Originally Posted by
Vaelorian
Personally I think you are right. But here comes the next guy (not me) saying in capslock: IT IS A 9 YEAR OLD GAME!!!!!!
Which I personally find a very flawed argument. It is popular still, it is a cult thing even.
But here comes the guy saying in capslock: BUT PEOPLE GROW UP!!!!
Which is a very flawed argument aswell... People sure did grow up. But growing up has nothing to do with liking or even playing a game or not. Personal circumstance does or choice does. While some people married at 25 and got a kid, I myself a MANY MANY people like me still found the time to play WoW with decent raidingguild. And as Blizzard said themselves: more people have quit WoW then play it. This was already true when WoW was at its peak of 12 million. So it sure isn't a "growing up" issue.
And as you can see from your chart, other games never put a dent into WoW's popularity.
So there must be OTHER reasons for it to decline. And convenience and loss of immersion are MAJOR factors.
LFR/LFD: while both are major contributors to its decline. But LFR/LFD isn't the real reason behind it. But while it "fixes" some thing (which I will get to soon), it also destroys a community.
A server takes care of its own. If we had a server only LFR/LFD it would not be as bad... But guess what? Some servers have a very very low amount of players on it. So LFR/LFD would not work nicely because the queues would be insanely long.
So we have a low populated server... How to fix this? Oh right... instead of merging servers for real... we got Cross Server things like LFR/LFD. And because it is cross server everyone can be an asshole to everyone.
While I won't deny there were assholes in Vanilla/TBC/WOTLK, from my POV they WERE kept in check. They would also be kept in check by themselves because they needed other players to continue their game or they needed to pay 8 euro to name change. And also you usually had a guild or 2 on the server that for some reason invited all the assholes. Usually it would collapse within a period of 6 to 8 months, but everyone knew not to bother with people from THAT guild. Now you don't have that anymore. People are unaccountable. Very bad for business imo.
So again if they merged servers, some stuff would probably not have been an issue.
Then we come to the matter of content that is so trivial, you won't bother with it after getting from it what you wanted.
- 5 man heroic dungeons
- LFR
I must admit I have been pretty "commited" to WoW and my character. I raided heroic for as long as it existed and have raided since Vanilla. But back in Vanilla, TBC and Prenerf Cata, 5 man heroics did actually matter for the entire expansion.
Now you could say that this is not true. Gearupgrades will make such content trivial. I say this is a flawed argument. Sure the content does get easier even if at first it was challenging. But you can easily make that content more fun to play if you handicap yourself. Such as: going without a tank, going with 5 dps, going without a healer etc etc. Or just trying to beat a selfmade timer. You can do this ofcourse if the content was trivial to begin with... sure. But doing this gimmicky things only stretches the content a bit more. If you begin with pretty hard dungeons, you make em last a lot longer.
Now in come the people who say: "But hard dungeons is what drove people away, look at Cataclysm ZOMG!!!"
This is probably true. But how did this happen? Why did it drive people away? Was it the difficulty? Was it that really? Or was it LFD(cross server) that made this happen? Because if you did not go with your own guild, you could have a lot of issues with those dungeons. But if you were with your own server kind of people, or guildies you would def. had a better chance at completing them.
1. you would probably not kick people right away
2. you would probably stay for more wipes
This in turn would potentially make for better players and more easily make friends. But only at the start of an expansion.
Why? You can make friends anytime some would say. Sure sure... you can make friends. People who claim this are probably 14 and are already calling people "friends" when someone says "hi" to them. I say this because dungeons take like 15/20 minutes. And because there are no wipes and no communication needed, you cannot truly get a decent assesment on someone. Why bother giving out your Real ID anyway. You very much likely won't contact those people ever again. You have no basis of potential friendship anymore, not enough anyway.
We need 5 man challenging content, but we need others to be able to do them. And these others need to have the patience to wipe and the respect to be polite. How do we do this? Yes no crossserver bullshit.
But alas Blizzard moved away from server merges because of all sorts of things, names of people to name one. I care about my name. I was the first one to use it, came up with it by myself without some form of name generator. I even have a story on how I got my name. If we would still be in Vanilla thru WOTLK I would even have a very good reputation connected to the name. But I would GLADLY give it up if it meant we could merge servers as was intented by the community.
Then comes the Flying into the game.
People say: Do not use flying mounts if you hate them.
Like I said so many times: People take the path of the least resistance. If you do not, you will fall behind. And you would also be alone, because no one else uses their groundmount when it is not needed. Zones themselves are designed nowadays for Flying Mounts. So no in the content we have now, we cannot lose flying mounts. But we sure as hell can make new content without flying mounts. But Blizzard is too scared to use this tool.
Immersion would be better. People who claim riding is tedious on a groundmount making travel time longer, is not immersive, do not understand what real immersion is or can do without it. I would tell these people to please play another game where you special niche is actually appriciated. WoW used to be really immersive. It was very much an adventure if you set a goal to go somewhere. Sure sometimes you would feel like: Ok... I need to travel for 20 minutes now... pffffff. But overal it would not bother me at all. It was awesome also seeing your guild at raidtime, take the Flight Paths. A long chain of people flying. We had fun while getting to the instance. We communicated.
About other convenience features. I don't mind portals much as long as they are functional and not too common. What I don't feel is right is why they don't have portals in every major city. I would just go into a different city whenever I felt like it as my home. It just does not make sense to me apart from getting a sense of having a busy server. If this is the reason, then my former statement comes into place about merging servers.