The real reason WoW is losing subs

[Rafoel]

For me it's just that the combat is so out-dated and boring (for the most part).

Then again that goes for any game with tab-target combat... It just doesn't feel the same after playing MMOs with decent action combat (like TERA).

All these action combat MMOs have much lower amount of players than WoW.

You don't like tab-target system, fine. That's your opinion. IMine, on the other hand, is opposite to yours. However, nobody leaves WoW because of combat system. If they didn't like it, they wouldn't START playing to begin with.

[Daedius]

Blizzard can't force people to raid for the more demanding stuff, plenty of guilds haven't downed Mythic Archimonde yet... but then again, they have offered LFR which many see as raiding and choose to not do the other difficulties because "they have seen it all" already.

[Nightstalker]

It has gotten old and blizzard runs it more on maintenance instead of pumping a ton of creativity in it. You can say all you want about what they should have done back then and there. We will never really know, but my guess is: If they hadn't done what they did the subs might have dropped even sooner and the game might have died out in many different iterations that certain types of players want to see more prevalant in this game.

[Deleted]

Why do people still watch superhero stories from superheroes that are almost 100 years old?
Why do people still watch Star Wars? The original movies are from the 70's and 80's and the new movie is just a remake of the original story.
Why do people still play games like Counterstrike or even Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3 or the original Starcraft?

Nostalgia is one thing. Regarding comic book heroes - do you know how often they have been re-imagined? I am not very up-to-date anymore, but I remember about 3 versions of Superman alone. There have been at least 2 Batmen. I don't know how many Spider-Men have been there because of all the cloning mess. And don't let me start on the X-Men who just cannot stay dead...

But what does this have to do with an MMO-RPG?

[Queen of Hamsters]

It has gotten old and blizzard runs it more on maintenance instead of pumping a ton of creativity in it. You can say all you want about what they should have done back then and there. We will never really know, but my guess is: If they hadn't done what they did the subs might have dropped even sooner and the game might have died out in many different iterations that certain types of players want to see more prevalant in this game.

Not the impression I've gotten on Beta.

WoD is by no means a long-running standard for the game. MoP being the most recent time of the game when they poured their hearts into it, and were met by "lol stupid pandas stop pulling lore out your asses!!!" by the retard crowd.

[Noxx79]

The reason why WOW has less subscribers is because there are more people quitting the game than joining. The reasons for that, only the people and/or Blizzard know.
(Remember, WOW has had over 100,000,000 people play it at one point. I had 2 guilds die in between MC and AQ with people having the same complains as now, but they were replaced by the massive influx of new people)

So it's really not worthwhile to push [my pet reason] as the reasons wow's sub numbers are falling.

[Deleted]

Blizzard can't force people to raid for the more demanding stuff, plenty of guilds haven't downed Mythic Archimonde yet... but then again, they have offered LFR which many see as raiding and choose to not do the other difficulties because "they have seen it all" already.

I don't want to have anything to do with organised raiding anymore because of loot drama, people who sleep with guild leader getting everything regardless of their performance, people who let you down constantly, bitching and intrigue, being used and abused... I don't need this "social" shit, I rather carry the LFR morons who I will never meet again as soon as the raid is finished - or I votekick so they leave if they perform especially bad.

I farm tier sets and mounts for my collection when I am able to run a raid solo. I don't see myself investing any more time and energy into building up guilds and raid groups only to see some jerks to destroy all my efforts because whatever fancy strikes them.

[Rafoel]

This.

There's less of a grind to access shit, but mechanically the game has never been more of a challenge than now. In content that's MEANT to be challenging, that is.

People being constantly challenged by the Classic leveling grind, the "mechanics" of that time and dying like flies to leveling AI because they can't learn from simple mistakes are by no means the people the game should be tuned around...since then we'd be back to 1 or 2 boss mechanics consisting of fire and a knockback.

WoD saw the biggest sub loss to date because there wasn't enough content for those NOT raiding. The raiding community, especially the Mythic percent, have been pretty damned challenged by their content.

1) Addons like DBM make game much easier than vanilla or TBC. They literally tell you everything.

And don't even try to use "don't like it don't use it" argument. No guild is going to accept you knowing you play without DBM.

2) Challenge that comes from mechanical point of view is problematic. It's very hard to improve your own skill, especially if you play the game already for 10 years. Most PvE-ers probably already reached their skill cap. They can't improve anymore. For them it's either "I can do this" or "I can't do this". End of story. The content that can be classified as "I can BARELY do this" might be 1% of all content. Not sufficient for sure.

[KurenaiXIII]

He's not wrong. Nobody wants a game that feels unrewarding to play, and WoW, because of casualization, has limited how rewarding the experience can be to aesthetics, which are expensive art assets.

A game being inaccessible is also unrewarding to play. Not everyone wants to, knows how to, or has the ability/time/what have you to reach for that 'hard content'. I didn't start raiding until well into Burning Crusade and that was purely because I didn't know where to go to start raiding, despite being in a large guild that was full of experienced MMO players. It was only because I helped found the guild I'm in now in BC--and because we had dedicated players who pushed for it--that we began to form a raiding structure and even then it wasn't until after BC that we were able to start raiding. We were never large enough to even think about tackling the 25-man content on our own, much less the 40-man; our guild was not 'a raiding guild' but was a guild that raids, and we were very selective in our recruiting because we wanted our guild members to be friends, and not just raid-mates.

If the raiding structure were the same as it were in Vanilla, or even in BC, I doubt we would still be playing, my guild; having that content locked away not because we can't overcome it but we can't even start to confront it is not a 'challenge' we'd 'meet'.

As many people have pointed out, there is no one 'reason' why WoW is losing subs. Certainly the vocal minority would have you believe that 'pandering to the casuals' is the major factor, and I'm sure it is for some, but the fact also remains that WoW is over ten years old. People's lives change in ten years; many simply can't devote the same kind of time to the game--or indeed any game--that they could ten years ago. If accessing a big chunk of that content required the same time commitments it did in Vanilla, I believe the raiding game would have ground to a halt very quickly.

[Darktbs]

Nostalgia is one thing. Regarding comic book heroes - do you know how often they have been re-imagined? I am not very up-to-date anymore, but I remember about 3 versions of Superman alone. There have been at least 2 Batmen. I don't know how many Spider-Men have been there because of all the cloning mess. And don't let me start on the X-Men who just cannot stay dead...

But what does this have to do with an MMO-RPG?

The argument of its age.Even if some watch for nostalgia,is a enternaiment.If its good people will still like it years past,thats why WoW its still alive
,even with all new MMO its still one of the bests and once was the best.

the downside is that sometimes people can't accept changes to whats is good and they became a bunch of stupid cribabies.Ex:Star Wars fan base as a whole,wow vanilla babies,genwunners and the list goes on.

[Deleted]

Not the impression I've gotten on Beta.

WoD is by no means a long-running standard for the game. MoP being the most recent time of the game when they poured their hearts into it, and were met by "lol stupid pandas stop pulling lore out your asses!!!" by the retard crowd.

I never understood that. MoP had some flaws, but they surely were not regarding Pandaren or any other races there. The plot twist with Klaxxi was worth spending time with questing there. While I hated what they did with Jaina in MoP, that character died for me after being a long-time favorite, my overall impression was that the story was great.

- - - Updated - - -

The argument of its age.Even if some watch for nostalgia,is a enternaiment.If its good people will still like it years past,thats why WoW its still alive
,even with all new MMO its still one of the bests and once was the best.

the downside is that sometimes people can't accept changes to whats is good and they became a bunch of stupid cribabies.Ex:Star Wars fan base as a whole,wow vanilla babies,genwunners and the list goes on.

Okay, this fits. Successful evergreens change with the time to stay fresh. You just have to be careful not to go overboard with changes. They reverted the idea of Superman not being married to Lois Lane, for example. While many fanboys shipped Superman x Wonderwoman, and there was some logic to it, Superman x Lois Lane was simply iconical. To throw this away was kinda dumb.

[Flaks]

He's not wrong. Nobody wants a game that feels unrewarding to play, and WoW, because of casualization, has limited how rewarding the experience can be to aesthetics, which are expensive art assets.

It's like most people didn't even read all of the op.

[MasterHamster]

Blizzard has slowly, through convenience, accessibility and "agh everyone has to see all content" design choices effectively removed the key part of MMOs with longevity, rewarding long-time commitment. Leveling has been turned into a complete joke, non-raid content is almost 100% soloable, and you can clear every raid in the game through an anonymous premade group tool.

WoW losing subs isn't a surprise. We've got "what the players wanted". Too bad players don't know what it is that had them captivated for months and months. Hint, it's not to be geared for the latest raid tier in a week after hitting maxlevel.

But I can't fault Blizzard too much either. Almost all these changes were encouraged by the community.
We don't want to spend weeks leveling right,
we don't want to farm mats for hours upon hours,
we don't want to feel forced to grind faction reputation for pre-raid gear,
we don't want to cap Valor every week,
we don't want to sit in /trade and look for groups,
we don't want to farm resistance gear,
we don't want to do attunements that takes forever,
we don't want artificial gating,
and we expect new raids to have a linear difficulty curve, and it to be somewhat clearable if your raid group is geared from the previous tier.

So, who the FUCK could be surprised that people run out of things to strive for in WoW so quickly they unsub instead of doing nothing for half a year!? Those things we "didn't want" was what kept us playing and felt some sort of satisfaction when we reaped the rewards for our characters efforts.

My latest alt has a mere 36 hours /played at lvl 100 and has a ilvl of 712. An iLvl I think many casual players sort of settle at.

Longevity? Where did that go, I wonder...

[Queen of Hamsters]

1) Addons like DBM make game much easier than vanilla or TBC. They literally tell you everything.


.

The boss mechanics have been tuned to account for addons, but nice try. Tons of guilds can't even progress past Mythic Gorefiend, and that's with DBM. The BEST players in the world had over 900 wipes in HFC Mythic, over 400 on Archimonde alone, and that's with addons. Classic raid mechanics were so easy there was no need for addons.

The perceived difficulty of Classic came from people being new, grinds, logistics. NOT from mechanics.

[Spray]

Actually, it is.

How is it old exactly? Because I don't see much difference in terms of mechanics and gameplay between WoW and any other current MMO out there.

WoW from 2004 would be old in 2016, definitely. But we're not playing 2004 WoW, but 2016 WoW - lots of improvements, both in gameplay and in visuals.

The perceived difficulty of Classic came from people being new, grinds, logistics. NOT from mechanics.

QFT.

Also, lack of organization in 40-man raids and complete lack of spec diversity (aka druid = heal, pala = heal, warrior = tank).

[ThunderTaco]

Yeah, the reason why WoW is losing subs can't be that wow has way more competitors than before, no it's entirely the designers fault.

[Krobane]

The real reason WoW is losing subs is simple.

It's not because the game has gotten old.
It's not because the game has gotten worse.
It's not because the game has gotten easy.

You can have an opinion on all these things. You can think the game is easier now, you can thnk the game was better in Vanilla. That's all a matter of perspective. But these are not the reasons why the game has lost so many subs.

The reason why the game has lost so many subs is because the game has become less demanding. The game has moved away from trying to pin down players and keep them busy for months. The game has moved away from trying to force players into some kind of commitment, like into a guild, where they have to attend raids every week in order to even have a chance at seeing all the content.

Casual playing and accessability are the key words here. Now this might not be news to anyone. But I think it's so obvious that these are the main factors why the game is losing subs. People can now play the game like a singleplayer game. You can start it up, play for a few hours, and if you do that every day, you're gonna have played through the game pretty much after a couple of days. There isn't really much more content in this game for more than a couple of hours anyway.

And it wasn't any different in Vanilla. There was maybe a little bit more content than today, especially if you compare the content we get in patches, but it wasn't that much more to make a huge difference. A little bit more would've kept us busy a little bit longer in recent expansions.

What really made so many more people subscribe for such a longer time in Vanilla compared to today is that the game was designed to be difficult to play while still maintaining a healthy real life outside of the game. It's no secret. Back in the day, tons of people were addicted to WoW, to the point where they needed to go into "rehab". People neglected their real life, their friends, their family. Even their kids. We've all heard of it.

The game demanded you to structure your real life around the game, if you wanted to actually get somewhere in the game. And for many people, that might be what made the game great. People invested time, because they had to. People committed to guilds, because they had to. Not necessarily because they really wanted to.

And the reason less people invest that amount of time and commitment is because the game doesn't demand it of them anymore. If you want to see the content, you can do LFR and LFG. If you are busy with stuff in real life, you can catch up, with things like catch-up raid gear and even level boosts. You don't depend on the community and your guild anymore and you can schedule the game around your real life, instead of the other way around.

Some people might now be thinking that I'm trying to criticize the game for it's casualness and accessability. That I'm trying to say that this is why "the game is dying". But that's actually not what I'm trying to say. I'm actually wondering now if it isn't better this way.

The game never had a justification for us to play it as much as so many of us did back in the day. There weren't that many quests in the zones in Vanilla. Leveling took so long because you had to run and fly back and forth so much. It took so long because the experience gain was tuned in such a way where you had to do all the quests available to you in every zone, plus dungeons and probably plus a little bit of extra grinding. Dungeons could be cleared once rather quickly, but the reason you spent so much time in there was because they gave you reasons to grind them over and over again. You needed to in order to advance to the next kind of content.

Is that really fun? If you think about it, would you like to do that in a singleplayer game? If they told you to play through level 1 ten times before advancing to level 2, would that be fun to you? Or would you think it was a blatantly obvious attempt to stretch game time? They didn't make more content, they just forced you to repeat the same content again. And there are still instances of that in today's WoW, but Vanilla WoW was so much worse when it came to grinding. Because in today's WoW, at least you can see all the content without grinding anything. And I'm starting to think it's better that way. MMOs always relied on pointless grinding way too much anyway.

Oh mah gawd!!! You figured it out! Hurry up and fucking run to tell the developers before it's too late!

[Kanegasi]

Why does it matter? Also, subs don't matter any more due to tokens. So many people purchased enough tokens for years of active play. Other people bought each one of those tokens for $20 instead of $15 so Blizzard made bank on that.

[Rafoel]

The boss mechanics have been tuned to account for addons, but nice try. Tons of guilds can't even progress past Mythic Gorefiend, and that's with DBM. The BEST players in the world had over 900 wipes in HFC Mythic, over 400 on Archimonde alone, and that's with addons. Classic raid mechanics were so easy there was no need for addons.

The perceived difficulty of Classic came from people being new, grinds, logistics. NOT from mechanics.

Mythic Archimonde was so far killed by over 1600 guilds.

Mythic Gorefiend? 5000

Guilds that killed Kel'thuzad? 23. Twenty fucking three guilds cleared Naxx before BC.

But nooooo, vanilla was so eeeeasy.

[Nihilist74]

Even though its faster to level, the game is still time consuming compared to other games. When I tell people I work with about wow, they think it sounds like an awesome game but they don't want to try it because they are afraid of becoming addicted to it and wasting time one it.