Doesn't take a genius to predict sub changes for a game that's 8 years old.
Too bad an inevitable stage in any popular products popularity is used as a way of strengthening negative opinion that can be as diverse as the playerbase.
You see it in every damn thread as subs have gone down. "It was due to x! -No it was due to y! -Guys, it was obviously z. -You're all wrong, it's because of Hello Kitty."
Is Apple as a company failing because the iPhone isn't the behemoth it once was? When Samsung at some point will stop increasing in the global market, are the Galaxy smartphones dying?
So sick and tired of this mentality that WoW subs has to go up by half a million every quarter, or else it's obviously doing something wrong. The biggest factor in WoWs declining subs is its age. That's it. Cliché. Hard to prove. Yet that's simply it. How many new players have you met recently? How large can the potential "new player" base be after this long? Up until Cataclysm, the game was still new enough (not to mention unchallenged by other MMOs) to attract way more new players than players quitting. Eventually those will equalize, then players quitting the game will be higher than the new players coming in.
And I'm certain there are people reading this post thinking things like "PvP is an unbalanced mess, that's why!" or "I don't like ToT/the latest raid, obviously no one else does." or even "I STILL HAVE TO DO DAILIES/MONOTONOUS TASKS NOW AND THEN?!"