Let's be Cynical: Predictions on WoW (& it's Community) Over the Next Two Years!

[mhdoe]

"Let's be Cynical" when is any post on this website not cynical anymore?

[Kryos]

I think it will be over faster than many believed - over in the sense that we will still get expansions, but slower and with much less content since the user base will be ~1 million loyal players left that will keep the game running but not really alive.

[Musta]

Man you throw out the weakest canned arguments, let's see here:

1) They don't have data: A team of a couple devs in their FREE TIME managed to do this. If you're going to try and sell me a staffed team by Blizzard couldn't do similar, you're off your rocker. Hell, why don't they also just approach the Nostalrius team and hire them on since they already did most of the ground work, then they know they are hiring competent people. Or here's where you say something about how Blizzard shouldn't hire on people that recreated their content because they are "criminals". Either way, that's my answer.

2) "Bored in 2 months": Nostalrius over 10 days had 150k active players. The servers were alive for about a year and it was spread solely through word of mouth. With Blizzard having Twitch ban every Private Server streamer, and popular Youtubers weren't making videos under fear of getting a strike. Asmongold even said he desperately wanted to make Nostalrius content or to play it but he knew if he made any content on Youtube for it, Blizzard would have his partnership gone in a snap. Could you imagine the kind of numbers that'd be obtainable if Blizzard backed the idea? You'd have streamers, active Youtubers for a bit and it would self advertise. Not to mention a lot of people are afraid Blizzard will ban them if they touch a private server. Dunno about you but my guild on their PvE server alone had two raiding teams and a ton of active players that didn't raid. Server was always active. Am I denying people do play for nostalgia then quit? No, I know they exist but they get filtered out by level 20 anyway.

3) "Everything Changed in 12 years": Yeah, a lot of us don't like the changes. That's why we want these servers. i admit I don't have the level of free time I used to, but I still found time to hit 60, fully gear and raid weekly while doing dungeons on the weekdays just because I could, or helping guildmates gear out. A number of my guild also raided on retail servers, two of which had Mythic Archimonde down, more who were Mythic raiders in the off days. A lot of our guild was filled with adults working full time. Vanilla isn't this "you can't go offline or you die!" world. Leveling is easy, tedious and time consuming, but once you do that and get geared it basically becomes a matter of logging on for the couple hours to raid. You may have to play a bit to farm gold for your consumables but past that, you can get by on playing for four hours a week if your guild understands your working situation. Find a guild to fit your schedule, Vanilla players are far more accepting of how life is because most are adults. Don't know if you're looked at WoW recently but. . . it sucks. I may have changed a bit, but I certainly didn't change enough to where I prefer a game tube feed me items. I would say spoonfeed but then I still have to put forth the effort to swallow the food.

4) "They would have already": Not necessarily. Took Jagex a while to buy into the idea and when they did it pretty much saved Runescape for them. Also where the fuck are you drawing this 12 years wasting money? THEY'RE NOT DELETING WOW FOR THESE SERVERS. THEY'D BE A COMPLETELY FUCKING OPTIONAL CHOICE, IF YOU LIKE WOD, PLAY THE WOD SERVERS.

If you just lost your shit instead of discuss, theres no need to me to take any more part of it. It seens that you can only speak with people that actually agree with you and do not respect other views. Either way, we are done here. I don't have time for yellings and swearings. Have a nice evening.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

If the community actually gets worse than it is currently I think I'm gonna have to stop coming here.
I enjoyed most of my time here, but the amount of clueless casuals complaining about things they haven't ever done NOW is enough to tilt me.
If it gets worse than this, they are just going to destroy the game.

Especially if Blizzard keeps listening to them.
They need to add a character pane here like on the live forums so we can see who's serious and who isn't.

[Osmeric]

If the community actually gets worse than it is currently I think I'm gonna have to stop coming here.

Sadly, I don't believe you will carry through on this threat.

[rda]

I'd like nothing more than Legion to deliver, but I think it won't.

Here's my prediction:

* Obviously, the release of Legion will bring back many people who put the game down for a while - we might not know the total number of subs, but perhaps it will be something like 7-8 mil.

* Most of Legion content will end in a month or two. There just isn't much. Leveling is way faster than in WoD (and that was faster than in MoP) simply because there are way less quests, you'll be max level in a week playing on evenings, guaranteed. World quests will hold your attention for a month or so, then you will do them all *and* get enough artifact power to get like 80% from your artifact (of what you can get from the world). Professions have miniscule changes that aren't worth talking about, they won't be more of a factor in your gameplay than they are now. Gameplay in order halls is more or less the missions table again (sure, sure, I can hear you saying that order halls aren't missions table, but show me the gameplay in them... there is practically none besides that effing missions table). What's going to be left are infinite instances and raids plus PVP, if you are into that. You will enter the era of logging several times a week in order to do them - it's expected that you will enter that era, I am just saying that it won't take long to enter it.

* After people exhaust non-raid / PVP content in one-two months, many of them will quit. Quite a lot of people will feel betrayed by Legion being no better than WoD in terms of the amount of interesting content, many will say that Legion is WoD 2.0. Subs will drop hard, to levels lower than they were before Legion started. This time we surely won't know what the numbers are, they will likely be half of what they were at the peak - something like 4 mil.

And then it will all depend on how many patches Blizzard are going to do. If they do more than one big patch, there's some hope - for the future expansion (damn... always for the future expansion, because the current one, meaning Legion here, is largely unsalvageable, it's already broken). Otherwise, I don't know, there's only so much BS that people can tolerate, it all will go down again demoralizing everyone.

[Bethrezen]

Geez you're all being Debby downers here...

[Deleted]

I keep seeing people mention "one tier expansion" or that Legion will not get any new dungeons or raids in patches. Don't know if that's a fact.

I could see it.

- - - Updated - - -

Geez you're all being Debby downers here...

The title of the thread is "let's be cynical".
Although it's not really even being cynical at this point, more like realistic, with Blizzard's recent history.

[Pull My Finger]

This thread is actually MMO-C in a nutshell: a big circle jerk of crazed, obsessive nutjob flagellants. It's a hilarious meta-statement, although I doubt it was intentional.

[Echo of Soul]

Why don't you play Wildstar then? It was designed specially to cater to Vanilla/TBC fans. All problems are in your brain only.

Because Wildstar is a crap game. Doesn't matter who you cater to if the game is just plain bad.

[l33t]

Because Wildstar is a crap game. Doesn't matter who you cater to if the game is just plain bad.

Only thing that was bad in Wildstar was its rated battleground system.

People are just like that, they think they are "hardcore", but give them actually hardcore game and they will flop out in droves, crying about dungeons being too hard or attunement to the raid is too long, raids require too much time, roster requires too many people, etc. That is a good lesson to learn for developers - people who praise the difficulty on forums and boards are pseudo-hardcore wannabees and should never be catered to as a target auditory, since they will be the first to start whining when they meet actual difficulty.

Wildstar also had possibly the best housing system I've ever saw in games. I can only dream that some day Blizzard will manage to create something like Wildstar's housing system in WoW.


OT:
Let me be a little optimistic here. Legion will actually be awesome, MoP levels of awesome at least. People come back in droves and have fun playing. And after Legion we get another filler expansion of one content patch of orc vs humans forced war nonsense which nobody likes except for 74 old Warcraft1 diehard fans.

[rda]

Geez you're all being Debby downers here...

I've heard that when we were talking about WoD and I was saying that I am not seeing much to do, garrisons are the only big thing being added, and that they aren't enough by far.

Instead of going from emotions ("gee, you are a downer", etc), *look* into what is in Legion. Try to think how much time it will take you to get through their stuff. Hint: it's not a lot of time. All the skepticism flows from that.

[Leih]

I just like how the topic is like "Let's be cynical" as if that's not something that happens in EVERY topic on this forum xD

[Echo of Soul]

Only thing that was bad in Wildstar was its rated battleground system.

People are just like that, they think they are "hardcore", but give them actually hardcore game and they will flop out in droves, crying about dungeons being too hard or attunement to the raid is too long, raids require too much time, roster requires too many people, etc. That is a good lesson to learn for developers - people who praise the difficulty on forums and boards are pseudo-hardcore wannabees and should never be catered to as a target auditory, since they will be the first to start whining when they meet actual difficulty.

No it's bad. Most people didn't even experience the content that was supposed to make the game great because they left way ahead of that. I personally got to like lvl15 and then gave up on it, the world was just so boring, the UI sucked and all the races were bland. It had no magic what so ever.

[WowIsDead64]

Because Wildstar is a crap game. Doesn't matter who you cater to if the game is just plain bad.

Why it's bad? It has everything, Wow players were asking for. It has TBC-like colourful graphics style. It has simple combat system. It don't have flying. It has long hard enough leveling. I has hard 5ppls and raids. It has attunements. It has world content. It has group content - lots of elites, that can't be soloed. It has housing. It has interesting story. It has "path of Titans" - i.e. paths. It has wardrobe. It has interesting and meaningful professions. And many other things. It actually very MMOish, instead of Wow. If players don't play Wildstar - then they actually don't need MMO - they want to play solo-friendly game. Only few players need MMO - that's what I'm trying to prove.

Don't call games bad, because they're not Wow. If you like Wow due to Wow story - say it directly. "I like Wow story". But judging game depending on story - is plain wrong. You should go read books then. Also you should admit, that you like Wow - because it's your first MMO and you used to it too much. It happened to me too. I could play Wildstar or some other MMO, that has higher quality than Wow. But they all look...different. Wildstart isn't just clone of Wow. Carbine tried something different and executed it very well. For example launch was very smooth in opposite to Wow - no lags and I experienced only 1-2 bugs during leveling. But I used to Wow too much. And I invested too much time in Wow - it's just impossible to catch up this progress in any other MMO.

- - - Updated - - -

I think it will be over faster than many believed - over in the sense that we will still get expansions, but slower and with much less content since the user base will be ~1 million loyal players left that will keep the game running but not really alive.

It should be already at 3M, if not even lesser, and Legion isn't released yet.

[Life-Binder]

*subscriber count drops to 6 mill, FFXIV overtakes*

FF14 will never have 6 million paying subs even if WoW servers get shut down



o/t: I foresee BabyRages about having to group to do the elite world quests and there being too many quests to do and not enough time to do them all each day, especially on multiple characters at once

[Deleted]

I have a serious concern about Legion in that it looks as if all the interesting content will be dealt with early.

After wod you can't assume they will flesh out the expansion properly. If they said "there'll be three major patches with new zones and content" I'd pre-order today.

[Life-Binder]

World quests will hold your attention for a month or so, then you will do them all *and* get enough artifact power to get like 80% from your artifact (of what you can get from the world).

What's going to be left are infinite instances and raids plus PVP,

* After people exhaust non-raid / PVP content in one-two months, many of them will quit.

somehow this wasnt a problem in MoP, hmm

and MoP didnt even have 10 "infinite instances" (in fact it only had 6 new crap ones)


also there are these things called off-specs/off-spec artifacts and alts

[Echo of Soul]

Why it's bad? It has everything, Wow players were asking for. It has TBC-like colourful graphics style. It has simple combat system. It don't have flying. It has long hard enough leveling. I has hard 5ppls and raids. It has attunements. It has world content. It has group content - lots of elites, that can't be soloed. It has housing. It has interesting story. It has "path of Titans" - i.e. paths. It has wardrobe. It has interesting and meaningful professions. And many other things. It actually very MMOish, instead of Wow. If players don't play Wildstar - then they actually don't need MMO - they want to play solo-friendly game. Only few players need MMO - that's what I'm trying to prove.

Don't call games bad, because they're not Wow. If you like Wow due to Wow story - say it directly. "I like Wow story". But judging game depending on story - is plain wrong. You should go read books then. Also you should admit, that you like Wow - because it's your first MMO and you used to it too much. It happened to me too. I could play Wildstar or some other MMO, that has higher quality than Wow. But they all look...different. Wildstart isn't just clone of Wow. Carbine tried something different and executed it very well. For example launch was very smooth in opposite to Wow - no lags and I experienced only 1-2 bugs during leveling. But I used to Wow too much. And I invested too much time in Wow - it's just impossible to catch up this progress in any other MMO.

No the game is just bad. I'm sure mechanically it's fine and has great underlying systems and character progression but the world is just so uninteresting, the narrative is just awful and when leveling up a character is that boring and that painful you won't even get to experience the good stuff unless you push through.
I'm all for giving praise where praise is deserved. Final Fantasy XIV for example is my MMORPG of choice these days. The world and the characters are interesting and the gameplay is fun and you need that in order for people to even bother reaching endgame, an endgame which btw at its highest difficulty is bloody hard.

[Deleted]

somehow this wasnt a problem in MoP, hmm

and MoP didnt even have 10 "infinite instances" (in fact it only had 6 new crap ones)


also there are these things called off-specs/off-spec artifacts and alts

What if I like my spec and don't want to play any other? And what if I don't enjoy playing everything a second time on an alt? Yep... much content to enjoy.