Originally Posted by
King of Gaming
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.