So I saw the 50 page thread about WoW' numbers dropping and Im thinking its just not related to only WoW. I think people are tired of the same old MMO theme and then you have the fact nothing halfway decent other than Rift has even been released since WoW has made a lot of people stop playing online games. Also please dont pull that crap about how D3 was the best selling PC game we all know how it turned out, and we all know there probably arent even 15% of people who bought the game still playing...and no bots dont count so actually theres probably only 5-10% of REAL people actually still playing. Im talking about amount of people STILL PLAYING not how many box copies were sold.
So you are left with WoW thats been out for 8 years now and people are tired of it. Especially since instead of increasing the game's difficulty to keep people motivated and challenged so they stay interested in the game and want to keep playing they have just dumbed it down to basically "OK I just hit max level just mail my my epics...thanks" The game has become like playing Madden and setting all your players' stats to 100. Sure you faceroll every team you play but it gets old after a while. Burnout combined with nothing else worth playing means people doing other things. D3 started out with 30-40K public games and now never more than 500 even during prime time. Also the AH is pretty much dead especially the RMAH. Have to relist items that are even a few million cheaper than something with similar stats several times just because no one is buying them even though they have good stats. My GW2 server was one of the largest and had queues for hours to do WvWvW. Now I hardly see anyone in the crafting areas or the banks in major cities and the queues are instant. SW:ToR was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread and fell flat on its face. Its like BioWare took everything that made other MMOs great and fun and said "nope not going in our game"
So are MMOs just getting more and more stale and are more people quitting them for console FPS games or games like D3, LoL, or DoTA2? Or are MMOs fine and the losses from WoW are just spread out among other MMOs like Rift and GW2 so players just switched games but are still playing MMOs.