What do you think is the greatest contributor to the downfall of wow?

[Schmilblick]

Casuals...
EDIT : all things in this poll and more.

[Ciddy]

You really want to see the downfall of WoW? Take away all the stuff in that list, and it'll happen pretty quick.

[Papapwn]

Firstly WoW is still going strong, i dont really see a huge downfall. if you are referring to the last quarter of the 1m sub loss then you should also consider that 0 new content has come out since DS. Im sure a lot will return back for MoP.

But a few things that make new content not last so long is :
1) Easy content/epics : Firstly im a casual, i dont raid hardcore. Heck im not even in a raiding guild. I do all my raids through pugs once a week. But to make content very easy and have different modes kills the game. Why did people love BC and Vanilla so much? Simply because you wouldnt see everyone on the realm wearing the newest tier around you. This is not about stroking your ego, but just like in any hobby.. the more time you invest the higher the reward.

2) %buffs for DS/ICC. So whats the point of this? I thought LFR/Normal were already implemented for the casuals like me to see. Now i can do heroic mode too without much effort? Okay that makes sense...Not.

3) LFR : I get people should be able to experience the content but i think LFR should always come out a patch later with the previous raid. Honestly who really feels like doing normal/heroic anymore after doing LFR? Before people say not to do it, its pretty stupid not to. You get such good gear why wouldnt you? Heck even the most hardcore of guilds have their raiders get upgrades from it to progress. It just doesnt make sense not to do it. Its like having a vendor with the latest tier being purchasable but telling people who dont like it to not use it.

Raiding needs a serious overhaul. As for PvP they need to make incentives to world pvp. Like add either world pvp honor with its own pvp rewards. Add world pvp quests. I think MoP does help this department a lot though from my understanding so im happy about that.

[Deleted]

theres no downfall. Yes there was a big subscription loss, maybe the biggest so far but thats understandable seeing as how we didnt get any new content in months and DS was fairly quickly cleared by many.

What a lot of people seem to miss is the fact that not only wow has grown in size and variety since vanilla the outside world that supports wow in any shape or form has grown as well. Theres an addon for every little thing now. Cant find a certain mount, weapon, piece of armor, pet or questmob? theres addons and billions of sites that offer the solution quick and easy at everyones fingertips in almost every language, even more languages than wow is available for...

there are guides, previews, beta-buy-ins, loottables everywhere and they make it easy for everyone to not use their brain and therefore people get so many rewards without actually having to work for it. people complain about "getting epics for free" and thats why the game gets easier. thats not true, just because the items are epic doesnt mean they give you a free pass to finish the contents end boss. we have all seen people with ilvl 400+ who are complete and utter shit in raids while there are people in heroic dungeon gear that surpass those people in dmg, healing and overall movement.

my point is, nowadays there is so much more help offered outside WoW compared to vanilla or tbc and since people are lazy or fear they fall behind if they dont use said help they take the easy route.

[Ryme]

The poor content. Nothing more, nothing less.

You could turn out the crappiest features in the world, ruin gear progression forever, but if your main content is gold, you're going to do well. Cataclysm proved the reverse is not true. It brought out many, many good features, but it's main content sucked. It sucked for raiders, casuals, levelers (save for the pre bc zones), pvpers, everyone.

It also made things seem a lot less important for a lot of people, which I could label a big cause for the displeasure a lot of people have for the expansion.

[DemoBytom]

The vocal community.. The biggest problem WoW (and not only WoW) has is the vocal minority claiming they know all the design ideas to cure clearly dying game, that WoW is.. People who think that by just jumping onto the hate bandwagon, by repeating phrases that are catchy, can magically not only 'cure' wow but also are bringing some ancient knowledge that nobody before them have ever thought about.. The problem are people who think that by removing effects of some game design changes they would revert those changes and make everyone happy. Those are people who don't understand that all those changes weren't just pulled out of Blizz's ass, and were in fact (partially) made because of people like them - previous vocal minority. People who think that their way of thinking is the only way of thinking..

In essence - the biggest problem WoW has are people like OP >.>'

Flying Mounts - people always wanted to travel faster and in more convenient way. They didn't want to AFK on the taxi, they wanted exploration.. Blizz gave them the ability to travel both faster and more convenient.. Effect? People are raging that it was added..

Welfare Epics - This is one of the most false arguments that are going on in the community. Everyone who is yelling 'omg walfare epics everywhere' doesn't understand the gear progression, and the idea of item level and gear power.. For at least 3 expansions now it's pretty clear that purple color doesn't make the item BiS. Yes - you can get purple items, but they are basically never enough to be called best items in the game. For 2 expansions for sure, the only thing the gear name color has any real effect are the enchanting mats.
Dusts/essences from green, shards from blue and crystals from purple - and as the expansion progresses, and high level enchants naturally loose value they need to become more available.
What's more, moderately good gear, that is easily available, vastly reduces the effect the RNG has on people. WoW has 2 progression systems, that affect the character's power. First is character progression, in form of leveling from lv 1 to max lv. during this process your character naturally gains more power, abilities etc.. But at max lv this system stops having any effect in player power - you just reach max. Then the second system kicks in - the gear progression, which is easily translated into player power. That is the system that keeps on growing during whole expansion life cycle and gives players a reason to keep on playing. But this is the system on which players have only limited control - RNG makes sure that you can't just get everything you want in one or two tries.
Whether you like it or not, WoW was always about player power progression, and people play this game for the feeling of getting more and more powerful. But there are moments where RNG just hates you, and refuses to drop this one item you so desperately need. Just an example - it took me over 20 Madness kills to get Gurthalak, more to get second souldrinker.. Generally when people are too long stuck on the same level of power, when they don't feel they are progressing, even though they work hard - they eventually give up. Blizzard saw this problem - it was seen by the amount people that were dropping from raiding, as well as amount of 'OMG RNG IS BITH AGAIN WHY MY DROP"S AIN"T HERE' threads. They added a way to get worse, but still usable items, to fill in those gaps that RNG just refuses to fill for you - that gave many people a linear and planned way of gear progression, without taking the the ability to go beyond that for those that needed this extra edge over 'common folk'... What's more this system allowed newer players to quicker jump into action and eased their way into serious end game.
Yet vocal minority is bitching again, because.. I still don't quite get why those people are bitching about it..

Easymode con6tent (WOTLK+) - another Cata bandwagon.. At the end of Wrath vocal minority cried on forums that content is easy.. When Cata hit - everything was hard and suddenly it turned out that vast majority of the gamers can't adopt to that. Stonecore HC was destroying random groups on first trash pull. Even fairly good groups couldn't defeat Commander Springvale in SFK HC without the fountain exploit. Drahga in Grim Batol was just obliterating pugs. The amount of angry threads about 'how stupid people are', 'how content is overtuned', 'how this is not what they asked for' flooded forums. People were leaving groups before even starting the pull 'because it's stonecore and people will fail'.. All this can be seen by Blizzard in their logs - vast majority of gamers didn't enjoy it (even though vocal minority claimed otherwise).. The peak of stupidity was reached in ZA/ZG where bosses like Pugbreaker or Jan'alai were just destroying groups. When majority of players don't find it fun to play, start drama in groups and leave the dungeon - they eventually stop playing. And every person that stops playing is counted as subscription lost during quaterly calls.. And we've all seen it - when WoW became hard again - people left it, in big numbers..

Portals Everywhere/LFD - LFD revived dungeonering on big scale. Before it the only way to get into dungeon was to spam for (sometimes several) hours in /trade looking for this one tank that is geared, not saved and willing to play.. On smaller realms it meant that you either played during peak hours or you could not be playing at all. Before LFD I was doing like 1 maybe 2 dungeons per week.. Today I sometimes do several per day.. It vastly increased number of dungeons I do, so why should I bitch on it? What's more have you looked through the TOR forums when this game was released? One of the most looked for feature was LFD system, because people hated to sit in the city and spam /trade..
What's more it's giant lie that LFD made everyone just AFK in Orgrimmar.. In fact LFD has exactly opposite effect - it allows you to queue for a dungeon while doing other things, be it questing, leveling, farming - many activities that can be done outside.. I personally always queue when I'm out of town, doing plenty of other stuff.. Soloing stuff, farming, questing - everything out there in the world while the game looks for a dungeon for me..
If it wasn't for LFD I'd NEED to sit in the city and spam trade.. >.>'
Again - vocal minority bitches..

Lack of Attunements / Group Quests - I haven't done any group quest when I was leveling and had it hard to get attunements - why? Because I was leveling mid expansion. At this point nobody wanted to join for group quests that they already did, and new players were only few. Everyone did their atunements and didn't want to do them for some 'noob' so I was left there without options to progress, without connections etc..
What attunements do is actually restricting players from content, making it harder for them to catch up if they weren't there from the beginning. In BC it was a common problem where you couldn't join good guild/group without attunement. So people were just jumping from guild to guild leeching attunements and then leaving the guild without valuable player. It was a common problem that was recurring on the forums!
Yet, when Blizz removed reason for such behavior - vocal minority bitches..



During the years WoW evolved. At the beginning end game was only for hardcore players - but this was making the rest unhappy.. What's more it was leading to a point where Blizzard was spending a lot of development time creating raid content, that later was experienced by 1% of playerbase.. That is TRAGIC - it meant that they spent half year to entertain 1% of players, while 99% had nothing to do.. That is the prime example of wasting money and development time - they'd do better releasing something that pleases 99% of people even if 1% stays unhappy.. Doing otherwise they pleased 1% while leaving stagnant the rest of their playerbase. And people who are left behind leave feeling they are not the target of the game.. And people who leave are then 'lost subscribers' showing that game is dying >.>'

[Deleted]

More competition from other games

[FiftyDKPMinus]

This seems like it's all of your opinion. I highly doubt most of these actually cause massive subscription loss.

The community, however, is a MASSIVE problem with WoW, as with most other games on the internet. If you were looking to give WoW a try for the first time and browse around on the official WoW site and forums, you'll see a game filled with nothing but a bunch of sniveling entitled babies that lash out at anyone who disagrees with either a personal attack on them or an insult like "lol nublet suckoez unintall L0l" (yes it's meant to have spelling and grammatical errors).

Would you want to play a game like that when you see people like those in this game, or better yet, leave it?

Imho, I'd like them to basically nuke the WoW forums and close them up for good, (save the server status section for updates on maintenance and restarts) and have some better enforcement of global channels than what we have right now. If people want to be like that in their guild, let them, who cares. Just doing those two things will cause a LOT of hate, but I believe it's a start in a better community.

[IxilaFA]

If you didn't meet new friends in TBC you either were a very shy person ingame or you didn't bother talknig at all. I'm not talking about meeting that one friend even though I have one of those aswell. I'm talking about my full friendlist that I had just from doing groups with random people from heroics and having a laugh with them. As heroics took longer you had no other choice than to connect with the people you played with or you would want to kill yourself in the process of clearing it without saying a word.

Ever since TBC that friendlist has been declining fast, and I can't recall the last time I met a friendly and social person in a random group...why would you want to act social anyway since LFD makes it you will never group with them again anyway.
I'm pretty sure I will never find the mix of social and endgame raiding like I had in the guilds in TBC...

None of this was my experience in TBC. My experience was advertising on trade for three hours to find a group. By the time we found a group, we went into the instance, somebody usually led (I was a Mage so I mostly just CCed things and went pew pew), we killed bosses, we left. Maybe you're just an extremely social person, I don't know, but throughout BC I had maybe 6 - 8 good friends on my friendslist that I talked to regularly. I met them all through guilds I was in and talking to them in guild chat / ventrillo. Now my friends list (realid) has 16 people on it, 8 of those who are in my raid group. So I'd say that my experience has been the complete opposite from yours.

So why don't we throw anecdotal evidence aside, since that's all we're discussing here.

[Woozle]

--SNIP--

I like everything about this post.

Don't quote a giant post just to post you like it

[Deleted]

This seems like it's all of your opinion. I highly doubt most of these actually cause massive subscription loss.

The community, however, is a MASSIVE problem with WoW, as with most other games on the internet. If you were looking to give WoW a try for the first time and browse around on the official WoW site and forums, you'll see a game filled with nothing but a bunch of sniveling entitled babies that lash out at anyone who disagrees with either a personal attack on them or an insult like "lol nublet suckoez unintall L0l" (yes it's meant to have spelling and grammatical errors).

Would you want to play a game like that when you see people like those in this game, or better yet, leave it?

Imho, I'd like them to basically nuke the WoW forums and close them up for good, (save the server status section for updates on maintenance and restarts) and have some better enforcement of global channels than what we have right now. If people want to be like that in their guild, let them, who cares. Just doing those two things will cause a LOT of hate, but I believe it's a start in a better community.

Really, the community isn't a that big deal as it's more or less shit in every game anyway. If you pick the people you play with correctly you get really good friends of them as wow definitely has nice people as well. I don't give a single fuck about some screaming idiot in a bg or dungeon or w/e it doesn't disturb me and I don't think it should disturb anyone else either. It's definitely not the community which is the problem of wow, there shit loads of more severe problems wow has currently.

[Nerraw]

Not voting, I don't see WoW in a downfall. A slight setback? Maybe. But those happen at the end of an expansion. I have no doubt the subscription numbers will soar a couple of months into Mists.

[Ryme]

But those happen at the end of an expansion.

No they don't. This is unprecedented for WoW.

[gemana]

Original player base is moving on to other things.

Replacement player base has more choices.

[OGXanos]

entitlement
/thread

[Cows For Life]

My vote is for Portals/LFD. I don't like flying mounts or welfare epics either but it seems like the thing that really stopped making world of warcraft feel "worldly" when was blizzard allowed players to port all over the place without leaving their healthstone location (sw/orgi). Even in WOTLK pre LFD where welfare epics and flying mounts have been around since BC, playing WOTLK still felt "worldly" and it really felt like I was playing a massive mutliplayer rpg with tons of interaction with other players.

Cata in comparison seems to have lost all semblance of a "massive world" feeling.

It's been a few months are you're still posting these "let's return to vanilla" type threads! -.-

---------- Post added 2012-08-21 at 03:02 PM ----------

Ah ha! We get to the meat of the matter. It isn't that you think any one thing is a problem in WoW today, you just think that WoW should never have changed, grown, or adapted in any way. Classic WoW is the only WoW worth it to you.

Good luck playing the exact same game for 8 years straight. A game that never changes, never alters, never fixes anything.

This guy has been posting these "let's return to vanilla" threads on here for months.

[smelltheglove]

forums....

[Deleted]

WoW isn't in a decline, to me, and nothing you listed is a problem...to me.

Remove it all and you don't have a game. 'Nuff said

I agree with most of this, except I realize that WoW is in somewhat of a decline.

But that's because of it's age and competition. For many years, WoW had virtually NO competition but the other companies have started to catch on. Also, WoW is like 8 years old!

[Deleted]

Gonna say us player who bash down on everything that Blizzard does

[Wromthrax]

Which downfall?

Also: All from the list