WoW is not dying in America or the EU, it is dying in China because it is being absolutely slaughtered by free to play MMOs.
It doesn't apply to wow dude. Nobody takes wow esports seriously. Not only is it not balacned for it the market isn't their. Dota, sc2, lol may all have tournaments set up for people to stream but who the hell does that for warcraft? Not only cause it not balanced but also because nobody gives a crap about wow as an esport. Ergo hero worship in wow is such a small minority. Next to nobody cares about the worlds first and the people who do are becoming more and more marginal. Hell even exodus/vodka couldn't recruit players to make up their spots. If their were so many hero worshippers out there you figure SOME OF THEM somewhere would step up to the plate.. not so much I guess.
obviously, everyone are gonna have their own definition of casual, i like to get with this one
casual playing means you have suddenly 1 hour (or 5, doesn't matter) to kill, so you kick back and play. It wasn't planned, you need a game you can jump right in and continue what you were doing last time.
for your exemple, raiding 4-5 hours a week, if it's organized with precise schedule, every saturday night, or every tuesday night, then it is not casual, with my definition, it's dedicated raiding.
but anyway, even with what you say, isn't mop the most casual time wow, even of you consider time versus reward?
This loss is expected. The game should stick to what has worked. Nobody likes Dailies or scenarios. Not making more dungeons is really lazy. This game has been going downhill ever since WOTLK so it's not surprising at all.
Actually their has been less engagement from people who raid but that's neither here nor there. Casuals do participate in organized activities. LFD and LFR. They are technically organized, even if it's by the system. As such they want to be able to perform whatever roll they can and they naturally get advice on how to do that. Casual players use noxxic and icy veins to and if you look at how those websites are written they are written for casual players. In fact I would make the real argument that hardcores don't touch that crap and figure that shit out for themselves by doing math and all kinds of homework on their own.
---------- Post added 2013-05-09 at 01:07 AM ----------
No and it's precisely because you need to have rep to buy valor gear. And because valor gear takes forever to cap. Hell I probably can't even get into lfr in the space of an hour. 4-5 hours a week is extremely casual raiding especially since were not really tight about attendance. Our players are good about it but were not gonna kick anybody who is sick or has kids.
That's exactly why they are having the problem they're having. Customers are finally showing what they think about LFR and the queuecraft style of gameplay that the vocal minority whined for on forums. They're getting slaughtered by better games because they didn't stay true to the MMORPG genre. Now that the game is, for many players, a single player experience with queuecraft MMO elements mixed in... newly released, mind-blowing, single player console games and F2P games are kicking WoW in the teeth. WoW can't compete in that market and should never have tried. This is the result of ignoring that.
Last edited by spectrefax; 2013-05-09 at 01:10 AM.
There was a time when WoW was an e-sport though. There are also tournament realms that blizzard offers money to the winners as well. While nobody takes it seriously anymore, at one point they did. I will cave that it does not apply to WoW anymore though. But in other games, hero worship is the fundamental principle of e-sports.
Last edited by mmoc9ff7ae5337; 2013-05-09 at 01:11 AM.
...or maybe Pandaland isn't such a great expansion after all, it's just a few noisy panda fanatics promoting it. Rest of the players just go on like desert wanderers, hoping for better times to come. MoP has lots of nice landscapes, I admit, but the content feels plastic, hollow, forced out, fake, or just plain retarded (pandas) - same as Cata. Blizz needs to create next content around the remaining features of Warcraft I, II and III.
Last edited by mmocf7a456daa4; 2013-05-09 at 01:16 AM.
yes exactly what i think. i tend not to include normal or heroic raiding as casual if they are organise by guilds. normal raiding joining a pug is casual, obviously, joining a
LFR, LFD is casual too. Daily, pet battle, BG, you do whenever you want, they are fit for casual gaming*.
So less participation in casual activity, means those activity aren't attractive for the casual crowd
2 reasons have beens given here
- people don't like to pay $15 for casual activity
- to much time for a reward in those activity
Is that a consensus why casual player leave wow?
No they are absolutely organized activities. They are not say scheduled but that doesn't mean it doesn't take orginzation by the system to get them together. It doesn't mean rolls aren't required and hell even for lei shen strats are required to. They are absolutely organized just not to the degree that your normal raiding is. However even if this weren't the case it doesn't get around the fact that casuals at all levels WANT TO KNOW HOW TO PLAY. They aren't inherently born with the knowledge and the game does a poor job of teaching them so they google HOW TO PLAY FURY WARRIOR and find Noxxic or Icy Veins. Those sites are BUILT FOR casuals they aren't for hardcores who ignore them by and large and focus on their own playstyles and stats.
Now that I think about it, it's kind of strange they didn't have Blizzcon last year. Between Diablo 3 being verbally abused by a lot of old fans, WoW subs crashing, and a delay on HotS, a bit of fan service and publicity couldn't have hurt.
You're right though, the next expansion better impress. There's a lot less blind followers of Blizzard's then there was in the past.
i wouldn't be subbed without lfr/lfd
the days where i commit to a guild and keep a schedule like a job are long gone
Hm. If memory serves, at WoTLK, people were complaining at how easy the heroics was. It was an AoE fest.
So come Cata with hard heroics, ala BC style. And people complained so it was toned back down. Then people said how great vanilla was, how great TBC was, how everything took time to grind. How bad DS and FL as a raid was.
Then in MoP, we have people complain about grinds, people complain that the normal raids were over tuned.
If anything, I think GC did listen and adjusted the game. Part of the problem is the player base does not know what it wants. We just look back in the past, IMAGINING how great it was when it was not never really that great the first time.
If you ignore the expansion bumps, WoW has lost 3 millions players over 3 years, so if that trend continues the lights will be turned off in about 8 years. However in that time computers may have grown in power so a standard desktop at Blizzard HQ can keep a server going forever.