Since Pandaria was announced I have seen an overwhelming amount of negative opinions from the WoW community on it. What I want to know is do people that don't play WoW feel the same way?

I really doubt it. 
 
Even if they lost 90% of their playerbase (which isnt going to happen) they can just decommission some hardware, let go of a bunch of customer support and still be hugely profitable.

no, the wow community might be bitching but they wont stop playing.

Probably not seeing as the only people really left are the hardcore fans. If they haven't stopped playing by now, they're NEVER going to stop playing.

With the Pokemon thing and the PVE/PVP scenarios they're adding (or ripping off), I'm sure people will continue to play WoW for nearly forever until the servers are shut down or if Titan dominates the MMO market.

This expansion will be the death of WoW just like Aion was. Oh wait...Ok, like WAR was. Damn it. Ah, got it, like Rift was. Fuck. Ok wait wait...I'll think of something

People will still take heroin, no matter the quality.

The WoW Community always cries out loud whenever Blizzard announced anything, you can't judge anything by reading the qq on message boards or comments on videos, it is always a vocal minority that are most visible.

Yes

Nope but it is a bit of a joke, it's not going anywhere, though.

@Village_Guy said:

The WoW Community always cries out loud whenever Blizzard announced anything, you can't judge anything by reading the qq on message boards or comments on videos, it is always a vocal minority that are most visible.

Cataclysm got a pretty good reception when it was announced, it looked very promising.

If someone doesn't like the idea of anthropomorphic pandas, I say good riddance.

I've had no problems with WoW save for the fact that I wasn't willing to pay a monthly subscription for a single game up until recently. This expansion just makes me feel like I made the right choice going with Rift.

There are probably tons of people that are totally cool with having pandas run around in their game that they've sunk hundreds of dollars of monthly fees into. I prefer a more serious tone.

The people who care about this kinda stuff have already left to greener pastures though. The only thing this expansion REALLY does is widen the target audience of casual gamers a bit more, and let's be honest; at this point, they are WoW's bread and butter.

If the community was better I'd never stopped playing WoW.
 
Pandaria looks silly, truth be told.
I'm sure its all fun and magical but somehow I'm not interested, which is fine but the Mantids (what a cliche name) breaking through a wall to swarm over the island?
Panda C-Thun? That's just silly no matter how you dress it.
 
Blizzard came up with so many awesome things, but kung fu panda's and the general stuff they announced don't interest me as much.
Also real curious to see what the talent changes will bring.
 
And hey, people couldn't clear heroics at the end of Wrath with insanely easy to get gear...challenge mode is gonna fuck them up and kill pugs even more.
Or its so easy it'll be a joke.
 
But no, it won't be the end, not by a long shot. 
But the consumerbase will decline slowly, no matter what kind of actions they throw at us.

@Sooty said:

Nope but it is a bit of a joke, it's not going anywhere, though.

@Village_Guy said:

The WoW Community always cries out loud whenever Blizzard announced anything, you can't judge anything by reading the qq on message boards or comments on videos, it is always a vocal minority that are most visible.

Cataclysm got a pretty good reception when it was announced, it looked very promising.

Cataclysm got a pretty good reception yes, but now people seem to only complain about it.

Also with MoP Blizzard are taking some bigger risks with changing the way some things work - Cataclysm was only minor changes, Mists of Pandaria is taking it one step beyond it seems...

WoW is dead to me.

Vanilla WoW was a great game, the Burning Crusade was alright.

When Lich King came out this came went totally off the rails with all kinds of stupid shit.

From the sounds of it, it is just a vocal minority... which happens every expansion. So, no, it won't be the end of WoW.

This happens any time anything changes in WoW. The expansion will still probably sell faster than all the others when it comes out.

It actually makes me kind of want to play WoW.

It makes me want to start playing again.

Let's be real. WoW is the most popular MMORPG ever, and even with so many imitators, it's still the best. The user base is huge, and I'd guess that those complaining are a minority. Even if a few people leave, the game will go on for who knows how long. However, because Blizzard does such a good job of making these games, the haters will probably end up staying due to the enhancements being made in the expansion.

WoW will never die.

@BoG: Welcome Back to being a mod, sir!

No, and it actually makes me want to re-sub.

It seems like it's the beginning of the end.

Nope, there's still the oft-rumored emerald dream expansion for them to release, and even then they will be a long way away from totally exhausting their fiction. But of course, the fiction is irrelevant, so long as there is more WoW, people will continue to pay for it.

They either don't know any better, or don't care and to be honest I would prefer it if the majority of the WoW community stayed there.

I guess I just don't get the hate. It's not like Pandarian were some off the wall bullshit they made out of nowhere. They existed in the Warcraft universe. And yea while goofy and shit, I think it's kinda cool. I mean what other races were people looking for? Naga? Kolbold? Were people expecting this expansion to the Emerald Dream stuff? All in all, I'd be way more excited about the new class more than anything else.

@nerdsbeware: I think people are mad because of how silly the Pandas are and the average WoW player probably doesn't know that they were in the lore before.

How can you not like pandas!?

Just like anything else in the world this group of people that are bashing it are the minority. I know tons of people, just from walking into Gamestop that are saying that this is awesome and had been a long time coming. The environments are beautiful, the models of the Pandaren are gorgeous, and Blizzard has never failed at giving us an amazing run with everything they do.

Everyone was negative about going into Outworld, Northerend, and then the whole game revamp.

It won't be the end, but I bet there will be a significant amount of players quitting about 2 - 3 months into the expansion. When it first releases, people will get hyped for WoW again and buy the expansion, they will see a boost in subscribers, but two or three months later I would be surprised if they didn't see a drop below where they are now. All my friends that I used to raid with in BC are quitting because they feel WoW has become a joke. I quit around the release of LK and have come back to it a few times for a few months since, but I am just dead tired of it now. Pretty much 0 chance of me going back. If I do play an MMO again, it will be SWTOR or GW2, depending on which my friends migrate to (SWTOR I bet).

@BoG said:

Let's be real. WoW is the most popular MMORPG ever, and even with so many imitators, it's still the best. The user base is huge, and I'd guess that those complaining are a minority. Even if a few people leave, the game will go on for who knows how long. However, because Blizzard does such a good job of making these games, the haters will probably end up staying due to the enhancements being made in the expansion.

WoW will never die.

This.

Even twenty years from now (if blizzard is still around) they'll still keep some servers around because people still want to live nostalgia.

No. They have said that the reason the levels have dropped to 5 was so they didnt get to 100 until WoW was ready to be replaced. I would guess we have either 1 or 2 expansions left in the pipes.

I'm resubbing for this. If it were an Outland v2.0, or an Emerald Dream expansion.... I'd ignore it. But silly-ass pandas? And a completely new healing class? OMG YES.

I don't get people who complain about silly shit being in WoW. The best part of WoW IS the silly shit.

@Barrock said:

I don't get people who complain about silly shit being in WoW. The best part of WoW IS the silly shit.

Yea, I mean with all the goofy inside jokes, NPC's named after movie & TV characters, quests themed after other games... why is this so crazy. I mean hell there was a quest where you had to feed an animal, so it would shit, and then loot the pile of shit. People just like to complain.

Doubt it. It will lose a few subscribers but it will pull a few people back too. WoW probably has another five years left in it, so milking another expansion or two after this shouldn't be a problem.

MMO communities always complain about change. Always.

The only reliable figure to judge whether or not the expansion is well received will be the subscription count a few months after release, allowing the people that come back just to check out the new stuff to have their fill and leave again.

As for me, this doesn't make me want to return. Pandaren are awesome, but I've spent my time and I am absolutely done. Once you see the carrot-on-a-stick for what it really is you either realize how you will never "win" and lose interest, or you decide that you just don't care and continue to play. I chose the former, with additional influence coming from the college student budget and college student time crunch.

I wonder if Turalyon is in Pandaria...

I've heard nothing but positive stuff about Pandaria, so I must be looking at the wrong comments or something. If anything, Pandaria has me considering a sub again. I quit after Lich King for a long while, then I picked it back up for about five days when Cata hit and then quit again. Cata didn't grab me like I thought it would.

A lot of that was because I felt the game was getting too packed. I don't mean "more people were playing". I mean that the stat numbers were getting too high for me (I've always preferred relatively low numbers in RPGs), the talent trees were incredibly cluttered, and it felt like there was just too much all at once going on. The fact that they are taking melee away from hunters and killing their minimum range req, taking out throwing items and relics and all this other crap, making the talent tree ONE TREE rather than three... It honestly sounds like they are doing a drastic overhaul of the SYSTEMS in place like they ended up overhauling Azeroth as a world in Cataclysm.

Add into that the idea of Pokemon-styled pet battles, and I'm genuinely psyched. I just don't know if I wanna start another toon and level from 1 to 90 now, then dump the timesink in.

People bitched for every expansion but it didn't stop them playing. If anything, it gives bored players such as myself an insentive to go back and play it again. I personally think the new expansion looks amazing and just a breath of fresh air to be honest. I've been screaming for a new class for a while.

im excited monk sounds awesome and some asian inspired locations would be cool

Every time Blizzard announces an expansion or a large content patch for WoW there is this very vocal minority who start crying foul and raging over stupid stuff. Someone always find something to bitch about no matter what happens. You eventually learn to stop taking the entire WoW community seriously.

What World of Warcraft? All I saw was Kung-Fu Panda online.

Wow died after the Lich King was killed 1,000,000 times by 12 year olds.

They have been losing their long time players since the launch of cataclysm, but at this point WoW is too much of an unstoppable force. It will gain new users whatever happens.

You know, there's a saying I heard in Supernatural - It's not jumping the shark if you never come down, and I don't think Blizzard has any intention of ever coming back down.

But, no, seriously, WoW's safe. Pandaria looks great and also is taking the game in a different, better direction. It may feature an Asian inspired setting with pandas but this is something they've had in their mind for over a decade to put into the warcraft universe; Pandarens first appeared in War3 and their lead artist was creating pandaren before that even. The pandaren may be light hearted and peaceful, but that doesn't mean they're some great big walking joke that will make the expansion a great big laughing stock. They want to use the expansion and the pandaren to take a look at the conflict between the horde and the alliance, why they're fighting, why they continue to fight, and the damage that it's causing to not only themselves but to the world, and may use the pandaren to even try to settle things down between the factions at least a little.

On top of this, the talent revamping is completely the right direction for the classes, and the new systems are encouraging even more diverse styles of play for the game than are already promoted. MoP isn't going to kill WoW. Nothing will kill WoW, there are too many fans that for all their rage and hate and fury still recognize that Blizzard makes high quality games and will keep playing WoW for years to come.

@BoG said:

... it's still the best...

Wait, what? That's kinda a bold statement... If we're talkin' sales, sure, but otherwise that's opinion, not fact.

I'm worried by the fact that so many people are into this. Am I getting too old for gaming? Do I just not "get it" any more?

EDIT: I'm not arguing sales, subs, or longevity of the game. Just that the mood of the game as clearly demonstrated by this expansion is not for me, and that it's hardly fair to call it the best MMO because it sold better than everyone else's. Blizzard, thanks to them being awesome producers of video games, were able to make the first MMO that really "felt right". I'll admit to that, but since then others have done it the same, maybe even better I haven't tried many, but WoW just has such a crazy headstart that no one can compete sales-wise until

1. It becomes incredibly outdated graphics and gameplay wise. This would be a very slow process, and while we're slowly seeing it happen, Blizzard wants to keep the cash cow going, and you can see that through their complete revamping of the game in the past year.

2. Blizzard shuts down the servers for whatever reason.

All that being said, a lot of the people I know who play WoW are not people I'd want to play MMO's with, so I really couldn't care less. Not saying everyone, but the casual gamers have their casual games, and I have my "hardcore" (for lack of a better word) games. I'm totally happy keeping it that way.

There's an extremely vocal negative minority opinion to everything Blizzard does with World of Warcraft. People will bitch and say "I'm never playing again" and then they'll be line day one. Then two years from now, they'll be bitching about something else.

I lost interest when space goats and horde paladins.

Age of Conan's expansion was set in a new east asian theme land, and that was pretty cool.

But there were no panda men. You could kill pandas though.

Whenever anything is changed in this kind of way with a franchise that people are deeply invested in there's always a lot of pissing and moaning, but people generally make a much bigger deal out of things and put up with a lot more crap than they'd like you to think they do. This isn't the first time people have kicked up a fuss over changes to the game and it won't be the last. The large majority of the people complaining now obviously care a lot about WoW so almost all of them are going to be the exact kind of people going out and buying this stuff from day one, and burning through the content. Even if they weren't though, WoW is a game with over 11 million subscribers, it's not going anywhere any time soon.

People like to complain, not even in WoW, and not even in MMOs in general. People just like to complain.

You'll probably see a spike of resubs after it comes out, that will slowly feter off as people clear the content. Myself, it's probably the most anticipated expansion they've done to date, and not necessarily for pandas. There's some gameplay systems that seem to have really worked on actually allowing choice and customization over cookie-cutter type builds. It's a trend I've noticed at Blizzard lately: giving up overcomplicated systems that only gave the illusion of choice (Previous wow talent system, D2 skill system) in favour of easier to understand systems that actually allow for choice.

Panda's are awesome. Nuff said.