Casuals > Raiders, when it comes to content - misconception

[Glorious Leader]

You mean the same people who are gushing subscribers from the casual switch would hold him down for trying to save it?
Sounds delusional. :O

I think money is clouding their judgment. The same logic they're applying sounds good in theory but in practice is shit. Like mixing foods that taste good separately but together end up like shit.

What's clouding their judgement is the vein attempt to appeal to a shrinking minority of players at the expense of everyone else by maintaining a laser like focus on raid content. Money has always been their aim and goal in world of warcraft and saying it's "clouding their judgement" is foolish.

[HeedmySpeed]

What's clouding their judgement is the vein attempt to appeal to a shrinking minority of players at the expense of everyone else by maintaining a laser like focus on raid content. Money has always been their aim and goal in world of warcraft and saying it's "clouding their judgement" is foolish.

Shrinking minority? Or shrinking majority? Pretty sure most of those subscriber losses were part of the "majority" you always refer to.
And it's most certain they have tried to appeal to those players when it was a folly attempt in the first place.
There's a difference from trying to make a descent living and being obsessed and over concerned with profits you lose sight of what got you here in the first place. Should I have said "profits?" instead of "money?"

[Grimble]

You mean the same people who are gushing subscribers from the casual switch would hold him down for trying to save it?

As I've pointed out earlier in this thread, WoW began losing subscribers at exactly the same time and rate as every other large, mainstream, market-leading MMORPG in the history of the fucking genre. If anything, it's doing somewhat better than average for its age.

Claiming that the game has only lost players because serious raiders haven't been asskissed enough is just bullshit wishful thinking from a tiny beleagured community unwilling to come to terms with its own irrelevance, and will not be allowed to fly. Period.

The overwhelming majority of WoW players haven't killed a single Normal boss all expansion. I know it seems unthinkable from inside that little bubble where everyone raids, but there just aren't that many of you.

[Glorious Leader]

Shrinking minority? Or shrinking majority? Pretty sure most of those subscriber losses were part of the "majority" you always refer to.
And it's most certain they have tried to appeal to those players when it was a folly attempt in the first place.
There's a difference from trying to make a descent living and being obsessed and over concerned with profits you lose sight of what got you here in the first place. Should I have said "profits?" instead of "money?"

No it's not "most certain" they tried to appeal to those players in the first place. If they were attempting to then it was a half assed effort who's real aim and objective was to maintain the status quo of raid or die. To appeal to those players would likely mean raiding would have to go bye bye instead. It was never clear that casual players wanted to raid or have raids become almost the entirety of their progression path at end game. That was a decision aimed to SAVE raiding by subjecting more people to it. It bit them in the asshole this expansion and every change made to the game associated with it and every change made to the game to give players "more to do" (really more to grind) also forced players to leave. Mists is the LEAST casual expansion since at least TBC. They've thrown in alot of junk and called it "casual content" but the real meet of the game (character progression) is more out of reach for casual players then ever.

Yes the raiding minority is shrinking, it's going extinct like the neanderthals except the raiders can see it coming and it stings like a bitch.

[HeedmySpeed]

As I've pointed out earlier in this thread, WoW began losing subscribers at exactly the same time and rate as every other large, mainstream, market-leading MMORPG in the history of the fucking genre. If anything, it's doing somewhat better than average for its age.

So you're looking back at something with a billion factors and saying "it's inevetible?" I see the pattern but obviously the player retention differs from those games, leading me to believe something could have been done better.
I also notice you left out Eve Online, http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-2.png we're almost 10 years in and it's still hovering at it's peak.

Claiming that the game has only lost players because serious raiders haven't been asskissed enough is just bullshit wishful thinking from a tiny beleagured community unwilling to come to terms with its own irrelevance, and will not be allowed to fly. Period.

The overwhelming majority of WoW players haven't killed a single Normal boss all expansion. I know it seems unthinkable from inside that little bubble where everyone raids, but there just aren't that many of you.

Challenging raiding content isn't just for "hardcore raiders," it's for everyone. There's little in this game that can compete with the accomplishment of a boss kill after many attempts. It's just that most players have to get their hands dirty with "inconveniences" to see that and they refuse to.
You want more dungeons? Me too. But I know for damn sure if you can piss through them as any other dungeon it won't keep you playing for long, there's nothing worth sticking around if you can't get that same exhileration.

Now, stop holding a grudge over that raid leader that refused your ass for not wanting to gem/enchant your gear and who got mad at you for standing in fire on a trial run. If you don't raid or PvP with a modicum of effort then you're just going to flake on this game. Sorry.

[Dormie]

I'd like to remind everyone that the subs really started going down after, Cata, and VERY SHORTLY AFTER they made the whole game's philosophy change. You can argue your correlation/causation BS, but it was at least running steady it's WHOLE CAREER until that point. If that didn't have a lot to do with the decline then it's a pretty big coincidence to ignore.

[melodramocracy]

As I've pointed out earlier in this thread, WoW began losing subscribers at exactly the same time and rate as every other large, mainstream, market-leading MMORPG in the history of the fucking genre. If anything, it's doing somewhat better than average for its age.

Claiming that the game has only lost players because serious raiders haven't been asskissed enough is just bullshit wishful thinking from a tiny beleagured community unwilling to come to terms with its own irrelevance, and will not be allowed to fly. Period.

The overwhelming majority of WoW players haven't killed a single Normal boss all expansion. I know it seems unthinkable from inside that little bubble where everyone raids, but there just aren't that many of you.

The whole 'WoW's dying because it's precisely x number of years old' schtick is the weakest argument I've ever seen put forth on these forums. And someone who claims to have been playing MMO's as long as you should know better.

As for the 'serious raiders' commentary: the definition of 'hardcore players' is at best a moving goalpost. They will always exist within any given game's community because that's how human nature works. There will always be a small % that strive for defeating the hardest content, and while the names will change, the percentages will vary less. This is true in any multiplayer game, MMO or otherwise.

I'm sure in some alternate universe, there exists a version of WoW where LFR is the most difficult content put forth, clearable by any and everyone, and servers aren't ghost towns after the fact. In this particular version of reality, things don't work that way, and never will.

[nekobaka]

As for the 'serious raiders' commentary: the definition of 'hardcore players' is at best a moving goalpost. They will always exist within any given game's community because that's how human nature works. There will always be a small % that strive for defeating the hardest content, and while the names will change, the percentages will vary less. This is true in any multiplayer game, MMO or otherwise.

Even that remains a subset of hardcores. Just being a raider does not make you a hard core and not stepping foot into a raid does not exclude one from being a hardcore.

[Ronduwil]

So you're looking back at something with a billion factors and saying "it's inevetible?" I see the pattern but obviously the player retention differs from those games, leading me to believe something could have been done better.
I also notice you left out Eve Online, http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-2.png we're almost 10 years in and it's still hovering at it's peak.

At it's peak of 0.5 million players. About 1/24th of WoW at its peak and 1/14th of WoW at this point in time. Who cares if Eve Online is still at its peak when its peak wasn't impressive to begin with? My "Ronduwil is awesome" fan club is still hovering at its peak of 1 person since its inception 42 years ago. That doesn't mean squat to anyone but me.

Challenging raiding content isn't just for "hardcore raiders," it's for everyone. There's little in this game that can compete with the accomplishment of a boss kill after many attempts.

To be honest I don't feel any accomplishment at killing a boss after many attempts. The only emotion I feel is relief that I'm not going to be forced to go at it yet again that night. Raiding doesn't inspire accomplishment for me; it just inspires dread. Many others I've spoken to have that opinion of raiding as well. I get a much higher sense of accomplishment by burning through about 10 levels on a mid-level alt in one night or in surviving five more waves of proving grounds than I did the previous day. I'm happy for you that you feel accomplished by spending every week with the same group of people beating your heads against the same boss that performs the same actions time and again, but I just don't personally see the appeal in that.

It's just that most players have to get their hands dirty with "inconveniences" to see that and they refuse to.

You make it sound as if there's something wrong with that. Like they're afraid to roll up their sleeves and really get down to business when in fact this is a freaking game and choosing to spend their time on productive pursuits is actually the more industrious choice to make.

You want more dungeons? Me too. But I know for damn sure if you can piss through them as any other dungeon it won't keep you playing for long, there's nothing worth sticking around if you can't get that same exhileration.

It's all in the variety. There hasn't been a decent choice of dungeons since WotLK.

Now, stop holding a grudge over that raid leader that refused your ass for not wanting to gem/enchant your gear and who got mad at you for standing in fire on a trial run. If you don't raid or PvP with a modicum of effort then you're just going to flake on this game. Sorry.

Despite having been gone for over 6 months I have had more raid invites this past week than you have probably had all year long. I just got done with a 6 hour flex raid and I'm pretty exhausted. I remember precisely why I unsubbed all those months ago. If Blizzard were to announce that there would be no more raids ever again I would be extremely happy: not because I was rejected, but because I'll be able to focus on the aspects of the game I enjoy rather than constantly turning down invitations to raids that I never asked for and never wanted.

- - - Updated - - -

I'd like to remind everyone that the subs really started going down after, Cata, and VERY SHORTLY AFTER they made the whole game's philosophy change.

Exactly. They started going down in Cata when they decided to treat casuals as second-class players. As soon as they put all their eggs in the raiding basket the subs went down the tubes. In MoP they went even further down that road and we've seen the results.

[Tomana]

I'd like to remind everyone that the subs really started going down after, Cata, and VERY SHORTLY AFTER they made the whole game's philosophy change.

No, the subs started going down after they made some retarded tuning to heroics and raids in early Cata. They actually tried to reverse WOTLK's philosophy and it backfired on them.

- - - Updated - - -

At it's peak of 0.5 million players. About 1/24th of WoW at its peak and 1/14th of WoW at this point in time. Who cares if Eve Online is still at its peak when its peak wasn't impressive to begin with? My "Ronduwil is awesome" fan club is still hovering at its peak of 1 person since its inception 42 years ago. That doesn't mean squat to anyone but me.

Guys, guys, EVE Online is a niche game. Its objective never was to draw large crowds because of its complicated mechanics. So it is bound to be kept in a niche.
BUT the difference is that its dev costs are much lower (static ship models and planet are cheaper to design than armor, raids and stuff), so they are pretty happy with their niche placement.
However, all the self-proclaimed "WoW killers" needed to invest a lot more in their development and would have to gather much more subs/box sales/micro-transactions as a consequence.

(On a related note: I finally gave up and bought EvE yesterday. )

[Grimble]

So you're looking back at something with a billion factors and saying "it's inevetible?" I see the pattern but obviously the player retention differs from those games, leading me to believe something could have been done better.
I also notice you left out Eve Online, http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-2.png we're almost 10 years in and it's still hovering at it's peak.

Oh wow, you noticed that did you? Did you spend the night poring intrepidly over reams of charts to reach that conclusion? Or maybe you just noticed the big goddamn bullet point in my linked post talking specifically about Eve and why it's not a valid comparison?

Namely, Eve is a space-based economic and territorial conquest PVP game with no raids and almost no PVE content in general. It has no design lessons to teach a game like WoW, and it's really not the sort of game a guy like you wants to use as a positive example of anything.

"Hey Grimble there is one game that has continued growing well past six years! It's that one with absolutely no raiding endgame-- wait what was my point again? Shiii--"

Great fucking argument.

On top of that, Eve was a flop when it released. CCP bought it back from Simon & Schuster for pennies on the dollar, and spent years slowly building an audience from complete obscurity. It took almost 3 years just to hit its first 100k subscribers, and has absolutely nothing in common businesswise with a big hyped-up hit like WoW.

By the way, you know what sorts of games DO have something in common with WoW? Hyped-up PVE games like the ones I actually compared it to.

Challenging raiding content isn't just for "hardcore raiders," it's for everyone. There's little in this game that can compete with the accomplishment of a boss kill after many attempts. It's just that most players have to get their hands dirty with "inconveniences" to see that and they refuse to.

So you say, but who gives a fuck? The majority of players aren't doing it, and probably don't give two shits about what sort of imaginary character flaws you want to assign them based on how they kill dragons in a video game. What's more, bullshit moral posturing about the work ethic of people who slay dragons on easy mode is worth exactly zero dollars to Blizzard, you dig?

But thanks for posting.

The whole 'WoW's dying because it's precisely x number of years old' schtick is the weakest argument I've ever seen put forth on these forums. And someone who claims to have been playing MMO's as long as you should know better.

First off, claiming that WoW is "dying" of some horrible flaw in need of immediate correction is hyperbolic horseshit of the first order. That's your routine, not mine. WoW isn't dying, it's aging. To date, no MMORPG that has ever lead either the Western or Eastern markets has ever died. Every single last one of them is still operating. Ultima Online, EverQuest, Lineage, all of them are still rolling along, still have forums somewhere full of players bitching about shitty drop rates and server downtime.

Secondly, it's telling that you've never had jack shit of any substance to say in refutation of such a "weak" argument. I mean what exactly is your explanation for the fact that I can rattle off four or five big market-leading fantasy PVE games that all started bleeding at precisely the six year mark? Exactly how long do you think a game as publicized as WoW is supposed to keep growing? Exactly where do you expect it to keep getting new players from now that everyone in the world has already heard of it?

You MMO immortalists are real long on "Nah bruh, it's only declining after all these years because they ain't making us raiders happy!" but awful fucking short on telling anyone how you think it was supposed to have gone down. What, WoW never removes attunements, subscribers hit 20 million by the end of Wrath? WoW never adds LFR, subscribers hit 40 million by the end of Cata? WoW tunes raids so that only 0.01% of players ever do them, gets every single person on Earth to play, then colonizes space and sells WoW to the Klingons?

I'm sure in some alternate universe, there exists a version of WoW where LFR is the most difficult content put forth, clearable by any and everyone, and servers aren't ghost towns after the fact. In this particular version of reality, things don't work that way, and never will.

Oh boy, here we go with some self-absorbed bullshit about how the 10% of players actually doing "real raids" are somehow magically keeping everyone else subscribed. Cluebat: Normal-and-above already may as well not exist to most people, since they don't fucking do them. Somehow the game has survived nine years and counting.

[Dormie]

No, the subs started going down after they made some retarded tuning to heroics and raids in early Cata. They actually tried to reverse WOTLK's philosophy and it backfired on them.

Excuses. That had almost nothing to do with the majority of lost subs.

Exactly. They started going down in Cata when they decided to treat casuals as second-class players. As soon as they put all their eggs in the raiding basket the subs went down the tubes. In MoP they went even further down that road and we've seen the results.

So delusional...

[Glorious Leader]

Excuses. That had almost nothing to do with the majority of lost subs.




So delusional...

Equally as delusional as

I'd like to remind everyone that the subs really started going down after, Cata, and VERY SHORTLY AFTER they made the whole game's philosophy change.

[Deleted]

The truth is that Blizzard lies about the % of people that raided. If only 1-5% of people raided in BC, they must of all been on my server.

I'm fairly certain they were talking about BT and sunwell.

[Glorious Leader]

Exactly. They started going down in Cata when they decided to treat casuals as second-class players. As soon as they put all their eggs in the raiding basket the subs went down the tubes. In MoP they went even further down that road and we've seen the results.

And it's lead to the biggest raids ever with the most bosses and most difficulty and overtly complex bullshit mechanics stacked on top of each other. It's a raiders DREAM and most of them recognize this I hope. However theirs apparently a vocal subset who comes on this forum and want's more. You give a hardcore a cook and he asks for a glass of milk.

[worsthitmanNa]

I'd like to remind everyone that the subs really started going down after, Cata, and VERY SHORTLY AFTER they made the whole game's philosophy change. You can argue your correlation/causation BS, but it was at least running steady it's WHOLE CAREER until that point. If that didn't have a lot to do with the decline then it's a pretty big coincidence to ignore.

They started diping in wotlk bro.

[Tomana]

Excuses. That had almost nothing to do with the majority of lost subs.

Of course it did. People expected something better than even WOTLK (hence the sub increase just before Cata) and all they got were stupidly tuned heroics. Look at the sub graph, it's a looooong fall up to 4.3, where easy 5-mans and LFR stopped the decrease for 2 quarters.

[PrairieChicken]

I'd like to remind everyone that the subs really started going down after, Cata, and VERY SHORTLY AFTER they made the whole game's philosophy change. You can argue your correlation/causation BS, but it was at least running steady it's WHOLE CAREER until that point. If that didn't have a lot to do with the decline then it's a pretty big coincidence to ignore.

No. decline started with Wrath actually (it was only not recognized because wrath was released in China at the end, so subs went up again. If you see before it it was decline all the way)

[HeedmySpeed]

Namely, Eve is a space-based economic and territorial conquest PVP game with no raids and almost no PVE content in general. It has no design lessons to teach a game like WoW, and it's really not the sort of game a guy like you wants to use as a positive example of anything.

"Hey Grimble there is one game that has continued growing well past six years! It's that one with absolutely no raiding endgame-- wait what was my point again? Shiii--"

Hey! Hey, get back here with those goal posts!

It's still MMO's with subscriptions. You can take whatever you want from any game, I don't know where this boundry you made up in your head came from. We now have turned based combat for fuck sake.

Age is not a reason a game loses subscribers. Graphics is a reason. Simplistic gameplay is a reason. No added content is a reason. Players don't go "neat game, it's 6 years old? Forget it."

It comes back to graphics, gameplay, art style, whatever.

These things are not necessarily age related. There can be changes up untill the point where the game is not considered the same game.

On top of that, Eve was a flop when it released. CCP bought it back from Simon & Schuster for pennies on the dollar, and spent years slowly building an audience from complete obscurity. It took almost 3 years just to hit its first 100k subscribers, and has absolutely nothing in common businesswise with a big hyped-up hit like WoW.
By the way, you know what sorts of games DO have something in common with WoW? Hyped-up PVE games like the ones I actually compared it to.
So you say, but who gives a fuck? The majority of players aren't doing it, and probably don't give two shits about what sort of imaginary character flaws you want to assign them based on how they kill dragons in a video game. What's more, bullshit moral posturing about the work ethic of people who slay dragons on easy mode is worth exactly zero dollars to Blizzard, you dig?

Seriously, put those goal posts down.

You could say the other Hyped PVE games were drastically different from WoW. Star Wars having a narrated story focused leveling. Or the fact that most of these games had almost no back story as well developed as WoW with it's 3(or however many) RTS games.

I'm not saying the game could have GROWN or STABALIZED. I'm saying the sub losses could have been less severe like most of us are. No, fuck that. With enough man power this game could have done whatever the fuck it wanted to.
There will be peaks, there will be declines. When those occur has hundreds of factors.

You guys are getting desperate at defending this "casual" paradigm shift. Face it, it didn't work.

[Deleted]

Of course it did. People expected something better than even WOTLK (hence the sub increase just before Cata) and all they got were stupidly tuned heroics. Look at the sub graph, it's a looooong fall up to 4.3, where easy 5-mans and LFR stopped the decrease for 2 quarters.

Cata was hardly updated too. I was very surprised by how lazy Blizz were. Maybe they bit off more than they could chew.

The loss of the world itself didn't help.