who searched wow tho when they already play it?
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
@foofoocuddlypoopz @OreoLover @Daemos daemonium
Ok maybe after seeing the results for "facebook" i agree that the decline is bound to happen
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...all&q=Facebook
so got any thing to back up the increase in que times? seems about the same as always to me.
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id guess less tech savy people use facebook (old people and the like) so they google it more instead of saving it. i know i have mmoc saved to both my phone and comp and i never google wow or wowhead.
WoW has become more and more accessible and "guided" within the game itself; additionally, resources for it like wowhead have their own very powerful search tools that I typically utilize over Google nowdays.
Why would anyone google something about WoW? MMO-C and wowhead are there.
They always told me I would miss my family... but I never miss from close range.
I think the OP's point might not be so good for indicating current playerbase, but it *is* good for indicating player growth. Obviously, long-term players don't search for this stuff anymore because it's all pinned or known by memory. But any influx of *new* players (not returning players) would show a bump in searching for many simple things--game terms, lore, mechanics, news, etc.
Other good point: stability of taxonomy search does not indicate whether these players stayed or left, as they would be folded over time into the "knowing" group of players that don't need to search for these things using a common web search tool.
I agree with everything you said and thats the only conclusion i take from this.
That wow is old and losing popularity.
Not a big deal, i know.
But the data has to mean something. Even if its just what you said and not sub numbers.
I just found funny people saying the "bookmark" excuse xD
OP, you're right, and even though I do still play the game myself and love it, you're going to get a lot of people in here yelling, "Google searches =/= subs!"
The truth is, though, searches on google DO correlate to the amount of people playing/having interest in the game. If those searches are indeed declining, it's an educated guess to say the interest in the game and therefor the player retention and subs are also declining. When a new expansion launches, that number (the google search number) will also rise, and then fall again until the release of the expansion after.
It's always been this way and it will always continue to be this way until Blizzard reboots the game engine and starts from scratch on updated systems in both a technical and gameplay sense. The traditional mmo genre is, in fact dying out in popularity (Though I, myself, love it still) to First Person Shooters. Look at the success Overwatch is having. Look at Fortnite. Even Hearthstone, a card game, has more active players. It's insane. WoW has never had the commercial success those types of games have had, and it's simply because the "average" gamer wants to log in, play for little bit, and log off. MMOs require so much more effort and time that the average person will not have. You also can't really dissect an mmo into a "I can specifically complete this one thing from start to finish in 15 minutes" unless you're talking about dungeons, I guess.
A person can give themselves 30 minutes to play Hearthstone, log in, play like 3-4 matches, and log off. That same person might be able to complete 1-2 dungeons in WoW but that's about it. The reward feels less in WoW, as well, because unless you're running mythic+, which takes significantly longer to organize and then to complete (not to mention gear for in the first place.) the rewards you're getting from heroic randoms are pathetic.
I love WoW, but I GET why it's not as popular as other genres of games, and that's okay. WoW isn't "dying," persay. I still think it has many years ahead of it, but don't lie to yourself and try to make it sound like it's the most popular game in the world anymore, because it's not.
Last edited by Servasus; 2018-03-16 at 10:54 PM.
Part of the problem with WOW is that there is TOO MUCH news and info about the game online.
You got youtubers, you got forums like this one, you got media sites like wowhead.
And not only that most of the content of an expansion is known and published before hand.
Used to be that part of the fun was the mystery of not knowing what was around every corner.
MUDS were fun because they were easy to create and the MUD designer could reset the map and redo it any time they wanted.
Similarly DnD is fun because Dungeon Masters have a lot of control over designing encounters.
MMOs while far beyond where they were 25 years ago, they haven't really moved much.
WOW is popular because of the story and the lore. This is what got people excited in the beginning.
Plus the game at the launch of WOW was big and new and a lot of it was mysterious and unknown.
Now it is pretty EZ to get in and get to a decent level in a short amount of time as a returning player.
Some of the QOL features do have downsides. It promotes this rush mentality which means content last longer.
Having to run to dungeons has a place. It gives a sense of place. Having popups for World Quests show while riding kind of destroys it.
Hence they need to come up with other "filler" stuff to do that would otherwise have been taken up by QOL enhancements.
Giving rise to MAUs and checking command tables type stuff, WQ popups all over the map and so forth.
But the bookmark excuse is still funny no? I dont know why i laughed.
If you search for Facebook which is a page everyone and their mothers have bookmarked, it still holds 30% of popularity.
World of Warcraft holds 3% which is strange non the less.
WoW has 14% which seems good compared to facebook. Very good.
Just to clarify - this does not show a decline in interest for World of Warcraft for existing players or people who already know about it (most of them have the sites bookmarked and have had for a good long time). It does, however, suggest that interest is declining for potential "new players", which really shouldn't come as a surprise with a 12 year old video game.
Just for perspective, here are some other MMOs you can look at to give you a bit more of a comparison for how well wow is still doing:
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...ll&q=everquest
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...ssert%20online
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...ild%20wars%202
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...20fantasy%2014
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...rolls%20Online
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...q=eve%20online
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...old%20republic
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...&q=destiny%202
I'm sure I've missed some of the more popular ones out there - but you can quickly see (in this list anyways) that only BDO is sitting higher than WoW in interest and I imagine that is because of the recent SEA server launches in Jan, which for many countries, was the 'THE' launch of the game due to ips being blocked from certain countries on the NA/JP/TW servers. Eve Online is also quite close, but you can see a similar decline there as well. Destiny 2 probably shouldn't be there - but I included it to show what a true game decline looks like.
Overall, the data is interesting, but I think it points to more of an overall decline in interest for the MMORPG genre when it comes to players that have not already joined one, rather than a decline of players actively playing those games. The genre is simply stagnant and ageing considering there really haven't been any new (successful) innovative MMO games in a good long time - just some new (and somewhat innovative) ideas from existing ones.
I would be curious to see if the number of "hits" on WoW's main site, forums, MMO champ, WoWhead, and Icey Veins over an extended period of time to see if we would see a similar decline there (and to clarify I don't mean google searches, I mean actual web site hits).
As for WoW 2, I don't think there's really a point. One of the main things that keeps WoW at it's popularity is how accessible it is with lower end computers. You release a fully updated WoW 2, even if we can bring our WoW1 characters over in all their glory, you will still be dividing your community drastically simply due to the higher system requirements. In some ways, they are already doing WoW 2 by adding all the new cut scenes, higher fidelity models, spells, etc.
This be UK trends.... Also people have established where they get the info. Like here..... I have a bookmark to this site or I just type the web address and it auto populates.
No, that's because game designers are retarded and keep trying to mimic WoW as it is now (or when they were working on it), rather than its original incarnation that caught everyone's attention. This whole "cater for the hardcore raiding and only focus on gearing up and make everything else super tedious or unnecessarily difficult to the extreme, that's the most important thing in the world, holy shit, nothing else matters!" mindset is why the "MMO genre is dying" (even though it's not). People's interest in that bullshit is what's dying, and why WoW itself is dying a slow, agonizing death.
For fuck's sake, the current host of developers for the game don't even understand the "holy trinity," and it's been forgotten pretty much since TBC came out.
Looks like a product lifecycle graph.