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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."
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
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
Actually, WoW has become more and more about PvP. The problem though, from my point of view as someone who's played since "vanilla" but recently just kind of lost interest, is that most WoW players used to be primarily PvE players who enjoyed world PvP and the occasional battleground match. These days more and more players are "kids" who just care about the organized and ranked PvP, Blizzard even crippled world PvP on PvP realms (quickly respawning elite lvl 85 NPCs kind of take the fun out of the old-style world PvP in and around towns).
I miss the fights in Hillsbrad or the horde invasions of Darkshire. Of course, back then there was also less of a gap between someone who was still leveling his/her character and someone at the level cap. If you were level 25 and in Darkshire when the shit hit the fan you could still put up a fight, these days when world PvP does happen it's always a bunch of lvl 85s with maxed out PvP gear who are able to tear through anyone but others who are also lvl 85 and in full PvP gear (PvE gear is useless for PvP these days).
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A very good analysis.
I started with WoW when it came out, returned from time to time, but it just can't captivate me any more. One of the reasons is what you describe.
I'm an old school PvE player. Still I played EvE for a long time, for the PvP. But that's more a matter of logistics, not so much one of actual shooting skill. EvE battles are, IMO, over before the first shot is fired. But I digress. WoW was designed around PvE. PvP, outside of world-PvP on dedicated PvP servers, was an afterthought. IIRC it took like a year before battlegrounds came into existence.
I'm actually surprised that Blizzard, after carefully avoiding pretty much all cardinal sins of MMO design and development (seriously, when I look back at the history of MMOs, I've seen my share of blunders and failures due to wrong decisions, be it balancing, content introduction or technical issues, and Blizzard so far avoided them all), fell into the old pit that spelled doom on so many MMOs: Do not alienate your core players by trying to cater to a fringe group that leaves you for another game. Most people I know that play(ed) WoW do and did so for the PvE content. The dungeon crawl, the item hunt, the raiding. Very few cared for battleground PvP (or PvP altogether).
Now, they will certainly lose players to games that are more PvP centric. But trying to win them back could easily lose them the PvE players that came to WoW because it is currently one of the few good MMOs that center around PvE, items hunting and raiding.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.