Slashdot Mirror
World of Warcraft Loses 1.3 Million Players in First Quarter of 2013
hypnosec writes "World of Warcarft, the gaming industry's most popular franchise and one of Blizzard's cash cows, is bleeding subscribers with 1.3 million defecting from the game in the first quarter of 2013 alone. Blizzard revealed a subscriber decline of over 14%, the total now standing at 8.3 million in their earnings call press release (PDF)."
the real question is, where are people going? bioshock infinite? chains & dragons? It remains to be seen...
The nude patch for GW2 was finally released.
Time for World of Starcraft. I'd play it :-P
Nothing lasts forever. Blizzard have had a good run that other companies can only dream of. I'd love to spend months in it, but real life beckons and by that I don't mean Facebook.
.. at what point does the critical mass of players get below a certain threshold that only the die-hards will remain?
.. eventually, it must die. The only realistic way to keep an MMO running is to cater to the new players. The game can't be easy, but it's got to be accessible.
..
That's the problem with MMO's. You're really there to play with others. When there's no new players coming in and the world is only getting bigger, there's less and less people to play with so it's less and less fun so there's less and less people playing
I pretty much played the gamut of DDO for about 3 years. WOW will probably do the same thing, eventually it'll be FTP and a whole bunch of people will join then they'll slowly lose interest as the devs keep catering to the 'subscribers' rather than trying to attract new players. Ultimately, the service is a service to play games with other people. If you don't concentrate on attracting other people, well
What is this World of Warcarft you speak of?
Graphics, especially, are just beginning to look old. Not that WoW was ever a paragon of robust graphic design (although mad props to their art directors), but for what is approaching a decade players were able to overlook the graphics because so many other aspects of the game were fun and appealing. Now, with over a dozen major MMOs due out this year, with every single one of them having better graphics than WoW by leaps and bound, people feel no obligation to stick around. (Also, many of my WoW-quitting friends found that Mists of Pandoria was the game jumping the shark, even if it was a fairly solid expansion.)
As I'm fond of saying, WoW is the King of MMOs in the same way that Budweiser is the King of Beers. It's popular and profitable. Personally, I prefer craft brews and niche MMORPGs.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
...inpatient video game addiction rehab centers.
tee hee,
You don't like Pandas?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I used to know basically no gamers who didn't play WoW. Now I don't know that I still know any. I was one of the loud defenders of Blizzard's choice to enter into a business merger with Activision, and I have been forced to admit that I was wrong. Blizzard's handling of events since then has been spectacularly bad -- I left over the Real ID stuff, myself. (Yes, I know, lots of people say they "backed down". Only temporarily and from the most ridiculously stupid parts; many other aspects are still horrible now, and some of the bad ideas they postponed may come back.)
Thing is, in MMOs, network effects are king. If you want to play a game with your friends, the game your friends play wins. But once you start losing that "everyone I know plays X" spot, there's not really any particularly great technical advantages of WoW over a lot of other MMOs, and quite a few are in many ways better. Even apart from my personal grudge against Blizzard, I found other games to do a better job of things that mattered to me, and I really got sick of Blizzard's active hostility to various parts of their user base. It was a real eye-opener when, after Blizzard spent several years explaining that it could never be possible to tweak the rulesets between PvE and PvP servers, Trion turned around and did it in a week during the Rift beta.
So now I play whatever I happen to know other people who play. And none of the individual games have the population density WoW did, but I am not totally unhappy about that, because it means more choice and more selection.
Stuff that's still going:
DDO: Very different philosophy and design, pretty cool. Overall I'm pretty happy with how Turbine runs things. The microtransaction stuff isn't as intrusive as I thought it would be, and the game design has some really nice appeal.
Rift: As a game, this is basically what I always wished Blizzard would do, and then some. Developers have been pretty responsive to user feedback, and there's a lot less of a focus on tedious time sinks. Big weakness, from my point of view, is that there's been basically no visible community maintenance in ages, so not only are there people who engage in massive, long-term harassment and abuse, but now there are lots more people who are abusive because they're convinced they can get away with it. Still, if you just wanna play with a few friends and ignore public channels, the game itself is amazing. (Slashdotters may care more than others: The addon API is beautiful. One of the nicest development APIs I've used.)
TSW: Not hugely happy with Funcom, but the game is fascinating, and does a lot of things which are radically different from other MMOs, some in very interesting ways. Also pretty responsive to user feedback in a lot of ways.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I know, right? Old people never talk about their hobbies from when they were younger. No sir.
"Remember that time..." works just as well for a video game as for anything else.
LOL And I kept thinking that maybe when I retired I'd play wow -- then maybe I'd have time for it.
1.3 Million PLUS ONE!
Take that blizzard!
In my opinion they made the game too easy. I remember when I started, every battle was an actual challenge.
Now you just rush through everything. It's almost impossible to die unless you run headlong into a bunch of enemies.
In the past, quest mobs at the end of a quest chain usually were elite mobs, and really tough. Now you don't even notice they are anything special.
Dungeons are especially bad. I'm leveling my monk at the moment, playing a healer, and it's downright boring most of the time. The biggest challenge is to keep close to the tank while he is churning through the mobs.
Now, I like the actual new content. Even the boss fights are rather interesting - or would be if it wasn't for the fact, that you can do it all in LFR where it is possible to ignore most of the mechanics. And when I've already killed the bosses countless times in LFR that makes the normal 10 man raid much less interesting. At least for me.
They also dumbed down some classes so much that it gets annoying. I remember when they banned the first heal bots. Now you can select a heal bot as a spec. Just play a disci priest. You don't even need to target who you want to heal; it's automatic.
I'm also miffed about the changes to the fire mage. I chose that spec because I found it more interesting than the others. More choices to make in a fight. But they really did their best to dumb it down to a similar level as all the other specs with almost no choice what to do at any given moment. Something procs - you need to use it almost instantly.
Still, I don't see anything that could replace WoW for me. So if I decided to stop playing, I'd probably not pick up anything else in it's stead.
christmas eve, 1985.
We had a tradition in my family, we unwrapped one present each on christmas eve. my dad kept hinting that I should unwrap the big box up front.
I did. It had an NES in it.
My dad passed on opening one of his presents so i could open another one of mine. it had Wrecking Crew in it.
My father and I spent the next several hours alternating between two-player wrecking crew and super mario brothers, until mom made us go to bed because santa wasn't coming as long as I was up.
it was a good day.
... But still larger than Switzerland.
I feel that WoW lost a lot of customers to Guild Wars 2. Over 2 million people bought GW2. It seems reasonable that some of them had to have quit WoW.
Lately, Arenanet (Guildwars maker) has been tormenting its players at the endgame, reducing Tier 6 drops, implementing: if you can see it, you are already dead champions (adversaries), such as the Champion Raiths in Orr, so people will probably make an exodus for Guild Wars 2, someday, too.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
You can argue otherwise, but I guarantee you no one will
be sitting in a rocking chair 40 years from now happily reminiscing
about playing some stupid video game.
The old monkey from Donkey Kong Country would beg to differ.
Diablo 3 launched a year ago next week. In the months leading up to the launch, Blizzard offered the game (D3) for free to any WoW subscriber who made a year long commitment. So you're going to have a lot of people, who might have otherwise quit over the course of 2012, all leaving at once when their year long subscription ends.
What did the number of canceled subs look like over the course of last year? Maybe they were all just backloaded in Q1 2013.
I have played for a long time, but as the years went by, Blizz broke the game to appease the QQing from the PVP crowd and the mechanics from PVP were incorporated into PVE and in the end, PVE became unrecognizable. PVE is some disgusting mutation, infected by PVP. MMOs are fun when you have other people to play with, but with all the expansions and revamping, WoW's flavor was homogenized to be a bland paste and it became just another kid on the block in a sea of WoW clones. WoW suffered the same fault as SWGalaxies of pandering to much to too many. I used to enjoy raiding, but unless you have a bunch of people with no lives and have the time to commit to a "2nd job" online, then trying to get a raid group together is next to impossible. I got married and had a kid, so I had other priorities and couldn't devote that much time. Casual WoW is only so fun, but unless you have raid gear, no guild will have you, but you can't get into a raid guild unless you have raid gear. It's a catch-22. Wife's cpu crapped out on her and without her in the game with me, it's just not that much fun since all my other friends left due to guild implosion and drama. So, I just cancelled my account this month. I am waiting for the Elder Scrolls MMO to come out. Then we will see how things look. I wouldn't mind looking at other MMOs, but even though Macs have Intel chips, not many developers are willing to write native code for Macs. (commence mac vs. pc flame war) Without my friends, MMOs aren't as fun, so until ESO comes out with dynamics servers... coordinating all my gamer friends to the same server is BS
Bullshit, Leroy Jenkins is timeless. Those kinds of stories will never die.
I haven't played world of warcraft - it just doesn't look like fun to me. It looks like work doing the same things over and over and waiting. But from what I've read on slashdot and elsewhere over the years, some players are really intense. I have no idea what most of these comments are talking about. It makes the idea of playing less appealing since they would be way too experienced to play against for a beginner. At the same time, most of the other comments here are about how little the top players play now because they burned out. So again, what's the draw for a new player?
That's a big part of why they are losing active users.
World of Warcraft turned out to be the game to beat World of Warcraft?
If you are one of those WoW players that left, hopefully you discovered the world around you. And props for leaving, don't go back and stay away from flash games.
But looking back, you think, "Opened some presents; Santa hasn't come yet—Heeyyy!!!"
WoW started pandering (no pun intended) to the casual crowd basically from TBC.
Anyone who played hardcore in vanilla WoW would know how much work was put into MC, BWL, Onyxia, Naxx and eventually AQ raids (still nothing when compared to Everquest but I did get time to go outside on occasion with WoW).
Once you remove that element of significant accomplishment and challenge and start handing out "epic" items in 5man raids any decent PUG can handle you diminish the value of epic items.
Scarcity made those items desirable and kept people trying to get them (and paying for a subscription). You make the game too easy, people lose interest.
A question that is often asked as if players would quit one game to play another, playing at least one video game on a mandatory basis.
From my experience with online gamers there isn't really a limit to the number of online games they play especially when not every single one of those games has monthly fees, they don't commit to a single one game like they might do in a social relationship. I know players that play World of Warcraft, EVE Online and PlanetSide 2 for example, they have their schedule for gaming. On Tuesday and Friday they have their raid in WoW, otherwise they would be playing EVE Online and when EVE Online is getting too slow for their mood they log into PlanetSide 2 or Battlefield 3 and get some "instant action". Gamers will play what is entertaining to them or at least what is effective in killing time. These players usually only quit a game for another one when there is a substitute that can replace every aspect of the 'old' game.
On the other hand I know "casual Gamers" who started with an online game like WoW because all their friends did. These players often tend to leave the game and won't look for a substitute when their friends are leaving the game, and the social aspect of the game has declined to a level where it is not worth spending time in this virtual world. Remember that WoW attracted not only people who were already gamers but introduced people to online gaming or even video games in the first place. These players usually will use their newly gained time for other hobbies, which may not even involve interactive electronics.
Personally I'm still surprised how Blizzard managed to keep such a large player base, to maintain an intake of new players while losing more and more "gamers" over the time. So far they did a really good job on maintaining their player base, a far better job than most online game developers and providers ever did. The only other game company that seems to do fine with a steady increase of players, although a few magnitudes smaller than WoW's playerbase, is CCP with their EVE Online and now DUST 514 online games.
on the other hand, holy crap ITS A NINTENDO!!!
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
... the question is more why they stopped coming. WoW (like most MMOs) has always had a large number of players leaving every year. This hasn't changed; what has changed is that in the past they've always been able to attract new players at a pretty fast rate so they can continue to grow.
So why are the new players not joining up any more? I blame the pandas. From an outside perspective, they make the game look silly.
This crap is for week-minded fools who lack the will power
to abstain from time-wasting activities.
...he posted to Slashdot.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I used to be an avid WoW player. WOTLK was the best expansion they made, hands down. The mechanics were solid (if easily exploitable, at best), the gameplay was reasonably thought out (to an extent), and the environment was pretty engaging (and at least 5% of the population weren't complete morons). When I saw the preview for Cataclysm, with its "challenge" of a +5 level cap, new "features" (YOU CAN NOW FLY IN AZEROTH!), "professions" (let's dig around in the dirt for hours on end!), I stopped playing.
At that point, I realized that Blizzard was headed on a downward spiral pretty quickly, and nothing short of angrying up the blood of Ted Turner and sacrificing a chicken in a non-denominational ceremony would stop this quickly approaching trainwreck from happening. Several of my close friends asked me why I thought it was a bad idea. I told them that I knew it was a bad idea because it was *clearly* a BAD idea. I know them when I see them, and this was no exception. My current roommate convinced me to start playing again, and reluctantly I did. It turned out not to be as bad of a trainwreck as I thought it would be, but it was still pretty bad. Everything had been dumbed down, and repetitively grinding rep, dungeons and more dungeons became the focus of the game. We were also able to actually BUILD a character, and things looked promising enough that Blizzard might actually have the chance to redeem themselves.
Man, was I in for a surprise when MoP came out, which I'm pretty sure a mop is what they used as a template for this particular expansion. This legendary, mythical mop wasn't made of anything fancy, like polished, pressure treated oak, a handle made of Corinthian leather, a titanium reinforced head with gold lief, and appropriate mopping fabric material made from the finest imported silk that one would be proud to caress their nether-regions with after a hard day's work. That one just happened to be the high priced, maximum quality mop that was shown on the Home Shopping Network for just 8 easy payments of $99.95. Clearly, this was too rich for their blood. After rustling up the town drunkard, they gave him a 12 pack of Blatz, a jug of cheap wine, and a 6 pack of Natty Light, and set him to the task of finding a mop of this quality. But really, quality didn't matter, they really just needed a mop, and there weren't any good sales going on that particular year.
Several years later, the drunkard returned with a rake. "I couldn't *hic* remember what you were looking for, but didn't you say something about toilets? I think *hic* this is a plunger."
Swing and a miss, Blizzard. 3 for a valiant effort, though. After obtaining this artifact of non-descript antiquity, the development team went to work. Behind closed doors, they agreed that it was most likely a rake picked up out of a dumpster or maybe someone's toolshed that lived down the street. They weren't sure, but there was no turning back now. Best not to let the public know, they also agreed, lest The Almighty Wrath of Tom Selleck's Moustache rear its head again. One of the leads suggested that since it wasn't a mop, perhaps they could make the offcast drippings of churning a poop vat into a mediocre product that would suffice in temporarily plugging the gaping hole in a quickly sinking ship. But it would need to be concentrated.
What was released with Mists Of Pandaria was percolated fecal matter of the highest caliber. That wasn't even from the bowels of the unsuspecting public. This was from Blizzard's own septic tank, full of late night tacos, half-digested food from Grampy's Greasy Spoon Diner (home of the 1/2lb Grampyburger for 89 cents, cheese is 10 cents extra), and empty ketchup packets that had been chewed up by the family dog and evacuated onto a moderately expensive accent rug that had once decorated the lot of the local carwash for 15+ years.
This was progress. This was the trainwreck that everyone said would never happen. Sweet glory of Jesus this was specta
Went 'old school' and back to MUDding (multi-user dungeons; text-based games). I was never a hardcore WoWer (mostly solo play) and Pandaria killed it for me. Muds are still there and enjoyable, IMO. Check out The Mud Connector and give it a whirl sometime...
I think the combination of a lot of those numbers comes from several servers that has basically died, and people simply giving up instead of transferring. Fix your broken servers Blizzard, you have too many.
-- Linux user #369862
Cmon Blizzard, I wanted to slay dragons and orcs, I accepted Pigs and Wolves for the first 40 levels, but now you expect me to play with a bunch of fucking Panda's? Oh yer - D3 can have intercourse with itself.
I quit many times many years ago anyway, for
- Age of Conan
- Warhammer
- Skyrim
- Fallout 3
- Civ 5
- Duke 3D (I started drinking heavily after this one)
- Real Life Holidays
- Work
- Vaginas
but overall the Pandas are the last nail in the coffin, you suck Blizzard.
Long Live Warcraft 2.
I'm not signing anything
Why on earth would any WoW player turn to flash games? I thought WoW was a real game, no? No true gamer would play flash games. ( or maybe I've missed some really really good flash games...)
Yeah, I remember when I got my Nintendo as well... Cut my finger on the edge of the box when I opened it. Bled like crazy. Didn't care at the time, but the funny thing is I don't remember the games or the year. I remember the cut though, damn that hurt.
Most discussed topic in game is low population servers and people moving away to other server. Most of this results in broken communities when 2 or 5 people leave for another server (payed). The result of that is that people simply stop playing since not everyone is prepared to jump ship or pay for transfers
I think pandas and the oriental style of pandaria are the reason I'm not playing anymore. Only Hello Kitty could be a worse playable race than a fat panda. Raids are not that bad, but too many mechanics, the daily grind is horrible, and there are one a few new dungeons (and none since 5.0...). The burning crusade: an alien planet to "explore" The lich king: a charismatic foe to kill Cataclysm: a bad-ass dragon that destroyed the world Pandaria: an island full of alchol-addicted pandas with laughable evil guys... (what the hell is a sha? :) )
I honestly lost interest after Cataclysm. I was never a particularly hardcore player (much more interested in solo and PVE than raiding), but I got tired of continually having to respec my talent tree, and once total specialization was enforced, I just gave up. I _liked_ being able to use any and all of arcane, fire, and frost on my main.
The thing about it (and this may sound silly) is that I became very attached to "old" Azeroth (I started playing long before the first expansion). Even though it wasn't as bustling as before, it was still beautiful and nostalgic. When I saw Loch Modan destroyed...it was like someone had bombed Disneyland. My heart just went out of it.
And I put up with this bullshit because the transition from fun to grind was so gradual I did not see it happen. So there I was paying subscribing to a game I didn't enjoy. Fortunately for me Verant intervened with their own ineptitude. The Shadows of Luclin expansion was bugged to high fuck which meant the server crashed, the client crashed, the content was bugged out and this went on for weeks. It gave me the time to realise I wasn't enjoying this.
So I let my subscription expire and I quit. It was a wrench to abandon the "investment" I made in the character but it just wasn't fun any more. On the plus side, it trained me to recognize grind and skinner box style gameplay that virtually all MMOs since have used to string people along - long travel distances, infrequent spawns, equipment that degrades, time sinks everywhere. I played other MMOs - Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars Galaxies, A Tale in the Desert and they all suffered from them. Ultimately I quit them all because they were the same damned thing - sucking $15 out of you each month in return for anti-fun.
That said, with the change to free-to-play model has made some MMOs fun again. Lord of the Rings Online for example has been aggressively cutting the grind all over the place - adding fast travel, instant looting, less maintenance, out of combat healing, NPC radar etc. Presumably in the FTP model it pays to get people to progress more quickly rather than have them fuck around looting corpses or recoup lost xp. It's also a very beautiful game with the lore to support it. I've been playing LOTRO for 18 months in the FTP model and must have bought about $50 of points on it, most of that still remaining to be spent. If I don't feel like playing I'm not losing out by not playing so it suits me a lot better. I can play it for 30 minutes during a bout of boredom and feel like I'm getting something from it.
I switched to Anno Online last week .. which is an amazing browser based flash game.
All the parent comment talks about is the unhappiness of a weak minded person.
30 years ago, more or less, I played Donkey Kong at the arcades and I have fond memories of it. Now I enjoy playing GW2 and it's not a waste of time because I enjoy it and I hurt no one.
There must be a reason why some people will always judge how other people legitimately use their time: probably someone is frustrated about his/her own life and all they can do is insult others who are having a happy time. How, it really shouldn't matter if it's legal.
Zelda Fanatics...
* I am not one.
Never really "got" MMORPG's. My brother was mad on MUD's back in his university days and I kind of got that. You would literally stumble into the person who was building all the rooms, quests, objects, etc. and it was usually a small team who created things INSIDE the game, so they were having fun as well (I don't doubt there was a lot of coding involved, but a lot of actions performed actually worked in-game as some in-game "magic" or similar). They were playing Minecraft, basically, and everyone else was inside their dungeons. And they were free, and run by people who lovingly created them.
The next fad was the Diablo's etc. Basically an MMORPG set in a formulaic plot. Nothing bad about that the first few times through, and they are still quite fun to play even with the poor-equivalents today(e.g. Torchlight etc.). But no real huge amounts of replayability without someone else there to play with. And they were pay-for, but professional and well-polished, but limited and repeating.
But MMORPG's, they kind of take the worst of everything. Let's have lots of random idiots. Let's have restrictions on what you can do. Let's have a financial incentive to make you spend as long as possible getting to the things you want to do. Let's have no "creators", no change to the set-down mechanics of the world, except in some far-off office where they come up with insane ideas without much player feedback.
Let's instead have the story evolve very, very slowly and in huge pay-for leaps and people get little choice about whether it was good or not, or whether they pay or not. There's no feedback. No people with interest in the state of the world, only the economy (which, as we all know, can be a disaster even in real-life). You're paying to play a Diablo with a bunch of random people whose co-operation you require, who are all also paying. And every time there's a significant change in the world, you have to pay again or be stuck in the timewarp of "old".
I couldn't really see the attraction, and the people I know who do spend a fortune on WoW tend not to have been exposed to the games of old (like MUDs etc.), hell some of them I'd barely class as gamers - they are mainly just socialising while button-bashing and the gaming is second. Nothing wrong with that, but Facebook-in-Second-Life is not what I want.
The "serious" gamers I know are infinitely more likely to spend their money on non-subscription games and equipment. They might well buy a pack of games for their LAN party, and upgrade to the next version as a one-off payment if it's good enough (or even just to play it together as friends), but an ongoing subscription model just isn't their thing.
And the people I do know who did play WoW etc. have all given it up, and their only real "catch" to doing so is losing their accounts/characters/whatever. Without exception, though, they do give it up and just abandon what they had in there after a while, whether through financial problems, or time problems, or the breakup of their favourite group, or just sheer exhaustion at the virtual world (especially prevalent at "pay-for-the-next-expansion" time).
The free-to-play ones aren't really popular with the gamers I know either. I think the whole free-to-play concept is great - as a teenager, I would have been hooked and no doubt WOULD have ended up spending money (hell, even as it is, I've made money just playing free-to-play games to play the game and then selling the random junk I was awarded). But it attracts even more idiots, and profiteering. And with free-to-play, you are willing to suffer slight bugginess or changes or restrictions that you wouldn't accept elsewhere.
Like anything else, I don't get "subscription" payments. Of course I don't mind paying but an automatic payment on a schedule? I don't see the incentive for the creators to keep creating after a while. They earn just as much between updates as they do immediately after them.
The same reason people keep gym memberships going and why most gym
Been out of it for 2 years now.... Got the 1yo pass because of D3 and thought I might come back one day.... BUT, every time I get the inspiration to log in, it downloads some 1000000000000Mb patch that takes forever to download and install.... Then I log in and my UI is totally fcked up, yes I used loads of addons, and got so customed to them (stuff being in the places I once put them long ago) that I just can't play with the default UI anymore. So I spend loads of time updating and re-setting up the addons.... at that point clock is 04.00 next morning and I've lost the inspiration....
The few time I've got past this point or my inspiration has remained the next day, I realize that the only thing to do (when not being able to raid) is to grin dailies.
Thanks but no thanks.
For everyone who has tried and reported it.
World of Tanks!
This is also the subject of today's Ctrl+Alt+Del comic.
This is just PR for Blizzards next MMO.
From TFA:
"Launched back in 1994 as Warcraft: Orcs & Humans the MMORPG saw a boost in 2012 with the launch of Mists of Pandaria when it sold over 2.7 million copies in the first week itself."
...erm, no. While WOW does continue with the franchise that started in '94 with Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, the two are completely separate games belonging to different game genres with different almost everything.
And, also, poor Blizzard. they've only got 8 MILLION subscribers left
And you're here posting on Slashdot with the rest of us.
FTA: "Launched back in 1994 as Warcraft: Orcs & Humans the MMORPG saw a boost in 2012 with the launch of Mists of Pandaria when it sold over 2.7 million copies in the first week itself. " Um yeah......whoever wrote that article doesn't know what they're talking about....Warcraft: Orcs & Humans isn't WoW...
Additionally, the story line for many years and expansions has been driven by the Horde faction. The opposing Alliance faction's story line is disjointed and fundamentally empty. Many players will switch sides but what large fraction just simply gives up?
For many years and several expansions, only the Horde faction story line has been driving the narrative of the game. The opposing Alliance faction has been a straw man for the writers. Alliance characters and lore is disjointed and fundamentally empty. Many players will switch sides but what large fraction will just quit?
I quit because the majority of the people I played with quit too, and there was zero compelling content.
Since quitting, I've been playing through the Fallout series of games for much less money, and much more enjoyment. Next up (once it releases), Shadowrun Returns. And then after that, Wasteland 2.
Screw Blizzard and their wallet-bleed business strategy.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
They really need to 'reboot' the game rather than come out with patches every couple of years. They need to just retire the current WoW and start from scratch. There is a barrier of entry for new players now with such a large installed base of 'senior' players but the senior players are aging. They need something for the next generation and the graphics of WoW just can't compare to most of what is out there today. They need to start from scratch with a new engine, storyline, classes, races, etc... Then build back up from there. The writing is on the wall for them now. The new generation is also probably not willing to fork out 15/mo for a game and are getting use to free-to-play style with in game purchases. With that frame of mind you either need to join that wave, or provide something significantly better to get them to pay. The current WoW can't attract that new gen of gamer.
Nothing i have to say is worth saying.
When Diablo 3 came out, there was a promotion for people who bought a year of WoW: they got Diablo 3 for free.
These people are now not playing WoW anymore, if they even ever did.
Not quite sure why there has been a trend to stray from this game to be honest. I mean I have quit a couple times but expansions have brought me back. This one even harder than the last. The raid content is good for my main, the lfr content good enough for my alts and damn some of the lore is just tear jerkingly good. I was at the lazy turnip a couple nights ago on one of my alts after killing Galleon and remembered this http://www.wowhead.com/object=216757/old-ri-and-the-million-souls The fact that that is just one of many great stories scattered around the world is one of the many things that have kept me enthralled. Tbh I'm die hard horde but I can't wait to see how Garrosh is dealt with. Now that is gonna be good story..
This decline is why I kind of expect that Titan announcement sooner rather than later. I personally think that waiting for Blizzcon this year to make that announcement would be a mistake, but we'll see what actually happens.
Sounds like it's the END OF THE WORLD... of warcraft.
WoW has changed from being an entertaining game that you could play for a few hours a week and still be able to experience content, into daily / weekly chores that have to be done or else you can't do stuff.
It ceased to be something I wanted to do, and instead turned into a hamster wheel. Or, if you prefer, stopped being a covert hamster wheel with a sense of reward and turned into an overt hamster wheel with no reward whatsoever.
Just like previous MMOs I've played, that's when I hit the cancel button.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I was an early adopter, joining the game in the Vanilla WoW beta. I ran one of the top 5 Alliance raiding guilds on the Bronzebeard server in Vanilla (Exiled Kingdom) until politics and my burn out of having the second job of running a guild killed it. I played regularly until 2009, when I returned to school.
WoW Vanilla was awesome.
The Burning Crusade was okay.
Wrath of the Lich King was epic.
Cataclysm was the beginning of the end.
Mists of Pandaria was the core collapse of the game... I'm still trying to decide if it's a black hole or a neutron star.
Killing theorycrafting by revamping the trees, introducing Pokemon, making Pandarians as a race... It has all contributed to breaking the back of the game. I left WoW and have not been back since. I moved on to Star Wars: The Old Republic and I've not looked back.
I! Tego Arcana Dei.
...of Warcraft!
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
I started out on private servers around 2008 or so, so mid-TBC. But many quests more complex than "kill # of trolls" or "gather # of berries" quests were broken, so it was an odd experience for awhile. Finally joined retail last year and it has been quite fun. I'm not a serious raider or pvp'er, just dabble in the respective "looking for..." random groupings. Pet collecting, achievement-hunting, trying out alts or new specs. There always seems to be some other place in the game you can focus on for a bit if you get bored or burnt-out on the others.
is that WoW had 1.3 million subscribers to lose. Its amazing how cynical and negative everyone can get. WoW loses 1.3 million subscribers and still has something around 8 million...9 years after it first released.
I don't really keep up with what MMOs are making what money, but is there any game out there that comes close to WoW's financials even now? WoW could lose 1.3 million subscribers a year for the next five years and still be more successful than virtually every other MMO out there. It really is sort of insane.
Nuff said.
WoW always had shit graphics from day 1.
Age of Conan has sick graphics & that game is YEARS old. PvP takes actual skill. -this game too is a ghost land.
Best bet for anybody who wants pvp & no crazy grinds.. play GW2.
More people is always fun. It's also a game you can pick up and put down without the addiction. (at least for me)
played for a few years, like every minute of it. But now it's just worn out. There is nothing really new or exciting in the game. It is like a TV show after awhile the episodes is just a modified rehash of the another episode. Blizzard needs to let WOW go and bring out a new game unrelated to WOW. The formula can be the same, just a new story and mythos.
Sometimes it goes up a couple mill, sometimes it goes down a couple mill... IT"S A FUCKING ROLLERCOASTER WOOOOOOOOOO!
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
One problem with outside is permanent death. Several people claiming to have an in with the GM have expressed conflicting opinions of how respawn works, whether it's more like rolling a new character or just a respawn of all characters after the server wipe event.
Another is that the available healing isn't very effective. If you sustain critical injury to a limb, for example, you lose the use of that limb for life. Some characters are even rolled up without all their limbs in the first place.
Sad fuckkers get a life!
This is a Failed business model.
When you charge a monthly subscription to play a game, people then feel obligated to play THAT game. Playing a free game seems silly, because that game will always be there and always be free. As a result players of the game power through content rather fast. So the game producer is now stuck building more and more content because their revenue stream is based on the player base not getting bored. Eventually they try to re-use content, and this is where grind comes in. They make getting through the scenery harder. So the customer wont reach their goals before their monthly sub runs out, so they have to buy another. Eventually the players realize they are on a hamster wheel and the goal line is always getting moved. What keeps them then is the social experience. Guilds and the like. But now you have a customer in a very precarious situation. They likely want to leave, but don't want to lose their friends. So you end up losing customers in catastrophic ways... either the customer waits for some social dysfunction to happen (big argument after a failed raid) after which they leave forever and now can never come back because of the fight or... the entire guild makes a plan to move to a different game and leave in mass exodus.
IMO if MMOs want to survive this sort of thing they need to make a few changes:
Offer MMOs in bundles. Multiple games that you can play with the same subscription. And don't charge more just because they can play different games. In truth the load on your servers is the same. Just charge for the game up front, then charge a "network subscription" that covers all of your games. They can buy the games they want to add to that sub for $50 or whatever and then their monthly sub will cover them all. It'll be affordable and will keep the customer in your network and give them enough variety to move around and not get board.
If game mechanics allow, let customers change their in-game identity for free once every 3 months or so. So they can abandon old fights and such. Then they can come back and start new. Server moves should be free as well.
End grinding. Let those that want to power through to the end of the game do so. Better yet, make it a setting that gives you a title. If you set your character to "grind mode" or whatever you get a title "Lord of whatever" or something. Generally people that like that sort of thing only like it because they want to brag about how hard it was for them.
In 40 years? They'll be with their fat 'geek' wife playing a new MMO, or forever alone playing a new MMO... so probably not reminiscing.
Maybe they'll make it cheaper so I can resubscribe.
World War II lost 70 million players.
Have gnu, will travel.
Dude, I reminisce about games I played 20 years ago, fairly certain I'll still be doing that in another 20.
So take your guarantee and go give your self a real good time.
I'm not suprised. MoP added in so much freaking dailies and even more of a grindfest for everything it's getting almost as bad as any korean mmo like Silkroad Online for grinding.
I may be a hardass for saying this or be in the minority for sure but if Blizzard had never been touched by Activision to begin with and if they had kept the model of Burning Crusade where you needed to do attunement quests to do raids with your guild as well as getting gear but just expanded upon the storyline of the burning legion and *MAYBE* WOTLK but without removing the things that made vanilla wow and BC unique, a game aimed towards hardcore players who actually wanted to spend time to do everything, read into everything in the storyline, and felt a sense of accomplishment for all you did, especially when battleground games like Alterac Valley could last 12 hours or longer, that was super epic.
Now ever since cata and especially MoP it's so blatantly aimed towards a casual player that anyone now can make a character and within a month of just doing random dungeons/heroics and the dozens upon dozens of dailies and rep grinds be geared up enough to start raiding with a guild to get more gear.. and god praise the lord if you actually know how to not stand in the fire, listen to your raid leader on ventrillo, and learn how to properly spec your character and use it's abilities to the fullest you may actually not be labeled yet another casual sheep to the warcraft slaughter.
My best gaming memories with warcraft are from 2007 when Burning Crusade was still the current expansion playing a night elf warrior and it always will be before this game slowly got ruined over the next six years and millions of other peoplw who think like me left.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
You seriously compare free account ever created for whatever reasons to active payed accounts... You must be dense. Why not compare the number of all WoW accounts every created, including during free weekends. And even then it doesn't compare because WoW is only on some occasions free to create an account while Maple story always is. You just confirmed to me the level of intelligence of F2P losers once again.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I mean it's still WoW but after a decade, the first half of it playing regularly and slowly playing less and less, a new coat of paint isn't enough to make it fun and exciting anymore. Time for something new but there isn't anything. Sure there are a lot of different names on boxes out there but they are all basically the same. The MMO world needs something truly innovative, there just isn't anything. For me, starting way back at UO, MMO's have run their course. Nothing in any of them keeps me interested more than a month.
Looking around at most of my friends who used to play WOW, very few of them are steadily working.
We have all been victims of this off shoring recession. Watching programming and IT jobs leave the Silicon Forest for the shores of Mumbai and Manila since 2005. Analyst and QA jobs were converted to project contracts with no guarantees of the project continuing after the 6 weeks was up. Contractors are also not allowed to bid on upcoming positions until their contracts are released just in case the current project is renewed.
This all leads to unstable or minimalistic incomes where monthly subscriptions are let go in favor of rent and food. Many of my friends and former coworkers took advantage of the annual and semiannual subscription rates with their tax refunds that were considered excess in their previous budgets. Those monies are now being used to catch up bills or make car repairs that have had to slide due to lack of funds.
Why there is not android version yet??
Perhaps if user could play EVERYWHERE it could help subscriber retention
Over 30. Ex-WoW player. Play LoL weekly. Checking in.
I think they had a good opportunity to bring world pvp back.
They should have integrated some element into archaeology that would have made players fight over relics that would appear once a week or so.
It's painfully obvious that "Wrath of the Lich King" was the end of the story the original creators set out to tell. They've all moved on, and the replacements are just making crap up based on focus groups, rather than trying to create an interesting narrative. For the players that don't care about the story at all, this doesn't really matter, but the ones who did are likely moving on to games more interested in an artistic expression than in just monetizing a dead horse IP.
Typical douche response... instead he wastes time posting to forums about how he doesn't play games... irony!
I have played WOW off and on since just after release (coworker was in beta and kept asking me to try it, once it was released I joined and was hooked) but MOP has been the first patch I didn't resub for. Personally the best times for me were TBC (Karazhan with friends, occasionally getting in higher tier raids as a sub) vanilla (so many great memories) and wotlk up to ulduar more or less.
In a game that has millions of players there are millions of stories and millions of reasons of why players play or quit, these are why I am personally not subscribed (even if I wish I could be, if TBC was going on I'd be resubbing tomorrow)
- no sense of community: LFR, LFD and CRZ have completely killed any sense of community: since there is no downside for being abusive most people seem to be, in the old days if you ninjaed something in a dungeon run the other player(s) would message your guild leader and you got a talking to, if you did it more than once you got kicked out, or your guild could even end up being blacklisted so you would never PUG again. You met people while levelling and ran dungeons together, and form friendships which sometimes led to guilds, and sometimes to various PUG runs, and in general again to a sense of community.
- difficulty levels are out of whack: in the old days there were easy instances, and hard instances, you brought your not-as-competent friends to the easy instances and carried them a bit, and it was fine, and it was fun. Nowadays it's super easy heroics, brainless LFR, and hard raids where most fights have a 'one person not as good can kill everybody else's evening'. In the old days it was possible to carry people in raids too, just look at how many people died on average on the safety dance in 'bad guilds' or mixed the polarity, but still it was possible to down the boss if at least 2/3rds of the raid was competent. Yes, this meant that the 'super hardcore' had a bit of a snoozefest at times, but it also meant that a LARGE part of the subscribers could do the content as it was written.
Now it seems that 'see the content' means 'tune it so drooling on random keyboard keys makes the boss go down' while normal and heroic are tuned hard in terms of mechanics. That might be good for the hardcore, but not for the average player (I shy from the 'casual' label because just because somebody is not as good at the game as somebody else it doesn't make them not care, which 'casual' seems to imply).
- game seems focused towards more and more time invested: in the old days the minimum amount of time you needed to play on a daily basis to do content was not nearly as high as it is now. People with less available time were still able to contribute very well, if they had more time they either had more alts or they did some of the OPTIONAL grinds (black thorium, furbolgs, ...).
Nowadays if you can't put at least a few hours PER CHARACTER a day you're going to get left behind, because of the dailies, reps and so on. It seems that Blizzard listened to the loud cries of people with no life but the game that 'there isn't anything else to do' and so added more 'things to do' but also made them pretty much mandatory.
- design constraints shaped by non-game factors: many times reading GC's twitter replies you get some form of 'well, we could do xyz and give you this, or we could do this other thing and give you a lot more, we can't afford to do both' usually in the form of 'you either get a new raid or a new dungeon, and we think a new raid is a better investment of our money' or 'you either get 3 new scenarios or a new dungeon, and we think the scenarios are better'. It seems that vanilla/tbc were games where the design was the priority, not how much it cost to implement.
Complex problems have complex solutions, but if it was up to me for the next patch I would:
- keep LFR/LFD but make them REALM RESTRICTED, you get grouped ONLY with people on your realm
- remove CRZ entirely
- free transfers for everybody once every 3 months.
- rework
-- the cake is a lie
Don't you mean:
"In 40 years? They'll be with their fat geek 'wife' playing a new MMO, or forever alone playing a new MMO... so probably not reminiscing"
Part of the reason why I quit this game was because it was too much time consuming. Everything you do takes hours to do, Raids, Dungeons, even Finding a group to do a dungeon/raid. It just became to repetitive. Once you level up your toon to the level cap you either raid or pvp. It's one or the other. Another reason why I quit playing was because it wasn't skilled base anymore. If a very skilled player lacks the gears a noob player has, all the noob player had to do was spam a move, run around and eventually the skilled player would die. It was all gear based, no skills needed. Not only that but there was way to much nerfing going on pretty much every week. Every week was a new nerf on a certain class. Everything you worked hard for, all your gears or skills did not matter anymore because you just got nerf. I could go on about why I quit but i'm pretty sure everyone who has quit knows just what I am talking about.
Seriously, all the people that came back into WOW really don't care about raids.
LFR, etc just bore the tears out of us.
What was missing was some major auto quest line for Pandas after they got back to Ogrimmar and Stormwind - stuff for us to do that wasn't same old same old.
I can't tell you how many accounts I have with pandas just sitting in their 20s and 30s doing nothing because it is boring to level them up to 85 just so I can get back to Pandaria so I can have fun again.
Give us a Monk Meditation Montage storyline that lets us have some fun after we leave the turtle until we return.
Yes, I know, all you hardcore WOW people are gung ho for raids, but the rest of us just don't care. At all.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You add Fat kung fu pandas, Pokemon and Farmville into what once was an awesome game..
^^
It's pretty likely that some non-trivial amount of them are moving to Neverwinter. (https://register.perfectworld.com/nw_splash)
This same thing happened to Ultima Online. When it first came out in 1996, it was a magnet drawing everyone interested in MMORPG. But after 5 years, the game starts to decline. Origin/EA stars adding in expansion modules until it no longer looked like the original game. Please move on as time goes by...
To lose a few hundred thousand might be regarded as a misfortune; to lose 1.3 million looks like carelessness.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Spent 1 month questing, somewhat fun, but I wasn't even reading the stories. Publishing the stories as a book or movie or whatever might be a good source of new revenue. Spent another 1 month grinding, never again, in WoW at least. The pattern is to max out your level first, then go for equipment, which becomes obsolete when they raise the level cap.
The rest is all Dungeon Finder and PvP. PvP in general will never get old, its just old fashioned fun competition. Dungeon finder is a great idea, you don't have to be in some guild or network to do the computer version of classic pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons.
I play World of Tanks now, and it's my only video game. It's free as in freemium (well ok this game made me upgrade my graphics to AMD's new APU line), all about PvP, strategic like chess, and is competitive and fun. I am so not paying for Mists of Pandera, or even game time. Not that the developers shouldn't get paid, but...
What did they think would happen when they release a obviously "Lets get new young kids into WoW" expansion called the Mists of Panda Express? Plus they won't (or can't) stop the gold farmers.
That is what killed it for me!
Relax. They just banned some gold farmers. No big deal.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
I quit playing World of Warcraft out of sheer boredom for the game. The game has become to easy in general to play End Game content. But I guess at some point every game has a point where it starts to become exceedingly repetitive or has been made far to easy to play. I haven't personally switched to another game in place of WoW.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20000612
You think that people would never tire of beating a dead horse, but apparently even basement trolls have their limits.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
YOU MUST NOT MISS IT! The website cheap wholesale and retail for many kinds of fashion shoes, like the nike,jordan, also including the handbags,sunglasses,jeans,shirts,hat,belt and the watch, All the products are free shipping, and the price is competitive, after the payment, can ship within short time. the goods are shipping by air express, such as EMS,DHL,the shipping time is in 5-7 business days! http://www.sport3trade.net/ cheap jordan for $40, Air Max 90 for $41, air shox for $40, best handbags for $39, Sunglasses for $18, wallet for $19, belt for $18, T-shirts for $20, Jeans for $39, NFL/MLB/NBA jersey for $25, Top Rolex watch,jordan for cheap, http://www.sport3trade.net/
Breaking Bad,
Homeland
Downton Abbey
Game of Thrones
..........FULL STOP.
The game has been in decline since the tail end of WotLK. All Acti-Blizz has offered has been to continually raise the threshold for loot, and "balance" by nerfing, so it makes sense that people will eventually look for alternatives.
YOU MUST NOT MISS IT! The website cheap wholesale and retail for many kinds of fashion shoes, like the nike,jordan, also including the handbags,sunglasses,jeans,shirts,hat,belt and the watch, All the products are free shipping, and the price is competitive, after the payment, can ship within short time. the goods are shipping by air express, such as EMS,DHL,the shipping time is in 5-7 business days! http://www.sport3trade.net/ cheap jordan for $40, Air Max 90 for $41, air shox for $40, best handbags for $39, Sunglasses for $18, wallet for $19, belt for $18, T-shirts for $20, Jeans for $39, NFL/MLB/NBA jersey for $25, Top Rolex watch,jordan for cheap, http://www.sport3trade.net/