Blizzard is just lucky

[lagiacrux]

If they have fully recovered, and I highly doubt that, that would be rather an exception than a rule. Dead mmos around us.. not even MMO's. After you fuck up you have to work your ass of for nothing just to try to repair the damage and you might not even succeed. No Mans Sky, what a fuck up, months of advertising, completely FREE major patches. It got better, but will never be same "hype" as it was before the fuck up.

there are quite a few success stories like this.

ff14
rainbow 6 siege
cant talk too much about ESO as i havent played it myself, but i heard it got a lot better
no mans sky, seems like an ok-ish game currently

not saying thats the norm, these are exceptions. but it shows that with dedication and investment you can come back from a critical flop.

[Elias01]

So I'm curious. Can you define 'competition?' Because, by all accounts, while WoW is steadily trending downward, 'garbage' MMOs like FFXIV, ESO, GW2, and PSO2 are all steadily trending upward (FFXIV in particular releases censuses on active accounts every summer, and has steadily grown since the A Realm Reborn relaunch, while the others report a rising playerbase on a semi-regular basis; PSO2 is currently helped in large part by being Japan's top performer and has an upcoming release in the West that will further help boost those numbers since people won't have to beat the hirigana 'captcha boss' to play on the JP servers).

If you mean another western-developed MMORPG that adheres to classic design philosophies, well, there's WoW Classic coming in August and Runescape Old School, which might also be competing with retail WoW at this point. Otherwise, though, I wouldn't hold my breath. The AAA market is too busy chasing trends and macrotransactions, and indie-developed, western MMORPGs don't have the marketing budget or polish to compete with WoW, ESO, or FFXIV.

If you're just here to promote BDO, more power to you, but BDO isn't going to be the next WoW. The sheer level of pay-to-win and power lockout, as well as forced PvP meaning people will be further pressured to buy gear off the shop just to stay competitive with someone who's played from day 1, have made sure of that. It's also a resource hog, something most MMORPG players tend to avoid (and something which avoiding has been a big help for WoW and FFXIV alike, since you can run them on a toaster if you have the time and patience).

You cant but gear from shop. You can buy cosmetics which you can sell for in game currency than buy yourself gear. But if this is pay to win than WoW is also pay to win. only difference is instead of buying cosmetics you buy gold by selling token.

[Evilfish]

i'm just killing time with wow, waiting for Camelot Unchained. (somewhere around this century)

You mean wasting time.

[Monster Hunter]

It's different there, there's only 50 levels, but then there's "levels" to earn champion points, it's similar to paragon levels like in D3, they're much faster and easier to get, and you use spend them on talents.

Also, champion points are shared across all of your characters.

I prefer that way of doing levels if a game must have levels. It's way more sustainable.

[McNeil]

They are lucky in the sense that WoW released on the perfect time when MMORPG's were only a very small niche. WoW was considered to be a lot more casual and accesible and it also had all the world building from the RTS games that a lot of players were familiar with. Mark Kern told stories of how much of a risk WoW was and they never expected the game to do as well as it did, let alone make 7 more expansions for it.

Most other MMORPG's tried to copy WoW, but lacked the polish and made some horrible game designs (like Wildstar making the game hardcore). FFXIV and ESO are great MMORPG's on their own and they are perfect alternatives to play if you are bored of WoW. I have a few friends who recently started ESO and had so much fun that they didn't even want to bother coming back for 8.2.

[Cosmic Janitor]

What is with this random shitposting.. you just launched a pathetic advertisment thread for a game that isn't even out of beta and the next moment you shit on ESO and FFXIV, who are currently achieving record numbers and have coined the term wow-refugee. The competition is stronger than ever and WoW is currently tasting it. They had massive luck back in 2005 with how big WoW got suddenly, but since then they have tried desperately to cover as many niches as possible.

Waffling on how now a game that pretty much only caters to grinders, p2w shops and PvP is getting some "awsome" pve by breaking their current class dynamic, yea I'm sure this will go over well. I guess your whole second paragraph is testament to what kind of desperate guy you are. You are probably the guy that jumps on each new bandwagon because you think the same studios that have half-assed shit for 15 years and practically reboot the same game every 2-3 years with another skin, is "going get big, this time for sure!".

Edit: Not to mention the stupid name..

[Monster Hunter]

They are lucky in the sense that WoW released on the perfect time when MMORPG's were only a very small niche. WoW was considered to be a lot more casual and accesible and it also had all the world building from the RTS games that a lot of players were familiar with. Mark Kern told stories of how much of a risk WoW was and they never expected the game to do as well as it did, let alone make 7 more expansions for it.

Most other MMORPG's tried to copy WoW, but lacked the polish and made some horrible game designs (like Wildstar making the game hardcore). FFXIV and ESO are great MMORPG's on their own and they are perfect alternatives to play if you are bored of WoW. I have a few friends who recently started ESO and had so much fun that they didn't even want to bother coming back for 8.2.

Honestly the casual aspect and the world didn't have a great deal to do with it. Warcraft had a small following but wasnt all that big at least outside the USA.

As of today total sales of warcraft 3, including gold edition and bundles and such stand at 3mil, which means 9 million players at wows peak never played the rts, Personaly I was big fan of age of empires and I'd never heard of warcraft the rts untill about a year into playing wow.

The game defiantly was more casual than what came befor, but tbh I don't think many people cared about that considering 10 million of those players never played an mmo before, so the whole it's "its more causal than ever quest" thing was mostly met with "what tfuck is ever quest"

No honestly thinking back I don't think wows success really had anything to do with its setting or its game play. I think it was Purley a sensation of the time.

It came out at a just the right point where people were wanting to be more connected and have mass socialisation, where simple forum style games like habbo hotel were doing extramly well as gamifyed social media and mainstream social media sites like fb and twitter had yet to enter the market.

WoW popularity in my opinion entirly hung on the social aspect, as ghost crawler once said in an interview the leading reason people give for leaving is there freinds left and I'd wager the leading cause of people joining was simply there freinds did.

And I think ultimately wows downfall can be simply chalked up to the rise of social media and always being connected to it through our phones, as people spent more and more of there day connected to a mass social network, people were simply less and less inclined to spend there free time connected to a smaller network

[Aucald]

"Game vs. game" type threads don't lend themselves to constructive discussion or debate. Closing this.