What drove you away from WoW?

[Itisamuh]

1. The subscription cost. Simply put, many other games are just as good or better, and don't require a subscription. It's not worth it, especially considering all the extra things that have to be paid for when they should be included in the sub.

2. The community. It's full of whiny brats, immature trolls, and jackasses. I don't have even the slightest desire to speak to any of these kinds of people, but it's kind of required at times. But to be fair, it's like this everywhere. Other genres don't require quite so much player interaction, so they're better for me in that regard. But really, even though it's like this everywhere to some degree, this game still has one of the worst communities.

3. The auction house. I was going to say the dead server situation here, which leads to insane auction prices, but honestly I think I'd be annoyed by it even if I was on a healthy server. Player controlled economy just ticks me off, mostly because of the people who buy stuff out and sell it for higher prices instead of letting someone who actually needs it get it for the more fair price. I still don't understand how that isn't considered grieving, or exploiting, or ruining player experience, but whatever.

4. Class balance. There's not much to say here, it's a joke, and gets worse every expansion. I play to fight other players, and it's just not fun anymore. Healers are way too effective, there's too much crowd control, the ever changing balance that never really improves gets old, and so on. I'm a competitive player, and this just isn't the genre for competition.

5. The grinds. I'm sick of having to spend eternity leveling just to get to end game, I'm sick of having to spend eternity gearing up before I can actually have fun, and I'm sick of having to farm gold to afford the ridiculously priced gems and enchants each season.

6. The expansion trend. By this, I'm referring to the fact that I think every expansion has been inferior as an overall package to the one before it. It's hard to want to keep playing when every time things change in a major way, it's for the worse. And no, raid finder and things like that aren't the reason for me, I don't mind them.

7. Time spent playing. This one kind of blankets the rest, but it's still worth mentioning. I've played this game for many years now, and even if it was just as good as I once felt it was, I'd probably still be getting bored with it after this much time.

[Lilija]

This is a thread for the unsubbed, is there any point making a post just to throw abuse at 1 poster?

So if you see someone promoting rasism you won't express your unappreciation? Promoting any kind of hate is one of the worse things ever and deserves to be looked down upon. Also, it isn't untrue that people who promote hate in the internet are emotionally immature since they express behaviour typical for teenagers.

[Huehuecoyotl]

So if you see someone promoting rasism you won't express your unappreciation? Promoting any kind of hate is one of the worse things ever and deserves to be looked down upon. Also, it isn't untrue that people who promote hate in the internet are emotionally immature since they express behaviour typical for teenagers.

you would compare people complaining about a game with racism? i think you need to get out and get some perspective, because you have a seriously warped view of things.

[Asics]

I love her to death, but my fiance was probably 60% of the reason. The other 40% was real-life commitments and work and whatnot, but in the 2 years leading up to when her and I first got together I could make raiding on a schedule work.

Do I miss progression raiding? Kind of, being one of the first to do something was always a cool experience.

[Tragopan]

The extremely poor character models. Will come back once they finally get updated.

[Lilija]

@ Lilija

Please leave this thread... there is no point for u to try to question the reasons people quit. They quit and theyre posting here to tell us why. Every post is valuable so please lets not see any abuse aimed at anyone who wants to post on this thread...

This is not a thread of opinion, this is a thread of real events.

The problem is that people don't present real events. They present their oppinion on the game as the reason of why they quit with arguments that are false or have nothing to do with reality. If someone says that they quit because they don't like the game anymore there is nothing to discuss. But when people say that WoW is not an MMORPG anymore, they spread an illogical statement coming from them not understanding the meaning of words they are using.

There are many valuable posts in this thread - but not all of them. Some of them are just whine at the game based on false statements.

[Litoru]

I started playing WoW december 2005, and I stopped around april 2012.

I've pretty much cleared everything ingame (except for naxxramas 40, since I was too slow on getting rep).
The feel was simply different. Or rather, the people and mindset was different.

When Blizzard made wow for "everyone", something went wrong, and the game wasn't as enjoyable as before, in my opinion. If you inspected people in both Vanilla and TBC, you'd think "damn, that's a badass". He'd be "proud", you'd be astonished, simple. Later, people weren't amazed, just jealous, and required Blizzard to give everyone the same gear.
Blizzard kind of became Oprah Winfrey. YOU GET A LEGENDARY, AND YOU GET A LEGENDARY, AND YOU AND YOU, EVERYBODY GETS A LEGENDARY!
They implemented heroic versions of raids, 10 and 25man difficulties, thinking that would satisfy people, since then "everyone got to see content". It was never about seeing content, since after a short period of time, people started whining they wanted to "see" heroic content too (in other words, get phat loot, fancy then rare mounts and so on), and everything got nerfed to the ground.

Why is this bad, in my opinion? Because even if the world's top 3 guilds have cleared the content on heroic, maybe I too want to. Our offtank suddenly stopped logging in the middle of our ragnaros hc progress, and rather being a fight against its mechanics, it was a fight against time. We really enjoyed the fight in its glory, non-nerfed, but we had to get a new tank, before the nerfs, and it took time. Normals, go ahead, share it with everyone, but leave heroics to the people who want a challenge, even if it's "late".
sidenote: we got server first Ragnaros 10hc, but it was a pain thinking "it'll get nerfed next week, hurry!".

In Cataclysm, I didn't think of people in LFG or LFR as real people behind the screen anymore. Half of my friends list was from Vanilla and TBC, not only guild mates, but randoms which you met through leveling, doing dungeons and such. Reputation simply meant nothing anymore. We had a guy in MC who ninjad some epic, and that guy couldn't find a new guild. WoTLK and CATA? Ninjaing, assholeing, douchebaggery? In your face, all the time.

Call it nostalgia. I don't play this game anymore, because it's simply not as good and the community has become worthless.

[killidan]

Casualism during Wrath, Cata, MOP
Healer imbalance during Cata
De-warcraftization (pandas, china) during MOP

[draykorinee]

Dailies and RL, just a terrible combo.

[Lilija]

you would compare people complaining about a game with racism? i think you need to get out and get some perspective, because you have a seriously warped view of things.

I didn't comment on him complaining on the game. I commented on what he had in his sig: promoting kicking people from groups if they have the new transmog from the shop. Do you think that's an ok thing to say? Hating on someone for buying an item in a computer game has the same roots as rasism or any other hate driven behaviour.

[Sturmbringe]

I started playing WoW december 2005, and I stopped around april 2012.

That's quite a coincidence. I too started playing in December 2005 during patch 1.8.4. I only played for 4 months total after WOTLK ended. That includes both CATA and MoP.

Originally Posted by killidan View Post
Played since 2005, raided in TBC/WotLK/Cata T11.

I know exactly what drove me away from the game, could be summarized as casualization of the game by the ultimate misguided inept aka Ghostcrawler. He is lazy as fuck, failed to generate sufficient content and resorted to rehashing time and again. He destroyed the effort-reward basis of the game by making everything faceroll.

He filled the game into an assortment of gimmicks, mounts, pets, achievements; now it is a collection game with an online store to take dumb players' money.

Finally he abandoned Warcraft lore and infested the game with pandas, jumpy rabbits and some chinese crap that has no connection to Warcraft whatsoever and has no place in the world of WARCRAFT whatsoever.

Pandas, all the silliness and slaughter of lore with childish elements, LFD/LFR, all around faceroll game: MOP

What this guy said. Also, the fact that they killed 25 man raid guilds by sharing 25 man raid lockouts with 10 man raids. This killed the community, which in turn left sixty-nine low pop/empty servers in the EU region alone.

[mizeri]

just don't have the motivation anymore

[Biggayshammy]

5. The community is unfriendly and full of people who are rude, disrespectful and who generally make the game toxic. The default behavior of players these days is to act like a douchebag thanks to the lack of consequences afforded by the ability to queue using dungeon finder, LFR etc. Back in the day you still had this kind of behavior from time to time, but generally people were more friendly, helpful and easy to get along with because if you became the douchebag of the server, nobody would play with you.

This sums it up for me. I played on Stormrage and it was rare to find nice people.

It also became rinse and repeat every patch.

[Deleted]

For me it was a combination of the fact that multiple close friends left my raiding guild, continued stress and inability to recruit new people we actually got on with, on a low population EU server, and the release of a lot of new games that I enjoyed playing more than being forced to stick to a raiding schedule with a set of new people I hardly knew. I suspect if my guild had stuck together - or if now, I had some close people who asked me to raid with them - I'd still be playing.

[Duito]

Nothing I still play, everyday....for hours if I'm not busy that day or have nothing planned. I'm on Wow...
Saving up for PS4, so I don't buy new games for the 360, TV sucks, and when I'm not doing anything in that day, there is Wow...and sleep! I choose Wow over sleep!
Hopefully nothing drives me away from Wow...besides another MMO? Which has yet to happen

[Ciddy]

I got bored of it because I ran out of viable (as in, not mind-numbingly boring to me) options for things to do in WoW. I'll probably reactivate to check out 5.4, but until then, I prefer to pass the time in other ways.

Another big thing is the fact that most of my best friends in WoW have also quit and moved on. My guild of 6 years started dying a slow death at the end of Wrath, which ended with a complete breakup by the end of Cataclysm. I didn't really feel like starting over by that point. I came back for a while in MoP just to level my main up to 90 and check out the new stuff, but it's getting boring now.

[mosely]

WotLK's Naxx tier was a joke in terms of difficulty, but I stuck around hoping that things would improve with the next raid tier. When I logged into PTR and was able to kill an Ulduar boss on the 2nd pull, I realized that the game was no longer worth playing.
I came back in Cataclysm to check things out since a lot of old vanilla players were returning. I did the small guild normal-mode raiding thing for a while then left after beating the disappointing Dragonsoul tier.
I came back and leveled a couple of characters in MoP, but couldn't stomach the disgusting Panda theme and complete absence of interesting content. The combination of Diablo 3 and MoP may have been too much for me. I don't know if Blizzard can redeem themselves after the disastrous 2012.

[Mister K]

Casualism during Wrath, Cata, MOP
Healer imbalance during Cata
De-warcraftization (pandas, china) during MOP

Wrath had strong casualism* but Hardmodes in Ulduar were fantastic. Lot of balance issues were fixed as well, god palas weren't so great in TBC. In general, TBC was fantastic, at least when it comes to PvE.

I really hope they open up old servers. Id love to see Vanilla, TBC, WOTLK servers or at least TBC and Vanilla. I just don't get why not.

- - - Updated - - -

WotLK's Naxx tier was a joke in terms of difficulty, but I stuck around hoping that things would improve with the next raid tier. When I logged into PTR and was able to kill an Ulduar boss on the 2nd pull

Ulduar wasn't hard on softcore. Doing the hardmodes was trivial, not the hardest of all but still very challenging. Anyway which boss are you talking about? Vanilla was new, it was buggy and lot did not know how classes worked and of course no major addons.

TBC on other hand was much more trivial, at least BT/Sunwell pre-nerfs. Still, some classes were broken which WOTLK fixed up nicely.

- - - Updated - - -

For me it was a little bit of everything, but I do have a small laundry list of items. Too many changes, way too quick. But it started with Cata for me.

1. The Story: In Wrath it seemed Arthas had a point and purpose to mingling with us (the player) as he did. He wanted to train us to be finely honed weapons, kill us, and then raise us as undead for his own purposes. In Cata the interaction with Deathwing were few and far between; which was understandable with what Blizzard was trying to point out, DW is a massive ANCIENT dragon that in theory should have been able to crush us at a moments notice. There was no need for getting close very often; however, this seemed to have the opposite effect. I felt more disconnected from him as the main villain. Personally it was like this with most dungeon bosses as well, it's as though most of them were just slapped in there as space fillers instead of feeling like they were part of the story.

3. Removal of Armor Pen: I, to this day resent this move. Blizzards argument "Armor Pen felt to mathy" but they were perfectly content in adding another stat that dealt in percents, Mastery. To me mastery is far more boring than what Armor Pen ever was. ಠ_ಠ

4. Talent Trees (The root of all evil): I started playing back in early/mid BC. So when I say talent tree I mean TREES! Not this 6 point, cookie cutter, hold your hand, pamper your baby-ish backside bs. I miss the days of 50-60 point talent trees that made you feel truly unique if you felt like being so. True there was a slight learning curve to it; with a little common sense and some comprehensive (and I use that loosely) reading, you could easily figure builds out.

I feel your pain. I recently logged into MOP and damn the talents made me just facepalm. Sure it can be argued that lots of unnecessary talents have been chucked out and what not but this is just, not the same. WOTLK nerfed hybrids, loved working Hybrids in TBC, was great fun to hit up world pvp, bgs with a hybrid spec which worked and keep hardcore "cookie-cutter" specs for raiding and arena.

[Osirys]

the amount of time i have to spend online for semi-hardcore raiding. got fed up with 4-5 raids (4 hours each), countless wipes and next day same thing all over again.
Oh and dailies were all right just MoP was a bit too much, felt like i HAD TO do 25+/day to stay competitive.

[Deleted]

The "idea" of the game has become distorted. For the developers. For most of the long-term players, it has remained intact however, hence the sub drops. Some people who still play the game call it lack of adaptive skills, I and many others call it critical thinking. I still think that if they hadn't gone the Naxx rehash route in WotLK, the game would be in a much better, in a much FIRMER state. The subscription numbers perhaps wouldn't have peaked so high, but they would have remained stable. TBC didn't care for casuals and rightly so.