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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."
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.