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[MMO juggernaut World of Warcraft has been shedding subscribers at an unexpectedly high rate since the launch of its latest expansion -- but what's the cause, and can anything be done to stem the tide? Gamasutra speaks to Blizzard, academics, and players.]
What is happening to World of Warcraft? In the months after the launch of Cataclysm, WoW's third official expansion, the game has lost almost 1 million players, dropping to 11.1 million subscribers from a peak of 12 million in 2010. The seven year-old MMO has been among the most successful video games in history, turning Blizzard into an essential piece of the biggest games company in the world.
In recent years the MMO model has changed dramatically, the pot of MMO gold has moved from a subscription model to free-to-play, with several games boasting player bases similar to, or surpassing, WoW's numbers. Where WoW once appeared to be king of an expanding empire of subscription-based games, it suddenly appears to own a market few compete in anymore. Indeed, with Cataclysm, even Blizzard revised its free-trial model, moving from a 14-day period to free-to-play until level 20.
Has WoW finally begun a slow but inevitable process of decline? Or is it simply changing, moving from one business model to a newer and sounder one? Is it possible to keep an MMO alive in perpetuity? Or do all virtual worlds have to die, no matter how big, glorious, and beloved they once were?
In With the Newb, Out With the Old
While Cataclysm famously destroyed the landscape of Azeroth, some of its most successful changes were to early game content. "The rework we did to the older content -- which was really showing its age -- was just huge," Greg Street, lead systems designer at Blizzard, told Gamasutra. "The quests flow better, there's not so much traveling all the way across the world, the rewards are just a little better."
Yet, fixes in one stage of the game can have unintended consequences in other areas, and with Cataclysm many of the changes to the changes meant for lower-level players have dampened the enthusiasm and sense of specialness for long-time players. Items, armor, and weapons that old-timers spent countless hours grinding, training, and raiding for have become increasingly accessible to newer players.
"One of the primary reasons I stopped playing was that I felt like so much of what made raiding interesting and fun was that elite end of the game where you have access to content that only a few people every get to see," Doug Thomas, Associate Professor at USC and co-author of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, said. "Systematically, I felt what Blizzard has done is taken their high-end game content and made it increasingly accessible to larger group of players."
"Even if you couldn't get the high-end Epics, you could get something that was pretty much equivalent through token systems. That kind of thing kind of eroded one of the core dynamics about what was fun about the game for me."
While many of these changes are off-putting to long-time fans, Blizzard is aware of the complaints. "We struggle with that all the time, it's huge," Street said. "We just don't have a lot of examples of games that have lasted this long and been this popular for so long to show the right way to do it."
"I think coming up with new mechanics and new systems is relatively easy, the problem is integrating it with what we already have. World of Warcraft today is so much more complicated than it was when it launched six or seven years ago."
While the joys of having an Epic item are diluted by the increasing number of ways for players to get them, the high-level game can still provide the special pleasures derived from gameplay itself. With new Heroic raids, new dungeons, and complex new challenges for experts to solve there could have been some off-set for the increasingly accessible loot rewards. But this approach comes with its own problems.
"The worst part of Cataclysm is the reward structure being all out of whack with content difficulty," Greg McClanahan, a long-time WoW player and frequent Gamasutra blogger, said. "Raids are much harder than they were in Wrath of the Lich King, but the rewards aren't significantly better than what you can acquire by queuing up for five-mans. On top of that, there's no longer any mystery about exactly which patch all of your gear is going to be obsolete."
"What this means is that you end up with a lot of people who are frustrated about wiping in raids, and there's not a strong rewards-based incentive to keep trying. That's precisely what happened with my own guild, and it drove us to stop raiding entirely, with a good chunk of people quitting or cutting back their play time significantly."
Learning, Leaning, Learned
Another long-term challenge for WoW, or any MMO that's survived as long, is competing against an increasingly savvy and capable player population. "The problem with the current structure of MMOs is that they're playing this kind of racing game with the player community based on expansions and creating new content," Thomas said. "They're never going to be as fast creating it as a certain element of the player base is going to be at defeating it."
"The amount of time it takes to do an expansion, or even to open a new dungeon, is astronomical in comparison to the amount of time it takes a high-end guild to get through it. Information from the high end guilds trickles out very quickly through the information network. It really only takes a couple teams knowing how to defeat the content to put it out onto various forums and wikis."
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I used to like that when you joined pvp, you saw familiar names among the enemy, you could develop rivalries and epic confrontations, now the pvp pool is so large you end up fighting nameless hordes.
I used to enjoy leveling up my spells and skills, but that joy ends quickly, with no way to enhance my skills in any permanent way besides gear. Gear that is completely obsolute with each content expansion.
I used to enjoy 5 mans when there was planning and crowd control, now its a speed race, with very little enjoyment.
I used to enjoy the epic long battles in Alterac Valley that lasted 3+ hours, you really felt like the conflict was at the right scale, now if Alterac Valley is not over in 2m, people leave. You were also rewarded for kills, with no diminished returns, now you just get rewards for winning.
Sometimes I wish the Launch version of WoW was available to transfer too...
Sometimes I wish we could continously level up our spells and skills in an mmo, and have content scale to our level, like Diablo :)
I wholeheartedly agree about 5 mans turning into a race and the gear fetishism, however.
If there was no end to your skill level, then you open the door (rather wide, too) for botting and putting the idea in new players' minds that they will never reach the level of power as the earlier players (first come, first serve, etc.).
Y'know... just because people want something, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea ;) People have a tendancy to focus on short-term personal benefits and fail (or even refuse) to consider the long-term impacts; they also often claim to want X (e.g. healthier food) and then choose Y (a fast-food burger).
The key to staying in business is recognising the difference between needs, wants and demands. Unfortunately, the internet has made it easier for vocal minorities (or majorities, to be fair!) to DEMAND changes...
However I have the same problem with any 'outsider' commentary on why WoW is faltering, or has lost it's 'magic' for some players. I have issue because more times than not the game is actually not broken in the ways that many think it still is, or the supposed problems are not so much problems but lynch pins that actually can't be removed or avoided without ripping almost the whole games structure apart.
I think the worst thing Blizzard could do now with WoW would be to turn it into something that it is not.
WoW has many flaws but without them it would cease to be the same game, Blizzard would just be turning an old game into a different game.
So while I agree that the limitations of the underlying structure of WoW will be the prime reason it will continue to lose relevance, I also know that Titan is a better conduit for vastly different ideas for structure and content.
As a final note, I know there will be a time I stop playing WoW regularly, but there will never be a time that I won't want to come back to my characters and jump back into Azeroth and play some more, I don't see the WoW servers ever going offline. There will be fewer servers by far but our characters will out live us all.
While Blizzard has tried to slow this down in Cataclysm, a lot of players were still dispirited by the fact that the epic gear they worked so hard to collect was suddenly vendor trash and that they also had weeks (not days, _weeks_) of grinding to endure before they could even start collecting the latest high-end recipes. And if they have a job or a life outside of WoW, then forget it, the grinding will never end.
In order to facilitate player's "race to the top" mentality that's inherent in level-based systems, Blizzard made the mistake of speeding up the leveling process. Before when players started a new character they had to undertake a good number of quests in an area before they could level up enough to move to the next area. This gave them the opportunity to become familiar with an area and feel as though they were really in another world. Now players rush through areas so quickly they're barely aware of the differences and Azeroth becomes this superficial blur of scenery where you only pause long enough to slaughter everything that moves. And who cares about armor, spells or recipes when two hours of playing makes everything obsolete. Why bother enchanting an item when it's going to be replaced in ten minutes?
WoW is too big and established to make any meaningful changes that could solve these problems, but with it's 11 million player base it will still be around for a few more years so that gives game designers a good opportunity to study what works and what doesn't over a long period of time. Constant level advancement seemed like a winning idea for the first couple of years, but now it looks to be a deadly trap. Leaving players out of the creative aspects of making content worked when launching an MMO, but over time it alienates players who want to have more involvement.
Now the question is, are any game designers learning these lessons? From what I've seen in the last few years the answer is a resounding "No." Minecraft, Spore, Sims, Little Big Planet and other such games have emphatically proven that players have this passionate desire to create stuff in the games they play, yet when game creators make MMOs they go out of their way to exclude player-created content. Despite all of the problems WoW is having with level advancement the vast majority of RPG games still adhere to same level systems as if they were mandated by law. Even though people leave WoW because of epic gear overload other gamer designers continue to believe that throwing tons of glowing armor at players will always make them happy.
Once i explored about everything in the game that was not raid related at that time (before the Lich king expansion) I lost interest in the game.
I recently tried the game again with a free 7 day pass, just to see what changes had occured in the world. I thought about playing again, but then realized that to play the game again, i would need to buy two expansions as the price of entry. I happened to get a free copy of Rift, and gave it a try and love it. It really caters to people like myself, very solo friendly, and i can play it when i have some time here and there.
I will say that i was impressed with the engine changes in WOW when i tried it again. The game looks really good for a game first released in 2004, the updates to the graphic engine impressed me.
One thing I don't get is why ATVI hasn't lowered WoW's cost. Sure they made it F2P for 20 levels, but you still need to spend 100$ to get into it. What MMO besides WoW could make that work? Perhaps if Blizzard lowered the barrier to enter to say 30 for all of it, or maybe 20$, then they'd see an influx of new players.
Merging 10 and 25 was probably the largest blunder. This killed the easy/casual raid tier that people seem to be complaining about in this article, and severely limited the mechanics they can use in real raids. They have just as many balance issues, and created entirely new problems like legendary item distribution which in its current form is extremely unfair. My 25 man guild reduced to two 10 man raids and in one of those raids every single player has quit playing and unsubscribed. Raiding just wasn't interesting to them anymore even though their raid got a server first kill.
The gear starvation problem is another thing that makes raiding less interesting. There's very little choice in gear anymore, which is probably related to the risk/reward problems people are citing in the article. As a developer I know that Blizzard probably reduced the amount of items they're creating out of necessity, but the effect on the player base is still very real.
To fix it they really just need to be honest with themselves. This 10/25 merge was an interesting experiment and all but they need to undo it next expansion. Go back to your roots. Cataclysm is the first time we've had non-tiered raid content. In TBC there were only 25 man raids, but there was a clear progression from instance to instance and even barriers to entry. In Wrath 10 man served as the easy tier. Currently there's no tiered content. That means high end raiders are rewarded less for being high end and more casual players find the game too hard. So people get bored and quit.
The worst part is I'm not sure they understand this. Their response to the subscriber loss has been "well I guess we need to make more content". Not necessarily, just make the content you have worth playing... which for raiders implies a large selection of rewards and strong differentiation of "real" and "casual" accomplishments. The exact stuff you took out in Cataclysm.
I will admit that Cataclysm was the expansion that I spent the least amount of time with. It has more to do with life changes. I came back during the summer months and quickly got bored with it. I guess it is the younger me wanting the days of vanilla and TBC back. I don't ever see Blizzard "going back to their roots" with this game. They obviously have shown where they direction is going. The core original crowd was left behind a few years ago.
Neither reforging nor the 10/25 loot and achievement merging affect the amount of content Blizzard needs to create. As for Firelands loot, each boss already has a massive bulging loot table as it is, so Blizzard is limited in it's options due to bosses in a tier, so I guess in that case it is in a sense a content issue.
Furthermore wanting a tactical raiding challenge and wanting to spend a lot of effort amassing 15 more raid ready players are vastly different challenges that are in no way equivalent. So the balance of the difficulty is still completely maluble in both 10 and 25, with hcs ready as the next step.
Finally I would say to your concerns that there is no casual raiding I mostly agree that this is a problem for the game, and I would support normal modes being balanced lower than they currently are so that most players with the time can see the normal modes through, and get guilds that want a challenge into the Hcs quicker, and make that the 'real' raid progression for the tier and not just stuff you wait to do in the next tier when you ilvl has jumped up again.
Also they made the tier bonuses awful for a number of specs, but that's a completely separate issue. If someone told me that Blizzard didn't understand their game's fanbase or mechanics at all some days I'd almost believe them.
"Stealth" characters have been in quite a few MMOs for over a decade, so it probably doesn't have much to do with the loss of WoW subscriptions.
I can think of one reason for this happening and sorry this may be tin foil hat time. That reason is the goal of WoW changing from being a good game that appealed to a few to a machine that was trying to make as much money for other projects etc. as possible. They seemed to have gotten over the initial shock of having the a golden goose to becoming so reliant on it they are farming it for every last egg possible. Now i understand why this would happen, and i honestly don't blame them, I'm sure i would do the same, but i think as a result they are now trying to attract everyone in an attempt to make more money instead of picking a demographic to work on and sticking to it. This has lead to a more unfocused and to be honest sloppy design to the more recent iterations of the game. I have no doubt that the moving of several talents away from WoW to other projects has also aided in this disharmony.
This game is OLD. It's a miracle the curve kept going up for so long.
But for those years that I played, the level cap was the same, and the game never got old. Instead of coming out with better gear, they came out with gear that was different, along with some end game types that really broke the mold for most MMO's. The biggest reason the game stayed good was just what I've seen WoW suffering with since I started playing. When you got something in FFXI, it took a lot of effort, and it was worth it. With WoW, I honestly don't want to put in the hours of playing arena games or raiding to get the extra 12 strength on my hands when I already have over a thousand.
Granted, I'm kind of comparing apples to oranges a bit, but the general concept is there. WoW has become too easy at the high end, and not given enough rewards to the very top end of it's players. It means that all the content they come out with isn't going to help unless they reassess their risk/reward model. Making the climb to 85 faster was necessary to let new people join the game, but making the climb from fresh level 85 to "I'm a super geared god" faster is most likely what's doing them in.
However for me the gear in WoW is simply a means to an end, I actually enjoy the playing of the game, so if I or other players can very rapidly gear up it is not a concern, in fact it's a boon as I have more people to play with.
The Heroic Ragnaros gear and title are very powerful/prestigious rewards in the game currently.
So I wonder do you think they are insufficient to reward the very best players in the game?
I think the designers let nostalgia overwhelm their good judgement. For all the whining players did during wrath about "the good old days" of mandatory crowd control, etc, I think those things were actually holding the game back from being truly fun. Cata has turned it into a frustrating, time-consuming mess.
Also, any sense of adventure in the game is now gone. After you blast through to max level there are flying mounts, portals, and queues to keep you from ever having to spend much time traveling. While at some point in older MMOs I may have complained about travel time, the WoW world just seems so much smaller and artificial when you can just queue up for dungeon after dungeon without leaving the city. I doubt everyone feels this way, but for me, this has really killed my enjoyment of the game.
And finally, WoW is the master at trivializing old content. This basically means that once an expansion or content patch comes out, there is no reason to do old content at all. In the original Ever Quest you could find some old raid/quest content from years earlier that would still have items you wanted. They might not be the most powerful items, but they would have clicky effects, or other attributes that would make completing the years old content still fun. Sigh, this too was something I complained about back in the EQ days, and now that it has come to pass in WoW I really don't care for the change.
Basically, WoW has taken the adventure and, for lack of a better term, "magic" out of the MMO. It is now boiled down to core mechanics only. Don't like to travel or look for friends on your server to group with? Fine, no traveling or grouping needed, just queue up time and time again to grind away. The gear treadmill has been streamlined to it's core. Reguler/Heroic - Content patch/Expansion - repeat. MMOs have always had gear progression, but at least it was hidden behind hard to get to dungeons (anyone remember running through Sirens Grotto to get to ToV in EQ) and just a very large number of diverse raid level encounters.
Blah, it may just be me, but the stream lined, never have to worry about doing something that might be boring on it's own, progression treadmill, adventureless style MMO just doesn't have enough flavor to keep me playing any more.
Been playing WoW since the Vanilla Beta in 2004 and while I think that you have a point here, I think that the random dungeons and random BGs have done the most to take the sense of community out of the game. Up until their implementation, you would "know" people on your server, there was a community of players who had known one another and who'd call out trolls or bad players on, well, trade chat. Where a sense of community was strong, people helped one another ... but most of my friends from those days don't play any more, and the recent batch of WoW players - which dictates what Blizzard has to do content wise - could care less and wants everything handed to them. "I pay $15 per month, so I have a right to have the best (insert item here)."
I was talking to a friend the other day and we agreed that even though we might not even had the best items in Vanilla, we sure had more fun, "bad" quest flow and everything. I was a quest junkie in Vanilla and BC - there are still hundreds of quests in LK and Cata that I haven't touched. Why? Rewards don't really matter, gold doesn't, and the story snippets served by doing them aren't as deep either.
My life has become busier too so I can't spend three evenings per night raiding, so my motivation to actually do anything in the game is at an all-time low. Grind troll instances for points to buy (!) Tier gear? That will be obsolete with the next content patch? Not so interesting, especially as it is a means to an end - I can do everything outside of raiding (and actually even raiding) with gear that the game offered upon its release. Maybe no heroic raid bosses, but oh well.
Maybe we all have played the game so long that we see too clearly the mechanistic game systems behind it?
I think people are, and have been for a while, sick of playing the same thing over and over but haven't really begun to realize it until recently. With more and more games that challenge the WoW standard being developed, I think WoW players will finally snap out of the hypnotic routine of 5-mans and dailies. I'm hoping the decline of WoW will bring about new ideas and games developed to appeal to a specific players and add a more flavored but focused experience for all. As much as I can't stand to play the game, I do appreciate what WoW has done to bring MMO's into the mainstream; but I do hope that there isn't another MMO juggernaut for a long while.
But that's just what I think drawing on my vast knowledge and experience in the industry...you know, because students have alot of that :)
That sums up the biggest reason they lost almost a million subscribers. Its age and the lure of new MMOs on the horizon is another, but the above paragraph's easily the main reason. Blizzard's lack of maintaining balance for both hardcore and casual players (and maybe a lack of accepting and using feedback from PTRs) are what's slowly sucking the life out of the game.
Most people play towards an objective. The most common one is getting better gear. It's rare that I see people actively discussing the lore and reasons why a boss acts or does what it does. It's just strategies on how to beat it and what it drops. Who really cares about achievements? No one will spend potential hours trying to fight a boss just to "see the content". Both hardcore and casual gamers want solid progression tailored to their style of play, and Cataclysm failed to bring that.
As for me, I quit because it got boring. I didn't see the point of grinding every day for a month to get one piece of gear without having to hop into a pug and raid, which I hate doing in WoW. Blizzard's going to need to pull some serious ish to get people to come back. I'd love to see what that is, but for now, I'll stick to waiting for SWTOR and GW2 than pay 15 bucks a month to stare at my holy paladin.
Anecdotal sure but, in my old guild this expansion there were a multitude of people who couldn't do normal heroic 5 mans at 85 and cut their play time back significantly or quit altogether. Another anecdotal piece: At the start of The Burning Crusade my guild had 70 active members (this was at a time when 40 man raids were just ending you have to keep in mind). We could barely field 25 members 5 months later because literally dozens of people had quit again since they hit max level and realized they didn't want/could not raid.
You will disagree now and probably forget about this when the time comes, but I can almost guarantee at the end of the expansion about a month or so before the next expansion we will see a huge spur in people playing again. This cycle ALWAYS happens and will continue to ALWAYS happen. There is no other reason for the decline in subs, at all. One or two people quitting because the game is too easy or too hard isn't part of the majority or the cycle.
However, WOTLK did create an epidemic. They achieved one of their goals but went back on it slightly in Cataclysm. Normal mode content for the most part was easy, especially on 10 man at the time. By the end of WOTLK every single player who cared enough to see the Lich King dead had done so, the same can not be said for cataclysm. Even with a HUGE nerf to launch content there are still many people that struggle with the normal mode versions of that content. One of the big reasons they have probably lost subs is due to this. In WOTLK you could simply run 5 mans to get the best gear in the game, then that gear would give you a nice boost when you wanted to tackle normal mode 10 man ICC.
Times have changed from that and players who cannot/will not do raids have no way to get some of the best gear in the game and they do not feel like playing anymore. People who say the game is too easy clearly haven't killed everything (There is seriously still less then 45 guilds IN THE ENTIRE WORLD that have cleared Heroic firelands despite it being out for 11 weeks now) and people saying the game is too hard are slightly correct, the game has gone up in difficulty since WOTLK.
This was not design, however, this was blizzard realizing too late that 4 different ilvls of gear each tier in wotlk (10n/10h/25n/25h) broke the game entirely and instead of redesigning stats completely they just rolled with the easier game, however, that's an entirely different discussion not pertaining to this one.
This was not design, however, this was blizzard realizing too late that 4 different ilvls of gear each tier in wotlk (10n/10h/25n/25h) broke the game entirely and instead of redesigning stats completely they just rolled with the easier game, however, that's an entirely different discussion not pertaining to this one."
I am not sure what to think of your reply. First you say the game got too hard, then it got too easy?
I don't subscribe to the "too hard" faction myself - if you were casually raiding in LK (one night per week here, heroic ICC minus LK in one evening) you would be fine gear-wise for the five mans and heroics of Cata.
I don't think the game is too easy either, see heroic raid bosses. What I think though is that the game doesn't really motivate legacy players a lot. Wow, look at the redesigned quest flow. Nice if you are a new player - maybe, even then you rush through the levels and will not even need to see all the content while leveling - but why would I go back and do all those quests once again, even with a few new and many modified quests?
Basically it boils down to the fact that I miss the *sense of wonder* in the game. Go kill dragons in BWD. Go kill, um, more dragons and stuff in BoT. Go kill flaming things in FL. Grind Zuls for VP to buy BiS gear that you can't (!) get in the latest raid tier. Yawn.
http://elementsofwar.net/WoW.aspx
I played the beta version for over 2 months on the PTR and by the time the live version was almost ready for release, I already knew I wouldn't be playing it. I quit entirely for 2 months, then returned to play only non-raid content, more out of nostalgia than anything else. Nine months after release, I have seen BWD, BoT and Tot4W once each, and BH twice. I have spent time grinding rep on Firelands trash but have not yet faced a single FL boss. In fact, there are still two Cataclysm 5-man dungeons I haven't bothered to try. There simply isn't enough new incentive in them to get me to invest the time.
I say this as someone who raided 3-4 hours per night, 3-4 nights per week, for 3 years. I owned seven level 80s, four of them Kingslayers, months before Cata released. My raid came within 2% of the Lich King's hp of earning Bane of the Fallen King titles before Cata released. So we weren't the hardest of hard core, but certainly more than most. I'm only mentioning all this to establish that difficulty, or the lack of it, had nothing to so with my decision to leave WoW.
For me, there were many reasons to walk away, but a few really stand out. One reason was that after spending so much time in the game for so long, I simply felt an urge to do something else with my life. I wasn't willing to go through another 2 year expansion (or so I thought it would be) spending the hours it took to play at the level I enjoyed. This meant that I would no longer raid at the level I had before, but it didn't necessarily require that I quit altogether.
The next problem was the repetition. The beta version made it clear to me that there was nothing truly new in Cata other than the new guild leveling system, which turned out to be an unexpectedly bad thing for some guilds - especially the smaller, more tightly knit guilds that in my opinion are the best ones. The rest of what I saw was repeating the same old process of leveling and then grinding gear, with very little in the new content to differentiate it from earlier content in terms of mechanics. In fact, a very large amount of it WAS rehashed old content, only with higher stats. Many class changes felt forced - change for change's sake, with lame justifications from the developers that weren't very convincing.
For the most part I liked the new zones, but the "streamlined" questing in them meant that after a day or two, I never needed to see them again except to farm materials. They felt more like a civil service entry exam than actual places. Which leads me to the third reason I no longer play much - the utter lack of atmosphere or "magic" in the world environment. Say what you will about WotLK's faults, Northrend had atmosphere in abundance. I still remember the thrill of exploration at the beginning of BC and WotLK. And the story line in WotLK was particularly strong, right from the late patches in BC that led up to WotLK's release. You could FEEL the dread of the Lich King and his scourge minions. There is nothing remotely equivalent in Cataclysm.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, there is the sad change brought in the social dimension of the game by the randomization of dungeons and the pressures on small guilds from the guild leveling system. These systems have teamed to de-personalize the community experience and practically destroy whatever social cohesion and civil decency the game once had.
On my server at least, smaller, older guilds have struggled and many have given up and dispersed into the much smaller number of much larger guilds that have survived. There are a quite number of adverse effects related to this trend, and I won't take time to detail them all here. Suffice it to say that the one truly new component of the game in Cata has unexpectedly turned out to have done more harm than good to the game in my opinion.
The dungeon randomizer has made it easier to reach dungeons, but as mentioned in other posts here, that's not always a good thing. For one thing, it means you can camp out in Stormwind or Orgrimmar pretty much all the time and hardly ever have to travel anywhere. Flight further exacerbates the lack of any need for the developers to create a sense of palpability in the game world. But the worst effect of the randomizer has been to make it effortless for people of no skill or ability to team with good players, and then behave very, very badly when things don't work out perfectly for them. Highly skilled players are showing far less tolerance for lesser skilled players than they would if those players were their guildies. One tiny mistake is sufficient to bring on a storm of verbal abuse followed by a sudden ejection from the group. More than any other single reason, it's the aggressive rudeness and breakdown of commonplace manners in some players I encounter in 5 man dungeons that has soured me on the game to the point where I'm almost ready to delete my beloved characters and cancel my subscription once and for all.
I'm with those who believe every game has a life cycle and that WoW has surpassed its maturation point and entered a stage of natural decline. It's gotten stale, plain and simple. Blizzard clearly recognizes this and has made a perfectly sensible business decision to commence gradual disengagement from investment in the game rather than attempt to radically refresh it. The best talent at Blizzard is already being diverted to new projects and WoW's subscriber base is being mined for revenues to develop those projects. Blizzard will do as much as they think they need to to continue getting the most dollars they can from WoW until the time is right to cut it loose, but only a fraction of those dollars will be reinvested in WoW. The fact that they've already bailed on at least one major Cata patch before rushing out a new expansion pack pretty much illustrates that decision.
Of course it wasn't fun waiting for an hour to find a group earlier, but at least when you did find a group, you most likely were going to see some of them in the future or at least had heard of their guilds, which made you want to act properly. Being a dick made you infamous on the whole server and no one would group with you anymore. Now that the possibility of this happening is taken away, everyone can just act like greedy bitches. And the new players that join the game, think that it's the way you're supposed to act. They'll never learn the proper way of dealing with other people, which then again causes them problems when they try to move to raiding, and they haven't learned anything about interaction with people.
This causes old players to get annoyed at the attitude, and causes new players to be unable to learn, which causes both of them to quit. The way I see it this is the biggest problem at the moment. Blizzard tried to fix it a bit with the growing focus on guilds in Cataclysm, but that doesn't work if the serverwide community is still nonexistant. And now that they've given the possibility to act like an asshole to people, it's difficult to take it away.
Santeri may be onto something... would the fix be in relegating LFG to the character's home server?
World of Warcraft’s primary game play directive has become one of herding the masses into end game as quickly as possible in pursuit of ensuing major expansion sales. But to physically make it through end game requires a player to invest serious time and study outside of the game (Tankspot, ElitistJerks, Youtube, etc...) regardless of how helpful a player’s guild might be. This pretty much excludes the casual player from end game and defeats the purpose of implementing rapid advancement.
Wrath brought us phasing where timelines changed throughout the course of quest chains. While it might be a clever way for Blizzard to expand the expansions, it basically sucks. Unless characters are on the same quest in a quest chain, they can’t play together in the same geographical area. They can’t even see each other! So players have to solo and farm or grind rep elsewhere until their friends catch up.
But that's okay with Blizzard as quests have been nerfed to account for it… to the point where the vast majority of them are easily soloable. Now only a few require any true group participation. This probably isn't a bad thing since it gives soloists a way to play through to end game. However other than leveling a new class, once they've reached end game there's nowhere for them to go except into the socially-flawed LFG queue.
Unless of course the player gets to raid in an active raiding guild. But according to WoWProgress.com that's only 14% of subscribers. More money, increasingly rapid level progression, more achievements and “over the counter” availability of raid quality epics (i.e. instant gratification) appear to be Blizzard’s primary incentives for the other 86% to keep playing.
Cataclysm reinforced LK's solo-friendly phasing (the only Cata quest I haven't been able to solo is Crucible.) In Firelands a single daily quest that takes 5 minutes to complete yields more money for a character than vanilla’s AQ40 did over the course of a week. Original level 60 Tier 3 epic gear was item level 88 and took almost a year of raid grinding and trading up to acquire. Current level 85 Cata Tier 12 gear is approaching item level 400 and can be had in just months of raiding – if not weeks for the serious player in a successful raiding guild.
We also have the ability to fly anywhere in the game now at upwards of 300% normal movement speed – in some cases almost 500% with special movement bonuses. I dare say that, in the same way lifestyle automation and the World Wide Web have shrunk our planet, so too has the combination of game play nerfing and Cata’s master flying shrunk World of Warcraft.
Maybe it’s just me but new content is starting to look like rehashes of previous content with fresh coats of paint. Meet the new boss... same as the old boss. Perhaps World of Warcraft has simply run its course.
I forget who exactly it was that said it, but when you create an MMORPG, you are building a world, not a game.
Actually it seems like you 10 classes at most. The unique abilities of so many classes have been spread out or nullfied through gameplay tweaks that the unique nature of a particular class and spec have been washed away. For example, Shamans have heroism. Mages now have Time Twister and Hunters have a pet that does the same thing. Why should I bring an elemental shaman with my raid if I can get more dps out of a mage and still get "heroism?" Oh, Shamans have 5-6 second interrupts.
Then I'll just nerf the boss that requires an interrupt every 4-5 seconds so that you can kill the add that needs to be interrupted before he casts.
It seems to me that some decisions are being made at a level that says "Why are we losing players? Is this too hard? Knock 25% off of enemy health and damage and reduce the occurance of their most damaging attack by 25% too."
I honestly think it was because of all the winging and whining that the devs decided to incorporate Battle Grounds and discouraged world fighting eventually altogether - there was no gain to do it. So now World of Warcraft became in effect World of tiny set places of Warcraft. What a disapointment?? The first time i saw Warong Gulch my whole WoW mindset was blown away - why would my war enduring warrior suddenly lower themselves to go capture a flag in someones idea of a game?? Mad i know but i really believed in the World of Warcraft and fought and worked desperate to help my faction own the realm. (ofc we never did, there is more to a war then a player and his/her time spent playing). Then the arena thing came out obviously to adress the issue that there were no skill to attending BG's and earning honour if you played well or read a book. To me Arena was just organised duels and didnt ever appeal to me - a bit like i bought World of Warcraft to play a war game - not to play a solo elitist i am best player v player game - i prefered street fighter 2 for that any day of the week!!
I stopped playing wow before cat came out or was announced having played from the start. Like so many have said it was for lots of reasons but one always comes to the front everytime. Guilds - they come they go - when they are good the game is unbeatable - when they collapse - the game becomes an extremely lonely slog. I noticed that blizz never took hold of that bunch of nettles preferring to leave the most troublesome and hardest part to the players to deal with - sadly it leaves alot of players out in the cold - sometimes top players because rivals deliberately leave them out in the cold for many reasons and then obviously the new player who is going to be such a drain on the guild to get them up to speed, Well - to be honest if you could reverse that in the game - maybe the community spirit would be returned as well.
Although i havent played cat and i hope you can accept a view from such a strange view point - i noticed a view complaints about how the game is ruined by people getting geared too easy etc - that is the trouble with the game - you have become so elitist it has destroyed the gameplay - to me the idea should be the game is where everyone is at and doesnt really begin until you get there - why do you think it right to hold back players as a way to improve the game?? Surely you want as many well geared good players as poss so when you get into a raid or a BG you play with skilled players and enjoy the game at its best?? I am considering returning to WoW because my partner wants to return - How long will it take me to get from WotLK to upto par in the cat?? I bet it will be over a mnth and maybe even 3mnths if the last releases are anything to go by, is that not long enough??
What should happen from here on is to consider what the game should be so everyone reaching the game where everyone is playing will find it exciting and enjoyable for the playing and not for the "considerably better than yow" drops. Bring back World of Warcraft - bring back Alliance v Horde (you can play both sides you know) and lets get this thing ON!!
Best Regards ALL
I agree with you.
IMO : /lfd and /lfr killed WoW for me.
Before that I needed to have a guild and communicate with people and it made it a social game. Now, you can level from 1-85 without ever saying hi to anyone on your server.
Before ruby sanctum patch, the game was balanced like a game of chess is. There are some pieces that totally dominate over others, but when put together into a team, it makes it balanced. The idea that all the pieces should somehow be balanced turns chess into checkers and makes it boring.
If the game has 12 million players, how many of them complain? Maybe 100k at the most, but what about the other 11+ million who are too busy enjoying the game to complain. WTF?!
Blizzard believes their player base is getting too good: they can burn through content too quickly, and so a lack of content is the problem. That's true... but only from the perspective of someone who doesn't understand the "time in between." The secret to making the game longer is NOT to include more grinding, or more tiers of things to grind. What you need are all the things they burned away - in the name of making the game more accessible and "quicker to the fun parts." They actually ended up burning away the social aspect of their MMO and now all they have left is stat builder. And there are too many single-player stat builder games out there that are more fun.
Let's face it, in any business the dominant brand is not by default the top quality one. WOW is the dominant MMO not because it has the best gameplay but because of the social snow ball effect and clever conditioning psychology applied without pause. People got addicted to play endlessly in the same way for repetitive rewards. They now complain that WOW content can't keep up the pace with the enormous crowd it gathered and its enormous appetite for more. If I may make a somewhat off analogy think of Call of Duty and its ability to draw in huge crowds every year with the same gameplay but more cinema, perks, levels and guns. There are only so many ways to aim a gun. Few are the dev teams who actually cut back bloated features to remove the clutter in sequels/expansions and make the existing systems more refined and interactive offering new ways to do things.
I don't think WOW is just a game, is resembles a social avalanche of disconnected people starting to crumble under its own contradictory dynamics because it can't no longer deliver enough appeal just as a game. Its extensive growth is finished. Is it slim enough to reinvent its core appeal through gameplay?