Article explaining exactly why WoW subs are going down

[Bergg]

Hey guys. Bergg here--you may remember me as the author of the Troll Regen Thread. Please check out my article, which attempts to list the specific reasons why WoW has recently lost subs. It's not an extremely serious article--I just hope that it may help some of you more easily identify what aspects of the game you may or may not like.

http://www.gatheryourparty.com/artic...what-happened/

I'd appreciate any and all criticism, as this is my first published article. --And if this is considered spam I am very very very sorry! Edit: Oh god, forgive the signature, it's more than a year old!

[Evil Inside]

TBH that just sounds like alot of nostalgia, nothing more.

[Dazzy]

They are disappointing some, but the fact is, the main and pretty much only reason they're losing subs in any substantial numbers is because the game is 7 years old.

The old players are getting bored, growing up, going to college, getting married, outgrowing it...etc.

And it's hard to attract new players to a game with an outdated engine that requires some learning curve (albeit not a great one) to be great at.


The generation coming into WoW age now is extremely lazy and ADD riddled, according to drug companies that make ADD drugs.

[Spellsword]

The generation coming into WoW age now is extremely lazy and ADD riddled, according to drug companies that make ADD drugs.

And Fox news

[Paranoid Android]

They are disappointing some, but the fact is, the main and pretty much only reason they're losing subs in any substantial numbers is because the game is 7 years old.

The old players are getting bored, growing up, going to college, getting married, outgrowing it...etc.

And it's hard to attract new players to a game with an outdated engine that requires some learning curve (albeit not a great one) to be great at.


The generation coming into WoW age now is extremely lazy and ADD riddled, according to drug companies that make ADD drugs.

Very good points and pretty much what I agree with. Started a few months into TBC and no I'm just tired of it. It seems old and honestly I could just be tired of all MMO's in general. Like you said ones that leave and to get new players they have to "tweek" the game which for tastes I do not like.

For all those who think I'm trying to slay WoW and enjoy the game, grats to you. Just my take on how Blizz is trying to keep an almost 8 year game fresh.

[Deficineiron]

I think cataclysm did a lot of different things which managed to annoy parts of most player cross-sections (not just raiders at all)

partial list (will edit when i remember more)
1) 10/25 lockout -what were they thinking? loss of raider subs has a domino effect on other areas of the game.

2) phasing - if you didn't like totally controlled questing environment, you were pretty screwed this time around. wotlk gave you a choice at 77+ - phased icecrown or storm peaks. phasing in caer darrow in classic was something that didn't lock you out of interacting with other players not phased in the area.

3) the bg queue bug. the game was released (cat) with a broken bg queue system, and very very close to zero communication from blizzard about it. You would queue random or for 2 bg's like normal, and never pop. there are screenshots of folk with hours in queue, avg time 5 min, and not poppping. the work-around was to queue for a single bg, and not random, and not 2, but blizzard never ever told you. I wasted many hours in orgr from this bug.

3a) once your queue did pop, your bg was full of pathing bots like never before, even in leveling brackets.

4) talent tree flexibility was eliminated. experimenting with different builds, different 21/31/41 point talent combos, etc., was a lot of fun. Not anymore.....

5) the reduction of leveling content to mindlessly trivial unchallenging brain-dead stuff. this is, of course, targeted at new players who quit before level 20 or whatever, but pre-2.3, leveling an alt was in itself a meta-game within wow. You would need to level at least 2-3 each faction to see all level 20+ areas and questlines, plus 1-20 to see starting areas you otherwise missed. If you screwed around and pulled too many normal mobs, death was a likely outcome. If you pulled a red mob, it was as well. If you pulled a trogg too close to other troggs, you needed to be ready to 'sir robin' out of there when he ran and got his friends. If you were physical dps and were gearing from quests and drops, you could very well reach a point your dps was so low that killing a normal mob at level used up a lot of your health, due to a lower level or white weapon being equipped. Elites killed you easily even when you were several levels above them.

Now of course, dying while leveling is hard to do unintentionally, except maybe by falling.

groups before would FAIL in instances at level if they didn't halfway have half their act together.

6) removal of flexibility on how you leveled - from january 2007 to december 2010, if you ran scholomance at level 60, you would continue to receive mob xp as per the classic mob xp formula, and would continue to until 67 or 68 when they turned grey. Scholo in particular had a very long quest chain in it that would put you in the instance many times. Players who, having experienced the joys of HFP enough to want to try soemthing different could stick around and run scholo, dire maul north, or quest in silitius, epl, winterspring, etc.

Blizzard, knowing more about how players SHOULD play than the players themselves know, reduced mob xp to 10% of normal at the content breakpoints. WTF did blizzard need to do this for? if you were able to get xp at level 60 or 70 or 80, you had obviously bought the next expansion already, so why do they need to control you so much?\ if the isssue was only the lvl 80 heroics being fastest way to 85, they could have changed the xp curve/equation for level 80 onwards.

I will add another thing tangential to this - blizzard, in its infinite wisdom, found that, after 6+ years of allowing players to purchase food and items with a higher required level than their current level, suddenly realized that this was BAD and they made it impossible, across the board. you are level 24 and want to buy level 25 food before leaving town? Nope. Level 27 and want to spend time while in queue going to ashenvale to buy the level 28 sword and ring, so you can have it ready to go when you ding? nope, you are being bad. And heaven forbid you actually want to level via bg's and be able to start pre-buying level 85 gear along the way, as you will earn 10s of thousands of honor en route.

That said, ham-fisted, disruptive solutions to fairly simple problems are common now. how about the 4.1 wsg changes, motivated by rbg's, that made far many other wsgs (normal) gy-camp events?

7) including skill-required content (heroics) in an LFD world - my only comment is imagine having needed to run bc heroics via today's lfd. it would have been impossible. can't kick, no way to control who is there, etc. Even in bc, pugging heroics often came up with folks just not up to par with what was needed to get past them. Heck, I think normal slabs and shat.halls would have been very hard via LFD. So the result is players who can do hard content are stuck wtih players who cannot or do not want to or want to troll, and they have no way to get away from them in many cases. playsers who want to do 15 minutes 'heroic' don't understand what they are looking at. players who want to troll can screw both of the above groups with impunity.

you will never see skill-required (not aoe-race) content in lfd again. I include challenge modes in this.

#) reputation= with very few exceptions, are now a matter of getting a tabard and a few hours work for exalted - this was an area where players once put extensive time and effort into getting for their own reasons.

##) archaeology - not quite sure how such a badly designed activity went live. you spend 70% of your time flying, but need to stick around to not overfly. It makes me wonder what the design team is actually thinking.

[Mormolyce]

Whoever that guy is, he doesn't know jack about the game. Does he even play?

Wait he's banging on about M'uru. Jackass probably hasn't played since BC.

Incidentally, this whole "the game used to be social before LFD" is complete BS. I remember putting together pugs for dungeons before LFD. It took forever, was a complete pain in the ass and had precisely zero social interaction. You posted "LF tank for ___" in trade and spammed away for an hour until you had a remotely viable party. Then you found out your healer was afk. Then you replaced him and went into the dungeon and found out one of your DPS was terrible and the other couldn't handle the mechanics, and your tank DCed. Back to square one.

And FYI, if you don't like LFD YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE IT! Blizzard didn't remove the ability to form pugs ffs. If you want to get together a group of friends or people in trade or whatever, that is just as easy as it always has been. And gives you a much better chance of a good run than LFD. But absolutely nobody does. Why? BECAUSE IT SUCKS AND NOBODY WANTS TO HAVE TO GO THROUGH THAT EVERY TIME THEY RUN A DUNGEON! END OF LINE!

P.S. Subs are dropping because the game is 7 years old. How is that hard to understand? Name another subscription MMO that continued to increase in subs after being around 7 years. Hell name another subscription MMO that EXISTS after 7 years.

Keep things civil, please

[ironmike666]

Hey guys. Bergg here--you may remember me as the author of the Troll Regen Thread. Please check out my article, which attempts to list the specific reasons why WoW has recently lost subs. It's not an extremely serious article--I just hope that it may help some of you more easily identify what aspects of the game you may or may not like.

http://www.gatheryourparty.com/artic...what-happened/

i agree with him at 100%

[Scream And Fly]

Everyone hated M’uru. I hated M’uru. But it was the fear that made me shake in my seat every time we almost killed it, and it was the hate that made me spontaneously ejaculate when it died at our feet.

This guy needs a dose of the outside world. Really.
On a more serious note, it does seem like mostly nostalgia to me. Remember that WoW was at its peak during Wrath, which coincidentally, contained most of what the author is complaining about.

[Count Zero]

Should be "article giving an opinion on why WoW subs are going down"

[Byniri]

That article was stupid. In a nutshell it was "Things were harder years ago, people quit cause casuals could raid, vanilla/BC was so friendly and social and fun, etc".

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

They are disappointing some, but the fact is, the main and pretty much only reason they're losing subs in any substantial numbers is because the game is 7 years old.

The old players are getting bored, growing up, going to college, getting married, outgrowing it...etc.

And it's hard to attract new players to a game with an outdated engine that requires some learning curve (albeit not a great one) to be great at.


The generation coming into WoW age now is extremely lazy and ADD riddled, according to drug companies that make ADD drugs.

I blame CoD. I have no facts to back me up, I just have a gut feeling CoD is to blame.


I have just used as much logic as most "this is why subs are down" threads use.

[Traknel]

Really not seeing how this "article" is any different than the hundreds of other "Waah, I'm not a special snowflake any more" threads that get posted daily on virtually every WoW forum there is.

[Anevers]

You do understand that Ony's second appearance in Wrath was not officially apart of the expansion? They revamped her as a bonus for their Anniversary and nothing more? A way for them to do something nice. Lore wise you only killed her once, actually Wrynn killed her. This was simply something that people wanted to experience again and Blizzard was nice enough to redo for us. Sad to say people cannot comprehend the fact it was an extra and complain about her reappearance.

Also Blizzcon was cancelled not because of any decline, their explanation was with 3 games launching(Heart of the Swarm, MoP, and Diablo 3) it would be more cost and time effective to concentrate on getting those games out the door rather than hold a convention with relative little news to speak of.

[Tehterokkar]

Whoever that guy is, he doesn't know jack about the game. Does he even play?

Wait he's banging on about M'uru. Jackass probably hasn't played since BC.

Incidentally, this whole "the game used to be social before LFD" is complete BS. I remember putting together pugs for dungeons before LFD. It took forever, was a complete pain in the ass and had precisely zero social interaction. You posted "LF tank for ___" in trade and spammed away for an hour until you had a remotely viable party. Then you found out your healer was afk. Then you replaced him and went into the dungeon and found out one of your DPS was terrible and the other couldn't handle the mechanics, and your tank DCed. Back to square one.

And FYI, if you don't like LFD YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE IT! Blizzard didn't remove the ability to form pugs ffs. If you want to get together a group of friends or people in trade or whatever, that is just as easy as it always has been. And gives you a much better chance of a good run than LFD. But absolutely nobody does. Why? BECAUSE IT SUCKS AND NOBODY WANTS TO HAVE TO GO THROUGH THAT EVERY TIME THEY RUN A DUNGEON! END OF LINE!

P.S. Subs are dropping because the game is 7 years old. How is that hard to understand? Name another subscription MMO that continued to increase in subs after being around 7 years. Hell name another subscription MMO that EXISTS after 7 years.

Keep things civil, please

Oh the memories ... I remember that, and hated it. It was such a pain to try to find a group as DPS. LFD > /2 pugging

[Byniri]

Oh the memories ... I remember that, and hated it. It was such a pain to try to find a group as DPS. LFD > /2 pugging

I remember doing this on the PTR for 4.3.

LFD was down so I spent a similar experience in trade chat. Spent 30 mins looking for a group, healer DC's when we reach the instance. I hearth, find another one, get summoned back, and the tank leaves group. Rinse and repeat, find another tank. Another 20 minutes wasted.

That's why I like LFD so much, even with its flaws. I still want a realm-only option for it though.

[fogel]

They are disappointing some, but the fact is, the main and pretty much only reason they're losing subs in any substantial numbers is because the game is 7 years old.

The old players are getting bored, growing up, going to college, getting married, outgrowing it...etc.

And it's hard to attract new players to a game with an outdated engine that requires some learning curve (albeit not a great one) to be great at.


The generation coming into WoW age now is extremely lazy and ADD riddled, according to drug companies that make ADD drugs.

When I am at parties I used to like at the age of 16, I sometimes think "MAN! Those parties rocked 15 years ago! Now they just suck. 16 year olds everywhere!" :P

I used to be hardcore, now I am the world's best casual gamer! (jk). Everyone changes.

"Casualisation" is in my opinion not really a bad thing. For example, the "ultimate" casual game - Angry Birds:

Angry Birds Space hit 50 Million Downloads 35 days after release.

There is no single explanation why WoW is on the decline sub-wise. There are tons of different reasons. Most of them involve "I don't like it any more", most of them are claiming "WoW sucks".

[Gsara]

What's funny is, casual is the direction that all games like WoW are going to be. There isnt one game thats came out in the last 4 or so years or is coming out this year that isnt designed overall for the casual player. Casual does not mean bad player either, it basically means, people dont want to fuck off 6 or 7 hours a day to get any where in a game. The days of long grinds are over, the gaming community has made this loud and clear to all developers making mmos these days.

I also disagree with LFD/LFR making the game bad, its a feature that the majority love not hate. I mean look at the stance with other companies saying"no lfd" and now they have it also, or are putting it in their game. I do very much miss the good ol days of vanilla, no not BC, vanilla where server rep mattered. I never waited to get parties for more than a couple of minutes myself, but the large majority of the player base did wait. Now they dont have to wait like that anymore and I think the majority will tell you or anyone that disagrees, that they want the feature. Just look at swotor and how they handled it. Random queuing is here to stay for gaming. Not all games mind you, but any that expect to see sub results within the mmo market.

[tennesseej]

While I agree with some of the things you said, I actually have an interesting perspective on it. Back when I was in college, I had pretty much all these opinions. I didn't understand people who didn't use DBM or BigWhigs, I cringed at n00bs who didn't research their optimal rotation, and I thought that everyone eventually downed all the content.

Then I got a job in the professional world, and found out that a bunch of my coworkers play WoW, how awesome was that!

The only problem, they were complete "n00bs". They were great people, but they had families and commitments, they could only play 2-3 hours a week. So that meant dungeon runs, alts, simple stuff. The more I learned about it, the more I realized that these players actual make up a much larger part of the community than we (on mmo-champ) realize. If you look at the number of players that have killed Deathwing on normal, and the number of max level players in the game, it's quite impressive (don't quote me, but if I remember right it is less than 10%). Granted many of those characters are alts and stuff, but still.

I can see why Blizzard is taking steps to ensure their content is seen by everyone. They spend a lot of work/time making a raid, why do that so that less than 10% of players can see it?

I think there needs to be reward/recognition for doing it pre-nerf, but I agree with the nerfing. It allows players to progress if they are stuck, and what is wrong with that? But again, there should be some cool title/mount/coloring on gear/something that shows you did it pre-nerf.


There are some stories from old WoW that sound awesome, but most just sound like there was a lot of time sitting around waiting for people. Hopefully in the future, WoW gets to the point that there are things that encourage some of the awesome "world" things from old WoW, but doesn't bring back the ridiculous amount of down time trying to find a group or grinding.

[candle86]

I started in TBC, I don't 100% disagree, trolls and lazy people in LFD do annoy me, but I also don't miss spaming Westfall general chat "LFG Deadmines" or LFM Deadmines PST