I'm not the one rationalizing here. You keep pointing to things that don't really mean much while ignoring the bigger picture.
you are presenting an alternative picture, so you have to explain / rationalize that. You cannot demand me to explain / defend mine but show nothing that backs up yours.
What is the bigger picture you are referring to ?
Metacritic scores? Who cares? It's well known that a lot of meta scores are weighed down by people who have an agenda, and in D3's case it's easy to see all the trolls who gave it a '0' because they had an axe to grind.
agreed, I did not say the 4.1 is fair, I said it shows that many people were disappointed. I am confident it does reflect that.
As to who cares ? Show me a better way to measure player rating of a game and we can use that, until then you just dismiss it because it does not fit your line of reasoning.
You also failed to mention that it has a critic metascore of 88.
I did not mention it because it is irrelevant to the point that players were disappointed.
In a separate discussion it was also pointed out that review scores by magazines are dubious to begin with as they do not want to lose access to early versions etc. by being too harsh. Are you trying to argue that 88 is an accurate reflection of the initial D3 quality, as that is what they reviewed ? if so, we are done here.
Define popular? I'd say 25 million is pretty damn popular.
that was not the point, the point was what does popular look like 3 years after release, 5 years after release, 10 years after release ?
That 25M sales is a good number is not disputed.
Who cares how many people played through it more than once? That's completely irrelevant as are most of the things you keep bringing up.
No, that is very relevant, as people not doing so is the drop off in players that was high and lead to them abandoning the 2nd expansion (along with sub-par sales of RoS, which also are a consequence of that).
I am not sure what you are trying to argue here. Nothing you say makes D3 a great game. Nothing you say can show that they did not abandon the second expansion because D3 did not meet their expectations in some way, which is the most likely scenario for why there was no 2nd expansion. It's not like Blizz cannot throw money and developers at multiple projects.
Seems you just disagree for the sake of disagreeing.