1941

Yep. That’s what I’m thinking although I don’t remember if it usually leaks before then. I’ve heard rumors about more demons. A cool idea would be invading the Demon plane/world where all these attacks originated. Sort of like TBC on steroids.

1942

I don’t think we’ve had a real leak of names before. Rumors, always a ton of rumors, but I haven’t heard an actual leak. They used to have a plan of expansion order that got leaked, but they deviated off of that a couple xpacs ago.

1943

They’ve generally been okay for me. The one thing that really annoys me, though, is that I can’t merge my wife’s account with mine. she’s a very casual gamer, and it would be neat if she had access to the pets and mounts I’ve racked up over the years.

1944

A further development in my hacked account saga. I logged on this morning to deal with some of my characters. I have to go to a mailbox and get the items that Blizzard replaced. I was quite amused to see that the gold seller who hacked my account had used one of my seldom-used characters to work the AH. I checked my mail on that character and I had nearly 4000 in gold waiting for me from auction sales. The gold seller also got me a third of a level on my 85 hunter too. I guess he used him to farm some kind of crystal – sha crystal? A lot of my auction money was from sales of that.

I bet that was one pissed gold seller when Blizzard banned my account and he had all those auctions in progress.

1945

As I recall, MMOC nailed the Pandaria name and some of the content before the official announcement. There’s probably some chatter about it in the Cataclysm thread. Other than that, I don’t recall anyone ever having more than a guess at what the expansion was going to be.

I’d still like to think there are plenty of other places in WoW-dom that could be explored other than going back to the demons. There’s always the long-rumored Emerald Dream for one. I suppose a final showdown with Sargeras could be in order, but I’d almost prefer a new threat and area that hasn’t been seen before.

1946

They seem to be building towards something with the mantid, the old gods, the titan, and the mogu all being tied together. I’d also guess it would have something to do with the threat to the world Wrathion talks about in the beginning of the legendary quest. 1:35 here…

1947

Just a heads up for those that missed it, Blizzard just released a series of superb videos that tells the story of Shaohao’s struggles 10,000 years ago in Pandaria and gives hints (or rather big flashing signs) for what’s next in store for Azeroth. I highly recommend watching them as it’s some of Blizzard’s best work to date.

The videos actually gave me, not only a much better appreciation for Mists of Pandaria, but for the lore in general and has me going back and reading the novels in preparation for resubbing (for the upteenth time).

1949

I actually liked the warcraft lore somewhat before this panda shit. Well, the blue alien thing was also kind of… well, not their best hour, but i could kind of ignore them for the most part. The talking pandas that you just can’t take seriously are in your face throughout this whole expansion. I know Warcraft has always not been 100% serious, but at least it was like 60%. Now it is not even trying to be serious at all and thus in turn i can’t take any of these stories of despair/impossible odds/evil seriously at all.

I know some people on these forums actually like this angle, but being someone who does not like pixar movies, i do wish they had kept the panda race as a april 1st joke. I don’t mind my games being cartoony, but at some point (probably the point where you have a talking panda that walks on two legs) we cross in to saturday morning kids cartoon territory.

1950

Yeah, I have to agree with Murbella. It’s the thing that turned me off most about Panda and keeps me from delving back in.

1951

Here’s an interesting video with a little discussion about the direction Blizzard’s going with WoW: this guy’s theory was that they’ve made it so accessable to that it’s no longer engaging. His example? The game has become so casual-friendly that you can be the worst player in the world and still see all the content. And this inevitably leads to people subscribing when new content comes out - playing for a short time to see everything - and then unsubscribing. Yeah, this is done through LFR and you can say the LFR content has been purposely made easy to do, but his point is that for many people, once you do it with LFR, you don’t feel a need to do it the harder way, since for many, they just want to experience the content.

To test this theory, he created what he described as the worst WoW player in the world, with the goal to see all the raid content the game currently offers.

Might be old news to those of you still engaged with the game, but I found it interesting: video.

1952

Pandas were in Warcraft at least as far back as WC3, so while I can’t blame people for not liking them it isn’t something ‘new’ or to ride Dreamworks coattails or whatever. I still can’t fathom why talking cows are fine, but pandas are over the line.

I can see the point about WoW going to the themepark extreme, though. However, I’m not sure they’ll change directions until it is either too late or another game comes out with a more ‘vanilla WoW’ gating that proves players really prefer that model. I feel that outside of the hardcore crowd, people like the ‘see the content a move on’ model because WoW then isn’t a permanent time-sink. Blizz is hurt by the fact it is so easy to drop your sub and just pick back up when you want. GW2 is getting a lot of flak for all their temporary content - because lots of people will not get to see it. Just because it is gated by timing rather than gear-level, it is a similar deal.

1953

But you can overlook the cute talking cows, or the talking Wolves, or the talking Blue tentacled aliens, or the cutesy gnomes with pink hair everywhere? At least the pandarians have been part of warcraft lore since the original RTS.

I mean WoW and warcraft has always been cartoony and childish, its just sometimes they have the odd adult storyline.

I also agree with Daagar above, i drop back into WoW once a year to play through all the content, and i have an enjoyable few months then quit again. I also have GW2 and im pretty sure if i log back in today for the first time in 5 months there will be almost zero new content for me as they seem to like temporary only stuff - which unfortunately means i likely wont every play GW2 again until an x pack is released. I feel i have missed so much GW2 story lore and content that for some unknown reason is temporary i don’t feel i can catch up on what’s happened.

1954

I’m in the same boat when it comes to WoW and GW2. Try as I might, I just can’t get back into GW2 and don’t think I ever will until a substantial amount of permanent content is added.

And I was one of the detractors when I first heard Blizzard would be doing a panda expansion and didn’t buy it until a few months after it was released. I really thought Blizz had lost their f’ing mind. But yeah, pandas aren’t so bad. :P

1955

I loved the levellng content for pandaria, i just think theyve messed up end game. (Admittedly, i dont know how to fix it.)

1956

I think “content tourism” is pretty much the natural endstate of an accessible themepark-style MMO. And as long as you can keep the content coming so that people come back, I don’t see that as a particularly bad thing. I’m not in these games for challenge or having to spend every day playing in order to see and do everything I want to do. I’m here to explore new zones, follow new storylines, and (ideally) see the dramatic boss battle conclusions to them. As it is I still find the gear grind to take enough time investment just to access LFR that I’ve yet to do it.

I wouldn’t hold your breath for a GW2 expansion - they’ve said they probably aren’t going to do an expansion as such, although they plan to add content like you might see in an expansion gradually through the living story content.

1957

Yea, that’s using a fairly mainline theory of difficulty, that without challenge people get bored and quit. I’d suggest that Flex raiding is supposed to deal with that…

1958

Flex raiding is a solution to having to form a dedicated “raid team” with alternates that get benched because the main team all showed up that night. A great idea, and something certainly worthwhile especially for guilds that are more casual but want to run together and not PUG everything. But unless LFR was taken away, I don’t see how it’ll deal with the theory in Charlatan’s link. People that just want to see content for content’s sake will run LFR, see the sights, and unsub just as before. The won’t suddenly be compelled to run a flex raid.

1959

I think flex raiding is also Blizzard’s attempt to make raid leading a little less of a headache. I lead a 10-man raid for several years, and even with a near-solid group of 10 regulars (and a fairly decent pool of guildies with alts), managing the roster was probably the unpleasant thing I had to do. At times it felt like a second job. The group continued on after I left, and decided they’d go with a system where they had 12-13 regulars and they’d just rotate who sat. While it’s made it a lot easier to deal with the last second no-show, there are still times when they only have 9, or some people (tanks/heals) hardly ever sit while others (mainly dps) sits a lot. There are also times when someone gets stuck at work an extra 20 minutes, and the group can’t go without that person. With flex raiding, the group could recruit a few more people, and most of those issues will go away.

That said, the group isn’t planning to going to switch to flex. I think there’s a bit of a stigma associated with dropping down in difficulty and loot iLevel, even if the difficulty is far closer to normal than LFR. It makes it harder for an established group to switch from normal to flex. However newer groups may opt for it for the obvious advantages.

1960

I think I’ve actually enjoyed the lore in MoP more than any of the other expansions, including WotLK. I think Blizz has really strived to make sure there’s a story being told here, and integrated it tightly with the questing. I mean you even have people clearly named Lorewalker, and the sequences told with the Lorewalker faction after finding the lore bits scattered around Pandaria are one of my favorite things in WoW ever.

1961

The flipside of that is people who just wanted to see content for content’s sake probably just didn’t raid at all before LFR. I know I fall into that category and while I did get to do a little bit of legitimate full difficulty raiding in Wrath, it was typically pretty frustrating because I didn’t have a dedicated raid team and PUGs never got anywhere.