Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Relapses]

To say that a single feature resulted in a loss of subs is foolish.

But there's a couple of facts that can be stated:

Fact n1: The game kept gaining subs without slowing down having no LFD and LFR.
Fact n2: After LFD and LFR being implemented the game never saw the same pattern of steady increase.

This to me doesnt say that the tools were the cause, it just says that if the tool was so needed and so important in the first place, aswell as many other supposed "QoL features" maybe the game wouldn't have become so popular in the first place.

...yet you can make the exact same argument against them. Had the QoL features not been added, WoW may have lost ground to other MMOs which did have QoL features. And as much as it's cool to hate on retail WoW in this thread, none of us would be posting here right now if the game had died off during Cata.

[Deleted]

Keep ducking the important things. You haven't played since WotLK you don't know why and how the game is far more difficult than Vanilla. This is why most people can't take you seriously in this thread.

Raiding (mythic) is much harder yeah, everything else is super easy and basically give you everything for free tho. If you are talking about raids, retail is way harder but overall it is much easier.

[Deleted]

Why the game lost its sub? Because the game is 12 years old. You are 12 years older today. Just as the playerbase changes, the market changes as well. Times change right?

Move on guys. This is really boring, especially when people are bashing LFR and other stuff random stuff; that makes no sense.

[Deleted]

Neither of your points are facts or strictly accurate.

Subscriber growth had slowed significantly by 2008, in the three quarters before Wrath's launch in Q4 '08 the overall growth was just 300k subs. Wrath saw sub numbers increase by 500k to 11.5million in Q4 '08 there were no official sub announcements between then and Q4 '09, which coincided with the introduction of LFD in patch 3.3, when Blizzard reported subs were still at 11.5million. Sub growth had not only slowed down but the total number had been stagnant for a year prior to LFD

Cata launched in Q4 '10 with 12million subscribers by the end of Q3 '11, the quarter before LFR was introduced, 1.7million subs had been lost. LFR launched in Q4 '11 with loss of just 100k on the previous quarter and no losses in Q1 '11. It was only in Q2 '11 when DS was well past its sell by date that the losses continued. It is quite clear that not only did sub losses stabilise briefly after LFR by that they were fewer post LFR than prior, 1.3million versus 1.7million.

Just a minor rebuttal: early 2009 vivendi claimed wow to be at 12 million. so you could argue that wotlk had a slump of .5 million in the middle.
http://www.reuters.com/article/viven...brandchannel=0

"We expect video games to continue to show a nice growth. We started the year with 12 million subscribers for World of Warcraft, which is a good base," he said.

I think wanting to draw conclusions about the feeling of a design-change from the immediate feedback is not always helpful.

We can interpret the data in very different ways. Even change how we interpret that stuff.

In Cata I thought it were the noobs that left when dungeons were hard. That may be true to an extent - but nowadays I see the problem more in the new design decisions no longer meshing well with tight-tuning. If you have dungeongroups that vary extremely widely in ability and are expected to succeed tight tuning will be a disaster.
But if you look at MOP and it's abysmally easy dungeons - they are not engaging enough so even more quit.

In the overall arch of WoW, its changes and its sub-numbers I see two thing that affected it the most.
One is age - self-explanatory.
The other is the first impression of the game that imo got worse all the time.
That became only clear after having played vanilla again. Nostalrius was unbelievably well tuned.
Yes, the game was mechanically less complex so yes the skill-ceiling is much higher now and mechanically more difficult, but if you are expected to beat something, it has to be doable by pretty much everyone.
Vanilla relied much more on white damage - slow abilitys. You could not take as much effect one on one with a mob. Your character acted more like an equalizer between skilled and bad players. The game was much tighter tuned so even if you were skilled even pulling two or three mobs was often deadly.

That tight tuning was imo the most interesting part of vanilla explicitly and over time it was all watered down, especially at low levels.
I only started my warrior alt in BC and when I tried it on Nostalrius is was like night and day - so much harder. BC was still engaging for me - but there was a distinct change and imo for the worse which got worse and worse over time.
I think too much player-agency in character performance is not a good fit in a character-driven mmo like WoW. Especially if you combine it with trying to make everything more accessible.

There are more factors in there that affect it and I think difficulty are very direct changes that affect Sub-numbers.
I know many people that quit at the start of wotlk because Naxx was a f'ucking joke. They never returned as far as I know. That explains to me the half a million slump at the start of 2009. The change for harder stuff in Cata had a similar effect imo.
But the change with LFD was not nearly as direct. I thought at the start that it was a great new tool too. I realized the dramatic effect it had on my playstyle halfway through Cata and talked with friends about it. some agreed, many laughed at it. Many people in my friendslist quit and only ever came back for very short times in the future.
I myself pretty much resorted to only running raids in MOP (logging in twice a week - yay -.-) and completely quit shortly after the start of WOD.

A community is something you build. Changes like LFD are not like an earthquake that destroys almost everything, but turns the ground on top of which it was built into quicksand into which community was slowly sliding away into.

I think many people could not say what exactly made them leave - they choose the next best scapegoat - be it hard dungeons/raids or easy dungeons/raids or LFR or garrisons or no longer being in dalaran or shop-mounts or content-droughts or whatever else.
But perhaps it was just that they lost something that was holding them in the game.

Whatever, enough rambling about my opinion of wotlk overall and LFD sucking donkeyballs.

[Pann]

Just a minor rebuttal: early 2009 vivendi claimed wow to be at 12 million. so you could argue that wotlk had a slump of .5 million in the middle.
http://www.reuters.com/article/viven...brandchannel=0


I think wanting to draw conclusions about the feeling of a design-change from the immediate feedback is not always helpful.

We can interpret the data in very different ways. Even change how we interpret that stuff....

I was aware of that quote however in the absence of an official announcement from Blizzard it is difficult to say whether did reach 12million subs or he was just rounding up 11.5million which is why I did not include it. However I do think you are correct that there may have been a slump in the number of players during Wrath.

The purpose of my post was not offer an opinion on LFR or LFD but to show that the, widely held, belief that there was a mass exodus of players after their introduction is not supported by actual sub numbers.

[Deleted]

I was aware of that quote however in the absence of an official announcement from Blizzard it is difficult to say whether did reach 12million subs or he was just rounding up 11.5million which is why I did not include it. However I do think you are correct that there may have been a slump in the number of players during Wrath.

The purpose of my post was not offer an opinion on LFR or LFD but to show that the, widely held, belief that there was a mass exodus of players after their introduction is not supported by actual sub numbers.

I 100% agree with you.
My point was only supposed to be that LFD can still have had disastrous consequences even if it does not correlate with a direct decrease in the sub at the exact moment it was implemented -> it was a change that changed a lot beneath the surface that were not immediately noticeable.
And that somehow turned into a rant, sorry :P

[voidillusion]

I was aware of that quote however in the absence of an official announcement from Blizzard it is difficult to say whether did reach 12million subs or he was just rounding up 11.5million which is why I did not include it. However I do think you are correct that there may have been a slump in the number of players during Wrath.

The purpose of my post was not offer an opinion on LFR or LFD but to show that the, widely held, belief that there was a mass exodus of players after their introduction is not supported by actual sub numbers.

That relation can't be established, that or any other. Any change to the game, unless it has a radical impact on the game and population itself, can only have it's impact observed over the time and not imediatly.

But as i said before, to claim LFD+LFR is the only reason for a population decrease would be foolish, altough my opinion, having played before and after the inclusion of both tools, is that the game didn't need them at all, and having them implemented dumbed down completly the 5 man content. You could argue that the game is for raiders blablabla, but you shouldnt understimate the need for that kind of content for many, many players.

[Deleted]

The game is 12 years old! Don't you see it?

There are nothing on earth, that would keep someone around for 12 years. Think of any job, hobby whatever, that makes you stick around for that long.

Obviously after some time, you need to find a reason for why something sucks and this is like soccer sucks because the off-side rule.

I can never agree on any argument that is so vague(and should be very obvious why). What would it fix if they removed LFD? Nothing. People would still disagree, because the playerbase who are using LFD is MUCH bigger than people who rather go without it.

[Darktbs]

The game is 12 years old! Don't you see it?

There are nothing on earth, that would keep someone around for 12 years. Think of any job, hobby whatever, that makes you stick around for that long.

Obviously after some time, you need to find a reason for why something sucks and this is like soccer sucks because the off-side rule.

I can never agree with any arguments that is so vague. What would it fix if they removed LFD? Nothing. People would still whine.

The thing is not how old the game is but for how long you can make it interesting.

YES people will quit because of time,but is because they are doing the same thing over and over again and eventually it will become uniteresting for then to continue.

A game can be 50 years old but if it manage to make every single year worth playing,then there will be people playing it.

How come one make the game/franchise interesting for so long?Depends to each game its hard to tell.

[Deleted]

The thing is not how old the game is but for how long you can make it interesting.

YES people will quit because of time,but is because they are doing the same thing over and over again and eventually it will become uniteresting for then to continue.

A game can be 50 years old but if it manage to make every single year worth playing,then there will be people playing it.

How come one make the game/franchise interesting for so long?Depends to each game its hard to tell.

Yes, wishful thinking indeed. But that kind of thing is not supported/possible. Let's be realistic.

[Deleted]

The game is 12 years old! Don't you see it?

There are nothing on earth, that would keep someone around for 12 years. Think of any job, hobby whatever, that makes you stick around for that long.

Obviously after some time, you need to find a reason for why something sucks and this is like soccer sucks because the off-side rule.

I can never agree with any argument that is so vague. What would it fix if they removed LFD? Nothing. People would still whine, because the playerbase who are using LFD is MUCH bigger than people who rather go without it.

There are many reasons, I, and many others are not only blaming LFD.
I am not even for removing LFD from the game per se. I like the pristine realm idea - just expanded and rest can be changed for everyone probably be overall changes for the better. I am also an even stronger proponent of legacy realms because I don't trust blizz enough to ever come close to vanilla again.

Also I fell in love again with wow on nostalrius after i quit at the start of wod. a 12 year old game can be extremely charming even today.. insane. and I played since april 2005...

and of course vast majority uses LFD because it only brings advantages (buffs, teleport etc).
I still even expect the current majority to really like LFD.
I just see the flaws with it and absolutely hate the guts out of it.

[Deleted]

There are many reasons, I, and many others are not only blaming LFD.
I am not even for removing LFD from the game per se. I like the pristine realm idea - just expanded and rest can be changed for everyone probably be overall changes for the better. I am also an even stronger proponent of legacy realms because I don't trust blizz enough to ever come close to vanilla again.

Also I fell in love again with wow on nostalrius after i quit at the start of wod. a 12 year old game can be extremely charming even today.. insane. and I played since april 2005...

and of course vast majority uses LFD because it only brings advantages (buffs, teleport etc).
I still even expect the current majority to really like LFD.
I just see the flaws with it and absolutely hate the guts out of it.

I still don't understand you. You are not the money. The biggest group is the money. And they are casuals. No casual left = you can have your pristine servers forever, because of nobody to support the development/maintenance.

The question is: do you still want to play. Yes or no.

[Pann]

That relation can't be established, that or any other. Any change to the game, unless it has a radical impact on the game and population itself, can only have it's impact observed over the time and not imediatly.

But as i said before, to claim LFD+LFR is the only reason for a population decrease would be foolish, altough my opinion, having played before and after the inclusion of both tools, is that the game didn't need them at all, and having them implemented dumbed down completly the 5 man content. You could argue that the game is for raiders blablabla, but you shouldnt understimate the need for that kind of content for many, many players.

That is completely different claim from the two you made earlier.

The first dungeons introduced after LFD were the ICC 5 mans which were a significant step up in difficulty from previous Wrath dungeons so that disproves your claim 5 mans were dumbed down.

Whilst this is going somewhat off topic I think Cata's failure with the implementation of difficult dungeons was because unlike the ICC 5 mans, where 1 or 2 good players playing to their ability would result in success, they challenged the weakest member of the group and it no longer mattered how well the better players played they would always be dragged down by the weakest link.

[Deleted]

What if LFD was implemented during Vanilla? Would it still be on peoples mind?

Again, people who are actively reasoning why something is bad, should just happy with the time and go(because the journey was/is wonderful).

This is nothing but love/hate relationship otherwise.

[voidillusion]

That is completely different claim from the two you made earlier.

The first dungeons introduced after LFD were the ICC 5 mans which were a significant step up in difficulty from previous Wrath dungeons so that disproves your claim 5 mans were dumbed down.

Whilst this is going somewhat off topic I think Cata's failure with the implementation of difficult dungeons was because unlike the ICC 5 mans, where 1 or 2 good players playing to their ability would result in success, they challenged the weakest member of the group and it no longer mattered how well the better players played they would always be dragged down by the weakest link.

Thinking of shattered halls heroic, os shadow labs heroic, and them coming to all of the LK 5 mans hc you got to be kidding me seriously. LK was the start of the aoe fest in 5 mans.

[Deleted]

That is completely different claim from the two you made earlier.

The first dungeons introduced after LFD were the ICC 5 mans which were a significant step up in difficulty from previous Wrath dungeons so that disproves your claim 5 mans were dumbed down.

Whilst this is going somewhat off topic I think Cata's failure with the implementation of difficult dungeons was because unlike the ICC 5 mans, where 1 or 2 good players playing to their ability would result in success, they challenged the weakest member of the group and it no longer mattered how well the better players played they would always be dragged down by the weakest link.

I would argue that at the very start of wotlk heroics were harder than the icc-heroics relative to the gear people had. at the very start of wotlk dungeonsruns still failed and all - they were mindless aoe-fests compared to BC or absolutely insane once you had gear, but there were still groups that failed them. ICC dungeons were immediately easier because many people had already too good gear.
I concede that is primarily just anecdotal evidence but I do not see a huge difference between wotlk heroics at launch... they were all really easy

edit: just to clarify - icc heroics were of course harder tuned, but they were still easier than wotlk heroics at wotlk launch because of raidgear imo

I still don't understand you. You are not the money. The biggest group is the money. And they are casuals. No casual left = you can have your pristine servers forever, because of nobody to support the development/maintenance.

The question is: do you still want to play. Yes or no.

What if LFD was implemented during Vanilla? Would it still be on peoples mind?

Again, people who are actively reasoning why something is bad, should just happy with the time and go(because the journey was/is wonderful).

This is nothing but love/hate relationship otherwise.

Vanilla had a form of matchmaking for dungeons - it was just not transparent and did not build successfull groups. and it was built into meeting stones/innkeepers instead of a menu. It was not popular.

regarding me not being the money... I think these people that returned for wod and left while content was still clearly on the horizon would tell me otherwise.
Sure not everyone would like to play more or whatever, but I think a sizeable portion would like to - and something is wrong for them in the game.
Sure it may not be a majority, but it still can be many - and much money

[Pann]

Thinking of shattered halls heroic, os shadow labs heroic, and them coming to all of the LK 5 mans hc you got to be kidding me seriously. LK was the start of the aoe fest in 5 mans.

I didn't mention anything about TBC heroics as they are not relevant to the topic of group finder.

[voidillusion]

The first dungeons introduced after LFD were the ICC 5 mans which were a significant step up in difficulty from previous Wrath dungeons so that disproves your claim 5 mans were dumbed down.

My bad, reread your post and you were talking about the initial LK dungeons.

[Pann]

I would argue that at the very start of wotlk heroics were harder than the icc-heroics relative to the gear people had. at the very start of wotlk dungeonsruns still failed and all - they were mindless aoe-fests compared to BC or absolutely insane once you had gear, but there were still groups that failed them. ICC dungeons were immediately easier because many people had already too good gear.
I concede that is primarily just anecdotal evidence but I do not see a huge difference between wotlk heroics at launch... they were all really easy

edit: just to clarify - icc heroics were of course harder tuned, but they were still easier than wotlk heroics at wotlk launch because of raidgear imo

I am not sure about the early Wrath heroics being harder than the ICC but I agree that they were harder than people make them out to be and it was a result of over-gearing by quite some margin that turned them into AOE races. I think that is a good point that the ICC dungeons were easy for the people with raid gear but I think if you compare launch dungeons at 180 ilvl to HoR at 219 ilvl (the minimum according to Wowhead) then HoR was more difficult.

[Deleted]

I am not sure about the early Wrath heroics being harder than the ICC but I agree that they were harder than people make them out to be and it was a result of over-gearing by quite some margin that turned them into AOE races. I think that is a good point that the ICC dungeons were easy for the people with raid gear but I think if you compare launch dungeons at 180 ilvl to HoR at 219 ilvl (the minimum according to Wowhead) then HoR was more difficult.

that might be true if going by lowest possible item lvl.
I just did not see HoR being harder than gundrak at release really. i "struggled" in gundrak more than HoR. but yeah just anecdotal evidence is sadly not fact

that brings me to a unrelated siderant about itemlvl and dungeons...
at the start of wod I wanted to do the auchindoun dungeon (forgot the exact name right now) while leveling.
built a group with friends - looked into dungeonfinder: itemlvl too low.
ok whatever we are going to run in there old school style - nope the guy whose itemlvl was too low could not enter...
that brought my blood to boiling point that day... I thought they would have changed that shit since cataclysmn -.-