Influencers got their will, Bliz listened to their feedback, yet noone plays game

[Malkiah]

WoW content or progression to the gear is not really fun.

But having the gear is.

interesting... i generally feel exactly the opposite.
once i have the gear is when i get bored of things, most notably in WoW's case because once you have the gear there's nothing to do with it, but that's another issue entirely.
i'm very excited for 10.1 because of the gear reset and the months in which i'll be playing with a driving sense of character power improvement.

i'm not saying this to try and negate what you said, your post just stuck out to me as being fascinating, the way different people enjoy different things in the same game, and how those things can be completely at odds with each other.

[Inoculate]

How so? You finish Exile's Reach and through Chromie Time can do any expansion content.

New players have to get to 50 on a character before Chromie time is unlocked. Else it's BFA for them.

This can be negated by doing a class trial and using that to do the unlock part but most new players won't know that.

[Malkiah]

Interesting, but isn't the point of an MMO to commit to playing with other players? It sounds to me like the issue is partially, as you say, commitment and probably accountability. Can't exactly pop out to join another game when you've got accountability and responsibility to uphold commitments.

my take is that the answer is: yes and no.

for instance i stopped raiding (with a guild) around the tail end of legion, i was getting to the point where most often i found the "other people" were the thing interfering with my enjoyment of the game.
guild drama, personality conflicts, that stupid asshole in discord who's vaping with their mic open, that one dipshit who dies every single god damn fight but is still invited to raids... and now the stupid asshole quit the guild and took his vape pen to another server to join a guild 1 boss further in progression than us, and the dipshit who dies every fight is changing mains so they're also undergeared, and now half the guild wants to move to a higher pop server... on and on and on.

i know not every guild is like this but i'm sure most people have experienced some of what i just mentioned.
i just got tired of it - i got tired of the frustration, i got tired of the annoyance. i just got tired of other people and their bullshit.

now, i just pug M+ and occasionally raids - and yeah sometimes there's someone with a toddler screaming in the background, or someone who thinks it's acceptable to bring a 395 spriest to a +20.
but you know what? i don't know these people, and i don't owe them anything and perhaps more importantly i don't feel that they owe me anything.
so sure a lot of the same negatives exist, but i can just mute the dipshit in discord in a pug and forget they exist. i can finish the M+ even if we don't time it just to get my vault for the week and never see any of these people again, so their performance doesn't really matter to me because it's not impacting me 2-4 times a week.

"commitment" isn't just about time, it's about a substantial investment in mental and emotional energy. it's one thing i've noticed i used to have a near limitless capacity for, but as i've gotten older has shrunk down to almost nothing.

[Yakut]

I'm curious can you show me exactly where that is written down at? I keep hearing folks tell me what playing a MMO means, but I can't see to find the exact definition anywhere. What I think you mean is joining a raid team and wanting to raid and not just a MMO in general, though maybe you consider playing a MMO to mean you must join a raid guild and raid. Again, like to see the cited definition of what playing a MMO means

Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game - MMORPG. That's what WoW is. The entirety of the end-game content is designed to be done with other players. Whether that's raiding (10-30 man for normal/heroic, 20 for mythic), pvp (arenas, rated battlegrounds), or M+, none of the challenging end-game content is solo. It is, by definition, with multiple players.

Blizzard doesn't need to write or expand upon the definition of the agreed upon genre nor do they need to reaffirm it for people. It's a modern era where you can Google any term you are not familiar with or use (and, from personal experience, has worked since the mid to late 90s).

Blizzard has repeatedly stated their intention is for this to be a social game where your best rewards and content will be playing with other players (and/or against in the context of PvP). I get that a lot of people like to rewrite, reimagine, or reinterpret definitions provided by others, but this is the one Blizzard is using (and did not invent the term themselves).

[NineSpine]

Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game - MMORPG. That's what WoW is. The entirety of the end-game content is designed to be done with other players. Whether that's raiding (10-30 man for normal/heroic, 20 for mythic), pvp (arenas, rated battlegrounds), or M+, none of the challenging end-game content is solo. It is, by definition, with multiple players.

Blizzard doesn't need to write or expand upon the definition of the agreed upon genre nor do they need to reaffirm it for people. It's a modern era where you can Google any term you are not familiar with or use (and, from personal experience, has worked since the mid to late 90s).

Blizzard has repeatedly stated their intention is for this to be a social game where your best rewards and content will be playing with other players (and/or against in the context of PvP). I get that a lot of people like to rewrite, reimagine, or reinterpret definitions provided by others, but this is the one Blizzard is using (and did not invent the term themselves).

Being in an instance with a handful of other people is not Massively Multiplayer by any definition. Being out in the open world of the game is what is Massively Multiplayer. If the argument is that wow needs to be as much of an MMORPG as possible, then you should be arguing for them to eliminate instances.

[VMSmith]

Being in an instance with a handful of other people is not Massively Multiplayer by any definition. Being out in the open world of the game is what is Massively Multiplayer. If the argument is that wow needs to be as much of an MMORPG as possible, then you should be arguing for them to eliminate instances.

It was as you say. Instancing tech was relatively new when WoW was being developed and it was one of the first MMOs to heavily lean into instances.

And the draw was not so much that it was "group" content (which had always existed in the persistent worlds of MMOs) but that you didn't have to share mobs with anyone outside of your group.

[Nalam the Venom]

interesting... i generally feel exactly the opposite.
once i have the gear is when i get bored of things, most notably in WoW's case because once you have the gear there's nothing to do with it, but that's another issue entirely.
i'm very excited for 10.1 because of the gear reset and the months in which i'll be playing with a driving sense of character power improvement.

i'm not saying this to try and negate what you said, your post just stuck out to me as being fascinating, the way different people enjoy different things in the same game, and how those things can be completely at odds with each other.

Maybe you are raiding?

Not stepped foot in one of those since nighthold.

I just M+.

[Malkiah]

I just M+.

i don't raid either, nor am i in a guild. i pug M+ exclusively, maybe once or twice a tier i'll join a pug raid just long enough to remember why i stopped raiding in the first place, but that's it.

[tromage2]

Biggest mistake they currently make is removing the factions. Warcraft is build around the core war of Horde and Alliance without it it will come just another random fantasy game without any meaning. I find it funny that blizzard and people on youtube keep promoting it like a great feature but they dont get that they remove the core and soul out of this game to the point that people will dont view it anymore as warcraft but a totally different game like lovecraft with ‘for azeroth’ corny crap they try to push into the faces of people.

[VMSmith]

Biggest mistake they currently make is removing the factions. Warcraft is build around the core war of Horde and Alliance without it it will come just another random fantasy game without any meaning. I find it funny that blizzard and people on youtube keep promoting it like a great feature but they dont get that they remove the core and soul out of this game to the point that people will dont view it anymore as warcraft but a totally different game like lovecraft with ‘for azeroth’ corny crap they try to push into the faces of people.

They've long since removed the "World" part of World of Warcraft, I couldn't give two Hershey squirts if they remove the "War" part as well. Being able to be a Blood Elf and play with my Alliance guild is literally the only reason I'm subbed right now. It would help if the game itself were more fun, though, but the faction conflict was never any part of any fun, for me.

[Yakut]

Being in an instance with a handful of other people is not Massively Multiplayer by any definition. Being out in the open world of the game is what is Massively Multiplayer. If the argument is that wow needs to be as much of an MMORPG as possible, then you should be arguing for them to eliminate instances.

They tried this very thing multiple times and ultimately decided against it for practical reasons (Opening of the Gates of AQ was the first major instance of this). Too many people in one area caused massive lag both server-side and client-side. Sharding has been introduced since and still has some (albeit to a lesser degree) latency issues there.

Where they can do it practically without harming the player experience, they try. I make no claims as to their success rate, but they do try. Harder content will still never be open world though I know you and a few others are lobbying for it.

[Nymrohd]

I don't think it's the difficulty, i think it's the commitment. People want to jump in and out on games, play if they want and not play if they have no desire to. If something new comes out or you have real live priorities or just have no motivation to play WoW you can't just not show up for a few weeks if you raid.

I have to say I find that weird. As someone with a lot of real life obligations, I find raiding to be much easier because it is just something I can put in my schedule. Two nights a week with an optional third night, I know what I am doing and it is part of my planning. And if need be I can prep for it at some random time and then log in a few minutes before the raid and everything works out fine. Meanwhile for M+ or rated PvP outside of something schedule in guild I would have to form a group and my experience would vary a hell of a lot more so it is not a dependable experience.

I'd absolutely get the plug and play approach when I was more than a decade younger and time table was far more fluid so that meant committing to a raid table would mean I lose opportunities to go out. But now most of my friends have kids, I have a partner and if we want to go out it very much needs to be scheduled ahead.

[Yriel]

Interesting, but isn't the point of an MMO to commit to playing with other players? It sounds to me like the issue is partially, as you say, commitment and probably accountability. Can't exactly pop out to join another game when you've got accountability and responsibility to uphold commitments.

I agree with you that it certainly meant that at some point 20 years in the past, during the times of Everquest, Daoc or UO. But times have changed and so has the habits of players.
Just look at what became popular during WoWs runtime... Mobas and Battle Royals at the forefront, most online games are structured that you can hop in anytime you want, play some and then do something else. Plus games are cheap and available a plenty so people have a lot of other stuff they want to play.
And i think MMOs should have changed to reflect that if they want to be mainstream. WoW tried that to a point by making everything super accessible and easy but then stopped that at endgame and that is where they lost most of the players.

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I have to say I find that weird. As someone with a lot of real life obligations, I find raiding to be much easier because it is just something I can put in my schedule. Two nights a week with an optional third night, I know what I am doing and it is part of my planning. And if need be I can prep for it at some random time and then log in a few minutes before the raid and everything works out fine. Meanwhile for M+ or rated PvP outside of something schedule in guild I would have to form a group and my experience would vary a hell of a lot more so it is not a dependable experience.

Yes but compare your Raid schedule with, let's say, playing Dota2 or Lol, or playing Fortnight or playing World of Tanks or whatever. That is what WoW is competing with. Plus you are spend two to three nights a week for wow, if you want to or not. Thats why i ultimately stopped raiding during MoP because there were many evenings when i was commuting home from an annoying day at work and really didn't want to play WoW or anything that evening but i had to because it was raid night and i was a healer and there were no replacements. So instead of having a nice quite evening i had to quickly gulp down a pizza to be ready to play. And at some point i was not willing to do that anymore.
I still had fun in WoW in general, just not every Sunday and Tuesday evening.

[VinylScratch]

No, here's the problem. Blizzard when the game started to really blow up in the mainstream pop culture never decided to make a declaration of who their target audience was. They tried to straddle a line that appealed to everybody and at a time they were capable of doing this. The problem is you have a number of very distinct factions of people arguing for what they want in the game and a lot of it conflicting so rather than make one side happy, they just piss off both. Keep in mind, we're playing an MMO, MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ONLINE game and people increasingly demand the game have more SINGLE PLAYER ELEMENTS. FFS we literally flocked to MMOs in their infancy because the idea of enjoying an RPG world with other people was like a dream come true. I wasn't the only hero in Ultima Online, I was just some random schmuck making their story and I could be successful as a skilled blacksmith, or go slay bosses, or just chat with people and no matter what it was a fulfilling experience. THAT is why MMOs were popular early on. It's no shock in Wrath when the game started to dig away at the social structure you had a plateau with just as many veterans quitting as newer players coming in, and even moreso now when the game compared to the numbers it was pulling in just 2005 is on life support.

Straight up if Blizzard has ANY hope of salvaging the game, they need to put it on hold and have a serious talk amongst themselves, and the community at large about where the game should go and who the target audience should be so they can design the baseline around that. Because this whole idea of there being three very distinct worlds within WoW where players of any group are barely even playing the same game as the other two but expecting them to share some kind of commonality is absurd and has done more harm than good.

It also doesn't help that the two most notable groups that get attention constantly have middle child syndrome. Casuals got catered to for 3 straight expansions leading to the game feeling horribly watered down if you were in that weird middle section where you weren't involved enough to be "elite" anymore as in you didn't do cutting edge Mythic raiding, but were still above people who only ever did LFR because you did not feel like anything was really for you, and the only real motivator you'd have aside from pride which has been whittled down more and more ever since Wrath is gear, but the game also just spits free high level gear at you for merely pretending to try and play the game so what's the point of doing Mythic Antorus when I can just spam easy dungeons and get titanforges? Which was also causing a problem in raiding because people who didn't raid as a sport and just did it to have nice gear started to do that, which is why in BFA they tried to make the loot from m+ harder to get vast quantities of in short order. To which the casual players screamed "YOU ALWAYS CATER TO THE ELITE, NEVER TO US, THIS ISN'T FAIR!"

Then when the game is catered towards the casual players in an effort to dial back some changes, the elite scream the game is casual catered and most damage has been done to the game in this stupid tug-o-war over whether the game is for mega casuals or mega elite when instead the game should just build itself around the average player being baseline, telling those beneath the line to belly up to the bar like games in the past required you to do, then the people above that line to shut up because the game isn't going to get casually dragged in their direction either.

This super hard if you want it to be, but generally super forgiving massive world where nothing really matters so you don't feel obligated to care full of people who exist more as AI NPCs than actual people to accomplish a task MMO with optional multiplayer functionality like SWTOR was just ain't it chief. Not by a longshot.

The fact I find more enjoyment on a different game operating as an RP gatherer who will procure large sums of trade goods for an agreed upon price than this game's actual selling point content should really say something about where this game has gone. I used to race home from school, giddy to get on and spend 8 hours just doing pointless crap in WoW. Maybe I'd world pvp in Silithus, maybe I'd pickpocket BRD for gold, maybe I'd do BGs to push honor, maybe I'd run UBRS or some other dungeons. Literally all of it made the time spent playing enjoyable... you can only put so much water in with the koolaid mix until it doesn't taste like koolaid as much as water and we're at the point where I'm wondering if there's even a speck of that powder in this damned glass 19 years later. Oh how sad it is to reminisce on F&F alpha and all the promising feelings then have firsthand knowledge what the game actually ends up becoming.

[RobertMugabe]

What do you think?

I think that you have no idea what you are talking about.

Why do people always get the impression that the game is dying? For almost now 20 years it seems...

Dragonflight is doing great, it is doing as well as WoW always does compared to previous years, Blizzard's own numbers even prove that.

[Shadowferal]

A game on life support isn't dying, but I find that less than reassuring.

[VinylScratch]

I think that you have no idea what you are talking about.

Why do people always get the impression that the game is dying? For almost now 20 years it seems...

Dragonflight is doing great, it is doing as well as WoW always does compared to previous years, Blizzard's own numbers even prove that.

You mean the numbers where this suspiciously was the one time they weren't trying to shove how many copies they sold down our throats shortly after launch? Q4 report they outright said Dragonflight didn't reach the levels of Shadowlands on sales and Shadowlands was trying to flaunt selling like 4 million copies on launch. Which sounds impressive... until you've played since prior to WoD and remember Blizzard getting super giddy they had 10 million subscribers for WoD launch back when they used to give us those numbers and in one quarter lost literally half of that figure... and now they're selling releases barely meeting HALF of the disastrous "5.4 million concurrent subscribers" that scared Blizzard into refusing to release sub figures anymore.

To say WoW is dying is an understatement, it's been dying and bleeding for over a decade now. It gives the illusion of "being alive" because the servers haven't been shut off and the game is largely populated by people who are either new, or sunk too much time into the game to quit (sunken cost fallacy), but comparatively to the numbers this game used to pull, yeah it's dead. Especially now that players have actual options now in terms of other MMOs that all cater to different playstyles and ideas, it isn't just "Play WoW, or an endless procession of WoW clones with an added Korean grind to everything". Has been this way for a while.

I guess if you're part of the like "Began in MoP/WoD/Legion" crowd it doesn't look as bad, but I think the game looks like a ghosttown to anybody that played in Wrath. It's like two different people looking at the same body, one sees it as Arnold in his prime, the other sees it as a limp, malnourished body just slowly bleeding out pathetically on the pavement. These differences in views created solely by what they saw the game as when they began playing in terms of playercount.

Actually, in the simplest way here's a simple thought experiment. Take Dragonflight, remove World of Warcraft from the title, remove all association to WoW and your existing character from it. Dragonflight releases with everything it has right now, but your characters, collections, achievements, etc are all gone. This is a fresh game release, a new MMO, fresh soil to cultivate and settle... would you play this dogshit for more than two weeks? No, it would die like literally every other half-baked hype MMO release like Bless Online. Dragonflight isn't even relevant, fuck it's barely even alive and even that barely alive status is 90% carried by "World of Warcraft" in the title, NOT "Dragonflight." It's also why you'll never see a WoW 2, because they're aware the second they lose the sunken cost players they are beyond fucked because not many people who still primarily play MMOs trust Blizzard to deliver the starpower they did almost two decades past.

If FF14-2 and WoW 2 were to release on the same day hypothetically, I have no doubts people would go with FF14-2 because the single biggest alienating factor for players is the absurd MSQ grind to fully enjoy the game, as well as stomach ARR. That goes out of the window with a fresh game where XIV would shed its biggest weakness for bringing in new players. Similarly WoW loses it's singular biggest strength of "I've played the game for so long, I can't just quit because then it meant nothing!" It'd be like watching Tyson in his prime fight a 5 year old and pulling no punches.

[Osmeric]

Interesting, but isn't the point of an MMO to commit to playing with other players?

The point of an MMO, the reason it exists, is to make money. Every other aspect the game is subservient to that primary goal. There is no aspect of an MMO that is there just because it has to be there.

[Reive]

You mean the numbers where this suspiciously was the one time they weren't trying to shove how many copies they sold down our throats shortly after launch? Q4 report they outright said Dragonflight didn't reach the levels of Shadowlands on sales and Shadowlands was trying to flaunt selling like 4 million copies on launch. Which sounds impressive... until you've played since prior to WoD and remember Blizzard getting super giddy they had 10 million subscribers for WoD launch back when they used to give us those numbers and in one quarter lost literally half of that figure... and now they're selling releases barely meeting HALF of the disastrous "5.4 million concurrent subscribers" that scared Blizzard into refusing to release sub figures anymore.

To say WoW is dying is an understatement, it's been dying and bleeding for over a decade now. It gives the illusion of "being alive" because the servers haven't been shut off and the game is largely populated by people who are either new, or sunk too much time into the game to quit (sunken cost fallacy), but comparatively to the numbers this game used to pull, yeah it's dead. Especially now that players have actual options now in terms of other MMOs that all cater to different playstyles and ideas, it isn't just "Play WoW, or an endless procession of WoW clones with an added Korean grind to everything". Has been this way for a while.

I guess if you're part of the like "Began in MoP/WoD/Legion" crowd it doesn't look as bad, but I think the game looks like a ghosttown to anybody that played in Wrath. It's like two different people looking at the same body, one sees it as Arnold in his prime, the other sees it as a limp, malnourished body just slowly bleeding out pathetically on the pavement. These differences in views created solely by what they saw the game as when they began playing in terms of playercount.

Actually, in the simplest way here's a simple thought experiment. Take Dragonflight, remove World of Warcraft from the title, remove all association to WoW and your existing character from it. Dragonflight releases with everything it has right now, but your characters, collections, achievements, etc are all gone. This is a fresh game release, a new MMO, fresh soil to cultivate and settle... would you play this dogshit for more than two weeks? No, it would die like literally every other half-baked hype MMO release like Bless Online. Dragonflight isn't even relevant, fuck it's barely even alive and even that barely alive status is 90% carried by "World of Warcraft" in the title, NOT "Dragonflight." It's also why you'll never see a WoW 2, because they're aware the second they lose the sunken cost players they are beyond fucked because not many people who still primarily play MMOs trust Blizzard to deliver the starpower they did almost two decades past.

If FF14-2 and WoW 2 were to release on the same day hypothetically, I have no doubts people would go with FF14-2 because the single biggest alienating factor for players is the absurd MSQ grind to fully enjoy the game, as well as stomach ARR. That goes out of the window with a fresh game where XIV would shed its biggest weakness for bringing in new players. Similarly WoW loses it's singular biggest strength of "I've played the game for so long, I can't just quit because then it meant nothing!" It'd be like watching Tyson in his prime fight a 5 year old and pulling no punches.

Cope. if wow is dead ffxiv is already rotting 6ft underground lmao

these wowfugees are something else

[VinylScratch]

The point of an MMO, the reason it exists, is to make money. Every other aspect the game is subservient to that primary goal. There is no aspect of an MMO that is there just because it has to be there.

Except here's the thing. Old MMOs, and WoW for a time realized the game will profit so long as you deliver an enjoyable experience that is sustainable long term. WoW was designed expecting to peak at maybe half a million players tops ever but was designed in a way that those who did play wanted to keep playing, they were enjoying it.

Wasn't really until the whole Candy Crush thing blowing up and investors seeing video games actually make money then investing in gaming companies that MMOs in particular started to become cashgrabs where instead of there being a balance between profit and playability it's now strictly profit. Content is designed to be cheap to maximize profit margins, content is made so watered down to justify enough players completing it to warrant the resource allocation to developing it... Quite a ways away from when the idea was "Profit comes when we make a good enough product that it sells like hotcakes from word of mouth". Now it's more "Okay, pay influencers to shill the game for us, capitalize on launch sales, give them lip service to keep them around for a bit. When they get pissed off and quit, promise to listen and do better then start making the next expansion to do the same thing because they trust us still for some reason."

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Cope. if wow is dead ffxiv is already rotting 6ft underground lmao

these wowfugees are something else

Game keeps reaching new peaks, WoW is afraid to disclose exactly how much Dragonflight copies they've sold. You do the math there brainiac.