I'm not being melodramatic when I say this may be the tipping point for me not pick up MoP and possibly quitting altogether. I have played continuously since I first started in early BC, and have never gotten the burnout that most players do, I've always found something in the game to interest me and occupy my time. I love the game, the setting, the lore, and my characters.
Many people have now experienced the theramore "event" and the outcry is both terrible and deserved. How blizzard can put this piece of crap out the door as-is is completely beyond my comprehension. It's terrible. It's worse than terrible, it's a slap in the face. A giant "F-U, go buy our book" from blizzard. And it's either a sign that they just don't understand how to tell a good story anymore, or they just don't care. Or both. There's no context, no preamble, no setup, no resolution. It's like reading chapter 13 of a 25 chapter book without even a summary page, you'd have to go online and read the sparknotes to make heads or tales of it. And it wouldn't have been so bad except for how much HYPE blizzard has generated for it! It's a bigger disappointment than the so-called "epic" Thrall questline that consisted of " go kill 20 elementals without getting ganked, repeat 3 more times"
Cata shook my faith in Blizzard and for the first time, I nearly quit the game. It was not burnout, I HATED cataclysm, hated the changes, hated the stories and the new races (well, goblins). Hated how long everything took, how hard quest/daily mobs hit and how slowly they died, how difficult the dungeons were. Especially hated how silly everything was, between rediculously over the top goblins (who are now EVERYWHERE) and silly quests with non-stop pop-culture references with the on-rails storytelling. Hated that all my favorite quests were removed and all my favorite places gone, and hated doing hours and hours of archeology for a troll sword I never got, a long boring new "feature" that only succeeded in giving me plenty of time flying over the world instead of experiencing it to think about how much I hated the changes. Only transmog kept me playing, it was announced the day after I decided I would let my account slip and it saved the game for me. My raid team is the only other reason I still play, they're all kinds of awesome.
But MoP looks terrible. It's like they read my psych profile and set out to make the worst possible expansion for me, tailor-made. I hate pandas. I hate that they're called panda people, and that they come from panda land, and that they know kung fu and are chinese. Some aspects of the xpac look neat, but the core doesn't engage me at all. I was willing to give it a chance despite my complete lack of excitement over it, but now? Blizzard has cemented the fact that they have lost the magic they used to have. The game is nothing like what made me love it, what made me want to lose myself in it. I don't feel tired of playing it, I feel copletely let down and abandoned in favor of what Blizzard thinks will somehow be "fun" and I just don't see it at all. All I see is a bunch of developers REALLY excited about everything I don't care about, and everything I care about gone or back-burnered or de-emphasized. Talk about a sad panda.
