IRVINE, CA — Fans of massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft are disappointed and angry that new expansion Mists of Pandaria has caused little disappointment or anger in the wider gaming community. Two full days have passed since release and the expansion has racked up a paltry 15 one-star reviews on amazon.com, a far cry from the triple-digit numbers hoped for. “I just don’t understand it” said keen WoW player Ian Keenwowplayer; “after the rage that greeted the announcement of Pandaria at Blizzon 2011 I was sure we were in for a maelstrom of all-caps fury, but it’s been a real let-down. My speciality is to instantly leap upon any mention of the movie Kung Fu Panda and point out that Pandaran in Warcraft lore pre-date the film by many years in a highly detailed argument with extensive annotation and footnotes. I was there at midnight on Reddit and in the general chat channel with a paste buffer full of quotes from tie-in novels, but had no need to deploy them. I had to actually play the game in the end.”

Blizzard spokesperson Ian Spokesperson tried to put a brave face on the reception, pointing out page after page of incoherent forum rants with random capitalisation, bizarre punctuation and highly innovative approaches to spelling the word “ridiculous”, but under questioning was forced to admit that the forums were always full of incoherent rants, and nothing had really changed since the expansion apart from a rise in accusations of Blizzard “panda-ing” to the lowest common denominator of their player base. Studies have yet to determine whether the majority of authors are making deliberate puns on the homophones “panda” and “pander”, or idiots.

In a bid to understand the lack of reaction we reached out to the Deputy Chairman of the National League of Angry Bloggers and Union of Really Quite Cross Online Commenters, Ian Deputychairmanofthenationalleagueofangrybloggersandunionofreallyquitecrossonlinecommenters. “It’s just been a really busy year”, he said. “We’ve had to be unnecessarily disparaging about Star Wars: The Old Republic, TERA, Diablo III and The Secret World, not to mention assorted updates and expansions. Guild Wars 2 is currently taking a massive amount of effort to tell everyone just how little we care about it, and how boring it is. It’s hard to keep up the sustained levels of bile and hatred that’s expected, especially when you factor in news of disappointing sales and job losses to be repugnantly gleeful over.” He also feels that the really big triple-A campaigns like that for Mass Effect 3 are having a damaging effect overall, setting unreasonable expectations. “People don’t understand the resources needed for something like that, I mean to be so tenaciously insane over something so inconsequential, we just can’t manage that for every release. We still have members searching out any story related to Bioware, EA, or the words “Mass” or “Effect” and posting furious comments, we’re not expecting them to be available for unwarranted abuse about other games before 2015. You know, we try a bit of fast-turnaround small-team abuse, but people see a couple of ‘OMG THIS GAEM SUX’ user comments on metacritic, they’re just not interested, they’re all ‘where is the nineteen page deconstruction of every quote ever made by any person connected with the game in an interview, where is the personal abuse on Twitter’, that sort of stuff takes time, you know?”

In a bid to pacify the increasingly angry Blizzard fanbase, Mr Deputychairmanofthenationalleagueofangrybloggersandunionofreallyquitecrossonlinecommenters agreed to launch an exclusive attack on Mists of Pandaria. “Erm, it’s really stupid” he ranted “like, uh, that movie with… y’know… the voice of the guy from School of Rock and… yeah, Kung Fu Panda, that’s it”.

“Oh really?” he continued “Originally seen in The Frozen Throne expansion for Warcraft III in 2003, five years before the film? No, I didn’t know that. Yeah, that’s fascinating, really… look, I’ve got a bus to catch, yeah? OK, great, you send me the scans of all the comic panels that included or referenced Pandaren together with the fan-fiction they spawned, yup, I’ll definitely be on the lookout for that, I really do need to be going though, OK?”