The problem is raiding

[Lane]

Because people are calling for a mage tower challenge feature to replace raids or be in raids. Instead of having mage tower challenge AND raids, they want raid to be solo content. They want raiding as we know it to be gone and have it be something you do alone with a bunch of NPCs or maybe a friend or two. Imagine fighting archimonde, gul dan, Illidan or any other powerful foe with 1 or 2 friends or random NPCs.

Not everyone is asking for raids to be removed or replaced, just the assets repurposed to provide content to more than one type of playstyle.

But people like torish dont want time commitment, positive social interaction with strangers and skills. Its easy, obtainable content done with very few friends or even NPCs. Why bother interacting with other people and doing hard content when you can just complete a raid with 1 friend?

The few extremely lucky people who managed to find a golden needle in the haystack of a good guild always seem to assume it's like that for everyone. It is not. Raiding guilds, from my experience, are full of some of the most toxic people I would never under any circumstances associate with were it not to accomplish a goal -- and sharing a common goal does not a positive social interaction make. Some of my worst memories of WoW are from raiding in vanilla and BC. It took until Wrath to find a guild that raided during a schedule I could meet and wasn't full of jerks. Sadly, it fell apart with the disaster that was Cataclysm (no pun intended) and I couldn't bring myself to go through another 8 years of kissing frogs to find another guild that didn't suck. It's not like raiding at its core is a fun activity anyway, it's just that the right people make it a more bearable experience. This is also why I don't do LFR. I don't care how easy it is, raiding in any form is simply not an enjoyable investment of my time.

Raiding has kept WoW alive for many years, Blizzard would know what content pays off. Funny that you say problem is raiding... Plenty of MMOs out there with minimal to no raid content, go enjoy them.

Clearly they don't know what content pays off judging by BfA. At this point, many are playing other MMOs if they haven't quit the genre entirely.

[crusadernero]

Not everyone is asking for raids to be removed or replaced, just the assets repurposed to provide content to more than one type of playstyle.



The few extremely lucky people who managed to find a golden needle in the haystack of a good guild always seem to assume it's like that for everyone. It is not. Raiding guilds, from my experience, are full of some of the most toxic people I would never under any circumstances associate with were it not to accomplish a goal -- and sharing a common goal does not a positive social interaction make. Some of my worst memories of WoW are from raiding in vanilla and BC. It took until Wrath to find a guild that raided during a schedule I could meet and wasn't full of jerks. Sadly, it fell apart with the disaster that was Cataclysm (no pun intended) and I couldn't bring myself to go through another 8 years of kissing frogs to find another guild that didn't suck. It's not like raiding at its core is a fun activity anyway, it's just that the right people make it a more bearable experience. This is also why I don't do LFR. I don't care how easy it is, raiding in any form is simply not an enjoyable investment of my time.



Clearly they don't know what content pays off judging by BfA. At this point, many are playing other MMOs if they haven't quit the genre entirely.

If it helps - I havent had a good guild or raiding guild since wotlk/early cata. Been pugging ever since.

[GhostlyBG]

I don't raid to get better gear. I raid for the challenge of raiding. If there was no raiding what would I need the gear for anyway? If there was no raiding in the game, I would not still be subscribed...

[Velshin]

First of all the main reason for subs decreasing is not because of the current raiding system. The game is very old. Another main reason is that the MMORPG genre is not in its prime golden age anymore (2004 to 2009 was kinda the golden age of MMORPG genre). This is why you can barely see any good successful MMORPG anymore other than few ones (other than WoW obviously) like FFXIV, and ESO.


Now most of the players specially the new generation prefer a fast paced games that doesn't take as much time investment as the nature of MMORPG genre, like LoL, Heroes of the Storm, PugG, and Fortinite, etc etc.

[Trumpcat]

...

Clearly they don't know what content pays off judging by BfA. At this point, many are playing other MMOs if they haven't quit the genre entirely.

Let's judge by WoW's 15 years history, not the 2 months of a new expansion.

[lummiuster]

The problem is a combination of 1000 factors. I really hope Vanilla gets more players than modern wow so they realise their innovation is trash. I hope people will understand that class balance is bad for the game. It is great to have the plate wearer warrior beat the hell out of whoever gets in close range with them.
Modern wow is a much superior game than vanilla. But vanilla is much better because it brings importance to everything we do in the game, more fulfillment, better community, rewarding goals.

[Deleted]

The problem is a combination of 1000 factors. I really hope Vanilla gets more players than modern wow so they realise their innovation is trash. I hope people will understand that class balance is bad for the game. It is great to have the plate wearer warrior beat the hell out of whoever gets in close range with them.
Modern wow is a much superior game than vanilla. But vanilla is much better because it brings importance to everything we do in the game, more fulfillment, better community, rewarding goals.

I don't think this is going to be the case, dude.

Vanilla WoW succeeded, because the general MMO market was only played by nerds who enjoyed games where relations and work mattered.

Now, the MMO market is completely different. I am such a nerd myself. But I doubt I can go back to farming the same old raid for 2 years only to get the last important upgrades for my raid mates.

[Sansnom]

Problem is YOU and people who agrees with you:

Say raiding was gone. What do you do ingame? You just do expeditions? How would you kill endgame bosses? Would you put them as world boss?

This is the worst suggestion ive been reading - like in almost 2 decades.

Isn't that exactly the problem? Besides raiding, what other alternative contents are there? Very little. The reason can be many. Either Blizzard will not make alternative content because they are too focus on raids. Or they cannot because they do not have any ideas besides raids.

Not everyone raids. Raiding has always been a minority, hence the numerous attempts to funnel more people into. 40m -> 25m -> 10m -`> flex. Multiple difficulties. LFR. All these are fixes to get more people to raid. If raiding was as interesting and as easy to enter, then this would not be a problem. Not every guilds has a roster of 10 people who can play at fixed time and at a fixed period.

You can. Your guild can. Your friends can. Your dog can. Your super successful friend who works 60+hrs week with many friends and children can. Good. They cannot. That is all that matters to them.

If raiding was successful and the majority was doing this, this discussion would even be happening.

[lummiuster]

I don't think this is going to be the case, dude.

Vanilla WoW succeeded, because the general MMO market was only played by nerds who enjoyed games where relations and work mattered.

Now, the MMO market is completely different. I am such a nerd myself. But I doubt I can go back to farming the same old raid for 2 years only to get the last important upgrades for my raid mates.

Vanilla was great because every aspects in the game was challenging and rewarding. Your comment is the proof of it (srsly look at it with open mind). You talk about raiding the same thing for 2 years because this is what we do in modern wow. Jump in whatever patch we are at, get to max level, farm the last raid in lfr mode. Start normal/heroic the following week. And keep farming it for a year.

In vanilla you level. Every level is a challenge, completing scarlet monastery at level 28 seems as a big step as raiding mythic today. Leveling is a long adventure full of challenge and friends youll make (lots of tanks).
Then you have professions which are very hard to level. You have to get to Uldaman for a specific trainer. Other dungeons for different professions. Reagents you only find at the other end of the world. Levelling your profession is much more rewarding than raiding mythic today.
Raiding. To raid the molten core, you need to farm anh qiraj. before and qiraj you need to farm the other raid. To farm them you need nature resistance gear which drop from some dungeons. The best resistance gear is crafted by very hard to get recipes. To craft them, you need the dragonhide leather that drops from a dungeon. You need to mine ore from a raid. You can only melt the ore with the anvil that is in Blackrock depth. And so on.

[Akka]

You all argue as if there were only a set number of 12 mil. players in the whole lifetime of wow.
Blizzard themselves said they had a big player turnover and at least 10 times as much people tried wow then there were active players. Most people bought it and never even finished leveling. A whole lot quit at other stages of the game, who can say why.
My guess is because they, at some point, run out of enjoyable content to justify paying a monthly fee. I also guess that this has a lot to do with raiding, since it was always the be all, end all endgame activity and people who (for whatever reasons) didn't raid just quit at some point. The number of raiders were always small and you always could track them via 3rd party sites.

I'm pretty aware of the turn-over, and my opinion is that removing progression, putting everyone in the same content and reducing the effective content to the last raid tier, had a much worse effect on player retention than having existing content had more staying power and a part which was less accessible.

But raiding is cheap for Blizzard. Instead of making 10 dungeons every patch, why not make just one, scale up the numbers and call it a raid, that will keep the people occupied. It's just a cost-benefit assessment for Blizzard.

Don't see what all that has to do with how fun the game is. I'm a player, and players should be interested in how much they enjoy a game, not trying to defend choices that make the game worse to line the pocket of the company.

[Rukh]

I love raiding. It should stay the best way to get gear, being the most difficult content, but the game has shifted into making everyone just chase gear and chase max level. Everything under 120 doesn't matter anymore. I used to level alts somewhat slower but it's just not fun anymore. The importance put on raids is probably a bit too high.

I think this was a good point right here. This game has so much content, and so much work put in to it that has been made completely irrelevant. Due to how power levels work the only thing that matters for people is what gear you can get at 120. That's basically anything under ilevel 340 for about two days and then the rest of the expansion is just supposed to be about how to get gear above ilevel 340. That's it. That's the whole expansion after about the first week. Why do people feel there's nothing to do? Because everything else is currently irrelevant besides this extremely small slice of obtaining 340+ gear. For most people currently, that's the whole game they see.

[Celarent]

Response number one million and one, but I think the problem is turning leveling and dungeons into a speed bump that compresses a ton of content into mere weeks or days of experience. Does max level have to be the only relevant status? Why not make endgame more for the end again?

If I were Blizzard, I'd look closely at if/how Classic works for insight on how to make retail WoW a more proportioned game.

[qikink]

Echoing the sentiment of many. For me the only thing that sets WoW apart from from other MMO's is the difficulty of it's large-group content. I can play Dark Souls, or an ARPG for a challenging solo experience, and I can play nearly any other MMO on the market for an easy (success guaranteed) group experience, but WoW has a unique niche in creating content that requires a large, coordinated group.

The day raids ceased being relevant would be the day I unsubbed.

[Relapses]

Not everyone is asking for raids to be removed or replaced, just the assets repurposed to provide content to more than one type of playstyle.

WoW is, in essence, about its raids. Nearly all of the game's major story elements are told through raids and they've been a key part of the game since its inception. I can understand there are players who may want the game to adapt to "different playstyles," but at what point should developers ignore a crucial aspect of the game's DNA to appease a few outliers who want the game to be something it isn't? Raids aren't going away and the real solution here is for players who feel like raiding should go away (or "repurposed," or diminished, or...whatever you want to call it) to find a new game if they feel like Blizzard isn't catering enough to them.

The few extremely lucky people who managed to find a golden needle in the haystack of a good guild always seem to assume it's like that for everyone. It is not. Raiding guilds, from my experience, are full of some of the most toxic people I would never under any circumstances associate with were it not to accomplish a goal -- and sharing a common goal does not a positive social interaction make. Some of my worst memories of WoW are from raiding in vanilla and BC. It took until Wrath to find a guild that raided during a schedule I could meet and wasn't full of jerks. Sadly, it fell apart with the disaster that was Cataclysm (no pun intended) and I couldn't bring myself to go through another 8 years of kissing frogs to find another guild that didn't suck. It's not like raiding at its core is a fun activity anyway, it's just that the right people make it a more bearable experience. This is also why I don't do LFR. I don't care how easy it is, raiding in any form is simply not an enjoyable investment of my time.

Are you willing to admit you may be a bit too picky when it comes to finding a guild? It sounds like you were burned by a bad experience and haven't been able to get past it. This isn't directly a fault of the game.

Clearly they don't know what content pays off judging by BfA. At this point, many are playing other MMOs if they haven't quit the genre entirely.

This is completely speculative. We can't say anything with any amount of certainty without working for Blizzard themselves. There are definitely areas where Blizzard can improve the game but it seems a bit extreme to hand waive all of its problems and make a definitive statement based off of entirely unknowable information.

[Schattenlied]

because doin the same bosses in raid 30 times is sooo much more interesting and doesnt make people to quit game -_-

- - - Updated - - -



ah ye .. those amazing vanilla / TBC time when 3/4 of classes were using 3 buttons at max .

those were good times with complicated interesting gamestyle.

persoanlly cant wait for classic so people who never played back then realise how shitty gameplay way .

demo on blizzcon will be eye opening for so many people

yes, because there was absolutely nothing between the end of TBC and the beginning of Legion.

Class design was immeasurably better in WotLK, Cata (yes, even cata), MoP, and even WoD than it was in Legion and BFA.

[Berndorf]

WoW is, in essence, about its raids. Nearly all of the game's major story elements are told through raids and they've been a key part of the game since its inception. I can understand there are players who may want the game to adapt to "different playstyles," but at what point should developers ignore a crucial aspect of the game's DNA to appease a few outliers who want the game to be something it isn't? Raids aren't going away and the real solution here is for players who feel like raiding should go away (or "repurposed," or diminished, or...whatever you want to call it) to find a new game if they feel like Blizzard isn't catering enough to them.



Are you willing to admit you may be a bit too picky when it comes to finding a guild? It sounds like you were burned by a bad experience and haven't been able to get past it. This isn't directly a fault of the game.



This is completely speculative. We can't say anything with any amount of certainty without working for Blizzard themselves. There are definitely areas where Blizzard can improve the game but it seems a bit extreme to hand waive all of its problems and make a definitive statement based off of entirely unknowable information.

That's not really a speculative statement at all. Its just a matter of what in your mind would constitute 'many'. At the least there are prob half a million wow players who have moved on from wow since Bfa launched and I think it would be pretty accurate to say that the vast majority of them are either playing a different mmo or have quit the genre completely since its basically an either/or situation once they have left wow.

[Relapses]

That's not really a speculative statement at all. Its just a matter of what in your mind would constitute 'many'. At the least there are prob half a million wow players who have moved on from wow since Bfa launched and I think it would be pretty accurate to say that the vast majority of them are either playing a different mmo or have quit the genre completely since its basically an either/or situation once they have left wow.

"prob," "I think," "vast majority"

You cannot discredit the criticism of unsourced speculation with even more speculation. That's not how this works.

[crono14]

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueofleg...treet/d7jwm98/

"I have a lot of regrets about Raid Finder for WoW. I am sure I worked on features that were much, much worse, but that's the first one that came to mind.

To be clear, the goal of getting more players into raiding is a good one. But the way Raid Finder turned out removed, IMO anyway, a lot of the epicness of what made raiding raiding. I also haven't played WoW in a few years, so it's entirely possible they have solved the problem by now."
- Ghostcrawler

Guy who created LFR admitting what a dumpsterfire LFR is and how it erodes the foundation of what raiding should be.

[Berndorf]

"prob," "I think," "vast majority"

You cannot discredit the criticism of unsourced speculation with even more speculation. That's not how this works.

This isn't a matter of speculation. Is it speculation to say that the sky is blue? I mean you can split hairs all you want but everything you are calling speculation here is something we all already know. Wow subs have gone down substantially within months of a new exp being released every exp since Cata. bfa is not an overly well received exp by anyone's standards. Those players leaving are either going to another mmo or leaving the genre. There's no other option except leaving wow and possibly coming back at a later date.

[Relapses]

This isn't a matter of speculation. Is it speculation to say that the sky is blue?

So the fact that Blizzard is bleeding subs is as apparent as the sky being blue? Nice hyperbole.

I mean you can split hairs all you want but everything you are calling speculation here is something we all already know.

Nope, and this is a commonly used logical fallacy. You know why we don't know? Because Blizzard doesn't tell us. And you want to know something else? Even if they DID tell us the subscriber numbers, they'd mean absolutely fucking nothing since we don't know why people are quitting the game. (See below, re: attrition.)

We never have and we never will.

Wow subs have gone down substantially within months of a new exp being released every exp since Cata.

Here we can agree. But the degree to which Blizzard has lost subscribers in BfA remains unknown.

bfa is not an overly well received exp by anyone's standards.

Man, you used the same logical fallacy twice within two sentences. Does that constitute bonus points?

"Not overly well received by anyone's standards" is, yet again, a completely subjective statement. You do not get to speak on behalf of "everybody," even if there are plenty of people on this forum who agree with your sentiment. These forums do not constitute a majority opinion (in fact, it's quite the opposite).

And finally,

Those players leaving are either going to another mmo or leaving the genre. There's no other option except leaving wow and possibly coming back at a later date.

Congratulations, you've broadly defined the term attrition. Without knowing the reasons why WoW experiences attrition, however, it's impossible to make any arguments about it. Blaming the problem on raiding is just one of any number of batshit crazy arguments players try to attribute attrition towards. But really, only Blizzard knows the reasons players are quitting. Until Blizzard shares that information with us (Spoiler: They won't) it seems rather pointless to assign reason behind things we can't possibly know.