How did people feel about pandas when they first came out?

Community General Discussion
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I wasn’t here when MOP was out, but I’ve seen a lot of varying opinions about them over the forums. Some loving them a lot and a lot of people even going so far as to say that the entire style of MOP should have been something else entirely. I personally love them quite a lot and I like the style of MOP. Just was kind of curious about how their overall reception was when they were first released.

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I was meh about them at first, didn’t really care about them much, but they grew on me and I have two now

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It was an obvious Chinese Cash grab.

Now blizz games are banned in China.

Plan level failure: Panda Mode; Engage.

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Pandas were the high elves of their time. It was the utter end of WoW, as far as the naysayers were concerned. That’s all you read on the forums in the months leading up to release, just arguments over their validity. Usual doom and gloom stuff.

Of course some did like it and were interested, but others seemed personally offended that such an abomination made its way into WoW. :roll_eyes:

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No my graven raven, that was the introduction of the Blood Elfs. Do try and learn your history.

/tentacleflip

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abomination made its way into WoW

I want playable abominations.

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I was so-so when I first heard about Pandarains being released. I was in Mist’s Beta and the starting zone for the pandas was crazy with way too many people making them all at once. After playing one I found them fun, they had good animation, but it was hard to take them serious. Leveling through mist I found that they fit with the setting and over all mist is one of my favorite expansions.

So Basically I think they are fine to have around even though I don’t take them seriously. It is ok to have a fun race not, everything has to be doom and gloom.

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They were seen as a joke race pandering to the Asian market if I recall correctly

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Blizzard games aren’t banned in China though

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three words

KUNG FU PANDA

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Well I always liked pandaren since Warcraft 3. I thought Chen Stormstout was a cool character.

I thought they fleshed out pandarens really well in MoP. MoP is one of my favorite expansions because it focused heavily on my two favorite races … pandaren and trolls.

Taran Zhu, Cho, taoshi, lili were all new characters that I grew to really like.

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There was always a small number of people who kept pestering Blizzard for pandas. This gave a false impression (and verified by GC’s quote, above) that lots of people wanted pandas, when that turned out not to be the case.

Even though it’s the only race available to both factions, pandas are one of the least-played races in the game. Going off realmpop’s numbers for 120’s, there are about as many Horde & Alliance pandas combined as there are Dwarves (not even counting the Dark Iron variant).

These days, pandas are rarely seen in the game. Even when the racial leaders get together, it’s a coin toss whether blizzard bothers to include the pandas or not.

A lot of people, at the time, had 3 concerns:

  1. That basing a new race, class, and expansion off a joke character from the WC3 bonus campaign was not the best use of time.
  2. That it diverted attention from the core storylines (remember we were still waiting for the burning legion to come back, at this point).
  3. The treatment of them was too cutesy, compared to Samwise Didier’s original (black & white drawings) pandaren concepts.
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Taoshi and Taran Zhu were both pretty bad a$$

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This, for example, was old school pandaren art concept:

https://www.topsimages.com/thumbs/vBTwS4-XWDhWYooJSxFcuRbH6SOlPtCJSyskvlvH__SK-hD_5Lv81BdYHfCKbccC0fChMPYBCWWzvhPkB-gpvw.jpg

The original panda idea was SAMURAI pandas. But they had to remove the Japanese imagery for obvious reasons, since WoW is sold in China and not in Japan.

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Sadly we already have gnomes

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Those were the same folks who didn’t realize there was already a story behind pandarens well before WoW, in WC3. Most of it I hate to say it was just racist tendencies Americans tend to have, even when they don’t know they harbor the prejudice. The expansion was actually beautiful, but the design and artwork team always do such a fantastic job. This was the first time they tried to reintroduce the faction war.

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I was like, “wtf.” Then I said, “I wish we got model updates for all races so they all look as good as the pandas.”

I ended up quite happy.

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Same as today: i look like a panda, my people are called pandaren, our land is called pandaria. Slow me down if I’m going too fast for the average WOW player.

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In my case was love at first sight. I always really liked chinese culture, so have something like that in my favorite MMO was great. Also i like races that are “animals”, like taurens and worgens.