Pay difference
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Quick reminder to those reading, Blizzard died in 2005.
They closed Blizzard North in 2005.
Those are the people that made the games you remember from back in the day.
Now Blizzard themselves make the games. They used to do the CG and the marketing.
After WoW released, there was zero people from Blizard North around to steer the ship. And they ran it into several icebergs since then, and are now heading to ground the ship completely.
Sure Microsoft bought them, but if you read the court documents, it was 95% for Activision, and King games. The cared so little for Blizzard that they didn't mention a single game they made in the documents. That's how little they're worth.
I’d say Overwatch was their last successful product. Unless you want to argue Diablo 4 is. So they are coming up on 10 years with nothing but garbage money grabs. I was a WoW nut too, and as far as I’m concerned that game died with the Lich King.
MoP was better than anyone expected and than what people give it credit for. I think it was better than Wrath, but Cata had left it a huge cratering hole to build out of.
Brawler's Guild is still one of the best pieces of content in that game and its MoP incarnation was its peak. Timeless Isle was the best "daily zone" in terms of diverse things to do. The raids were all strong. The new characters were actually compelling and telling a decent story.
I think most people just made "lul kungfu panda" jokes because they wanted to fit in and then never moved on.
I'd just totally moved on by then and I think a lot of the vanilla players had. Everything got too fast and grindy to me. Rush through get your loot badges and leave. That comes from someone who leveled in vanilla for the most part. I was the weird freak that liked the BRD dungeon crawl, outside of a few things like trash respawns and crazy corpse walks. I didn't even raid that much in Wrath, not like I did in BC. I quit and came back a few times and quit for good midway through Cataclysm.
I get it. I spent the better part of months on the Marshall Windsor quest in BRD because I autistically refused to leave a zone until every quest was done (had Loremaster already complete when they added achievements). Shit I even did most of the Cenarion Circle grind in Silithus solo because TBC had launched and rendered old world barren.
That's why I enjoyed MoP. It was a lot slower but still progressing in its design. It stuck that good point between the "clear your entire day" difficult of release Cata/TBC but not complete faceroll of Wrath. The dungeons were still doable, but you had to be competent and able to do mechanics regardless.
And Challenge Mode was phenomenally fun, simply because it was 100% optional. Not "optional" like every other mechanic in the game was, but optional in that you gained nothing but a mount and a cosmetic armor set from it. No recipes, no gear, just something you did for fun with the boys.
I played that game from mid Vanilla until early Legion, and was even a hardcore raider spending 8+ hours a day from late TBC until MoP ended. And I truly think MoP was the peak of the game portion of it. Vanilla and parts of TBC had that "soul" to the world that filled it with wonder, but those fucking Pandas managed to strike the balance between being fun and what was left of that soul.
Also I think the problem with Cata was they spent so much time redoing all of the vanilla zones that anyone who wasn't a brand new player was left with a fraction of the dev time left for the end game experience. The dungeons and raids were fun enough, but there was nothing outside of them.