Slashdot Mirror
World of Warcraft Finally Loses Subscribers
bonch writes "After seven years and a highpoint of 12 million subscribers, World of Warcraft has seen a loss of nearly one million subscribers in the last six months for the first time in its history, according to Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime during an Activision earnings call. However, the game remains the most popular MMO, and Morhaime said Blizzard plans to reverse the trend with fresh content. Some believe that the loss in subscriber interest is a sign of the game's inevitable twilight years. Blizzard also recently received a trademark for 'Mists of Pandaria,' fueling speculation about the next expansion pack."
Personally, and for many others, the constant feeling of grinding did it. RIFT is a much more fun game, it has a lot of variety and you get to the fun stuff right from the beginning. EVE Online has a huge interesting world where everything goes, and is tailored much more towards PVP. World of Warcraft is just too much about PVE and grinding that environment, which really isn't that fun, especially considering it's an MMO. Even withholding the MMO games, there are so many absolutely fantastic games coming out now and in the recent years that I'm not surprised people feel bored with WoW. It's only going to be worse for WoW, with Battlefield 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and many more fantastic coming out really soon.
Wow....(no pun intended).... Last quarter wow lost 600k plus another 300k this quarter.... and the news appears now on /?
I look forward to being able to tank against kung-fu pandas.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
It could just be people taking some time off before Diablo 3 comes out?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
One of the interesting things about MMOs versus single player games has always been the social aspects. You get to interact with the people around you and, surely over time, are going to accumulate a few friends and maybe a desire to go out more.
Complete speculation: is it possible the decline is related to gamers 'growing up' and finding themselves with less time to devote to the game? Trying not to sound pedantic, but it has to be hard to maintain a Warcraft addiction while being employed, having a spouse, working a job, having children, etc. I wonder if enough of the magic has finally worn off that people are starting to look at other ways of spending their time.
One can readily imagine that WoW-players will be the next generation Star Trek fans. TV series followers from a few decades ago probably are the same (alien?) breed. The long term nostalgia potential for WoW appears great.
I don't have time to play MMOGs, but people I know who play WoW and the like have recently moved to playing Rift as their new fantasy MMO of choice.
Paid customer services, like character recustomization and especially migration have been deadly for certain realms and games in general.
If your friends move to another realm, you have 2 options: transfer your own character, or quit playing. The same goes when a previously florishing realm goes 'dead' - people either move either quit playing.
Blizzard neglected this issue way too long - look at their fora, for certain realm subfora this is the most common complaint 'our realm was good but now everyone left there's : not even enough players to raid with / too many opponents / etc. The character transfers also heavily affected PvP - no-one wants to belong to the 'loosers' so a lot of battlegroups got serious balancing issues. -There are other indications that blizzard didnt take PvP serious enough, like heavy class imbalances, but in my opinion it were the character migrations that have been deadly for certain realms...
Last not least - blizzard 'hardened' the content. While most will agree that a lot of content in previous expansions was 'too easy' (major cause of this being 'epics' too easily available - hence the term 'welfare epics' was introduced) - the balance now swapped to the other side and a lot of semi-casual guilds and players just gave up on the raiding content because it was 'too hard'. Blizz still being king of content - they'd better taken some of the complaints on the fora more serious as they seem to be unaware of certain issues that every player is aware of..
So.. i'm not surprised - it's still a great game but it cries for more variation in the content to please both hardcore, casual, PvE and PvP players - and yes, the players got spoiled over the years, too, demanding a better game all the time ;)
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
I tried WoW when it first came out in the EU. I gave up after a month for numerous reasons (basically, it just wasn't my kind of game), however a couple of years ago I met my (now) wife who was an avid WoW player. She played at a professional level, in a guild with sponsorships and that kind of thing. By all definitions, she was a "hardcore" WoW player. Yes - was.
I watched from the sidelines as her interest in the game dwindled and it's easy, from an outside perspective, to see why - Blizzard were trying to appeal to too many "types" of MMO player and more or less alienated everyone. To break it down in its simplest terms, there's 2 kinds of player - casual and hardcore. When the burning crusade came out, it was hard. Tough as nails, in fact. I remember watching her and her 25 man guild wipe numerous times on regular bosses, let alone the heroics. And it was fun! They enjoyed the challenege, but the problem is the "casual" players didn't. The casual argument was that they're paying the same subscription as everyone else yet only getting to see half of the content because they couldn't progress.
That's when Blizzard decided to tone down the difficulty, just in time for Wrath of the Litch King. This kept a lot of the casual players happy, but it meant the hardcore guilds were completing the content a day or two after it came out. If Blizzard didn't stagger patch releases, Arthas would have been dead before Christmas.
In each instance, Blizzard ultimately lost players. Sure, they'd gain an increase in subscribers when the expansions were released, but shortly after people would stop paying the subscription. On the one hand, the casuals feel cheated when content is too hard and the hardcore guilds get bored because there is no content left for them. I've even seen Casual players argue that the heroic modes are too hard and that it isn't fair, despite the fact that the content is the same and the purpose of heroics is to keep the hardcore guilds happy.
The end result is that Blizzard constantly changes their mind on who they focus on - casual or hardcore and ultimately appeases neither.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
- the rampant immaturity and callousness. MMOs need a karma system, even several, where you rate your random-grouped partners on their skill, social behaviour, and efficiency.
- the endless grind, which is harder to solve: either things come too easy to anyone, or one must grind them for hours...
- the lack of new stuff. Blizzard has tweaked WoW, but not really added new game mechanisms over the years. My last fights a few months ago were very similar to whatever I was doing in Molten Core way back when.
- the gross imbalance in Tank/Healer/DPS numbers, leading to 30+ minutes waits to run an instance with a DPS.
- my guild insisted on doing 25-players raids, which I find top heavy and boring.
- permanent balance issues. I think there were too many classes filling the same roles, but not equally. They never delivered on "take the player, not the class"
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
... World of warcraft set back single player RPG's and single player games in general hugely. As everyone tried to copy WoW or wow'ify their RPG experience and now with the whole rise of the free 2 play phenomenon one wonders if there will ever be good variety of single player RPG's ever again on the PC.
Reversing the loss of subscribers with 'fresh' content would be offering a drowning man a glass of water. The game doesn't need more of the same, nor does it need more of the suspiciously similar.
The game is simply over. Eventually the whole Red Queen-syndrome of an MMO gets really, really old. Most players can put up with the invisible hand in the sky - that one that occasionally tells them all their end-game gear is suddenly vendor trash and they should go fight a bigger, differently colored monster which has conveniently appeared in the next village over- for exactly as long as the game remains interesting. The problem is that with the same engine, the same art direction, the same development team, the same corporate overlords, etc. the game can't remain interesting forever. You can't come up with truly new, practical ideas ad infinitum without reaching the point where the software can't take it or where with every New Thing (tm) you're changing the core experience and consequently losing at least as many players as you gain.
Blizzard needs to prevent WoW from becoming The X-Files here; they need to notice that the interest level (and the natural story arc) are winding down and create a proper ending before the whole thing becomes a bloated mess destined to a messy, horribly unsatisfying conclusion.
It's probably too late now.
But I never enjoyed it quite so much as when it was first out and there were .. assholes roaming around making it hard for the time deprived, slower people to level. A bit of villainy is necessary. When mass confrontation did happen in the world (even if it wasn't all that well dealt with by server).
I'm sure it would never have been as popular if it weren't so generic, but it's the reason to step away from it. Every quest you do is geared for you to pass. Every setback has virtually no cost. It's a brilliant game - but the highs and lows are gone. For me, anyway.
For me, Blizzard failed at one thing. They should have catered to a wider level of expectation. If a person wanted to play on a server with a more cut-throat edge to it, there should be one. If a person wanted to play on a server that had a deliberate time limit on how long you could play, so that power leveling was virtually non existent and people who wanted to play for X hours a week could remain competitive - without feeling like they were missing the boat - there should have been one.
Instead, everybody has to play with the people who just strip the fun out of competition by rushing through content. Everybody has to play on a server where you're only really permitted to pvp where they say you should (which is to say, where you can't be a rascal, if you so desire). Blizzard neither cater for the casual or the hardcore. Or the casual hardcore :)
All in all, you eventually realise the game has neither highs or lows and you move on.
The real problem is that the low level content has been invalidated by Bind on account equipment items that scale better than any other items you can get in dungeons/quests for your level and boost the amount of xp you get as well. Basically the only interesting content is the end-game raiding content.
I play with a group of friends that get together once a fortnight to play WoW and we level new characters over the space of a couple of months. However we are dumping WoW in favour of Lord of the Rings. You can no longer fail at playing WoW.
Probably those million are the people who are switching to SWTOR
It is probably a combination of things:
1) WoW is just getting old. Some people get bored of the same thing after a time. Yes they introduce some new content but the fundamental game hasn't changed much. That was why I canceled my account. I'd just had my fill. Perhaps I'll play again later, after all if yo leave something alone it can become new again, who knows?
2) A solid alternative came out in the form of Rift. Most MMOs are complete and total disasters when they launch, they are all kinds of broke and you have to put up with a lot of shit. Not Rift, it was solid out of the gate, so you really could leave WoW and go enjoy it. Also Rift is solidly targeted at the same kind of gamer. It is a fantasy MMO, with quests, dungeons, etc. It's UI is extremely WoW like, and so on. I played it for awhile until I got too busy and I tell everyone "Rift is for you if you enjoyed WoW, but want new things in the same vein."
3) Blizzard seems to be getting real schizophrenic on what players they want to target with WoW. So in the previous expansion, they seemed to continue more casual gamer targeting, at least for PvE content. They made dungeons a hell of a lot easier, toned down raids in normal mode and so on. Very casual friendly. However in the current one they turned the difficulty way up, dungeons were a real challenge and raid were more old school. Also in PvP they have continually targeted more and more hardcore people, putting emphasis on the "digital sport" type of thing. This leads to a problem because gamers can't get what they want and it makes everyone unhappy. Hardcore types get mad when it gets easier, causal types get mad when it gets harder. Everyone seems to get mad when things just suddenly change (even the people I knew who liked more challenging dungeons were pissed off at Cata heroics because it was a massive change, with no middle ground).
This probably marks the end of WoW's glory years. It made MMOs in to something that all sorts of people play and really established the mass market. However it seems people are moving on. I doubt Blizzard will reverse the trend. Now I don't think WoW will die, I think it will be here for many more years, probably decades, but I think the player base will dwindle and settle at a much lower level.
It's had its run, but many people are moving on.
- permanent balance issues. I think there were too many classes filling the same roles, but not equally. They never delivered on "take the player, not the class"
Show me a game that does, and I'll show you a game without the concept of classes.
Or to quote some ramblin' dude from the days of text-based gaming (Hi, Tenny!):
You could clone the warrior class and simply change the class name and the name of all the skills, and people would still bitch about balance.
When I fight anything in WOW, I spend most of my time staring at my task bar, to monitor cooldowns and such.
Needing to look at something other than what you are fighting, while you are fighting, always struck me as a pretty serious design flaw.
As a player that as been there since the days of Vanilla and playing almost non-stop in a semi-casual guild (and now as Guild Leader) I feel blizzard have been testing the waters for quite a while and have finally got it right. They have been experimenting with different ways of balancing PvP and PvE, as well as the difficulties of Raids and at which level they should be aimed at. In WotLK Naxx and TotC were complete and utter failures while Ulduar and ICC is rated as some of the best content to brace WoW since Vanilla. Come Cataclym, expectations where high, and though the first 3 Raid Dungeons were okay, they weren't great (besides Nef).. Because of peoples experience of WotlK (which I think was blizzards worst so far) people had already stopped playing and then when Firelands came out they didn't even bother levelling up to 85 ( http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2413-Character-Activity-Stats-Poll-Trip-to-Blizzcon-Contest-MMO-Report ) But for those of us who have stuck it out, have finally been rewarded with Firelands... In my humble opinion, Blizzard has gotten Firelands 100% correct. It is hard, fun and epic. Firelands is about bringing the player, not the class It is about movement and tactics, not just standing still and smashing buttons.. Yes.. this has made organising raid nights harder as you can no longer carry players, but once you have weeded out those who are just not up to it.. It is definitely worth it.. The problem Blizzard are facing now is that because Firelands is so awesome, and hard casual players just aren't buying into it anymore, and so they are starting to pull the plug on subscriptions which looks bad, but it is probably the best thing that can happen.. This way blizzard won't have to cater for the n00bs who can't even play arcane mage :(
I for once is finally enjoying WoW again (as I did back in Vanilla and TBC) and I can definitely recommend Firelands to any WoW player who has ended their subscription and has been thinking of trying it out again.
We need fresh games, now someone might create something and get a load of wow subscribers.
I love mmorpg, but wow is now feeling like work more than fun.
i liked the early casual-style just-for-fun pvp. hate arenas rated bgs and co.
I like discovering new places, exploration, new dungeons... and that is severely lacking in WoW. Daily quests suck i dont like repeating day after day the same shit.
Why cant they create stuff faster with their 100s of millions ?? like a new dungeon a month would be a MINIMUM.
Everything is bound on equip, i liked Everquest style where people were more helpful and sharing stuff was fun.
And above all, WoW attracts unpleasant kids. and they cant do anything about this.
We've talked about this in our guild a couple of times over the past year. The main thoughts from us are that the game in terms of PvE content is better than its ever been, but our problem is that we've been playing it for 6+ years now. After that length of time, things start to get old no matter what happens. At the moment the main thing keeping us together is the raiding - Firelands is brilliant. We're a small group of friends from Uni with a few others that have joined over the years. We meet up reguarly and we have relaxed raids where we have a laugh and everyone knows each other. It's good fun and we've not found another game that can match it, let alone the effort in getting everyone to rerole etc. I don't think this will be of any major concern for Blizzard. Their subscriptions could half and they'd still be the largest MMO in the world and the game would still be worth developing for. Even if subscribers drop, they can probably just cut back on some hardware and merge servers with no loss to players. Several times a year for the past 2 years I've heard of "WoW Killers" (Age of Conan anyone?) and how WoW is at the end of its life and won't last another expansion. That's rubbish. The game will last as long as its profitable, maybe even another 3 expansions. Eventually a game will come along that will deal it a big blow, but thats not happened yet, and even when it does, it probably won't kill it. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Ultima Online still going and didn't it get another expansion last year? As long as the game brings in money Blizzard will support it and maybe even a bit beyond that point as long as people play.
It was about 5 years ago. I was going to push for more content for a few reasons. First off, many people who quit the game do it out of boredom of nothing new to do. If you have lots of stuff for them, they won't leave, just keep making higher levels, and equipment and boards, and monsters, and quests. Next, if you make a good enough game, that it is a generational coming of age, you'll get a never ending stream of 10 year olds coming in, and they'll play til their 18 because of all that great content you ran up. Your game could be a permanent fixation on the Internet.
What is cool is that I found a company to work with where I am a game designer, and this is our philosophy. Too bad it is a small company though because I also have to do the job of game programmer too. You gotta do what you gotta do.
God spoke to me
I quit about 4 months ago after about 4 years of playing the same class/role (warrior tank). The driving factor for me was that the game had massively shifted from being huge and exciting, with a real sense of achievement, to inevitable victories and reinforcement pellets.
I used to love playing with my girlfriend, levelling and exploring the new content. We felt skillful completing raids with a group of people. We were never the best, but we worked hard and achieved our goals. Even when Wrath of the Lich King came out, it still felt epic and there was a lot of new content to explore and play.
However, now it's just a Skinner box. See here and here for great articles on this.
So, no new content, a lazy achievements system and uninspired story telling made me quit. This time, I don't think I'll ever go back.
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
While it's a long time until the WOW servers get switched off, I think there will be a point where subscribers keep falling, servers keep getting merged and Blizzard will be compelled to go F2P. Their model simply doesn't work any more. I wouldn't be surprised if the same happens for other subscription based stalwarts like EVE too eventually.
I got out of WoW at the end of April 2010. I'd been a fairly hardcore player for a couple of years up to that point (having been fairly hardcore in Final Fantasy XI beforehand). However, by the start of 2010, it was clear (and probably had been for some time if I'd been looking for the signs) that the game was past its prime.
I think the trap Blizzard have fallen into is being too prescriptive towards their player base. In the Blizzard model of the world, everybody is basically working down a set progression path, with very little else to do. This is a theme that runs through every facet of the game.
In terms of overall progression, Blizzard have made it very clear that they want all of their players to be working on the same raid content at the same time. An expansion hits, raises the level cap and renders all previous raids obsolete. The new expansion has a tier of raid content, which everybody jumps into. A few months later, the next tier of content is added. At the same time, the previous tier is adjusted so as to be ludicrously easy - and the rewards from it quickly become obsolete. Then a new patch comes a few months later, and the previous content is all nerfed down again. After this repeats a few times, you get a new expansion and the cycle begins again.
What this means is that the game ends up not actually feeling like a persistent world. There's a treadmill that everybody has to stay on - with very little real potential to either pull ahead of the pack or - provided you are at least minimally competent - get left behind. This really diminishes any sense of achievement associated with the thing. Worse still, it's an entirely linear path that you have to tread; there are no credible alternative routes to gearing up and making progress, not least because the stats required for PvE and PvP are so completely different.
Now, I understand that there isn't a quick and easy fix to this and that some games have gone too far the other way; one frustration in FFXI was that a lot of the best gear in the game actually dropped from the "ground kings", who were some of the oldest (and most irritating to find) bosses in the game. Given the game's... what... 8 years old now, that starts to look a bit pathetic. But WoW's habit of doing a "soft reset" with every patch and a "hard reset" with every expansion is even more infuriating.
The lack of choice also runs through the character classes and the balancing. I always felt that Blizzard made a huge mistake in tying PvE and PvP balance together - they should have switched the game to different rules entirely whenever PvP was invoked. As it is, because of the constant tweaks required to maintain PvP balance, Blizzard got into the habit of constantly tinkering with every class in the game - and then fundamentally redesigning classes largely just because they felt like it.
There's no freedom in WoW to develop your class in ways that Blizzard hadn't anticipated. They know how they want you to play a class and if you don't go along with their scheme, they'll just patch it so that you have no choice. By contrast, when players found that FFXI's Ninja class, which had been designed as a damage-dealer and debuffer, actually worked best as a tank, Square-Enix followed their players, and while they did end up tweaking the class a bit, it was aimed at fitting it in alongside the other tank classes, rather than trying to reinforce their original intentions. Blizzard, by contrast, would likely just have banned the people playing the class as a tank for "exploiting" and then patched the class so that it could only be used as a damage dealer.
I think what I'm trying to say is that Blizzard's big mistake with WoW has been to let themselves become too interventionist, so that the game feels less like an exciting online world and more like a sequence of arbitrary hoops to jump through.
..and Indie gaming in general.
Actually, the "Great Recession" probably has even more to do with the decline -- when people do have money to spend on games, they won't be spending it on a monthly subscription. They'll buy a cheap pickup game like Terraria and get a couple months worth of entertainment out of it for the price of a single month on WoW. Or they'll play a "free-to-play" MMO that is more geared toward their style of play.
We are the 198 proof..
Something that's not been mentioned is that the writing has taken a sharp decline. I mean we're talking about a Blizzard MMO, the story was never spectacular. But in Vanilla and BC (and some of Wrath) it was good enough to do the job. It made sense. It drove things forward. It gave you reasons for why stuff was going on.
Cataclysm is just pathetically bad in this regard. Things routinely happen that aren't explained in the game (go buy a godawful Richard Knaak book!). When things are explained, they're hackneyed and don't make sense. It looks like it's just been set up so the team has an easy excuse to create PvP. The Horde has gone back to being the rather flagrantly evil faction, though mostly because they have one flagrantly evil member (the Forsaken and their plague warfare) and the rest of them say "hey don't do that!" then remain blissfully ignorant that it's going on anyway.
Also, content is a problem. Being 85 basically obsoletes everything except 85 content. Except that after release they went a very long time without any. When 4.1 hit and we got new dungeons, it was recycled troll dungeons from previous versions of the game retuned for 85, and that's it. So. Very. Weak. The raids in 4.0 were too hard for many people who had been able to raid in Wrath (they're easier now, but those people got bored and left with nothing to do). Now something apparently good came out in 4.2 but the damage is already done.
Combined with the general fact that the game is now getting old and every few months there needs to be a fan revolt to keep Blizzard from making some braindead decision they'd never have done in the past (real ID forum names, more recently trying to charge an extra fee to group with your real ID friends) and it's clear things just aren't what they used to be.
Finally, the competition is catching up. Blizzard had the advantage for years of other games not learning anything from WoW and having lousy UIs and unpolished releases. Not anymore.
It had to happen eventually, and here we are. The question now is just how many people it'll lose, and if they can get those people back with their next MMO.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I want to raid, their content looks fun and interesting. The problem is, I barely managed to get 1 character to 85 with a LOT of encouragement from friends. But raiding as 1 class gets old, and getting a new class to raid with takes WAY to much wasted, unfun grinding. Thus, I left wow for games with lower barriers of entry on the "fun" elements.
The biggest change in Cataclysm was the healing model. Once a character passes level 80, the highest of the previous expansion, their costs to use healing spells increases to where by the time they are level 85; the new top level; their mana to healing cost has gone up four times. It is never a good idea in any game to make a player feel less effective as they progress. This one change alone had a very detrimental effect on players with many guilds report losses of people playing healers if playing at all; for some this was the only role they wanted and they when they stopped feeling effective they could not play.
The problem Blizzard had with PvP and especially Arenas which they put so much effort into is that it was all a burst affair. Those who could unload the fastest and most coordinated won. So what did Blizzard do? They jacked up the hit points of characters. When an average mage had 20k health at level 80 in the previous release they now have 100k health. This caused a new problem, healers would just make PvP (specifically Arenas) play drag on and on. So they eliminate the effects of burst attacks with immense health pools and in turn keep the games from going on forever by nerfing the healers so strongly they cannot afford to heal effectively for any period of time.
Blizzard causes all these problems through gear inflation. Its a common joke that your gear is better than your character, hell a mage's staff can double if not triple or more their ability. People used to make jokes in the previous release about how it was bound to happen when caster weapons would offer +999 spell power - well they do and actually do triple that.
So Blizzard balances a game around X, then they monty hall it to death and wonder why the model no longer works. To fix the problem they create the nerf players all under the guise of providing a challenge. When one side of their development team does not operate within limits how do they expect to balance a game. Worse, they lied to their players. They claimed for months leading up to Cata they wanted to give healers a more challenging and rewarding play style. They didn't bother to ask and when people complained they merely deleted threads.
What Blizzard forgot is that the majority of their players play to have fun. Having fun means being able to be a hero, saving the day, pulling it out under incredible odds. When they turned the healing model upside down they stripped that feeling from a large amount of their player base. Now I here they want to do the same to tanking as its "not engaging enough". Random groups already make DPS players wait nearly 30 minutes to get in (standard five man mechanics and needless to say more people play dps) so I can only imagine the pain coming forth.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
starcraft & broodwar kick arse!!!!
...Give or take a million, not to mention the fact that 6 million are easily playing WoW from China as their job/prison sentence.
So let's say five million.
Five. Million.
Yeah, it seems MMO makers fathom the correct thing: They need to emulate WoW if they want the big bucks. I'm not going to argue how shortsighted that is (every game that has gone up against WoW has failed - and no, Rifties, your shiny game hasn't proven itself yet), or how disappointing it is for fans of the genre. But it's the monetary, corporations-have-a-duty-to-enrich-their-shareholders truth of the matter.
When new stuff comes out I may be found wondering back into the game here and there. But lately the content cycle has create somewhat of an immunity in most. I have not even bothered to visit Firelands when it came out. I used my free 7 day return pass to mostly twidle my thumbs in Orgrimmar. The thought of doing another instance made a gulp of vomit come up my throat mere moments after I clicked to join the PvE queue, prompting me to just close the game down. They really need to come up with new, interesting, and exciting things to do. Just riding the same horse around, parading it in-front of people, just won't do anymore!
Aside from progressing the character I like getting things that make my character look different from other characters. WoW didn't allow you to do that very well because by the next raid tier or expansion that fancy staff you really like for Character X was no good anymore and had to be tossed. I always said Orgimmar or Stormwind looked like the broken photocopier capitals of Azeroth.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Wrath of the lich king was a rich expansion - its content was fresh, epic, grand, taken from world's own mythology (titans to dragons nords to nagas). And it was huge - even a single zone like dragonblight had more content than 5-6 original vanilla zones confined.
Then they revisited original azeroth. a lot of people made a lot of applause for that in online forums, but these were mostly people who were in nostalgia because they were people who played original vanilla wow. when in a chat-channel (city-wide) discussion, i queried whether it was more the people they played with, and the stuff they did and its nostalgia rather than really content in original azeroth were they missing, some admitted that it was more nostalgia than content.
and it is true. imagine stepping down from titans, giants, dragons and nords, that kind of epic, historically plausible myths and sagas down to 'original azeroth revisited'. most of what is in there are stuff that was made up by warcraft's own lore. good or bad, they are inevitably less interesting than titans or dragons.
i said to myself, this will be a boring step down. and unsubscribed when the expansion launch was near. didnt return since and i dont think returning unless they produce epic setting and stories like northrend again. i noticed a lot of people talked and acted similarly while i was unsubscribing back then.
Read radical news here
I believe that many of the unpleasantness that came with the latest expansion has also had a major impact on subscribers. I have friends that I have made over the years in WoW, they may not be the best players but they truly are good people. The skill needed for the beginning dungeons in Cataclysm was a bit too steep. You could not avoid the mechanics of a fight anymore as in the previous expansion.
Blizzard put in minimal gear requirements for doing harder dungeons and I believe that they might not have been quite high enough.So many of my friends are just not playing anymore. The players you encountered using Blizzard's random group matching system became unbelievably rude and intolerant.
Then some people got offended when they reduced the difficulty on previous raid content. (This to me was just childish).
The total revamp of all classes did not help either. You had to re-learn a class that you have been playing for the past 5 years.
But as others have said previously, this expansion sure does feel much more of a grind than the previous. WoW, when it first started removed many of the old style MMO grind. The death penalty was just some gold, items did not decay, you did not lose experience when dying.
For Cataclysm it seems that they are heading in the opposite direction the started in.
Not WoW it is free to play but with quite crippling limits, I think what's really hitting WoW numbers most is the rise of the free to play model amongst other MMO's none of which have anywhere near as crippling limitations as WoW take a look at the free to play on steam section and there are 4 MMO style games all of which are free with microtransaction support that offers a substantial boost but is not required to actually participate even at high levels with no problems. Compare that to WoW where you can get to level 20 and have severe limitations on your character and i'm going to gravitate my time and effort towards the free to play game that for sure. The one i've been spending most time with is Spiral Knights, very simple persistant world game that's remarkably fun and you can do excpetionally well in without spending a single cent.
I played this game way to much. I went to Blizzcon. My family had two accounts and three for a little while. I had two mobile auction house accounts. The quarterly magazine. I did the paid arena tourney. Blizzard was making money from me on everything except plush toys.
I could put up with players in their various methods of anti-social behavior.
However, one day one of those kids submitted a ticket. They suspended me for 3 hours. I was not upset, but when I asked via email exactly why I was suspended I got a form mail. We exchanged emails various times. I always got a different person to respond and gradually blizzards responses became more to the point. Finally a supervisor answered my email by sending me a copy of section 8 of the terms of service which said we can suspend or ban your account for anytime, for any reason without explanation and then up my suspension from 3 hours to 3 days. This was after my suspension was over by the way.
Never in the email exchange was I rude. I was even to the point of being nice. I simply wanted to know what exactly did I do wrong to get a suspension, so that I would not do it again. I never has a blizzard customer support person use a name. They always had some name like frobozz or treya. The first set of emails were form letters, some of them were not even on subject. One, I kid you not, was on you need to discuss business opportunities on the forums or some nonsense. To be honest, I don't even think the people who answered the emails spoke English. I think they were just posting form letters since they could not understand my email. Even in the end, the supervisor did not give me a personal email other than "Please review the following" before inserting the section 8 boiler plate.
As a result, I quit and started spending my money elsewhere.
Once again, the masses at slashdot prove why they consume games rather than create them. (Similar could be said of cell phones, automobiles, or damned near anything.) What a bunch of whiny dipshits who somehow think their worldview is not only not absurd, but is ubiquitous.
I'll add the disclaimer right off the start that I play WoW and will continue to play it for years to come. But I'm one of the hard core players that has played since day one. Now, having said that, one thing I've always realized was a danger was the desire to make WoW big, as in creating a huge player base. It was always thrilling to hear the numbers go up (3 million, 7 million, 12 million....) but there was always the realization that this was catering to a casual crowd that doesn't play hard core MMOs. It was great that they got a lot of non-players into playing the game, but then that meant that they had to keep them. And THAT was the problem. Casual players rarely become hard core players, and when they get bored, they leave and don't come back. A hard core player who gets bored tries something else for a month or so and then come back. What happened was they kept those numbers climbing but common sense tells you that a lot of those millions weren't playing the game any longer. So each "new" subscription or starter was not adding to the numbers but replacing many casuals who left. Such a model is not sustainable for growth. It's sustainable for playing, as long as you realize that the numbers can't keep increasing forever. But because MMOers are famous for loving the demise of the strong, any loss of growth is immediately seen as a failing game, which common sense should tell you otherwise. WoW will continue strong for some years to come, but if they think they can keep attracting new people (or even the people they already had), they're chasing after false profits, and every goblin knows that there's no profit in that.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
Here they are in no particular order:
1. Summertime in the northern hemisphere. People go do stuff when the weather isn't terrible
2. The current state of the game. This entire expansion has been a rerun of content that was already in the game, with a little extra material thrown in. You can either do the same PvP arena grind that hasn't changed in a couple years other than new class abilities and scaled gear; or you can run the same two heroics over and over, which are retreads of instances they released years ago; or you can do the one current-level raid. THAT'S IT.
3. They've become lazy in their development. You could see it starting with the last expansion when they recycled Naxxramas and Onyxia from the original game. Now Blizzard has taken to recycling 5-man dungeons, and taking 10-man raids and turning them into recycled 5-man dungeons. New content keeps MMOs alive. Retread content gets people looking for the unsubscribe button.
They've managed to obsolete all the content in their game by having ridiculous scaling. The only reason to go into any raid instance other than Firelands is for tourism. The only reason to do the ~11 5-man dungeons made available in this expansion is if you don't have the gear necessary to get into the two retread troll instances, so you can grind them over and over again until you get to your weekly cap on "valor points."
The game has no content for someone that doesn't like endlessly repeating the same crap, or endlessly repeating the same crap on a different class. Hardly surprising that they lost ~8% of their subscribers in 6 months.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I read all these posts and see a lot of QQ.
Wow has evolved over the years, things have changed in it over the years, its not the exact same mechanics as it was in Vanilla and BC. Vehicles, more interactive quests (throwing bears from a tree?), and that sort of thing. Blizzard has tried to appeal to the masses, but where is the fault in that? What is wrong with a company trying to appease everyone, why are all of you complaining because a company is actually trying to give you your moneys worth?
I'm not totally disagreeing with what has been said, it is true that wow has failed at balancing classes for PVP vs PVE, Casual vs Hardcore, etc. Stop and think though, would you all rather them have just ignored everything and done nothing? How many people would still be playing wow if it were exactly like it was when it was v1.0, and no tweaks or changes were made. All of you posting on here must be top advisors at a company that has a MMO that actually competes with wow because of how much you know about what players want, and what demographic plays Wow. I'm sure had they brought you in on their no doubt numerous meetings, they would have near 20million subscribers, to think... the things mentioned here must have NEVER came across the meeting table at Blizzard..
IMO whoever posted this is a troll, trying to start a heated debate amongst nerds who think they are never wrong, and I wouldn't doubt if most of the people posting here QQing about wow, are going to go home and log in tonight and raid, and QQ in the raid about their class getting nerfed, then QQ about their loot not dropping.
While loosing almost 10% of the player base is significant, people are making too big of a deal over it. The vast majority of these accounts could easily have been gold selling accounts, multi-boxers who lost interest, etc. There was a huge surge in the popularity of multi-boxing at the end of wrath, and fads which gained popularity due to boredom, will fade once new content is released. As many have pointed out, there is more competition now too ...
when they can wring money out of it all the way down?
semantics are everything!
If you want to craft, you have to raid.
If you want the top recipies you have to raid.
If you want the materials for the recipes, you have to raid.
There is almost nothing to be done in the game that does not involve or even require raiding to reach the top levels. You have to raid even if you just want to pvp. Why? Because wow is heavily gear dependent and because if you aren't in the top tier of pvp'ers and dedicated to grinding it out you won't get gear and you will get roflstomped.
They wanted gear parity between pve and pvp but forgot that all of their pve encounters are scripted and follow a set path. Pvp is against real people who are not scripted and who excel at min-maxing, exploiting the fact that blizzard does not balance character classes for pvp. So if you want to do well at it you either have to be a god, or you have to switch to flavor of the month class. Everyone else who is not a pvp god has no chance of maintaining gear levels and gets roflstomped. Unless of course they want to.... Wait for it.... Raid.
So, if you don't want to raid, and your not capable of competing at a high level in pvp, what's left?
I used to enjoy Alterac Valley, it was big enough that I could not have the top tier gear and still feel effective. It was epic. Then it was nerfed and became the race to the boss. 40 v 40 where both sides just raced past each other and almost never scored a single kill. The elemental lords were never seen again.
I played to 85, and even enjoyed a couple of dungeons I would never have seen if it weren't for the dungeon finder. But after doing them two or three times I was no longer interested. I'm not a pvp god and I don't enjoy raiding. Once I had leveled a few 85 toons there wasn't anything left for me.
WoW is raid or die. I don't need it to survive, it was fun for a while. It does need people like me though. There are a finite number of hard core raiders and arena junkies. I'm guessing those people alone can't pay for the work involved in creating content and maintaining the game. Based on the last time I had free game time, realms which were once high population are now low population. It's raid or die, if the people who don't want to raid leave there's only one option left for the game.
Everybody I know has been moving over to LotRO
Morhaime said Blizzard plans to reverse the trend with fresh content.
Now, I don't play WoW, but from all my friends who did and quit? The new content is the bloody reason.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
When Cata came out and I saw the new items for PvP I said to myself, this game is dead. Everyone is walking around with exactly the same stuff on. Everyone looks the same, has the same gems, has the same weps, etc etc etc. Dead game. Why do I still play ? Because I have 4 lvl 85 chars with a lot of gear that took a long time to get. I will jump ship the instant I find something interesting.
OMG Pandaren monks on the way!!
I was bored with the game and felt like leaving but one of my buddy started playing and suggested we should level goblins. Whatever criticism you have about Cataclysm I sure hope it doesn't include goblins, they are the best race so far (not in term of number but in term of fun to play) and their storyline is quite entertaining. I decided I would play a tank, I thought it might be boring after all those big numbers I am used to see on my mage, the role of tank might have a bad reputation but it is actually very fun to play.
I guess if you are a hardcore player you might be disappointed at the complete dumbing down of the game but I love pvp and just basically playing with my friends so I am not even close to the nerd rages I hear everywhere about trivial crap from the game.
Raid have gotten much more interesting also, the boss mechanics are in most case entertaining.
Basically, I am not leaving soon, I do play less however, I guess burning crusade was the perfect balance between casual and harcore to me and cataclysm redefined questing in the game, I actually enjoy questing, a lot now, and the storyline finally make sense and the world seem alive, they haven't fucked everything, at all.
... if you expect that they will produce perfection always.
A lot of people grew up on WoW, and have such rosy memories of vanilla or BC. Cataclysm has been a seriously hit-or-miss expansion. Some things are awesome, and some things are terrible. Here's why:
Blizzard is trying to cater to too many factions in their playerbase. They need to please the maximum number of players in order to keep their subscriber numbers up.
There's one faction that will steamroll through content. They have 7/7 Heroic Firelands done, finished the legendary and are now bored.
There's another faction that doesn't. My guild is 2/7 Firelands -normal-, and my raid group is 0/7 Firelands because after 4 weeks we cannot down Shannox or Beth. (For all people in the previous faction, how do you find that content so easy?)
There's one faction that doesn't care at all, and there's too little for them to do. The same 5-mans all the time are obnoxious, and there seem to be far fewer of them in Cataclysm compared to Wrath.
There's a faction that cares WAY TOO MUCH about PVP. And RAGE on the FORUMS using ALL CAPS because THEIR MAIN IS SO NERFED.
And then there is the faction of players that pine over their childhood and wish that WoW never changed because it's so not cool anymore, 'cause back in the day you had to walk barefoot up Blackrock mountain with 39 friends to get a rare pair of shoes that has a 10% chance to drop off a boss that you might be able to get to after 2 hours.
I mean, how do you please all of those competing interests? You don't. You do your best and sometimes ideas just don't work out so well as you'd hoped.
The problem is that blizzard is just too damn greedy...the "5 billion in the bank is not enough" attitude, is sickening.
I have been an avid player since the beginning, and have lately stopped playing for a few months at a time...to avoid repeated play time...so that when an expansion comes out, i grind it to a certain level long enough to feel comfortable, yet not long enough for blizzard to make too much money off of me.
This being said, I did not understand why they would also turn around and do only to lvl 85 instead of lvl 90 on the last expansion...again being greedy.
No one is going to play your game forever, and now that you are trying to really squeeze more out of your players that have already spent an arm and a leg playing your damn game,...you realize "oh crap" we should not have done that....
With all the hacked accounts as well, or p0wning going on, when someone complains about something, take care of them, offer them real compensation for their troubles, else they will leave, we know how hard it is to grind stuff...so offer more goodies more often...this 5 eggnogs and cookies as christmas gifts sucks,....bring out the cool weapons instead...help the player along...
I've played solidly since vanilla and I can tell you why I've been "on break" for the first time since I started playing... there's too much shit to keep up with anymore. Blizzard's main demographic has grown up, with more pressures on their time than they used to have. At the same time, Blizzard is adding to and changing the game mechanics so radically and so often that the bulk of their players can 't keep up anymore. Last month I'm stacking X (with gems and reforging and enchants and on and on and on and on) ... this month that stat is crap? Really? I gave up on this latest patch... it's just been too much.
I can't speak to WOW of course. I played it during beta, signed up for the first month and quit after about 2 weeks because the game was way too boring and simplistic. I am sure it has changed since then, but it seemed to me and my friends at the time that it was MMORPGing on "easy mode" and intended to get people interested in the genre, without actually challenging them in any real manner.
Of course I "grew up" in MMOs on Everquest (yechh, ptuie), Dark Age of Camelot (one of the best games ever, despite its flaws), and Star Wars Galaxies (the most ambitious and my 2nd candidate for best game ever, in its first incarnation, despite huge massive flaws). In my opinion WOW did everything right, but nothing inspired.
If they have lost the PvE market though, they have joined a long line of MMO game companies who have made that mistake. Despite the fact that PvP players shout the loudest and insist vehemently that their style of gameplay is the most important and only valid form until they are blue in the face, the majority of MMO players prefer to play PvE style gameplay, although they might dabble in PvP from time to time. Game companies who continue to tailor their game to the concerns of PvP players at the expense of their much larger PvE population (most of whom seldom visit or post to forums), are doomed to lower subscriber populations. I have PvPed a lot, but I have spend 20x more engaged in PvE gameplay either because I preferred it (5 Years or so in City of Heroes, probably the best coded MMO ever) or because it was required to engage in PvP (most games seem to make those who hate PvE engage in a lot of it so they can engage in the PvP gameplay style they prefer, go figure).
I suspect that the continued support of PvE gameplay is the reason Everquests I & II are still in existence. The focus on PvP gameplay has shrunk the populations of DAOC and SWG (which is now cancelled of course).
I think the only game that ever got the mix right was the aforementioned Dark Age of Camelot - and they quickly moved to break it and offend their customers with the Trials of Atlantis expansion which pissed absolutely everyone off.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Around the time Blizzard announced the new level cap was 85, and barely any new content would be available, I decided the game was no longer worth playing. Predictably, I was told later on that the experience had become cheapened by a lot of people who had played for quite some time. Call me what you will, but the price, along with the monthly subscription fee is not worth the circle jerk Blizzard put out this time.
Good riddance indeed - it means all the bad players from the WOTLK and earlier era's are now gone that had no clue how to gear up, play, raid, and to NOT STAND I. I have really, really enjoyed Cataclysm immensly.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
I am in a very large raiding alliance on Silver Hand--Leftovers.
On our forums--where the point is raiding--we agree that leveling is too easy, gearing up at 85 too hard and raiding is such that you can't carry your weaker players. You have to raid to win or not raid--there is no raid to have fun as of 4.1.
Easy leaving + hard raiding = bad.
The 80-85 game is on rails too. This is the first expansion where I only had 1 max level character and 0 desire to see the content again.
And lastly--the game came out in 11/04--and I had been playing about that long. After 6 years in the same game I am just burned out. EQ lasted about 5.5 years for me. Could I come back after (with luck) a 5+ year relationship with SW:TOR? Yes, for a bit at least.
I think it's time for them to finally release Diablo 3 and get those players back
and frankly it feel like a daunting chore. It is not beginner friendly at all. The problem is that the game itself and other players are way too hardcore. Come on, there are players who make statistics and advanced math to determine optimal damage and combinations. That's what made me quit. Everyone looks down at you and before you can have any fun you have to kill a million boars.
a LOT. and i do mean a LOT of people were playing the game in the 19,29,39,49,59,69 levels(twinking) - because that was the only thing that was fun. I was one of those people. I had a lvl 69 rogue - yeah he was maxed out and hit like a truck(i beat lvl 73s and 74s) but then they decided that they would allow people to get XP by going into the battlegrounds. Whether that change was motivated or not by people(with no twink gear) complaining about being killed too easily or whether blizz didn't like people who stuck at a low level without leveling or both reasons is left up to debate.
But players, regardless of twinking ever being a factor or not should not have allowed people to gain XP. Then they allowed people to gain XP by merely gathering items relevant to their profession. Like myself, people with twinks usually were using that character on a different account(you have two computer and you run your twink with your lvl 80/85/whatever through all the higher level dungeons to get all the twink gear). So of course the merging of ALL battlegrounds to be merged cross realm solved that but that means everyone moved to lvl 70 and turned off XP. What they should have done what that they should have allowed people to turn off XP and still play with people who didn't - but then you think they made it to where you couldn't that they didn't like twinks. This is one example of Blizzard trying to horde too much control over how people choose to play the game. Lots of people with lvl 80s and 85s dont want to make another toon and go all the way up to 85 again. Why should we have to level when we want to have fun at a certain level? In many cases I suspect because of what I have just explained, is that a LOT of those sub losses are a combination of multiple account removals or people that decided that they would just go all the way and cancel their subscriptions altogether. (The main purpose of having the main high level toon was to furnish money, pvp items/tools to the twink).
You can run LOTRO inside Cross fire from Codeweavers (free two week trial available).
I run it on my MBA when I'm away from home.
Or you could run bootcamp, which is what I do on my Mac Pro at home.
If you like LOTR then the lore/back story in LOTRO will really appeal.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I personally dropped my account a while back. I had pretty much stopped playing for the 4-5 months before Cataclysm hit. The expansion brought me back for another 2 months or so, but after that I was bored again and just dropped the subscription.
Overall, being a competitive person, what really did it for me was the dumbing down of the content and trivializing of the gear. Don't get me wrong, I'm no elitist - I actually got very little of the top level gear when it was hard to get because I simply didn't have the time or energy to raid hardcore to get it. Still though, I raided occasionally, and when I did manage to attain something, it felt like a true achievement. When I finally downed a boss - even if it was on a raid instance from 2 content patches ago - it felt like I DID something.
They basically killed that. They hand out gear like its candy. Nothing feels special anymore, because the only thing needed to attain that gear is pure boring GRIND. Content gets easier over time - not only because they keep handing out better and better gear on a schedule, but they actually nerf the content as time goes on.
It means nothing now. Even when I wasn't doing the upper tier content - when I wasn't dripping purples, I was having more fun because it felt like what I DID have, I earned.
Naturally its their game, and their perogative, so they can do what they will, but in its current incarnation I have little interest in playing. I've gone back to mostly single player games, and now have more time to actually do outdoors things (like REAL fishing, and USPSA competitions - where I still suck, but I still enjoy it despite them not bending the scores so that everybody "wins").
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The Pandaraen brewmaster was my favorite hero in Warcraft III, a kick-ass kung-fu panda hero character that split into 3 (earth, wind, fire) mini characters for his special power.
Haven't played WoW in years (boring shit, too much damn walking, not enough fighting) might have to get back into it.
There is nothing new or unexpected here... There are now several very good MMOs for players to choose. Blizzard had a top 12M active subscribers accounting for more than 50% of the market. This is not a market where it is possible to get to 60, 70, 80% market share just by doing price and propaganda. This is a hardcore gaming market and Blizzard will eventually lose more and more subscribers to other MMOs. They know it, they plan for it, that's why they have other games under development. That's why they merged with Activision. This has nothing to do with the actual game content or mechanics.
WoW has been attracting new and untested gamers into the whole concept of gaming for years. I'm talking about folks that never played a videogame more involved than tetris until their buddy or their S/O sent them a free trial. People like my wife, who like to follow my friends and I around healing and got decent enough to raid with us, or my friend Joe who has aggrophobia and enjoys the opportunity to socialize without having to take a bunch of meds. But these folks are NOT gamers. They don't have a ton of coordination, and they don't have this concept that trying to do the same jump 40 times until you get it right is somehow enjoyable. They play, they enjoy playing, but severe difficulty is, for them, a wall.
In Wrath of the Lich King, these folks could play everything in the game. The most difficult fights were unlocked by triggering optional hard-modes, and the basic level of difficulty was set low enough that even my wife and my friend Joe could do their part and we'd make decent progress from week to week without burning out. For me, that all changed in Cata. It started with the truly bad players who we carried at the end of Wrath of the Lich King -- but once they were gone there was another layer of players who tried hard, liked to play, wanted to succeed, but for whatever reason couldn't hack it. Cata, even the five man dungeons, was way too hard. The poster above captures one element of that, the changes to the healing system made it hard for healers (and hey, guess what role tends to get asigned ot the guy that dose not game and dosen't really know what to role they want to play). That in turn makes it hard for tanks (and let me tell you, dieing because my healer runs out of mana when the boss is at 50% health, NOT a fun experience for a tank). That in turn makes sucess impossible for the DPS, who's key roles are to (1) not take damage and (2) do as much damage as fast as possible.
For me, and for my guild, we enjoyed raiding with people we actually liked as, you know, people. Once the difficulty level goes up I was forced to choose again between finding some raiding guild full of elitist sh*theads (and always that one guy who's REALLY good at playing the game and also a total racist/mysogenist pig) OR not getting to play end-game and just tooling through 5 man dungeons over and over until I got my teir pieces... whee. I chose option three, RIFT and wait for TOR.
Now -- watch for the elitist responses blaming the players for not being up to the challenge. I guess my response would be, okay, say you're right -- I'm still not going to pay for a game that is set to an unadjustable difficulty level that is so hight that my wife and friends gave up and quit.
...and that is not a bad thing. Casual gamers want to be able to socialize and be rewarded with peer recognition. Farmville, Angry Birds, Foursquare (the last is not a game, per se, but the socialize-peer recog mechanic is identical) provide exactly that. Socializers want rewards for doing things they *like* to do, and they want their friends to know about it, instantly. That just doesn't happen in WoW. As it stands in WoW right now, socializers face a stunningly steep learning curve and a long, tedious grind to the level cap before any of the social aspects (such as they are) of the game are available. And when they do get to the level cap, they face continuous, scathing criticism from gamers who could care less about the number of pets somebody has when they need a 'lock who can actually melt face in a raid. Social forces are culling the herd that is the WoW subscriber base -- I see the drop in subscribers as reflecting the gamer/socializer divide, and that is why it is not a bad thing for WoW gamers. I think Blizz's rock-paper-scissors approach to game balance has been pitch perfect; what is happening is Blizz is not really catering to the socializers, so they are departing in droves, creating a smaller but more pure gamer community. This isn't a death knell for WoW -- even if half the subscriber base turns out to be socializers who are looking for instant gratification via non-challenging, non-threatening venues like Angry Birds or Farmville, that still leaves BC - level numbers of real gamers to raid and PvP with.
We are that one waaaayyyy at the bottom of the list on WoWProgress...yea, that very last one....That's us. We have fun. It's like being in 'Cheers' every time you log in. Most people in Stormwind are in their RP gear, with the newest acquired mount/pet/funTrinket, chatting up a storm. We even have a Museum of Traveling Debris!
Sure we are a lot slower on progression, heck, we don't even have a single 25 man kill on any Firelands boss, but everybody knows your name.....and you know who you can turn to in order to finish filling up that last raid spot.
A million lost subscriptions is $1.5 million less revenue per month.
Blizzard, you got PWNED :)
> Then you should come to our server! We are pretty much nothing but a server of socializers!
Sounds interesting... Which server?!
Wouldn't that be $15 million a month, not $1.5 million? Or does only every tenth person pay for their account?
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
The karma idea is the greatest, in my opinion, but of a different variation. I think a rating system by players on other players would immediately be exploited by griefers and cliques to the point where it would be useless, unless they did something to really make it work right. However, I would love to see something more aligned with what was done back in the day with Ultima Online when you got karma (both good and bad) for doing certain things and killing certain types of monsters. Having titles that reflected that immediately gave you an indication that the guy you ran across might not be the most trustworthy fellow on the planet. Sometimes you got fooled, but not as often as you would think.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
We have done some fun World PvP with Promade. A bunch of people got together to do 25 man Ulduar for the drake achievements, which was a huge deal for us. Other servers can just toss out a 'LFM', but on our server, it's a very creative process to get people to go do things. In the end, however, it ends up being a ton of fun, friends are made, and true community spirit is alive and well.
Please note, progression is minimal. Expect to see mages with agility enchants, hunters with spirit gear, and pally tanks wearing leather. Don't set your hopes up on 'making it the best possible server ever', as the community will eat you alive. We have had several 25 man progression guilds transfer in to get the realm firsts, only to be endlessly mocked until they transfer back off. This server eats hard core progression guilds like a fat kid with candy.
But if you are looking for a change of pace, and a chance to feel part of the community, stop on by! Don't forget to bring Thunderfury
This isn't the first time WoW loses subscribers, it has been losing subscribers for years. It just managed to get enough new subscribers to disguise that fact. But the game world consistency has been going downhill since the Lich King expansion, and most of the original and Burning Crusade players have left (the ones who aren't addicted, anyway). Most servers (especially the newer ones) are full of 13 year old jerks who play WoW because Counter Strike requires too much skill (and note that Counter Strike actually requires very little skill).
Blizzard has clearly put WoW into "management" mode. Most of the original designers have left Blizzard (or moved to different projects within Blizzard), and WoW updates are just new random content (some weird rooms with weird creatures in them, with no connection to the game world and no logic) or random stat reshuffles, to try to keep people from cancelling their subscription after the first month (which is how long it takes to realise the game is just a chore simulator).
WoW was never really a RPG (it was more of a multiplayer RTS), but up to the Burning Crusade, the game world made some sort of sense and the character classes had some personality.
The only things that could save WoW at this point would be 1) a designer (singular) with a vision and the balls to make unpopular decisions and 2) a reputation system, where players could rate others after playing through an instance with them, with actual consequences (ex., the bottom 25% of players would get longer queues or be banned from using the automated dungeon finder, and the top 25% would get shorter queues or free play time).
But Blizzard will never do either of these things, because they're focused on short term results. They'd much rather keep getting the subscription fee from ten jerks than hold on to nine good players. And the result of that is that only jerks (and addicts) will stay for long.
I spent many a year playing good ol' text muds (renegade outpost).
Then played Dark Age of Camelot for about 5 years.
When WoW came along I played for about 2 weeks and said, "been there, done that" and promptly closed my account. When you realize that you're spending months of your life to flip a bit on a hard-drive in a server farm somewhere, the traditional MMORPG loses its appeal.
Just like every other MMO out there, I predict that WoW will slowly collapse into a few servers but will never die. Players will migrate to the next big thing that Blizzard or some other company comes along with.
As others mentioned there are multiple reasons why WoW is now going down hill.
-The formula got old. People have finally gotten sick of marginally better upgrades that are just reskinned old items. Over the course of the entire game remarkably little has actually changed in terms of gameplay mechanics and actually adding NEW things (of course the hardcore fans will argue this). Essentially little has really changed even after all this time.
-Blizzard seems to have no real direction anymore. With each expansion pack they usually targeted a different game. BC was GW, Wrath was WAR and Aion, Cata on the other hand had nothing like it. They decided to target themselves... well their past selves more precisely. Adding to that that most of the development team moved to Titan didn't help anything.
-Blizzard just doesn't seem to care and the players can tell. The half ass slap on of a couple dozen hot fixes. The raids that are shut down for a week after the content comes out to readjust trash drop rates (they didn't think of trash farming?).
-Classes are no longer unique. Everything has finally been normalized to the point that every class that can do the samething as another class (tank, dps, heal) is pretty much one in the same
-Adding to that classes have been over simplified. They removed tons of abilities, but that's really what made WoW, well WoW. The best I can tell they did this to make it more like other MMOs, such as GW, but in essence removed one of the unique attributes that made WoW unique.
-They finally killed off twinking in Cata. This was a huge one for me. You can argue this all you want, but even max level can be considered twinking. Some people simply wanted a level where they didn't need to ride the gear escalator. they could simply log on six months later and still have the best gear. Nothing to do, just play the game.
-Rift was released. This ties into the game simply getting old. Rift amounts to WoW 2. If WoW was made six years later. It not only incorporates a completely overhauled system and graphics, it also adds some new play elements... such as Rifts. That isn't suffice to say it's the silver bullet. Rift, too, will also die out as it simply doesn't have anything measurably better then WoW. It's another combination of every other mmo out there, which will abruptly end when the big boys finally hit (Guild Wars 2 and Old Republic)... right now it's simply new.
-This is more speculative and may be giving them too much credit, but I honestly believe Blizzard is trying to kill off WoW. Not necessarily actively, but passively. In a efffort to make sure their fan base doesn't turn completely rabid when Titan comes out. When that happens they will need to make a choice and rather then have their fans feel jerked back and forth between two mmos they're laying them out to fallow (so to speak) so they build up enthusiasm for Titan. If they have two top of the line MMOs running it's a overall loss for them, but if they have one mainstream one running and one designed to keep churning out expansion packs so the hardcore players that will never leave will keep playing it's win-win.
-Five level expansion pack simply so they could add more expansions later on makes players feel cheated.
-Waaaay too much phasing simply removes players from interacting with others. It essentially started turning the game into GW, where you can no longer interact with others because they aren't in your phase (this takes place at 80-85 for the most part). It also removes player freedom from the game).
-Recylcing old content continually from the game. They went beyond just reskinning items to redoing dungeons and raids. Which is part of what leads me to believe they're trying to kill off the game. The sharp drop in the quality of their work to save some money.
-Adding to all of this is the community that is now going rabid because they have nothing to do so they're bored and troll people 'for fun'. I suppose that's what happens when the main driving factor for people playing your game is not fun, bu
The core problem is that the evolution of the average WoW player is at odds with the evolution of the game.
Think about it: The Warcraft series has been out since 1994 and WoW was first released in 2004. Someone who was a freshman in college in 1994 would have graduated in 1998. If they want for an advanced degree, most would have received it by 2004. The end of schooling would result in a massive decrease in the available time for gaming due to the typical life progression after education: start a full-time job, get married, and have kids. With a 9-5 job and a wife it is possible to play WoW. But add on a child and/or a job requiring take-home work, any meaningful WoW experience is just not possible... even if you don't have to sleep!
Meanwhile, we have seen WoW evolve from a predominately PvE environment to a highly specialized PvE or PvP environment requiring more time input. It used to be possible to have a high level character with good gear and do well at both PvE and PvP. That is no longer true. WoW now requires players to input a massive dungeon effort to get the right PvE gear. To enjoy PvP, you have to put in similar time into the battlegrounds for top-notch PvP gear. Blizzard has stratified the gameplay such that it is simply not possible to survive in either (the PvP or PvE) environment unless your character abilities and gear are specialized for that specific environment. And all that is on top of the base grinding time requirement necessary to maintain any character.
As you get older and have more responsibilities outside of WoW, maintaining your characters turns into more of a job. This is exacerbated by the fact that you can no longer enjoy both PvE and PvP unless you double your time in game. With a max-level character and good (but not great) gear, playing WoW is about as fun as doing chores around the house, and it costs more. I think many adult WoW players are starting to realize that.
If Blizzard wants to increase their subscriber base, I would argue that they need to make WoW more accessible to players with limited play time. Decrease the grinding necessary for high-level characters. Have some (large) portion of dungeons be negotiable with a pick-up group. Merge the PvP and PvE gearsets. Start some WoW servers with in-game parameters tuned for players with busy lives (lower difficulty, higher grinding return, merged PvP/PvE gearsets, more dungeons completable in 1 hr).
Making the gameplay more elite with an aging subscriber base is a bad idea, until that subscriber base hits retirement age!
I've been playing since release. Over the years, I have heard a lot of people quitting for various reasons--and I see that almost all of them have already been mentioned. But lately, when I ask people why they are quitting, I hear one reason much more than ever before:
Money.
A chunk of the fanbase may be becoming more cautious with their spending. I don't want to go off-topic, but people who are already worried about money (no job, less pay, etc.) may have an easier time quitting the game, and cancelling their subscription. Few that I've talked to have said that the $15 per month subscription was the only reason they were quitting, but many of them have mentioned it soon--if not immediately--after complaining about , gear, stale content, etc.
Anyone who has played DPS and either healer or tank to any amount can tell you that there are way too many DPS to tanks/healers. In Wrath as a tank your dungeon Q was instant, as a healer, 2 minutes at most, and usually closer to instant. As DPS? 30 minutes easily. This tells you that despite needing 3 DPS for 1 each tank and healer, there were still many more DPS. I mean on my druid I'd Q as tank and DPS and I never, ever, not even once, was chosen for DPS. The game always needed tanks.
Ok fine, but that means if you want to make something harder to do, it is not tanks or healers. You want them to be easier, and DPS to be harder. That might encourage more players to play tank/healer or at least to try it as an off spec. Instead they made the specs there weren't enough of harder, thus making things worse for everyone.
Also as you say, they screwed the difficulty curve up in that they didn't have one, they had a wall. Quests? Easysauce. Regular dungeons? Nearly as easy, particularly the low level ones. Heroics? Seemingly impossible. There was this massive jump, and it happened quickly. Doesn't take long to go form 80 to 85 and get tired of running the couple of regular dungeons over and over. However heroics seemed to be for uber players only. So.... then what for everyone else?
Good games feature a nice gradual difficulty curve. You get trained by doing something for what comes next. You are able to slowly move up because the game prepares you for each next step. Now eventually you may hit a level you can't go past, because of inherent skill limitations, but you don't hit a wall suddenly. Things just get harder and harder for you as you progress until you find you can't progress anymore. Or, maybe you find that you learn and you go all the way.
That doesn't happen with drastic jumps. People get frustrated, can't figure out what to do, and give up.
The game died once they changed the portals and removed all the content that was important to the game. The game now SUCKS!!!.. Sorry. Oh hey my prediction was correct. Just like DAOC they listen to the really stupid people and not the gamers. Good going BLIZ ..
I involuntarily gave it up a bit over a year ago when Blizzard finally phased out powerpc macs. My workstation still handles audio and video editing well, and browses the web like a champ, so no reason to upgrade.
I think the shaking's stopped, though.
On the flipside, I actually do more audio/video work now that I don't have WoW to distract me.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
It also means that any item that could be even remotely useful in a current/higher tier gets removed or nerfed: All items with "%" based modifiers are gone, the rogue cape with reduced fall damage is gone, the warlock thing that let you summon your voidwalker without a shard in 3.0 (obsoleted now), gear from Naxx40 (imagine how easy it would have been to take a few 80s and run 60s through Naxx40 to gear them out with the first _proper_ itemized gear in the game - gear that lasts you until Northrend).
The Bind-on-Account items that WotLK introduced has been cut back on - now you have to grind each and every alt to exalted to get access to enchants, and the old BoA gear wasn't lifted to support level 85.
And why they piled on the the difficulty layer in 4.0 I don't know. Add in the straightjacket of the new talent trees with no hybrid spec'ing, and you're slowly but surely sucking the fun out of the game.
That was my impression too. It seems like the same developers who made the BC made Cat.
precisely it feels that way. BC was also devoid of content, and was a mindless grind. it was as if it was a filler for Wrath to be completed. It was known that wrath was in development, but, if im not mistaken age of conan or some other mmo was coming up, so BC was hastily put out.
if so, it means cata is another utility/revamp/filler like BC, until they complete the new, real expansion that matches with Wrath's cycle.
if so, and if it comes out with an epic, epic storyline, grand epic settings like wrath, i may buy and play it.
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What killed off DAoC wasn't the focus on PvP, it was the Trials of Atlantis expansion and the introduction of its horribly overpowered killer equipment, coupled with the fact that you needed full groups of people who want to go in there to get it. Which invariably doesn't work out when you're late to the party, since you won't find people to go in there with you anymore. You can't really compete in RvR combat without, though, and, essentially, that's all that is in DAoC when it comes to "endgame", so... well, stuck in the creek without a paddle you are.
They tried to recover by creating the "classic" servers, but let's face it, the year was, IIRC, 2006, the MMO world has changed and ... well, facing the question whether start over again in DAoC on another server or just drop it and move on, people opted for the latter.
Aside of that, I agree. Mostly. I think the largest player group is simply the quiet one. The ones that play the game, engage mostly in PvE, enjoy a bit of the world, enjoy a bit of gameplay, go on a raid or two if it presents itself, but who don't really swing fully one way or another. Casual, but not too casual. And WoW served them quite well for most of its life. You could participate in WoW without giving up your life.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There was a few things that destroyed my enjoyment of WoW:
1) People. I cannot believe how vulgar, selfish and stupid a few individuals can be in-game. I think this partially stems from a lack of 'RP' in the game.
2) It's all about grind and gear. Someone with only an hour a day can't compete with everyone else in PVP, and PVE is repetitive to the hilt (mind the pun).
3) The cost.
I quit over 6 months ago after playing since vanilla. Personally I only enjoyed PVP (PVE raids took too much of my time and it was frustrating playing with players who weren't of the same skill level) but Blizzard got the class balance wrong over and over again. I stopped playing my warlock because for so long it was impossible to compete against melee classes.. so you ask yourself "why am i paying X amount a month just to not have any fun or even be able to compete". It's the same with PVE players and raids being too hard/easy. It use to annoy me seeing casual players having similar rewards to me when I put in all the extra time and effort.. but when I didn't have the time to play as often it was frustrating not being able to keep up with my friends.
Of course it's going to be impossible to cater to everybodys needs, but they didn't even get close. In my opinion Blizzard should somehow introduce servers which you can play each expansion on. So there should be servers you can play Vanilla (as it was before the expansion hit)... Burning Crusade... and the other expansions. I'd definitely pay to be able to go back and play Vanilla or TBC again and i'm sure plenty others would too. In fact, they need to look at vanilla much more closely... where you could be level 50+ and still compete vs level 60's. The scaling and difference between levels is far too big.
I started playing WoW on day 7. I just canceled my account this February. I still enjoy the game, but in the last several years, I've gotten married (which affected playing time slightly), and in January had a baby - which completely killed all available playing time. I wasn't going to pay to not play a game I didn't have time for any more. Now, my games consist of facebook games, because I can play for 5,10,15 minutes and drop it and take care of the baby - not possible in WoW. Maybe when my daughter doesn't need as much attention, and I don't need to sleep every chance I get, I'll re-join, but until then, I'm one of those non-subscribers.
I suspect that I'm not the only person who's gone through several life stages over the last several years, and well, that's what happens.
What Blizz did in Cata was alienate the casual player. Ghostcrawler for one should be fired. Harsh words but true. I am a casual player and have been playing since vanilla. The dungeons in Cata were to difficult for me and my buddies which took the fun away. Like other casual guilds, people in our guild started peeling off just after the launch of Cata. IMO, I believe what Blizz didn't get was that most caual players such as myself do not post on their forums and most don't even go to the forums. So again, IMO, if Blizz even listened to what people were saying on the forums they were expressed by a more serious playing crowd and were not expressed by what I feel was the majority. Blizz catered to the big guilds and left the little guy on the porch. This is always a risky step to take. When a company lets it's smaller customers go to focus on it's big customers is risky. Obviously, when you lose a big customer you lose a big piece of the pie. I think the majority of people playing WoW are casual players.
Making the game more difficult is not going to bring in new people let alone keep existing ones. Making the game playable by all should be the target focus. RIFT is a great example. I invested many years in WoW and enjoyed the time played but now it's time to say goodbye.