Any Chance of Blizzard fixing WoW

[leaks]

You've offended casual players greatly. They clutch their free epics close.

Prepare for Blizzard's white knight brigade!

More idiotic posts of "challenge is still there!" and "only 0.00001% players EVERINTHEHISTORYOFWOW ever saw raids when they were hard! huh? people are running them for transmog gear now? INVALID!"

You forgot to throw a "fanboi" into your rant.

[ManOluck]

Just because people are running LFR isn't because it is fun or engaging. It is because it is the only means to realisticly progress your character if you are not in a normal/hardmode guild. In vanilla wow people had all sorts of means to progress there characters because items actually felt powerful when you obtained them, even from a dungeon. Casual players could, for example, upgrade the dungeon sets to epic quality with long/intense quest chains that gave people something to do and wasn't drool on your keyboard content like LFR.

The world felt larger because flying mounts and rediculas amounts of portals to every location didn't exist giving people a reason to go out into the world. Dungeons were long crawls that many enjoyed as it made there accomplishments seem even sweeter when they obtained them (Blue gear from dungeons felt alot more epic then LFR gear even if they were blue in color but not in spirit). Some people may not like attunements but at least the developers were trying to engage the player in exploring the world with non linear questing, as opposed to the on rails questing that we have now.

The game was based more on the world experience and RPG elements of building a character (talent points) then looking for that quick fix from a gear slot machine that is LFR.

The game today is a game of menu's and repeating the same content over and over with little sense of progression where as in Vanilla and BC everyone felt liek they were progressing at there own pace regardless of who saw the content right when it was release (if someone hasnt seen content just because it wasnt new when they cleared it doesnt make it any less new for the player). All groups of people could run something that was tailored to them that wasn't stream lined like LFR. Heroic Dungeons , Tier 0.5, long dungeon Crawls, Karazhan for the friend/family guilds , SSC for the more hardcore etc etc.

Now the game has de-evolved from a classic RPG dungeon crawl/build your character/explore the world , to sit in town, open a menu and queue for content or run 4 different difficulties of the EXACT SAME RAID TIER causing burning out. This is what happens when you create fast food consumed type content.

The RPG aspect of progression in this game is Dead. Enjoy your boring epic saturated content that gives no sense of accomplish to the majority of the player base.

Blizzard has confused players with limited time to play with being inherently bad and thus giving them boring content akin to LFR.

Would Zelda as fun if he could kill Ganon by avoiding to hunting for pieces of the mastersword by simply farming valor for a few weeks and buying it from a merchant? People want a journey when obtaining gear and progressing there character and the current model rapes players of that experience.

[TheWerebison]

It blows me away that someone can honestly look at the last two quarters of several million sub losses and say "it is what it is". Do you really think that is Activision-Blizzard's mentality?

Losing almost a quarter of your entire playerbase in a matter of months is not a positive symbol, its a sign of major problems and a need to make changes. Yes they have competition, and guess what they always have, its not a new development.

Forgetting all the hardcore/casual garbage, WoWs problem is right before our eyes and its pretty simple: its not a fun game anymore. It can tout all the "polish" and "multi-faceted features" it wants, but the game has lost its addicting fun factor that made it legendary. There is so little reward to playing the game anymore, there is so little thrill or excitement anywhere in the world, particularly for the 99% who will not do heroic content.

Remember that amazing feeling you got when you finally got your first mount at level 40? Remember how awesome it feel to gallop around at 60% speed after walking for so long? That is what the game is missing now. Those little rewards and milestones that give you meaningful, exciting reward as your character progresses. How many newer players even know what that feeling is? How important is that feeling to retaining subs long term and generating loyal fans?

You don't create a rabid fan base by having your players run around doing monotonous, repetitive tasks. You create it by allowing the game to give them a emotional response that hooks them. Excitement, fear, conquest...it just doesn't exist often enough in the game anymore.

I'm sorry, I've been playing WoW for ages, and I gotta say...I never felt fear or conquest.

Here's the thing. It IS still a fun game. See what I did there? I voiced my opinion. I still have fun with it. You do not. That does not mean it is not a fun game.

Now, you talk of Blizzard having competition since the beginning. This is true. However, WoW was the fresh, new thing. AND...it was already more accessible than all the other MMORPG's out there. Can you imagine? The game you claim is getting worse because it is becoming more accessible was actually more popular partially because of its accessibility!

Many years pass. WoW is no longer the new kid. There are many MMO's that have come out trying to replace WoW, or feed off their success, while adding in some new, although not altogether original, ideas. And despite their efforts, none of them has even come CLOSE to what WoW had achieved. None. COMBINING the playerbase of most of those MMO's barely hits upon the popularity of this ONE.

WoW is getting older. There are new things coming out. Blizzard has actually been changing things and adding new things and polishing what was already there, and generally making everything better. It's been out a long time, though. And as it has aged, so have we. It is no longer going to feel as awesome getting on your mount for the first time because you've already done it before, and because you are older. And who are you to say how new people feel? I believe that can only be determined by the new person.

I gotta tell you, I cackled like a mad scientist when I got my thunderforged normal mode Durumu bow to drop. The game still feels awesome to me. Christ, I'm eagerly awaiting 5.4 so I can make a Sky Golem. I just spent a few hours flying around Pandaria doing archaeology achievements and trying to level up some good pets to use against that goddamn monkey from the Darkmoon Faire daily pet battle. Just because YOU do not like what the game currently is, doesn't mean it is broken, and that is a FACT you need to accept. It has changed, and, in my opinion, is better than it ever was, in storytelling, in lore, in endgame content, in things to effing do.

The threads like this that pop up are idiotic. I'm severely saddened by the knowledge that when Blizzard finally does stop making content for WoW, and the sub numbers drop really low, people will cheer about the fall of the king. That's what these threads are: it's people who stopped having fun gradually watching WoW get older and die so that they can dance on its grave. Never mind the large amount of people who still enjoy it. Screw them. They hate the change, they hate Blizzard not doing what THEY want them to do, and they enjoy watching sub numbers drop, and they have the audacity to claim it's because it's broken. Blind. But hey...I guess everybody's gotta have a hobby.

[Jtbrig7390]

Offtopic: I have 6 tabs open on MMOC of threads I am fallowing and this one keeps making my avast go off and say It blocked a miss Malicious URL blocked

Infection Details

URL: http://inanage.files.wordpress.com/2011/...
Process: C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\App...
Infection: URL:Mal

I got around 30 Chrome tabs and its only this one doing it so is anyone else getting this?

Edit: Ok now its not doing it and the only thing that has changed is the big ass image that Aquamonkey posted I can see now before I couldn't see it on page 7 or 8 Not saying the two things are related.

[Ielenia]

As of late, it would seem to be Blizzard's belief that the way to solve their declining sub crisis is to 'casualize' the game more and make it more 'accessible". Is there any chance in your mind that they could make a reversal?

Clarification: This is not a threae about casualization destroying the game; its about if you think they could fix it.

Paradox much? Your 'clarification' says it's not a thread about 'casualization' destroying the game, yet your very first line makes us understand that making the game more 'casual' and 'accessible' is detrimental to your tastes, therefore, 'destroying the game'.

[Aquamonkey]

Paradox much? Your 'clarification' says it's not a thread about 'casualization' destroying the game, yet your very first line makes us understand that making the game more 'casual' and 'accessible' is detrimental to your tastes, therefore, 'destroying the game'.

There is no paradox. He said those things are Blizzard's solution to the sub loss. He didn't say they caused the sub loss. Then asks if people think Blizzard can fix the sub loss.

[Norjak]

WoW's beyond fixing...

this......

Don't post "this" posts

[lunchbox2042]

The problem is by making content more accessible, people finish it and unsub faster.

[brunnor]

I'm sorry, I've been playing WoW for ages, and I gotta say...I never felt fear or conquest.

Here's the thing. It IS still a fun game. See what I did there? I voiced my opinion. I still have fun with it. You do not. That does not mean it is not a fun game.

Now, you talk of Blizzard having competition since the beginning. This is true. However, WoW was the fresh, new thing. AND...it was already more accessible than all the other MMORPG's out there. Can you imagine? The game you claim is getting worse because it is becoming more accessible was actually more popular partially because of its accessibility!

There is such thing as TOO much accessibility. If everyone has everything, there losses a lot of value in replay ability. If there is nothing new and different, you can't hold attention for long. While I understand that raids were, at a time, very limited, that doesn't mean we have to go 100% the opposite direction. There is a nice middle in there that needs to be worked towards.

[Zenny]

There is such thing as TOO much accessibility. If everyone has everything, there losses a lot of value in replay ability. If there is nothing new and different, you can't hold attention for long. While I understand that raids were, at a time, very limited, that doesn't mean we have to go 100% the opposite direction. There is a nice middle in there that needs to be worked towards.

This is true, however WoW does not currently have this mentality.

[Jtbrig7390]

There is such thing as TOO much accessibility. If everyone has everything, there losses a lot of value in replay ability. If there is nothing new and different, you can't hold attention for long. While I understand that raids were, at a time, very limited, that doesn't mean we have to go 100% the opposite direction. There is a nice middle in there that needs to be worked towards.

Everyone dose not have everything. The only difference now and a few years ago is that everyone can see endgame and see the ending.

If you want a full heroic clear you ether got to work for it or pay for it.
If you want the current Xpac/Tier raid mounts you have to work for it or pay for it.
If you want to clear brawler's guild you have to do at lease normal mode raiding to have the gear for it.

The only thing that is now easy'er to do is Level up and kill the endgame boss. Now here is the kicker the current player base dose not have the mind set as the player base in TBC. They do not want to spend tons of hr's to do all of that therefor they are happy with just doing LFR and messing around after. There is many reasons why people don't want to as well so to calm its just one reason is foolish.

Want to know what the most major change is with wow its the community. A huge chuck of the wow community is full of nothing but assholes and trolls who think its funny to act the way they do and they treat anyone new like a plague and people don't want to spend 15$ a month to deal with assholes so they find some other place to go.

Ya Vanilla and TBC did have a more close nick community but that was because back then both the community and blizzard enforced the rules and people did not want to be banned or black listed. Now nether enforce's the rules if "Joe Blow" did a ICC run and the mount drops and he ninja's it and then I go to trade chat ill just get trolled by trade and if I report him to blizzard they just say they can't do anything about it.

Anyone remember back in Vanilla and TBC there was a RP name rule and well sometime in wrath blizzard stopped enforcing it. Now we get players named Ifukurmom and stupid shit like that.

There is many reasons why wow is losing subs and whether or not people realize it the community is a big reason why. Go play SWTOR/GW2/Rift ask a few questions in trade "or a chat like it" for help and then come back and ask in trade chat you will see a major ass difference. Now I am not saying SWTOR/GW2/Rift dose not have trolls but they got it far less then what wow has.

Hell for me personally the way the community acted was one of the main reasons why I left wow.Personally I liked LFR but it also proved put a bunch of people in one spot with no rules they will become assholes. Sometimes playing a MMO with less people "for example 100k player base" is better then one with millions.

Rift has dam near every single LFG system WOW has and yet each time I have did a dungeon on there if we wiped once there was no one bitching. Hell the other day I did a dungeon and we wiped a few times and joked around about it. It was the most fun I had in a 5man dungeon in quite sometime.

/My 2 Cents and My Opinion.

[mrinvisable2]

They must expand lore with warcraft 4 and continue expansions acording to that thats why until wotlik was sub increase.

and ofcorse now there are more options to play. wow is dominant still, but now there is options of diferent type of mmos and chose your favorite .

[roahn the warlock]

yeah let´s listen to the minority of the gamers, that´s how business works...
could you be a little more specific to what you mean? there´s plenty of challenging content

^ I never understand this notion. I don't care one way or another.. but Wow had a very large playerbase through TBC. Blizzard traded that player base away for a bigger casual playerbase.. However, as we can see, that playerbase isn't exactly solid is it.. The current playerbase is very liquid, it rises and falls more than the US economy. To say that everything above casual is the minority is to say the entire playerbase of TBC is a minority.

Yes, hardcores might be a minority, but there is a large playerbase of.. normal players, normal players are not casual. They are what some call Semi-hardcore.

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Typical Blizzard drone right here. Did anyone say anything about HC raids? How they are easy? No?

Just a hint. 5% of a game's content being challenging doesn't equal to the whole game being challenging.The problem is that most people didn't even raid, and ever since WotlK Blizzard is behaving like raiding content is the only thing that matters. Like they have to force everyone into them. Some people actually enjoyed leveling and slowly going through the world and doing 5-mans where you could wipe and had to use cc. Some people were happy with 2 epics from heroics in TBC. But apparently everyone needs to raid so Blizzard trivialized everything except some hardcore raid mode. They made the talent tree straightforward, and flashy lights tell me which spell i need to click now on my warlock and even nerfed all outdoor mobs(and still some people say the game hasn't been dumbed down). Now the whiners for free epics got their way, the hardcore crowd still has heroics, but the one who got hurt were the true casuals.

Being bad and not dedicated to a game does not equal to being casual. When the whole game becomes trivialized to the point where thinking is not required, where you get rewarded for not trying and sitting in the capital, people get bored and stop paying for something trivial.

YES, THIS .

[MoanaLisa]

It blows me away that someone can honestly look at the last two quarters of several million sub losses and say "it is what it is". Do you really think that is Activision-Blizzard's mentality?

Here's what 'it is what it is' means:

1. Lore: Most people have an idea of what the story is, who the main characters are and how things more or less fit together. Blizzard gets beat up if they introduce a lot of new story at once (MoP for one example...pieces of BC for another, particularly Draenei) or called lazy and boring if they follow the tried and true that they've done for 15 years now including the RTS games. Telling the same story over that many years with all of the contradictions, etc. that they've introduced is not conducive to great plotting. MMO's are possibly the worst vehicle I can think of for telling a story over a long period of time. Some plot element is introduced and the story stays exactly where it is until the next patch comes along months later. PTR's expose most of the new story-telling elements for a patch so that we know pretty much exactly what's going to happen before the patch ever releases, with videos no less. There's no possible way that I can think of to introduce some shocking new plot twist in a way that will surprise anyone. This has been true now for years. So no real change there and it's unlikely that will ever change.

2. Game: Quests, raids, dungeons, PVP and variations on those themes for the most part. Character classes that continue to grow and become more unmanageable vis a vis one another for purposes of balance with each new one added. Pet battles were a nice addition but I don't think that anyone is seriously suggesing that mini-games are enough to turn things around. New character models will be nice but they aren't going to suddenly make the game totally different either. Better to look at maybe but the actual mechanics of gameplay won't be much affected. As an aside, they did pretty well creating a rabid fan base in the beginning by having players run around doing monotonous, repetitive tasks. You can do that when a game is new but it's a problem after eight years. What would you suggest as an alternative specifically?

3. Gameplay: Smooth, responsive, some of the best in the industry. I'm not sure I want any of that to change.

4. Art, graphics and aesthetics: There won't be any radical changes for this for both technical, aesthetic and business reasons. Blizzard has enjoyed a lot of success because the game runs tolerably well on a lot of old hardware. The aesthetic of the game is well-developed, internally consistent and one of the better things overall about the experience. Graphics are a bit subpar but bringing them up to current standards or better will affect the aesthetic in ways that can't be predicted, make the game slower for a lot of people and likely cause a lot of unintended consequences.

That's a short list that covers most of the primary building blocks of the game that Blizzard can control. None of them are overly likely to change much.

Your own expectation seems to be that after playing the game for a number of years it should still retain its ability to shock, surprise and amaze you. That's unrealistic. Familiarity breeds contempt. It's a cliche but there's an element of truth to it.

My own view is that the game, for all of its shortcomings, is engaging and a lot of fun. The problems with the game lie more with the problems attracting new players to a game that's now nearly a decade old, working off of an IP that is older than most of the 14-year olds that now might wish to sign up. P2P MMO's are now no longer the new hot thing; they haven't been for quite some time. The P2P MMO market is pretty much totally destroyed outside of the players that Blizzard has managed to retain thus far. The very idea that you have to buy a game, then pay for it every month is now pretty much sent to the dustbin of history. Inertia will carry things along for a while but most of the new competition will likely look better and be available for less personal monetary investment.

The TLDR for all of this is exactly where we started: WoW is what it is. It's not likely to change so radically that it will appear to you or anyone else as a totally new and different experience any time in the future. If you think you know precisely what the problem is, don't bother with generalities about 'engaging gameplay'...tell us all how to fix the game and keep it a viable, commercial property.

WoW will eventually go F2P and probably sooner than people imagine. At that point a lot of new and old players will return and we can only hope that the things that Blizzard is doing right now: CRZ, Virtual Realms, experimenting with how cash shops should work, and a lot of other things will be ready for that. I fully believe that while Blizzard is in no hurry to take WoW to F2P and will fight it off as long as they can, they know it will happen and with it the likelihood of many millions of people worldwide giving it a look. They are laying the foundations and framework for it now. Let's hope that they and us are ready when that day rolls around.

Sorry for the length but it's a complicated subject.

[roahn the warlock]

Snip

Good post, one problem. I really don't see how a game that is f2p will ever have the ammount of fair and balanced content P2P games have. I mean say I played Gw2 and alloted myself 15 dollars a month, I would get less stuff than Wow.. I think, maybe I'm wrong

[brunnor]

Everyone dose not have everything. The only difference now and a few years ago is that everyone can see endgame and see the ending.

If you want a full heroic clear you ether got to work for it or pay for it.
If you want the current Xpac/Tier raid mounts you have to work for it or pay for it.
If you want to clear brawler's guild you have to do at lease normal mode raiding to have the gear for it.

The only thing that is now easy'er to do is Level up and kill the endgame boss. Now here is the kicker the current player base dose not have the mind set as the player base in TBC. They do not want to spend tons of hr's to do all of that therefor they are happy with just doing LFR and messing around after. There is many reasons why people don't want to as well so to calm its just one reason is foolish.

Want to know what the most major change is with wow its the community. A huge chuck of the wow community is full of nothing but assholes and trolls who think its funny to act the way they do and they treat anyone new like a plague and people don't want to spend 15$ a month to deal with assholes so they find some other place to go.

Ya Vanilla and TBC did have a more close nick community but that was because back then both the community and blizzard enforced the rules and people did not want to be banned or black listed. Now nether enforce's the rules if "Joe Blow" did a ICC run and the mount drops and he ninja's it and then I go to trade chat ill just get trolled by trade and if I report him to blizzard they just say they can't do anything about it.

Anyone remember back in Vanilla and TBC there was a RP name rule and well sometime in wrath blizzard stopped enforcing it. Now we get players named Ifukurmom and stupid shit like that.

There is many reasons why wow is losing subs and whether or not people realize it the community is a big reason why. Go play SWTOR/GW2/Rift ask a few questions in trade "or a chat like it" for help and then come back and ask in trade chat you will see a major ass difference. Now I am not saying SWTOR/GW2/Rift dose not have trolls but they got it far less then what wow has.

Hell for me personally the way the community acted was one of the main reasons why I left wow.Personally I liked LFR but it also proved put a bunch of people in one spot with no rules they will become assholes. Sometimes playing a MMO with less people "for example 100k player base" is better then one with millions.

Rift has dam near every single LFG system WOW has and yet each time I have did a dungeon on there if we wiped once there was no one bitching. Hell the other day I did a dungeon and we wiped a few times and joked around about it. It was the most fun I had in a 5man dungeon in quite sometime.

/My 2 Cents and My Opinion.

But what you, and others, are missing is that seeing all the raid content and the ending IS the everything for most people. Majority of player base doesn't care what color their items are or if they say "heroic" or "thunderforged" by them. They don't care if Lei Shen LFR has less hp than heroic does. They don't care that you can upgrade gear because there isn't a need to do so for them. Hell, I bet a lot don't even care about ToT or any of T14 or any other raid. Once they've "been there" they don't need or want to go back.

WoW's sub loss has almost nothing to do with raiding. Blizzard seems hell bent on trying to shove everyone in to raiding when lots don't care. While doing so they are hurting raiding as whole. I don't think making raiding how it was back in the day will solve sub issues in the least. I do think that it will make raiding actually "good" again. That will help some sub issues but not the masses we see leaving. Those masses are due to being "done" with the game.

I do agree community problems are aiding in the losses Blizzard is facing. There is no way back from where they are at though. If Blizzard shut down server transfers and such, people would riot. The best thing Blizzard can do it shut down the cross realm stuff that makes it possible to be a douche and get away with it. That mean's the LFR/LFD/CRZ. While most people would love CRZ gone, the other two people cry over all the time. To fix WoW's community, it needs to be held accountable for its actions. To do so, people need to know who they are in a group with. That way those types can be avoided and blacklisted to the point where they either have to shape up, leave server or quit. All those options are acceptable to the general player base.

The cost of all of this is something a vast majority doesn't seem willing to give up. So in the end, while LFR, LFD, and CRZ might do good things at times for you, as a whole, they are hurting things worse than that. That being said, none of you seem willing to give it up, so we are stuck in a cycle where people see how to fix it, people don't want to give up what they have, so nothing gets fixed.

While most people will come to my posts, as usual, and call me some kind of elitist asshole who wants to be special etc etc, while all of that may or may not be true, does any of that take away from points I make? I can be the biggest elitist asshole ever and it shouldn't matter if my argument is thought out and logical.

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This is true, however WoW does not currently have this mentality.

How does it not? I explained some in my post about this so feel free to read it and let me know what you think.

[Jtbrig7390]

WoW will eventually go F2P and probably sooner than people imagine. At that point a lot of new and old players will return and we can only hope that the things that Blizzard is doing right now: CRZ, Virtual Realms, experimenting with how cash shops should work, and a lot of other things will be ready for that. I fully believe that while Blizzard is in no hurry to take WoW to F2P and will fight it off as long as they can, they know it will happen and with it the likelihood of many millions of people worldwide giving it a look. They are laying the foundations and framework for it now. Let's hope that they and us are ready when that day rolls around.

Sorry for the length but it's a complicated subject.

Funny you bring this up because the other night me and a friend was talking and he said he did not like WOW at all. He told me he played it for a couple levels and what turned him off was how the game look. I told him that if WOW was to ever go f2p I would come back and play the hell out of it. Right after I said that he said if it did go F2p "Rift Style" he would also pick it up again and give it a shot.

For a lot of people the price tag and the graphic's mite be a major turn off even more so since it seems this generation of gamer wants the game to look like real life and therefor WOW is a turn off for them but if something is free people will try it and that works with everything.

He isn't one of those types of people its just WOW's art style turned him off from it and in a way I can see why it dose turn people off even tho I like it.

[MoanaLisa]

Good post, one problem. I really don't see how a game that is f2p will ever have the ammount of fair and balanced content P2P games have. I mean say I played Gw2 and alloted myself 15 dollars a month, I would get less stuff than Wow.. I think, maybe I'm wrong

Thanks. As long as there are new social MMO's releasing at the rate of 3-5 a year, I don't know that it matters. I play lots of games and am looking to add on a few more. Players will simply bounce back and forth between one game or another as new stuff emerges I suppose. I do believe that the game industry has finally gotten the idea out of their head that just imitating the MMO mechanics that Blizzard has established is the way to riches and prosperity although it took them long enough to see the handwriting on the wall.

Sitting and staying with one game all of the time for years is highly overrated in my opinion. Truly my opinion though. Blizzard was incredibly lucky with WoW. That luck was more or less bound to run out while smaller and somewhat more agile game design houses tried to think up ways to counter it. No one game has managed it but I think the emergence of F2P as a major force represented by games like Rift, SW:TOR (even with it's terrible F2P system), Firefall and others. I'm pretty sure that someone at Elder Scrolls: Online has a career call to make soon.

Effectively at this point there's really only one really important and influential P2P game: WoW.

[Jtbrig7390]

--snip--

The thing is lets do say blizzard took away CRZ/LFG/LFR it would not go back to the way wow was in TBC where people was scared to be assholes.

All that would happen is tons more guilds would pop up and would group all of the assholes together and nothing would get changed. The damage is done but games like Rift/SWTOR do show that a LFG system will work within a game as I already stated in my personal opinion the community in both is 100% more helpful/nice and all around better then WOW's because people have decided in WOW its cool to troll its cool to be a asshole as long as it gets you ahead of everyone else.

Once blizzard stopped enforcing there rules the way they use to and then add LFG/LFR they made a wound that can't heal. As I said many people are leaving for many reasons and I bet one of them near the top of the list is the way the community is. I personally think that people being able to see endgame has little to do with subs dropping in EU/US because once they do get to hit that endgame and finish it they got time to do other things wow has to offer like pet battles doing old content and making a new toon.

As I said from personally experience I think one of the major things making subs bleed a bit in the EU/US is because of how the community treats people if they mess up 1 time and how they treat new player's.

Like I said in my last post go on Rift and ask some questions about how to build a toon or where the crafting person is and you will 9 times out of 10 get a answer. Ask the same question in WOW and trade will light up with "Your a fucken noob go google it ect..."

That's how I feel about it anyway.

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Thanks. As long as there are new social MMO's releasing at the rate of 3-5 a year, I don't know that it matters. I play lots of games and am looking to add on a few more. Players will simply bounce back and forth between one game or another as new stuff emerges I suppose. I do believe that the game industry has finally gotten the idea out of their head that just imitating the MMO mechanics that Blizzard has established is the way to riches and prosperity although it took them long enough to see the handwriting on the wall.

Sitting and staying with one game all of the time for years is highly overrated in my opinion. Truly my opinion though. Blizzard was incredibly lucky with WoW. That luck was more or less bound to run out while smaller and somewhat more agile game design houses tried to think up ways to counter it. No one game has managed it but I think the emergence of F2P as a major force represented by games like Rift, SW:TOR (even with it's terrible F2P system), Firefall and others. I'm pretty sure that someone at Elder Scrolls: Online has a career call to make soon.

Effectively at this point there's really only one really important and influential P2P game: WoW.

Don't take this as a way of me saying wow is dieing or WOW killer or anything like that.

But in my personal opinion I have always said it will not be 1 MMO that will Hurt "Kill" wow It will be all of them plus having to pay 15$ a month. Unlike 2004 and 2008 Player's now have a HUGE amount of choice's.

Ever want to play a game that has a everquest look but not the grind go to rift.
Ever want to play in the Star Wars Universe play SWTOR.
No longer like Hot Key MMO's play NW/GW2/Terra ect...

Blizzar did hit the sweet spot in the time frame they released wow and I personally feel if it was 1 year later it would have never reached the amount of subs it did.

With the amount of B2p/F2p MMO's out there I personally see no reason to pay monthly for one when I can get just as much fun/content as WOW delivers in ether Quality or Quantity but that is one of my reasons why I left WOW.

Each person has there own reason but I feel how the community has turned out play's a big role in it.

[MoanaLisa]

Once blizzard stopped enforcing there rules the way they use to and then add LFG/LFR they made a wound that can't heal. As I said many people are leaving for many reasons and I bet one of them near the top of the list is the way the community is.

You're right I think. I've been saying for a few years now--pretty much since the very end of Wrath--that the most dangerous thing in the game for Blizzard was the cancer that eats away at their subscribers is the bad apples in the community and Blizzard's apparent reluctance to really do anything about it. I can sympathize with their position in one way though: I personally wouldn't have a clue as to how to cut those people out of a herd numbering many millions. But community self-policing only goes so far and after a number of attempts to do the right thing to no visible effect, people will simply say 'Fuck it', turn off trade and move on.

It's a very bad thing and while Blizzard makes nice noises about it from time to time, actions speak louder than words and there's little in the way of visible action.

One of the problems is that Blizzard is running stuff like this in the same way they always have. 2013 is not 2006/2007 and not changing with the times in this respect is killing them.