Cata + MoP were necessary expansions

[Fus Ro Yay]

When they saw that millions of people left the game they should have pulled out the big guns. That was the time for the Legion expansion.

My bro Illidan once said; YOU ARE NOT PREPARED!
and damn was he right, if they made a legion expansion just after Deathwing, we wouldn't be. The wrathion questline, the titan lore and the old god lore we got from pandaria have made the way for the legion's return, we know more about the titans & old gods, giving us a fighting chance to mayhaps contact them, (if they're still out there) should Sargeras himself arrive.

And wrathion, like him or not, is looking out to be the spearhead against the legions return, he is doing what he can to prepare Azeroth... in his own chaotic and slightly manipulative way..

[Deleted]

I agree completely about Deathwing. He had so much potential as a villain, but it was just completely wasted. I think they built him up too powerful in the lore and couldn't come up with a compelling way to defeat him.

I totally agree with this, it's getting a problem with WoW, which appears to the final bosses Lich King and Deathwing mostly. They make the villains that evil and strong, it's almost impossible to kill him and you have to always be with a certain badass group to be able to kill him. Which drives away that epic feeling that you and your raid are the heroes. If Blizzard wants to keep writing imba heroes, like Kil'Jaeden for example, and be able to kill it without whole Azeroth watching. They need to come up with some sort of legendary questline for a legendary tank weapon for the guild MT. Only then you're able to kill him. That would be better and way more epic then this imo.

[Chonar]

Story and Lore are not the same.

Lore is past story. Lore is why we don't have spacegoat warlocks. The only past story we had for Pandaria was that 1) there were panda people and 2)they like beer

During WC3 the events were the story. Art has having killed his father, and having a zombie pony is lore.

Yet in Warcraft3 we never once saw a living Invincible, did we? Arthas was on foot everywhere.
However, we did see him killing his father. (Well, we saw the silhouettes and the falling, bloody crown... still a very powerful scene.)

[heath1056]

Yet in Warcraft3 we never once saw a living Invincible, did we? Arthas was on foot everywhere.
However, we did see him killing his father. (Well, we saw the silhouettes and the falling, bloody crown... still a very powerful scene.)

By the time Warcraft 3 came around, Invincible was already dead. He died when Arthas was in his teens and only after he gained the powers to raise the dead did he go back to his burial spot and raise him to be his steed once more. This is from the novel Arthas.

Agreed with most here. The lore standpoint makes sense but the failed execution of Cata, followed by Mists of Pandaria is the reason why wow is losing as many as it is. However with this last quarter they only lost 100k so maybe all that have left are done leaving.

[Count Zero]

Agreed with most here. The lore standpoint makes sense but the failed execution of Cata, followed by Mists of Pandaria is the reason why wow is losing as many as it is. However with this last quarter they only lost 100k so maybe all that have left are done leaving.

There is nothing they could have done to prevent the losses. Maybe they could have prevented them from happening as quick a they did, but no matter how awesome the xpac after Wrath was, it was gonna be downhill from there. After 5/6 years, it was more about the players themselves than about the game. Nearly every person I know who has stopped playing has done so because either they got a job, started college, or started having kids, or just stopped playing MMOs altogether.

Again, maybe if after Wrath they'd had another xpac that everyone puts on Wrath/BC level of quality (and for the most part I'm seeing people say MoP is pretty quality, but it's not all over yet so I'm leaving it out), we'd be closer to 8 or even 8.5 million subs ... but I think Cata gets a lot of disproportionate hate it doesn't deserve. And I think Blizz saw the writing on the wall with regard to player burnout/fatigue, after 5/6 years ... and decided to focus on making sure that future new subscribers had reasons to stick around, by re-tooling the old world and beginning to focus on lowering the barrier to entry to endgame ... their biggest mistake in Cata being the initial tuning of heroic dungeons and normal raids (after removing the ICC 10 level of difficulty -- aka friends and family and/or beer league raiding -- without providing an equivalent stepping stone).

Maybe if they'd introduced LFR and/or Flex and/or Hour of Twilight style dungeons and/or scenarios and/or Timeless Isle style gearing at the onset ... I think that would have had a bigger influence on subscriptions than the "quality" of the third expansion ... and if they'd had a few more bosses each in Firelands and Dragon Soul, yeah, I think people wouldn't perceive Cata in the way they tend do ... all in all, even with all that, I think absolute best case scenario would be for sub numbers to be around 9 to 9.5 million right now. Absolute best case.

The damn game is about to be 9 years old. Sure, it gets updated every couple years (maybe every year and a half, moving forward), but its fundamental engines cannot be changed and it is perceived as a nearly decade-old game. It's actually almost unbelievable that it's able to maintain the subscription base it currently does. Even newer games that play to the whims of internet sages who apparently have better business sense than a billion dollar company, are unable to crack half of WoW's subs at these newer games peaks ... are any even above a million subs now ?