Social Experiment and why users Quit World of Warcraft.

[tratra]

Hello all,

I'd like to give an example of how WoW has changed and as a game has less things to offer for most of us and point it out by that example.

Lets say you just found a place in NYC that has amazing food. You keep going there every now and then and you see that this place is getting better and better. Longer queues to get your food, more additions to the menu etc.
That new food place lets call it Azuregos, is reaching its peak! When you wanna go and buy food you need to wait like 2-3 hours to get your takeaway or something like that. You don't even think though of changing place cause the food that Azuregos provides you with is amazingly good and healthy.

Now lets look it from Azurego's Ceo point of view. He builded something small that would go up to the middle but he reached the TOP. The income is a lot and he is happy now that moved lets say from Brooklyn to Long Island.
There are some people called Onyxia that have only greed in their mind and they approach Azurego's Ceo Gill Bates to offer him ways to increase his income and from just a simple millioner become a multibillioner control things and have something to do in his life rather than sitting on the sofa watching Dancing with the Stars.
Now lets say he is hectic about it but he is accepting the offer to see how it goes. He still remains passionate about how people love his food and his place and generally he aint giving up on it.
At some point Onyxia finds out for Azuregos better deals on cheese and other products needed like vegettables steaks and whatever else. Gill Bates agrees with changing some of its products to get better deals but not all of them as he tries them himself (note that when he is accepting it everyone assures him that the quality is the same but in reality is slightly different).
Now Azuregos food started changing, even after a successful start and now being in the top of the top having massive income, it decided to lower the quality of its products to increase the earnings. This is happening a lot more in the future and more income comes in less quality in the food.

You that were in love with Azuregos, got dissapointed of the "small changes" in the product that made you think again and again if you would queue up to eat there. At this point azuregos is a world known food place that has millions of tourists in NYC looking for it just to get a taste.

So Azuregos keeps up making more commercial products with high profitability and less ingridients and quality that doesn't affect that much its food but still for you that you tasted the best food ever existed now thats a bit different and you can taste it, you are turned down. Azuregos keeps its spot in the top food places in the world and still receives million of customers etc with maybe losing some of its customers, but who cares it has the tourists that come and go. It's no longer dependant on the people that would eat there everyday.

I pretty much feel the same happened to WoW.

You = Player
Azuregos = Blizzard
Onyxia = Vivendi
Less quality food = Developers

If you agree, disagree or have an other point of view feel free to vote on the poll above and post a comment bellow.


A thing forgot to mention :

Well my bad there, I wanted to relate quality to commercialization of the game.

By trying to entertain a wider audience Blizzard forgot the passion their devs had about this game, and its all about finding solutions and ideas that will make the game more playable rather than enjoyable in terms of achieving greatness.

[Darsithis]

I disagree...because I don't think the quality has declined. WoW is the best it has been.

[Ägallar]

I agree in essence, but I can't say that WoW has lost quality, but rather, the passion to make a great game. From an industry perspective, WoW is a great game...it is smooth as the day is long, as far as character playability, and it has a ton of content. But...the content is all over the place, because the attempt now is to entertain a wider audience with each new feature, but that inherently makes each feature less robust and thus offer a shorter period of fun for each group. And when you have a ton of mini-games that distract from the core (raiding, questing: yes, this is a PvE game), you will not have as robust core gameplay.

TL;DR - the quality is great, but the developers are jumping the shark with new features.

[tratra]

Well my bad there, I wanted to relate quality to commercialization of the game.

By trying to entertain a wider audience Blizzard forgot the passion their devs had about this game, and its all about finding solutions and ideas that will make the game more playable rather than enjoyable in terms of achieving greatness.

[Deleted]

I disagree...because I don't think the quality has declined. WoW is the best it has been.

I do think some things aren't as good as they were before, but to be fair, us players also have changed with time. We expect a lot more than before and/or sometimes simply don't agree with the choices made by the devs. At this point, maybe it is indeed time to move on and do or play something else.

[Warlord Booty]

I "quit" and play substantially less because... well... I've been playing for like 7 years and I'm 18 now and games just don't have as big of a role in my life anymore.

In my eyes, the game hasn't changed one bit since BC. It really hasn't.

[Deleted]

You really didn't need to use names like Azuregos and Onyxia, it was really clear what you meant. Nice little tale. Basically you're saying WoW has changed so people who don't like the changes leave. Which is certainly true to some extent. Some people probably liked the game better back then and have left as a result of what the game has become now. However, how qualitative WoW is, is subjective. I think that WoW is a highly qualitative game in terms of gameplay, storytelling and art. You can see that the developers care a lot about this game.

[Ägallar]

I do think some things aren't as good as they were before, but to be fair, us players also have changed with time. We expect a lot more than before and/or sometimes simply don't agree with the choices made by the devs. At this point, maybe it is indeed time to move on and do or play something else.

I always find that rationale odd. Quit playing a game that I've loved and am passionate about? Seems silly. Why wouldn't anyone want to keep it they way they liked it, assuming they had an open mind to changes that weren't actually damaging to their play style? Just a thought.

[Mad_Murdock]

I think many users complaints are more that the game is different, and maybe less that the quality of the game is less. The best example I can think of is Comparin the battlefield series. I really loved the original Battlefield 1942, and the mod Desert Combat, it was a pretty good revamp of the first person shooter genere.
Battlefield Vietnam was OK, but didn't really capture the magic. Battlefield 2 and BF2142 were both solid games, still missing a little of that original magic.

Then they came out with BF3 and that's where I felt the game lost it's soul. Clearly they were trying to compete and attract more Call of Duty players with all the leveling and unlocks tey had added, they made the game a less tactical and more run and gun. Friendly fire on use to be standard and now you never see a FF server. The maps are smaller and is much more run and gun. No more needing to go to a control point for First aid, you just auto heal up. No need to tank jets and choppers back to the base to rearm, just fly around with unlimited ammo. BF4 has continued down the run and gun path that BF3 started.

The quality of the BF games are as high as always, but the style of gameplay has change a lot (my opinion for the worse), but the game seems to be doing better than ever. I miss the old Battlefield game and wish I could have it back, just like Vanilla players miss their game. But the game has adapted and changed to compete against other games.

[Twoflower]

Instead of filling half a page with a silly example including dragons and restaurants and whatnot. Just write "I think Vivendi influenced the creative process too much and in a bad way".

Do you absolutely want to be misunderstood ?

I did not vote cause I still try to make sense of what the original post is about.

But I gotta agree with Darsithis. The game has improved over the years, not worsened.

[Deleted]

I disagree...because I don't think the quality has declined. In my opinion, WoW is the best it has been.

Let's not speak for everyone. WoW has obviously seen better days.

[DeadmanWalking]

Yes, people who are incapable of handling change quit because they don't like changes. It has more to do with the players particular hang ups than wow. Anyone who says this isn't what wow is are incapable of intelligent thought as what one considers wow to be gets trumped by the people who actually decide what wow is.

- - - Updated - - -

Let's not speak for everyone. WoW has obviously seen better days.

Yes, obviously but it is only obvious when you are speaking for everyone... wait, didn't you say not to speak for everyone? Paradox!!!!

[Milkyz]

Let's not speak for everyone. WoW has obviously, in my opinion seen better days.

Let's not speak for everyone. Fix'd for you.

OT: In my opinion, game is much better now. People quit for various reasons.

[Tomana]

Vivendi already controlled Blizzard before WoW release. More news at 11.

[Ursiel]

The game is doing okay, I just don't like the feel of Mists very much. Doesn't feel like WoW to me. I never have liked the pandas and it's probably part of the reason I spend most of my time doing old content rather than sitting in Pandaria. I hate that entire continent and the lore behind it.

[greysaber]

I disagree...because I don't think the quality has declined. WoW is the best it has been.

pretty much this.

the quality has done nothing but go up. what people really dislike, is change. that is, until they realize they are wrong and change is usually good.

i used to be one of those people. i despised changes to wow. so much so that I quit the game for most of the last 3 years. I'm back now, accepted the changes and that things will always change, and have been having a lot of fun.

[Phuongvi]

Also Azuregos think is customer are granted
He think he can throw whatever he want in the food, no matter what, people will pay for it. Just like diluted fountain Pepsi.

Nice presentation but the food have no nutriment value.

[Faroth]

I disagree with your speculation as to the reason you perceive a lower quality to WoW. I don't think we have sub-par developers at all. We have many, MANY, of the same developers that gave us The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King still working on the game.

It's just a matter of aging and staying with the same thing for a decade. I can't subjectively say that the Amazing Spider-Man comic is as good now as it was 10 years ago, but the stories are still solid. Others that read in the 70s and 80s feel that the comic wasn't as good in the 90s when I started. Much as comic book readers grow accustomed to the tropes and lose a little of the mystery and excitement of those stories, WoW players grow accustomed to the mechanics and the "routine" of each expansion.

After 10 years, it's very difficult for the developers of WoW to keep it new, different, and fresh on the same architecture. Furthering the issue is the mass of new MMOs that are, for all effective purposes, the same game as WoW with little really new brought to the table. EQNext is the only MMO I've seen on the horizon with aspirations of taking the genre to a new level, but that's only if their tech and AI can really meet their aspirations.

WoW isn't worse today than it was in the past necessarily, it's just that it feels a little stale after a decade. As subscription numbers decline, however, and WoW settles into a comfortable, stable, population, the developers will find a good stride for the remaining players and might even start to experiment a little more with some wacky ideas, even if they only get used for one expansion (like those we've seen in Wrath and Cata, for example).

[Darsithis]

We don't all have to say "in my opinion". I wasn't speaking for everyone. I said "I disgree, because". Clearly it was my opinion.

I can argue my opinion as well. I feel WoW is in the best state it ever has been because of all the reasons I just posted in other threads:

- More convenience - closer inns, mailboxes, flightpaths, and rez points
- Easier to gear up and get into end-game. Raiding still has normal/heroic and requires a good group but you can get into it faster
- Easier to play with others. With real ID, cross-realm grouping, and cross-realm raids you've never had more ways to get to know new people or play with old friends
- Class balance & semi-homogenization. With classes sharing some key abilities, you're able to bring the player, not the class.

You get the idea.

[Deleted]

I disagree...because I don't think the quality has declined. WoW is the best it has been.

Completely agree.

I've had way, way more fun these last two years playing the game than I ever had back in 2005-2007.

I think that speaks for itself about how I find the quality of the game.