for me.

[johnnybgood8]

WOTLK has the best lore in WOW to this day and its connected with warcraft 3 the frozen throne- best rts game ever

[Delenis]

I personally feel that our MoP realm's current or past popularity has little relevance to whether the expansion is better than WotLK. I could not care less if hype caused our realms to be popular, for example, or that they are near dead now - MoP is likely the best, or tied for the best, expansion I experienced on live. My own personal preference on the expansion is that I hold it so dear to my heart that I refuse to play it on a private server unless the server in question is extremely close to Blizzard quality across the board in all parts of the game. No amount of popularity on a private server will ever convince me of anything but what my experience with it was on live. Yes, the expansion definitely has flaws, but I can't say it had so many as some other expansions. So which expansion would I say is better? It is actually hard for me to choose between the two, as they are my two favorite expansions.

Mop in Frostwolf was the best experiencie for me in Warmane. I started to play in Icecrown with all the lolmournes and oneshot kill classes, and pvp suck, Pve>>PvP for Pvp... I think something could be done for save Frostwolf, like try to merge with another Panda server and create a big MOP realm.

[Deathring101]

WOTLK has the best lore in WOW to this day and its connected with warcraft 3 the frozen throne- best rts game ever

The lore is another reason why I enjoyed WOTLK because I really liked the storyline in Warcraft 3.
Vanilla 1-60 questing is set post-third war so you get to learn what the f has happened since then, gives you time to catch up and discover the motives of the factions etc. whereas post-Wrath 1-60 questing is about cleaning up Deathwings mess, helping the survivors, dealing with new threats. So I was really devastated that they decided on getting rid of some of the most awesome quest lines and juicy lore content.
TBC and WOTLK were badass expansions because you get to confront Illidan and Arthas who were antagonists from Warcraft 3 and bring an end to the pain and suffering they caused

[-Notorious-]

I personally feel that our MoP realm's current or past popularity has little relevance to whether the expansion is better than WotLK. I could not care less if hype caused our realms to be popular, for example, or that they are near dead now - MoP is likely the best, or tied for the best, expansion I experienced on live. My own personal preference on the expansion is that I hold it so dear to my heart that I refuse to play it on a private server unless the server in question is extremely close to Blizzard quality across the board in all parts of the game. No amount of popularity on a private server will ever convince me of anything but what my experience with it was on live. Yes, the expansion definitely has flaws, but I can't say it had so many as some other expansions. So which expansion would I say is better? It is actually hard for me to choose between the two, as they are my two favorite expansions.

I'm glad we agree on something for once ;)

MoP's popularity/population (in my opinion) has no relevance to whether it was a better expansion. Population/popularity on private servers are a function of 3 things in the following order:
1) Amount of development work/Quality of scripting
2) Population itself
3) Enjoyment of expansion

In other words, how much work is being done on a realm typically decides how big its population will be. Furthermore, I believe that realms with high populations already tend to grow the most.

Using population to judge which expansion was "better" is a fool's errand since its typically not that big a deal on private servers. If an expansion being "better" truly mattered, Cataclysm wouldn't have had an equal or higher population than WotLK for most of its time on molten.

Besides, when people judge expansions I always get confused. Someone above brought up how S12 was garbage, and used that to judge S15/MoP 5.4.8. Those are 2 very different games. You can't judge S15 based on what S12 was like, much like you cannot use S5 to judge what S8 was like. Most expansions have terrible balance in the early patches and the balance gets better closer to the final patches (4.3.4 being the exception, as Cata took a big dip when DS was released).

[kingkrick]

hi all

me and my guild were actualy playing MOP servers,but we remember the cold shoulder at the time i think it was not kaer but the other dud rip off,people got frustraded for not geting fixes,eventualy people started moving from the server some went to retail some went to play others exp some tryed other servers,some even stoped like me
,i just got recently into wotlk hoping to see some fixes soon on mop.

and besides wotlk will get old soon enough people will get bored and then they will want to move to next expan like cata r mop,they just need more work i guess if they can


byby

[Mercy]

I'm glad we agree on something for once ;)

I don't think we agree, actually.

In other words, how much work is being done on a realm typically decides how big its population will be. Furthermore, I believe that realms with high populations already tend to grow the most.

That's not true at all. Many, including myself, consider MoP still too new to provide any real nostalgia or preference factor over playing live servers. This seems to be something you still fail to factor into your arguments.
Edit: I guess I should add that there are plenty of other factors, but I don't consider MoP being a popular expansion on a private server for so long as Legion remains to be successful.

[Skoobydoo]

I'm glad we agree on something for once ;)

MoP's popularity/population (in my opinion) has no relevance to whether it was a better expansion. Population/popularity on private servers are a function of 3 things in the following order:
1) Amount of development work/Quality of scripting
2) Population itself
3) Enjoyment of expansion

In other words, how much work is being done on a realm typically decides how big its population will be. Furthermore, I believe that realms with high populations already tend to grow the most.

Using population to judge which expansion was "better" is a fool's errand since its typically not that big a deal on private servers. If an expansion being "better" truly mattered, Cataclysm wouldn't have had an equal or higher population than WotLK for most of its time on molten.

Besides, when people judge expansions I always get confused. Someone above brought up how S12 was garbage, and used that to judge S15/MoP 5.4.8. Those are 2 very different games. You can't judge S15 based on what S12 was like, much like you cannot use S5 to judge what S8 was like. Most expansions have terrible balance in the early patches and the balance gets better closer to the final patches (4.3.4 being the exception, as Cata took a big dip when DS was released).

i think you are mixing people exp about expansion with your personal exp on private server.the 2 of this have nothing to do.MOP was 2 years log expansion and you wanna judge the last few week only ignoring 20+ months of complete trash.thats just wrong.on retail population drop BECAUSE of the content people have to deal with pre s15.also when warmane released his MOP realms only the client was at 5.4 but with no content and season 12.it took years for them to reach s15 and SoG.majority of players quit long ago and never look back.

if i have to rate my favorite expansion i will go like this.

1. WOTLK/TBC
2.Legion
3.Cataclym. ( Cataclym pre 4.3 was awesome expansion sadly the last 4.3 patch ruined everything.)
4.MOP
5.WOD

[Drkwispurr]

All I wanted to do by posting here was show evidence that MoP's population drop on Warmane is not because it was an unpopular expansion, but because it was ignored.

Excuse me, but you are not showing any kind of evidence with those screenshots at all to support your words. However, I'm definately not saying you are wrong. There are several reasons behind it. Not only Warmane focused more regularly on wotlk and tbc, true, but also MoP was way less populated than the others in the era, I've seen an oficial graphic showing it.
Here:

Spoiler: Show

But why we had full cata and mop servers then? Quite simple I guess, not only we have players who don't retail and still wanted to try them out, but also those servers were at their very beginning. As soon as they realize how the expansion itself works out, population starts to drop. And, unfortunately, the high amount of costs required to maintain the later expansions compared with tbc and wotlk is also a reason.

[Skuddy]

as a person who never played retail, and first experience with wow was warcraft 3, the thing that kept me from playing mop was simply the panda's and the theme'ing. found most of it to be hideous.i stick to wotlk as it was what i first started out on with molten, back when sargeras was a 20x wotlk relam.

[-Notorious-]

Hope this doesn't count as necro-ing, been too busy irl to reply!

I don't think we agree, actually.

I think we were? I was arguing not to use population to judge how much people prefer MoP, and I think you were saying the same thing? Maybe I'm wrong, so I'll just ask what you meant when you said "I personally feel that our MoP realm's current or past popularity has little relevance to whether the expansion is better than WotLK."

That's not true at all. Many, including myself, consider MoP still too new to provide any real nostalgia or preference factor over playing live servers. This seems to be something you still fail to factor into your arguments.
Edit: I guess I should add that there are plenty of other factors, but I don't consider MoP being a popular expansion on a private server for so long as Legion remains to be successful.

Maybe from a non-PvP perspective its possible you are right about Legion. Legion seems to have a lot to do in terms of stuff outside of PvP. For PvP however, perhaps you are not aware, many world class players (those that play in tournaments including Blizzcon) are ditching retail for MoP realms. There's a reason they didn't choose to roll on our PvP 3.3.5 realm. I think the interest in MoP is there, its the bugs that keep people out. Perhaps I'm wrong, however there will never be a way to say if nostalgia plays a bigger factor than %realm working, since when %realm working is at 75% or more, enough time will have passed for you to make an argument that any population increase was due to nostalgia.

i think you are mixing people exp about expansion with your personal exp on private server.the 2 of this have nothing to do.MOP was 2 years log expansion and you wanna judge the last few week only ignoring 20+ months of complete trash.thats just wrong.on retail population drop BECAUSE of the content people have to deal with pre s15.also when warmane released his MOP realms only the client was at 5.4 but with no content and season 12.it took years for them to reach s15 and SoG.majority of players quit long ago and never look back.

if i have to rate my favorite expansion i will go like this.

1. WOTLK/TBC
2.Legion
3.Cataclym. ( Cataclym pre 4.3 was awesome expansion sadly the last 4.3 patch ruined everything.)
4.MOP
5.WOD

I don't know where you got my personal preference from. All I've done so far is argue how fixes = more population. I also don't understand why you want to judge the popularity of 5.4.8 by using 5.1-5.4 as a standard. Judge 5.4.8 alone from how much enjoyment you got from it. Judge S15 based on S15 and S8 on S8. Don't use earlier patches to judge later content as doing so defies any logic. Yes, it took Warmane over a year to get to S15 and SoO. Yes, the population suffered from that. That is literally the point I am making, the lack of fixes are the reason for the population drop, not the popularity of the expansion. I'm glad you have found a server that has your favorite expansions in such great working order. I too enjoy playing on WotLK from time to time (as I mentioned, I have more played time on my WotLK character than on my MoP one).

Excuse me, but you are not showing any kind of evidence with those screenshots at all to support your words. However, I'm definately not saying you are wrong. There are several reasons behind it. Not only Warmane focused more regularly on wotlk and tbc, true, but also MoP was way less populated than the others in the era, I've seen an oficial graphic showing it.
Here:

Spoiler: Show

But why we had full cata and mop servers then? Quite simple I guess, not only we have players who don't retail and still wanted to try them out, but also those servers were at their very beginning. As soon as they realize how the expansion itself works out, population starts to drop. And, unfortunately, the high amount of costs required to maintain the later expansions compared with tbc and wotlk is also a reason.

I think the only issue I take with your post is the fact you are using retail numbers to justify private server numbers. These are not the same. As was mentioned before, retail saw population drops during both Cataclysm and MoP. However you are assuming this was because expansion were not as enjoyable. It is entirely possible that this may be the sole cause, but I believe it is likelier that population dropped due to newer genres and games being released. It is difficult to know why population dropped on retail, there are simply far too many factors.

What we can compare are populations on Warmane/Molten. After all, the purpose of this thread is to analyze populations on Warmane, is it not? The expansion that had the most focus on development saw the largest growth in population. Population growth was negative for expansions that were ignored. If I were to run a statistical analysis, I'm fairly certain it would spit out a strong relationship between # of developers on an expansion and population growth, stronger than even "favorite expansion" vs population growth. I obviously can't run such an analysis, but that is the crux of my argument.


It may seem like all my posts are intended with convincing people to play on MoP. I don't intend that to be the case. I was simply answering the question the OP posted:

Why does everyone play WOTLK on Icecrown/Lordaeron nowadays?

I gave my opinions with as many facts as I could to back them. I could totally be off, but that is for the readers to judge. I believe the single biggest factor for population decline in MoP was the lack of fixes. I didn't state any conclusions as to what was better for the server, because in the end who cares? What's done is done and honestly, I think Warmane probably made the right choice to focus on WotLK since it honestly is a more profitable expansion (donations on MoP are probably the lowest due to PvE gear being useless in Rated PvP). However, in my opinion, the reason for MoP's decline was not because it is a poor expansion (or I suppose I should say, 5.4.8 is not a poor patch). I think if you asked anyone with more than 50 days played on every expansion ever released on WoW, they will rate MoP very highly. It does seem like MoP is getting a LOT of fixes now, and the realm is REALLY improving. With the launch of conquest catch-up and some other changes, I think we'll see a lot of growth. In a year, if MoP is working really well and If its dead/empty then, I'll eat my words and come post how wrong I was (if I remember... lol).

[Happysanta]

Wall of text :)

Maybe people feel like I do. I've been playing every single expansion extensively and I keep falling back to wotlk. To me it has the right balance of nostalgia, pretty okay raids except ICC is very boring after you've ran it 1240912409124019 times. The pvp even with all the smournes are pretty fun.
I started on Outland when it launched to try it but after a while I had the feeling its a bit too time consuming for my life right now. Wotlk has the right amount. And it gives me the nostalgia party as well. I guess thats why? Its just the right combination from where wow became more modern and still retro.

[Drkwispurr]

I'm using retail numbers? Yes, that's true, but that doesn't mean it won't make an impact in here aswell, even if it's not a big deal for you or in general speaking. No, I'm not assuming anything about expansions being enjoyable or not, I just tried to bring as many factors as I could. My opinion too ofc...
- Players' preferences
- More wotlk/tbc focus
- Cata + MoP being more expensive to maintaim them (and more/harder work to do I guess)
- Other projects / servers being released

I'm sorry but you gave me the idea you were just pointing out the lack of MoP atention to justify its population drop, while I highly believe it's not just that. Maybe it probably is the highest factor, I don't know and I can't tell, however there are many others around which already leave a scratch behind.

[Obnoxious]

I think the only issue I take with your post is the fact you are using retail numbers to justify private server numbers. These are not the same. As was mentioned before, retail saw population drops during both Cataclysm and MoP. However you are assuming this was because expansion were not as enjoyable. It is entirely possible that this may be the sole cause, but I believe it is likelier that population dropped due to newer genres and games being released. It is difficult to know why population dropped on retail, there are simply far too many factors.

If your "more likelier" was correct, World of Warcraft would either have went on a continued decline or stagnated, as new games and genres continue to be released, even MMOs of way better quality than WoW. The fact Legion got a new increase in population - along with the fact the big population drops were after the release of said expansions, when people already had had a chance to play the new content and form opinions - shows you are more than likely incorrect.

[Mercy]

I think we were? I was arguing not to use population to judge how much people prefer MoP, and I think you were saying the same thing? Maybe I'm wrong, so I'll just ask what you meant when you said "I personally feel that our MoP realm's current or past popularity has little relevance to whether the expansion is better than WotLK."

Little != none, for one. And two, why do you continually bring up those numbers, hm? It's not the first time you've done it to just me in particular. The point I was making is that you shouldn't be posting those things at all, because then you're just going off on a tangent that doesn't really help the discussion.

Maybe from a non-PvP perspective its possible you are right about Legion. Legion seems to have a lot to do in terms of stuff outside of PvP. For PvP however, perhaps you are not aware, many world class players (those that play in tournaments including Blizzcon) are ditching retail for MoP realms. There's a reason they didn't choose to roll on our PvP 3.3.5 realm. I think the interest in MoP is there, its the bugs that keep people out. Perhaps I'm wrong, however there will never be a way to say if nostalgia plays a bigger factor than %realm working, since when %realm working is at 75% or more, enough time will have passed for you to make an argument that any population increase was due to nostalgia.

There's also a reason a lot of "world-class" pvp players I've been familiar with for many years stopped playing the game in MoP - or just stopped taking the game seriously. You know what that reason is? They were familiar with the game's pvp pre-Cata, and actually enjoyed not having wild absurdities such as Cata Ret, Cata Mage, Cata Rogue - and then the absurdities that just continued to grow going into MoP. You can't personally say anything about Legion pvp, or even WoD pvp for that matter, because you have no experience with it. All you have to say on the matter is hearsay and/or conjecture. The only reason to play MoP on a private server at this point, AT ALL, is by looking at it through rose-colored glasses or having played it for the first time on a private server. You can argue as much as you like, but you will never change the amount that the pvp stat systems and other things like 70% dampening and base resilience screwed with the game, or the fact that damage and healing was so out of control that things like that were necessary.