The real reason WoW is losing subs

[roahn the warlock]

I'm not really sure why you'd include that line if you're going to proceed to write about how much easier it is to complete content...

difficulty =/ time required to complete.

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The prime reason WOW lost subs, is because of attrition. WOW has been out for 11 FN years, no single form of popular entertainment has ever been able to keep this many people for this many years. No game, No TV Show, WOW has over 5 million subs right now. In Nelsen Ratings 5 million people for a show after 10 years, only a small handful of shows have pulled that off, most ended at the 10 year point BTW, WOW is in Year 11 come this winter.
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Yeah, but call of duty though. since CoD 4: Modern Warfare, it's been the same game. CoD 4 Modern warfare came out in 2007. That is now almost 10 years. It still sells absolutely massive numbers every year. And those idiots pay 60 dollars. It's all about replay-ability my friend.

[Daffan]

I mostly agree with you. Still, if less resources was poured into raids, maybe open world content would be a bit less craptastic in WoD. I guess we'll never know.

Why would anyone do world content with so much better welfare gear available elsewhere.

[King of Gaming]

You realize that's what people mean when they say the game has gotten easy. Guy's it has not gotten easy it's just easy now.
That and also classes need to be harder to play but Blizzard obviously doesn't want that.

Easy and demanding are not the same thing.

The game is still hard if you choose to play it on a hard difficulty. That's why I said that people can argue over whether the game is hard or easy, that's just a matter of perspective. The problem is not the difficulty, but accessibility. That includes things like having no more attunement quests for example. Attunements weren't hard, they just slowed you down.

[Ausr]

Does this guy seriously have dsp as an avatar? Wow, anyway...you can't quantify exactly why wow lost a lot of popularity based on a single thing. It's likely many factors, but for one, the mmo genre got old and less appealing. While wow enjoyed a good period of being insanely popular, there was still many who touted it as extremely addictive, and a dangerous game to play. I feel that one of the reason people kept playing is because the game got them so engrossed it was hard even with the stigma associated with it. Now, I think that immersion has worn off, and people are looking elsewhere for their fix. I don't even think the core mechanics of the game have changed much other than being way more accessible, and easier in some places.

Yes he does, which is why I don't take hims seriously on a heavily beaten horse he magically thinks he solved.

[Gadzooks]

I don't think there's a simple answer.

It could be that Wow just got lucky, with it's rapid rise, plateau, and now fall to it's current player base. Maybe it's found it's real core audience, at around 2.5 million players, with bumps for expansions. The 12 million during wrath were an outlier, kind of like how a band, if it hits the popular crowds at the right time, can play stadiums and sell multi-millions, but for the rest of their career - which is still successful, they play smaller venues and sell fewer albums. The Black Crowes and Pearl Jam are two good examples. Nobody can be Metallica and sustain the numbers they do for all these years - and bands that big tend to suck the oxygen out of the room, wow may have gotten TOO big, sucked all the oxygen out of the room, and now that people can breathe again, have moved on to other things.

Or the player base got too old. WoW has certainly not been bringing in hordes of new players, or even new to MMO players. It's kind of the Beatles, to the current top 40 hit band the younger kids are into. Some of them will check it out, but it's "that game mom and dad liked".

Or the devs simply haven't been able to hit the same magic as vanilla/TBC/Wrath.

God knows the competition for monthly budgets is higher these days, with Xbox/PS4 subs, downloading movies and music, downloading apps, Steam, etc. $15 a month is a hard sell these days.

Or as new games and ideas come out, the WoW model of what an MMO is and should be has changed, and WoW isn't keeping up with that. We know that it's strayed far from it's roots. I see a lot of argument, when people talk about what's wrong, that boils down to 'What is an MMO? What should an MMO be? Should it focus on raids? Or community? Or immersion?" To older players, Legion smells a lot like "We've seen this before", and that was bad in WOD to smell. Are the devs investing too much in their own nostalgia and building a game they want, but don't realize, they don't represent the market place? Do they need a new perspective on the game, and what defines it...or do they need a lot of new fresh blood in the dev team? New guys willing to take chances, try something unique and new that will make people think "Wow, I'd like to try that!"

I don't think it's the difficulty or the lack thereof. I think it's all of the above, and more. It's just collapsing under it's own weight. Expectations are too high on both sides, and neither side is really listening. Players want a game back that excites them to play, to pull them in, and engross them. The devs want you to play a certain way, in a more rigid, stripped down fashion, with less choice, more homogenization, and very few chances taken. They're playing it too safe. Legion isn't a step forward in game design and aesthetics and philosophy, it's mostly putting back what they stripped out, and sanding all the corners off what's left. They're too focused on balance, forgetting there can be as much fun in imbalance. And the players? They're all over the map - which could be good, if they were designing vanilla or TBC or Wrath, because those games catered to people all over the map.

And the whole while, the concept of "community" just fell off and never came back - and that's what the game sorely needs. People who want to play with other people, not just use them as pawn s or bots to get what they want.

What's wrong with the game, besides everything? The player has no sense of belonging in the game world, or the game community. They can enter a server, play for months, and never speak to another person unless absolutely necessary. They'll never know how fun it was to log on in vanilla, and not get anything done because the game most nights was chilling and talking with your guild, getting to know them. Or making guild runs. Or building raid and dungeon teams. Working together. What does Legion do, to bring that back? Oh, they made a room, you can stand in with other players, while you play a mini-game called "Class Halls.". What about guilds? Have they done ANYTHING to promote and strengthen guilds?

So, pick one. There's plenty of problems to choose from. If I were a dev, I wouldn't know what the hell to do, either, except maybe call for a month of meetings off-site after Legion ships, to try and figure out what the hell exactly Blizzard is trying to do, what defines an MMO, what they can do to support people playing together, and stop funneling people into raid instances, so the rest of the game doesn't shrivel and die, like it is now. Figure out, like Ion discussed, why the game before the highest levels is broken. Get rid of the need for character boosts - and most likely LFR and LFG. Make content FUN to play, so it doesnt take 3 hours to find someone to run a dungeon with.

Or start over.

[Deleted]

Easy and demanding are not the same thing.

Noone can dispute that; as they are actually polar opposites.

I liked attunements myself but wouldn't go back to them.

[Logwyn]

It boils down to...

Its a 10 year old game.
Its in the middle of the between expansions period.
Summer is coming.
And there is a ton more of crap out there to play both MMO and other genres.

[SoLoR1]

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.

As you said, you used to need to structure life at least partially around this game, if you wanted to see content and thats why game mattered to so many and keep people playing, this days you dont need structure life around it, so game becomes irrelevant for many.

[Drunkenfinn]

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.

Obviously I did like it before, otherwise I wouldn't have played it for 6 years :P And it's not like it was the main reason I quit, I just got bored of the game overall after playing it for such a long time, as well as the majority of my friends quitting.

I just mainly noticed it after trying to come back to WoW after playing MMOs with action-combat... Somehow WoWs combat just felt less engaging.

But as you said, opinions

[King of Gaming]

Noone can dispute that; as they are actually polar opposites.

I liked attunements myself but wouldn't go back to them.

I guess what I was trying to say was that easy and "less demanding" aren't the same thing.

[Gothicshark]

Yeah, but call of duty though. since CoD 4: Modern Warfare, it's been the same game. CoD 4 Modern warfare came out in 2007. That is now almost 10 years. It still sells absolutely massive numbers every year. And those idiots pay 60 dollars. It's all about replay-ability my friend.

You are clearly not a game developer. Otherwise you wouldn't say that, COD, has a play style that is uniform, it utilizes many similar assets. In each iteration of the game, however there have been 10 unique COD games and a remaster of COD4, since 2007.
Each game is similar, but they are separate entities, each with unique development cycles and changes in the technology to bring you a similar game.

Look at the dev teams: Infinity Ward, Treyarch, Sledgehammer, Raven. Yes the game is brought to us by the same destributor, but it has been made by several very different dev teams. Since Call of Duty: Black Ops II it has been a newer engine, with Infinite Warfare using the latest engine.

No sir, COD is not all the same game. They are all similar games with a connected story, but they are not the same game.

At the heart of WOW, is the WC3 engine, it's been changed a lot, but the root code is from 1997.

[supermage]

I love how this person generalizes everyone that has stopped playing into a certain reason category. Me and many of the people I know unsubbed for graphical advancements in other games. I also should add, the wow community gets nastier the longer this game continues on. Frankly, I ignore people when I come back on a casual sub experience. After a long day of work, I just don't want to deal with whinny angry people who have nothing better to do than sit around and complain about others and their play style. Somehow by the way this person talks by starting this thread, I'm sure he has contributed to the anti-social movement by his elitism in some fashion. You want players to interact more, start by fixing the community first. But good luck with that. lol

[Deleted]

Where did I say that?

In the subject of this thread.

[King of Gaming]

In the subject of this thread.

I didn't. Stop derailing this. Gonna ignore you now.

[Mlz]

To answer your Question, WOW is more fun now than ever for the majority of players.

You lose all credibility as soon as you start talking about the "majority of players" - you have no fucking clue who is the majority or minority or what they enjoy so please, just be quiet instead of pulling random arguments out of your ass.

[Deleted]

I didn't. Stop derailing this. Gonna ignore you now.

You said "The real reason WoW is losing subs" - you presented your post as a fact.
Next time, when you get back from your ban, try using "I think this is one possible reason why WoW is losing subs"

[Deleted]

You said "The real reason WoW is losing subs" - you presented your post as a fact.
Next time, when you get back from your ban, try using "I think this is one possible reason why WoW is losing subs"

How do you even know it was implied? How do you know its just an opinion and not a fact? Are you an omniscient god? Next time, when you post, try using "I think this is just your opinion and not a fact" or just stop derailing and wasting everyones time with platitudes about semantical trivia on a gaming forum.

[Tomana]

Why would anyone do world content with so much better welfare gear available elsewhere.

Because you can balance world content around NOT having better welfare gear available elsewhere?

[Deleted]

How do you even know it was implied? How do you know its just an opinion and not a fact? Are you an omniscient god? Next time, when you post, try using "I think this is just your opinion and not a fact" or just stop derailing and wasting everyones time with platitudes about semantical trivia on a gaming forum.

When someone posts a topic called "The real reason WoW is losing subs" what do you expect to find?
I kinda expect to find what it says in the subject.
In this case I found a subjective and polarized opinion with no evidence or proof that it would actually be The real reason.

Now I've been directing my feedback to the OP, clearly quoting the posts. I'm not quite sure why you suddenly felt the need to jump in - but the accusation of derailing and wasting time seems highly ironical considering the content of your reply.

[Kakera]

I mean, you people can debate for days. Reality is the game is just old. You guys are reaching for reasons when the reason is right in front of you. It's a shame because the game in its current state is the best it's ever been from a gameplay/balance perspective. And none of you care. Rather, you'll sit on this autism infested message board and debate about why. As if it fucking matters. Play the game. Or don't. Whatever suits you. But stop wasting your time on shit that doesn't fucking matter. You're wasting time.