Is the community dwindling?

[Junkaulen]

Yes, no community lasts forever

[Pua]

Everyone shits on everyone and make snarky indirect insults on other people's opinions.

That's the Internet.

Also, some of the moderators here are very good; sadly, some are terrible. Some awful things get left completely alone, despite being reported, while other completely innocuous statements get infractions because a specific moderator doesn't like who posted it.

[melodramocracy]

The game has lost a significant portion of its playerbase over the past few years, it would make sense that forum traffic also slows.

[Coils]

Of course it is.

Less active players, less active posters. Less news about the game, less to discuss. Its all a function of content releases.

[ro9ue]

I think so.

Ultimately, it doesn't look as if Legion is going to make much of a difference to the downward slide. Warlords of Draenor was garbage, and I think it's taken far too long for Legion to arrive. Blizzard needed to do much better than another 14-month wait in order to rebuild some of the lost faith, and certain things (like the Order Hall similarity to garrisons, secretive approach to flight or awful class design) are making people conclude that nothing has been learned.

When push comes to shove, I think folks are realising that not even Blizzard are especially interested in World of Warcraft anymore.

Agreed here. I personally think Legion looks amazing, but I consider myself a die hard. I'll always come back to WoW. However, a lot more of my casual buddies felt WoD was the nail in the coffin, and probably won't come back no matter how awesome Legion looks.

In a way, I don't think it matters. It won't really affect my interest in the game.

[aysatsana]

WoW is in it's worst state ever now, not just because of the content drought. There's a reason Blizzard isn't showing subscriber numbers anymore. And the subscribers that are left are mostly just logging on to do their garrisons (and probably paying with gold).

[SoulSoBreezy]

I am talking about the amounts of posts on mmo-champion and the official forums. I mean while before topics would race off the frontpage and now some threads without any reply will stick on the front page for hours (general wow section). When you look at the official forums (atleast EU, but US suffers from this too be it less) it is the same thing.

To me this feels kind of scary. People seem to care less - or the people that cared to write about WoW just seem to have quit/started not to care anymore. Ofcourse I realise that we have less subs. So logically posts would be less made aswell. But here on mmo champion, people who quit usually stick around if they used to come to this forum when their sub was still active.

Is it because the expansion is almost finished? I would say this probably has some impact. Still...

Remember, most of the folks on general forums like mmoc and the official forum have a widely negative outlook on the game. You'll want to consider just which parts of the community are dwindling.
Meanwhile on beta, I see players on it pushing progression REALLY hard, as if it's live. It's coming. (some) people are getting really excited for Legion. It's only 12 raid weeks away.

- - - Updated - - -

Of course it is.

Less active players, less active posters. Less news about the game, less to discuss. Its all a function of content releases.

My memory might be fuzzy, but it feels like we've seen more direct news from Blizzard about Legion than we got for WoD.

[Therris]

I abandoned the WoW community forms, toxic...toxic place full of elitiest and opinionated toddlers. I found MMO-Champion to be a waaaaay better place, full of people covering every topic and having lots and lots of different discussions. Some educated, some not.

The reason you don't see that many post is that there are alot of main threads to talk about things now, so you don't really have to make 100 different threads all talking about the same thing generally, when you can have one thread covering the whole of the topic. As well as, this is a HUGE down time for World of Warcraft due to them working heavily on the next expansion. People are done with WoD and with Legion being in the later phases of beta theres not that many interesting things to talk about due to them already being talked about, and still being talked about to this day. You just need to look and know where to look to see all of these discussions. The community is fine, we are just waiting for the next expansion to grab our lives away

[Marrilaife]

Other fav topics are leveling is too fast / vanilla. Occasionally there is indepth discussion like whats your fav pony and "does this mog make my bum look big?"

Yeah there is a point where you just get sick & tired of the same recycled threads appearing all the time, bringing nothing new to the table except yet another person rises to claim they know how to "fix wow", and it's always the same topics:
- Remove LFR, additionally any form of easy group finding
- Remove or nerf heirlooms
- Bring back vanilla (how stuff was better in vanilla or some other old xpac)
- More world pvp (nerf ways of people avoiding it), that goes well with the flying / noflying debate
- Make everything more punishing (dungeons, world bosses, levelling, everything)

Mostly peppered with buzzwords like "casuals", "entitlement", "instant gratification" and so on.

Obviously Blizzard didn't hire all these homemade geniuses for a reason, for every change someone petitioned for there are people protesting against it, for every part of the game made easier / harder there are people claiming "it's too hard / too easy", and you can never satisfy so what's the point of debating, people are entrenched in their opinions and those opinions have zero impact on the devs decisionmaking how the game will evolve.

Also MMO-champ specifically but bnet forums as well have a percentage of loud posters that want to make you feel bad if you dare to still play wow (and not unsub / go private server) and even worse, you dare to actually enjoy it and feel it's the best what you could've done with your free time. You immediately become a "fanboi", "white knight", "being up the blizzard's ass" and so on.

In that way, majority of the threads are not worth posting in.

The only ones still worth are 1) people asking for advice (but it's insta marred with people trolling them sadly "how come you don't know this" or "how come you want to play this game still", few people still post useful advice but others just come and ridicule the person asking) 2) beta discussions about how things will be in legion - since I don't have beta, it's a good read but sadly hard to comment on if you don't have beta, too bad that's often marred with negativity too, hard to know if all the bad sides of legion are true or just opinions of specific posters when you don't have beta yourself.

Reading comments without taking into consideration "how these forums usually are" you'd think legion is "world of diablocraft and garrisoncraft with unenjoable pruned classes you could do a wow console port with, with grindy repetitive mandatory and too little content, alt unfriendly where every entitled casual will get their epics and legendaries from a random boar or loot pinata world boss" etc. etc. In general, I believe legion will be better than those doomsayers claim but we'll see.

It just makes you drained out of any energy coming to the forums wanting to chill out and relax and you see same crap over and again. Oh, and majority of threads popping on the first page of MMO-champ are off-topic about Trump, evil feminists, evil immigrants / refugees, cops shooting someone or some laws being stupid.

There's little hype and excitement because it always goes down to an argument "I was hyped for WOD and see where that went". I'd rather go to wow and do some pet battle achievements than "discuss" on forums in such atmosphere.

[Ornerybear]

I reside on a medium pop realm and I must say I am currently leveling alts to 100 pre-legion and I've been seeing a massive amount of people leveling toons compared to mid expansion. i know its anecdotal but I think we are starting to see a trickle back of players before legion launches. I've also seen a lot of new people in draenor as well with fresh 100s or way behind the curve 100s from earlier in wod.

I think using the forums as an indicator of the community is really just the hardcore players who post on the forums, majority of wow players dont go on forums. unless only forum posters are what you are referring to as the community, then yes, it seems like there arent as many people posting.

[Baconeggcheese]

Hmm, think it's more hibernation till the next release.

I think ^this is apt, nearly a year since the last major content patch, nothing new happening in the beta as they're mostly just in the polish phase it seems like.

Not really a whole lot to talk about at the moment since most things that were worth discussing have already been discussed to death.

[Perkunas]

Legion drops and the game goes back to 8 million. After the first couple months we're at 5-6 million. Game goes through a content drought for another year and we're down to around 3 million or so.

[Transmigration]

I don't know about other people here, but I've been playing this game for 12 years. I'm not even the same human being I was when I started playing. I still love the game, but I'm pretty bored with it and not as involved in the community as I once was. I've just lost time for it and interest in it naturally overtime as other aspects of life have taken over the space I had in my mind for gaming and WoW.

Even if I lost my job and my wife and kids left me alone in my house with my dog, I don't think I'd ever be as active on the forums or in game as I once was. Probably just the result of an aging playerbase and game.

Now if Blizzard made a fresh new MMO, I think I might find more time to get involved. In my very humble opinion, I think the next expansion should end the game and Blizzard should start working on an entirely new MMO. I doubt they'll ever make another though with the success they have from smaller scale endeavors like HotS, HS, and OW.

[McNeil]

I don't know about others but I just can't get myself to care about the game anymore, the content droughts are unbearable and the content WoD gave doesn't justify the extra cost at all. The content is to little, and to easily consumed. Legion looks like it'll be fun for a few weeks, but I fear that it'll become another WoD with nothing to do. I really miss the times of TBC and WotLK, atleast these expansions felt huge where they consistently gave us quality content patches with new raids and other stuff.

Its obvious to say Blizzard doesn't consider WoW as their flagship anymore and are now focussing on all their other titles, WoW is basically in maintenance mode where they can farm as much money as they can before it dies off. I just hope that they'll eventually open legacy servers where I'll have plenty of enjoyable content to do.

[JustRob]

I don't know about other people here, but I've been playing this game for 12 years. I'm not even the same human being I was when I started playing. I still love the game, but I'm pretty bored with it and not as involved in the community as I once was. I've just lost time for it and interest in it naturally overtime as other aspects of life have taken over the space I had in my mind for gaming and WoW.

Even if I lost my job and my wife and kids left me alone in my house with my dog, I don't think I'd ever be as active on the forums or in game as I once was. Probably just the result of an aging playerbase and game.

Now if Blizzard made a fresh new MMO, I think I might find more time to get involved. In my very humble opinion, I think the next expansion should end the game and Blizzard should start working on an entirely new MMO. I doubt they'll ever make another though with the success they have from smaller scale endeavors like HotS, HS, and OW.

The problem is, if they make a new MMO they'll never get away with a monthly subscription fee anymore. The only reason WoW still can is because it's been like that since 2004 and because WoW tokens exist. Monthly subscription for a game is a thing of the past, it wouldn't work in today's landscape.

[Roamingstorm]

I think it is mainly because of how old the game has become. I mean look at franchises like Halo, Assassins Creed, and recently (especially) Call of Duty. While yes they're not MMO's the same thing still applies to how playing something every year or in some cases twice a year can lead to burn out or just pure boredom over something. And obviously the same thing applies to anything else we do in our day to day. I love pizza, but I know I'd get tired of it real fast if it's all I ate for 3 days straight. So inevitably the communities are going to shrink since there's a lack of interest in the game, unless you want to call the people who run around with pitchforks all day sacrificing chickens in hopes WoW flops the next day a "community".

It doesn't help either that as of the announcement of Legion there seems to be so much negativity surrounding the game, and most of it has nothing to deal with Legion, but a lot of "crotchety old men" types that do their "back in my day" speeches or people stressing on features that won't affect them. Even these forums have turned more sour as of late, which really I don't come to that often anymore. And honestly if people enjoy something still I doubt you'd want to come to forums that constantly trying to tell you why you need to hate the thing you like.

Truly, I don't care much about forum communities or server communities, find a guild, find some good people, have fun, make friends along the way. Since now a days most gaming communities have turned into ultra bitter and negative cesspools.

[merex760]

Going a year without updating WoW is basically Blizzard slowly killing their own community.

[Triks]

What community? There hasn't been a community since mid-Wrath.

[Bosen]

More like napping. You got blow the Horn of Cenarius to wake them back up once Legion drops.

*Hands you a sap and points you in the direction of the Valley Of Trials* Do look out for Sarkoth while you're waking up the labor.

[Pull My Finger]

I am talking about the amounts of posts on mmo-champion and the official forums. I mean while before topics would race off the frontpage and now some threads without any reply will stick on the front page for hours (general wow section). When you look at the official forums (atleast EU, but US suffers from this too be it less) it is the same thing.

To me this feels kind of scary. People seem to care less - or the people that cared to write about WoW just seem to have quit/started not to care anymore. Ofcourse I realise that we have less subs. So logically posts would be less made aswell. But here on mmo champion, people who quit usually stick around if they used to come to this forum when their sub was still active.

Is it because the expansion is almost finished? I would say this probably has some impact. Still...

Well sure, the game isn't as popular as when it was really hitting big. But this forum thing - I don't know if that's really something to go by. The official forums always seemed fairly lame to me, compared to fansites. I stopped looking in there years ago and I think it's the same with many other players.

Regarding MMO-C -maybe we're finally reaching the point of diminishing returns on bullshit. Think about it. Even in this place, there has to be a moment when even the most tenacious and incurable whiners and shitposters will start to grow sick and tired of seeing themselves and everyone else typing up the same old crap, day in, day out, year after year after year. Because that's what this place has essentially been about in the recent years.

Honestly, I think that MMO-C was done, as a relevant community site, years ago. It just kind of cannibalized itself and turned into this moron asylum instead. The place where whiners go to die, or something like that. It's same old threads and the same old shit over and over again. You literally know all the topics, opinions and arguments by heart. You know the rebuttals and the rebuttals of the rebuttals. I think everyone's gotten used to everybody else's crap by now. Perhaps things are slowing down because everyone's like, whatever.

And then there's the other thing - you said that people seem to care less. I think it's true. I care less. But it doesn't mean I don't care at all. It's been 12 years now. Of course I'm not gonna be all gung-ho about every aspect of the game and any little news any more. Isn't that completely natural? Doesn't mean that I'm not looking forward to Legion, or don't plan to ever reactivate my account again. But the game naturally occupates a smaller space in my mind and everyday life than it did in 2005. And that might mean that while I'm still interested in playing, I might be less interested in having many conversations about it, especially when it's mostly just whining, or attacking other people for having different preferences anyway.

Outside of that, there's actually little to talk about. Most things about this game are common knowledge now. Every single aspect of it has been thoroughly explored and everything is extensively documented. There are no mysteries or uncertainties left. The only thing that's left is actually taking about stuff because you're into it, but that's something the current generation is incapable of doing. That's more something we were doing in the 80es and 90es - sitting and talking about the stuff we love. Today you're not supposed to do that, it means that you're a fanboy or that you're riding someone's dick. You don't have to talk about stuff. You already have all the info, and your head is full with all possible viewpoints and opinions before you even talked to a person because you've been on the internet all the time anyway. So when you do have a conversation, it mostly either means you're venting about something or arguing with someone.