It seems WoD didn't do that bad

[Selky]

The WoD model was perfect for me, all you had to do was raid a few times each week and then you were free. There was no pressure of legendaries, RNG gear upgrades, AP or Mythic+ hanging over your head. There was a lack of content but at least it never pushed me to do content I didn't want to do. I already feel exhausted with Legion and I doubt I'll last until Nighthold.

[MinTDH]

WoD was an overhyped piece of shit, so it spiked and dropped.
Legion is an overhyped piece of shit, so it spiked and dropped.
No, the playerbase is not cyclical. Blizdevs, however, are retarded.

Legion? Overhyped? LOL, where the fuck have you been?

[Lane]

As I said WoD went back to 12 Million and the people who came back didn't come in expecting to quit in 1-3 months. Yes WoW can get back to a consistent 12 million if they made the game good. Has nothing to do with WoW being old, It has to do with every xpac since Cata being a disaster.

The only thing preventing WoW from being a huge thing again is Blizzard. They may of burned all the bridges though after the disaster WoD was when everyone gave the game another chance.

I agree. I quit during early Cata and came back for WoD only to be bitterly disappointed. It made me extremely hesitant to purchase Legion. Having said that, there is some merit not so much to WoW itself being old, but the developers' mindset. I feel like WoW should be leagues ahead of where it is both in design and features. The "raid or die" mentality has really hurt it over the years. It seems they quit 'borrowing' ideas from other MMOs, which despite having smaller audiences do many things better even just basic QoL improvements Blizzard's been reluctant to adopt.

[munkeyinorbit]

WoD was an overhyped piece of shit, so it spiked and dropped.
Legion is an overhyped piece of shit, so it spiked and dropped.
No, the playerbase is not cyclical. Blizdevs, however, are retarded.

So you are so angry because you believed the hype and got tricked or are you just salty over websites in general and you like arguing with people on the internet over anything.

Here is something you can get salty about. Green is the best colour because it is the best tasting milkshake.

[WowIsDead64]

Blizzard use aggressive marketing, like "X - is best xpack, ever made", "New class, you've been asking for a long time", "Cashbringer for everyone", "Let's revive long dead character(s) X/rehash old zone Y in order to boost nostalgia to enormous level" or "Let's also mention Vanilla servers, we won't make anyway" that makes many new/old players buy xpack and try it. But at the end it's exactly the same crap. WOD was "best xpack, ever made" not long before it's release. And what? It appeared to be the worst one just after 1-2 mounts. Same with Legion. Several months and players see, what crap it really is. So, this game would be dead long time ago, if Blizzard wouldn't spend so large amount of money on marketing, instead of investing them into game itself. All you need to avoid this situation - is experience. As experienced player, I don't need to try xpack in order to determine, is it good or bad - I can just see it. Legion isn't any better, that WOD - another nostalgia-driven TBC-rehash-based alternative-reality RNG-time-gated 3-button-style fest.

Yeah, Legion already has several elements of WotLK, but I still can bet, that one of next xpacks will be "Return of Lick King", lol. Bolvar is still there, waiting for his chance. Some "Old Gods", "Demons" or another revived character from alternative reality will spoil his mind and new Scourge invasion will start. Or changed timeline, caused by WOD, will bring some sort of "alternative" Northend. Or we will beat Demons in Legion, that will cause loop in time, that will open new alternative reality, where Arthas haven't turned into Lick Kind and haven't died as the result. Blah blah blah. Where can it take my money, I earned for working as story writer for Blizzard? And again it will be "best xpack ever made", despite of smallest and most RNG/time gated content ever made, removal of some other iconic features and porting Wow to consoles with obvious change of game mechanics to one button auto-target style.

It's just obvious, but some Wow fans and white knights (especially if they earn money via running Wow fansites) still can't accept this simple truth.

[Taeldorian]

Legion just isn't that good hate to say it because it was really fun for 1-2 months. The player base is very noticeably declining because max level is just flat out boring.

The questing and initial playthru was really fun, The artifact system was interesting and There were a ton of dungeons that looked cool and were fun.

Then people got max level and slowly figured out that everything was repetitive and boring.

World quests are boring, Mythic+ is literally just the same instance scaled up over and over gets boring, Class Balance is a complete mess, Legendary system is a complete mess, Making playing alts irrelevant, PvP is a disaster, Class pruning ruined some classes and removed their entire identity they had for 11 years and Raiding in WoW just really isn't relevant anymore.

The challenge in WoW is just gone Blizzard has made sure of that. You just get max level in a few days play for about a month and find out there is nothing to do that is interesting and quit.

That's what made Vanilla-WOTLK so enjoyable. You didn't get to max level in a day, you didn't get full epics in a day, you didn't have to run 3 different difficulties everyone was on the same playing field, Blizzard didn't assume we were all idiots and we had abilities. This just isn't the case anymore.

Lmao what? Take off your rose tinted goggles.

People went crazy in Wrath because that's when "welfare epics" were introduced. Casuals could do dungeons and easy raids to get badges in order to get gear similar to what raiders had. There were so many ways casuals could gear up and there were sooo many complains about Wrath being too casual.

You saying that Wrath was hard and that the game was good because nobody had to run multiple difficulties shows you didn't play in Wrath. People spammed the same dungeons for days because it gave badges which you could buy epics with. Wrath was the turning point of WoW becoming more casual focused.

As for classes, you really have no clue. Classes in Wrath practically had 3 button rotations. Nothing was complicated about hitting crusader strike into a divine storm. Like really? Go back and watch some Wrath raiding videos or something, the classes were most definitely not complicated. I do however agree that the whole class fantasy thing was dumb. I personally loved a majority of classes in MoP and how fun most of them were. MoP class design was probably the best overall design for classes in WoW. Some classes were hard, some were easy and they were mostly all different.

As for the leveling, I kind of agree but I'm biased towards Wrath zones. I loved every single one of them and that's what made my leveling experience great, had nothing to do with how fast or slow I went. Hell, legion took longer than WoD leveling did and people complained. There's really no way they can win here. A lot of people despise leveling taking more than a day and a lot of people like it.

You know what's funny? I bet if you were to link your armory, you wouldn't have Mythic EN completed or even heroic ToV. Let me see if this game is too easy for you, link your armory. Heroic-mythic ToV is most definitely a challenge, and since you claim that there's no longer any challenge then let's see your progress.

[Tierbook]

Lmao what? Take off your rose tinted goggles.

People went crazy in Wrath because that's when "welfare epics" were introduced. Casuals could do dungeons and easy raids to get badges in order to get gear similar to what raiders had. There were so many ways casuals could gear up and there were sooo many complains about Wrath being too casual.

You saying that Wrath was hard and that the game was good because nobody had to run multiple difficulties shows you didn't play in Wrath. People spammed the same dungeons for days because it gave badges which you could buy epics with. Wrath was the turning point of WoW becoming more casual focused.

As for classes, you really have no clue. Classes in WoD practically had 3 button rotations. Nothing was complicated about hitting crusader strike into a divine storm. Like really? Go back and watch some Wrath raiding videos or something, the classes were most definitely not complicated.

You know what's funny? I bet if you were to link your armory, you wouldn't have Mythic EN completed or even heroic ToV. Let me see if this game is too easy for you, link your armory. Heroic-mythic ToV is most definitely a challenge, and since you claim that there's no longer any challenge then let's see your progress.

Didn't Welfare epics start in TBC?

[Taeldorian]

Didn't Welfare epics start in TBC?

Don't remember. I remember the outrage of WoTlk and how easy it was to obtain gear though. It was all over the forums. Here, official forums, everywhere.

[Dhrizzle]

Didn't Welfare epics start in TBC?

Yep, mostly through arenas but there were also complaints about heroics guaranteeing an epic from the final boss, plus the badge gear which really took off during the ZA and Sunwell patches.

[BiggestNoob]

There's nothing cyclical. It's Blizzard failing to provide a high quality consistent gameplay that lasts more than a few months.

All they have to do is keep people wanting to show up at least once a month. They don't need to try and get people to log on every day and grind non-stop. Burnout is a fantastic way to kill off a playerbase. There's a reason D3's playerbase spikes and falls off like this. Lots of people enjoy playing the new season for a week, maybe 2, and then they've experienced everything new and the only thing left is grinding the never-ending RNG lottery to BiS and then infinite paragon growth.

So what does that mean? They need to:

1. Release the game in a stable, balanced state with every spec in a good spot. Any specs that are having problems should be addressed quickly, but people get attached to their characters and enjoy playing the character they chose and have worked hard to empower, so there shouldn't be major changes ever in the expansion, especially nothing that ruins a spec. Finesse is the game; small, minimal changes to tweak things should be the only real tools available.
2. What people earn should feel meaningful, not trivial because it'll just get replaced instantly.
3. Rewards should be earned, not randomly given.
4. Crafting should be rewarding, but not burdensome, and should integrate with all forms of gameplay/content.
5. There should be new stuff to do, new stuff to look forward to, and that means consistent and regular new content patches (not necessarily just raid after raid after raid or new dungeons every few months, there needs to be things like new zones, new stuff to do, events, stuff to shake up PvP, etc).
6. It should have content that challenges players, and still be friendly to people who want to play it casually.

This is the recipe for maximum sub numbers and for player happiness. If they could pull this off, they wouldn't have a massive sub dropoff. If you're curious, they've basically failed every single point in this list in Legion, so it's no real shocker that people are leaving.

[Restors]

I will never blame devs on Blizzard tbh. Problem is the playerbase, its a generation shift now and something that's gonna be hard to satisfy.
Up to WotLK, it could take a new player to get from level 1 to max level in perhaps one or two months. Imagine a new player or a new alt gonna take over a month just to get max leveled? Yeah outcry... But we didnt mind back then, we just loved the adventure and looked to the horizon that the game only starts at max level , yet you enjoyed so much during leveling.

People wants the game to have something meaningful reward in order to grind. Others dont want grind at all. No epics are allowed as reward outside of raiding, yet others outcry bout how to catch up with main. See the problem?

And the latest, we cry hard not only "why didnt i recieve a loot", its also "Its RNG".... I cant remember a time where a RPG based game werent heavenly RNG involved.
All the way to D&D days where even gaining XP were RNG.

New generation of gamers who all wants so damn different things, and thinks they're entitled to every damn thing. Blizzard have a real tough period now, how do you satisfy the needs of the many. They havent given up either, and that is why I have such respect for Blizzard as gaming company.

[rda]

I will never blame devs on Blizzard tbh. Problem is the playerbase, its a generation shift now and something that's gonna be hard to satisfy.
Up to WotLK, it could take a new player to get from level 1 to max level in perhaps one or two months. Imagine a new player or a new alt gonna take over a month just to get max leveled? Yeah outcry... But we didnt mind back then, we just loved the adventure and looked to the horizon that the game only starts at max level , yet you enjoyed so much during leveling.

People wants the game to have something meaningful reward in order to grind. Others dont want grind at all. No epics are allowed as reward outside of raiding, yet others outcry bout how to catch up with main. See the problem?

And the latest, we cry hard not only "why didnt i recieve a loot", its also "Its RNG".... I cant remember a time where a RPG based game werent heavenly RNG involved.
All the way to D&D days where even gaining XP were RNG.

New generation of gamers who all wants so damn different things, and thinks they're entitled to every damn thing. Blizzard have a real tough period now, how do you satisfy the needs of the many. They havent given up either, and that is why I have such respect for Blizzard as gaming company.

This position ("it's the players fault") is ridiculous and its ridiculousness becomes readily apparent when you try applying the same logic to other products - like cars or food or clothing. Yeah, it's totally the fault of the buyers that - what? - that BigMac costs as little as it does? That Toyota cars do 4 gallons per 100 miles? Once you move the initial idiotic argument from games (which you think you are such an expert on, hence the argument starting as idiotic) to a different subject, the argument quickly transforms the word "fault" into the word "preference" or "demand" and becomes sane. But that takes out the punchline, obviously. Because, yes, "players really want to have fun and to be able to get loot without too much RNG, to be viable in PVP, their class rotation to be enjoyable, etc, that's their preference", and it sounds (and is) completely normal.

[Dracullus]

There's nothing cyclical. It's Blizzard failing to provide a high quality consistent gameplay that lasts more than a few months.

All they have to do is keep people wanting to show up at least once a month. They don't need to try and get people to log on every day and grind non-stop. Burnout is a fantastic way to kill off a playerbase. There's a reason D3's playerbase spikes and falls off like this. Lots of people enjoy playing the new season for a week, maybe 2, and then they've experienced everything new and the only thing left is grinding the never-ending RNG lottery to BiS and then infinite paragon growth.

So what does that mean? They need to:

1. Release the game in a stable, balanced state with every spec in a good spot. Any specs that are having problems should be addressed quickly, but people get attached to their characters and enjoy playing the character they chose and have worked hard to empower, so there shouldn't be major changes ever in the expansion, especially nothing that ruins a spec. Finesse is the game; small, minimal changes to tweak things should be the only real tools available.
2. What people earn should feel meaningful, not trivial because it'll just get replaced instantly.
3. Rewards should be earned, not randomly given.
4. Crafting should be rewarding, but not burdensome, and should integrate with all forms of gameplay/content.
5. There should be new stuff to do, new stuff to look forward to, and that means consistent and regular new content patches (not necessarily just raid after raid after raid or new dungeons every few months, new zones, new stuff to do, events, etc).
6. It should have content that challenges players, and still be friendly to people who want to play it casually.

This is the recipe for maximum sub numbers and for player happiness. If they could pull this off, they wouldn't have a massive sub dropoff. If you're curious, they've basically failed every single point in this list in Legion, so it's no real shocker that people are leaving.

This is just list of slogans. Easy to write, but I don't really know how you would implement this:
1) They may make better job than in Legion, but it's impossible to balance this perfectly. And "every spec in a good spot"? You know that if spec A is 1% better than spec B, forums shout: "Spec B is UTTER SHIT WTF BLIZZZ!", more competetive play spec A and think that no one play spec B.
2) What do you mean? You want to get upgrade every few months? It is supposed to be fun?
3) What I need to do for a piece of loot? Do mythic +12? Pay them? Pay you? I do stuff in game and I get reward, harder content I do, better reward I get. Sometimes I had luck and get something better that I should, but it's just a bonus.
4) Again, don't get it. Professions quest involve outdoor questing and dungeons/raids. And sometimes even pvp. No pet battle profession quest so far, sorry.
5) It is. Beside raids we will get Broken Shore and Argus zones. New stuff to do and events we will also get in smaller patches.
6) You realize how big cap in skill is between new player and someone that played this for 12 years? How you want challenge them both without level difficulties? And how you define casual, guildless people? Content you challenge pug is trivial for organize groups. For solo hard content, we will get something for every spec in 7.2.

And again, no matter how game close is to your ideal, there are people that just level character, check dungeons, check raids in LFR, check story and leave. Do you think they will stay if everything will be challenge and you get piece of loot every few weeks or sth? It's not 2000's , people are not commited to stay in one game anymore, they want to experience as many they can in little time they have (typical gamer is not teenager, many are 30-35 with jobs and responsibilities). That's why many solo games are short. That's why many online games die out so fast. Blizzard is very lucky, because they have really loyal and passionate playerbase. Even whines make people talk about game. WoW will die out not when everybody will hate it, but when new expansion will be revealed and no one will really care.

[Akka]

Just flat out disagree. Played since Beta all the way till now. TBC is still my fav xpac but I'm not going to act like WOTLK was a bad xpac because it was probably the best, I just enjoyed the time I had in TBC more than WOTLK since TBC added everything I loved that moved to WOTLK and got perfected.

The entire veteran players leaving because of WOTLK is just flat out not true. As someone who's played on Tichondrius (first popular server from Vanilla to now) for the last 12 years I pretty much knew all the veteran players since I raided up to Naxx/Sunewell/ICC was high rated in PvP they didn't start quitting WoW till mid Cata when Talent trees got gutted, Heroics got nerfed into the ground after the first month and LFR was added.

WOTLK is considered the best PvP xpac by a mile by anyone who is actually good at PvP. PvE was also loved by the PvE community outside the entire ToC patch which a lot of people still enjoyed. If it wasn't for the year content drought at the end of WOTLK it would be by far the best xpac Blizzard ever made. Best part is even during the let me make this clear a YEAR CONTENT DROUGHT sub numbers didn't plummet 5-6 million like they do today in 1-3 months.

That's just your opinion and empirical evidence against my own opinion and empirical evidence.
I just notice that TBC has a higher popularity with the veterans and WotLK with the, well, Wrath Babies (operative words : "higher popularity", which means it's not 100 %, it's about trends).

[BiggestNoob]

1) They may make better job than in Legion, but it's impossible to balance this perfectly. And "every spec in a good spot"? You know that if spec A is 1% better than spec B, forums shout: "Spec B is UTTER SHIT WTF BLIZZZ!", more competetive play spec A and think that no one play spec B.

This tends to only happen with specs that are 5-10% below the average, and specs should never be 5-10% or more (20%+ like SPs are right now) above the average. It's not difficult at all to get every spec within a few percent of each other.

Another problem they've done horribly with in Legion is consistently designing encounters horribly, yet they intentionally design specs so they have certain strengths and weaknesses. When all the important encounters in a raid are such that certain specs have no benefit to a raid (their strength isn't expressed at all on important fights) that's when you get complaints.

In Legion it's been 100% priority target damage and multi-target cleave, and this heavily skews melee and SP with the current design. All of this can be done better. Pure DPS classes can have specs covering the gamut of strengths/weaknesses so these players can always be beneficial to their groups, and hybrids with a single DPS spec can be generally good but not excessively good at anything and remain competitive.

This isn't impossible or even very challenging, but Blizzard does not have anyone competent enough to pull this off involved in their design team. They have some the best players in the world with a better understanding of how their specs work than anyone at Blizzard telling them exactly how to do it and yet they just ignore that feedback. There was enormous amounts of this feedback during the beta.

2) What do you mean? You want to get upgrade every few months? It is supposed to be fun?

No, you'd get upgrades with new content. The alternative is the D3 design which is what they've done with Legion. WF/socket is a bad idea already (turning normal drops into undesirables), but now with TF gear, you grind out non-optimal items that just happen to roll high enough to be upgrades. In D3 you get a good piece for a slot and you'll probably replace it 20 times before you actually come close to getting a piece you can't replace even at PL 2000+. That's in like 4-5 weeks of play. It works in D3 because you grind non-stop, but it doesn't work in a game like WoW which is subscription based and meant to have regular content releases.

When you get a mythic raid piece because you worked to kill the boss, it should be a big deal and not just be something you're going to be able to replace in a M+2 you can run in 7 minutes.

This was pointed out in the beta and nothing was done.

3) What I need to do for a piece of loot? Do mythic +12? Pay them? Pay you? I do stuff in game and I get reward, harder content I do, better reward I get. Sometimes I had luck and get something better that I should, but it's just a bonus.

Mythic+'s current design exemplifies this issue. +12 is 870 gear, but people are wearing loads of 890-895s from spam 3-chesting 5-8s. It's heavily RNG based, and you're not specifically rewarded for doing the hardest content you possibly can. Your progression is doing harder dungeons, your goal should be to wear full 870 gear from +12, and the M+ gear should cap out at the level at which a group of people in that gear are ready to enter the latest mythic raid and be successful. It's supposed to be an alternate progression, that's what they explained it as, but it's the best progression and that's totally fucked everything.

And you've got people doing world quests getting expansion-long BiS gear. There's nothing earned about that. It'd be fine if it was completely exclusive of PvP and PvE, but it's not. I love the internal inconsistency here, rated PvP has things disabled meanwhile mythic (the "rated" PvE) doesn't.

All of this was pointed out in the beta, and nothing was done.

4) Again, don't get it. Professions quest involve outdoor questing and dungeons/raids. And sometimes even pvp. No pet battle profession quest so far, sorry.

They don't though. You get a questline that has you do those things but that's just to unlock recipes. The crafting has absolutely nothing tying it to that content. Imagine being able to craft an especially strong piece of gear by gathering mats out of M+12 dungeons or raids. Imagine you could get rewards from doing this content for gatherers that would let you create better consumables. This was a big problem (and it's still stupid) when Legion launched and everything needed Starlight Rose but everyone was too busy doing other shit to farm it, and farming it is literally trivial. The BoS vendor is just a bandaid fix to a badly designed crafting system. The crafting professions all feel mostly useless outside of alchemy, enchanting, and JC.

This was pointed out in the beta. It wasn't fixed.

5) It is. Beside raids we will get Broken Shore and Argus zones. New stuff to do and events we will also get in smaller patches.

There isn't. It's the same content being repeated. You'll get 1-2 new zones in a 3+ year expansion. You're paying a subscription. Have you ever paid a subscription for anything else? You typically get regular content, not "we'll give you content in 8 months, just stay subscribed!" Those models are the DLC models where you don't pay a sub fee, you just pay for access to the content when they do release it at whatever irregular pace they want. This "subscription for access to the same static content" is a cancer of the gaming industry.

6) You realize how big cap in skill is between new player and someone that played this for 12 years? How you want challenge them both without level difficulties? And how you define casual, guildless people? Content you challenge pug is trivial for organize groups. For solo hard content, we will get something for every spec in 7.2.

The skill cap has nothing to do with time spent playing. I joined and within a few months was high 90 percentiles in mythic raids. You do this by having different content for different players. Mythic raiding isn't meant for lower-skilled (or rather lower-effort) players, but you shouldn't be excluded from doing mythic because you haven't put in your 200 hour grind to get there.

There are lots of guilds out there that do the challenging content on very lax schedules and with Legion that content has to be tuned around what those who are grinding hardcore can do. This means there's no outgearing content, which is how such guilds typically end up finishing things. This is why HoV's completion rate will remain incredibly low, and it's why EN was considered undertuned.

More than that, some people do stay subscribed and play very little but enjoy doing things like pushing high M+ or doing rated PvP or very casually doing mythic raid content, and still others don't do those things at all but shouldn't feel like there's a huge grind of things to do either. There's a big problem there in that content is rarely released for these people, and it's not just those people who enjoy bonus stuff that's not just "super hard M+ dungeon" or "3000 rated PvP" or "mythic raid world first race." Those people are actually the most consistent subscribers, the bulk of the 7 million who left in WoD was the people who weren't getting regular content.

All of these things are easily achievable, and Legion had potential but Blizzard ignored all of the feedback in beta. Just completely ignored it. WoW can easily sustain over 10 million subs and actually grow again, Blizzard just doesn't give a shit about even attempting that anymore, and that's why ATVI's revenue has been flat for 5+ years and the company is not growing in an industry that's currently growing faster than any other entertainment industry. It's sad to see such terrible leadership both at the company level and at the project level.

[Deleted]

i highly doubt that those graphs are accurate

i just compare my guild online numbers and AH's in Ogrimmar and Warspear

Legion after 3 months is about 1.5x WoD at start

[Deleted]

I actually really like Legion, prob One of my fav expansions.

[Ehuehuecopter]

Thanks you League of Legend for taking our 12 year olds.

Actually the majority of vanilla fans were 12-16 so we were autistic too

[Chemii]

I'm not sure what game you guys are playing but I play everyday, if not on my main on one of four 110's and enjoy the process. The only issue I've had is not wanting to invest much time into a freshly levelled character until it has a decent amount of AK.

Other than that the game is exactly what I expect, maybe it's because I'm older and don't stress myself out about not having "X" legendary or "X" AP.

Also saying the zones are not memorable, maybe if you slowed down to look around once in a while you'd realise how great they actually are. Arguablly most players haven't actually even been to the top of Highmountain.

I did actually enjoy WoD for the first few months, after BRF it got tired very quick. So far Legion is better all round, I enjoy the dungeons, some of us enjoyed doing challenge modes and this provides a similar experience. There is still time for Legion to be poor however. Time will tell.

The problem is players are spoilt and stuff they were happy with a month ago is no longer considered quality content. By all means go play Final Fantasy or something, I'm sure we'll be here when you get back.

[Ehuehuecopter]

People need just to understand that maybe wow has changed but the players too, and maybe even more.

Just look @ the flask gate in Legion, people doesn't want to spend 3k for a flask neither farming all day for consumables for the raid

But that was they way in vanilla and tbc, remember farming searing gorge fore fire res flask or dragons breath in Felwood ?


Players now are used to play asap it's a normal change