Please explain to me why the game felt more "alive" for me when there was <500k SUBS

[Deleted]

/rambleon

Other issues include you have grown up in the last 8 years and your priorities are no longer the same now as they were when you first started.
When I started my priority was playing as much WoW as possible, and drinking on a weekend, now its looking after my children and fitting in a LFR or Flex after they have gone to bed.

Other issues include creating too many new realms when the olds ones werent actually full enough to warrant more realms, they could have added a couple at a time, but only when the others were peaking out, now we have a lot of dead realms which create an atmosphere of playing even more solo.

Also computer users and people with access over the last 10 years has changed dramatically so the footprint of customers now is not the same as it was in the earlier days.

Another point is that as people became more affluent especially in the earlier part of the decade they had more disposable income so they could do more frivolous things such as playing online games, but once the novelty wore off they werent really sure of the correct nuances and behaviours required of people, which has lead to a steady decline of the nice helpful player and increased the amount of trolls who know what they say online will not get to affect them physically in 99.999999% of cases.

/rambleover

[hakujinbakasama]

Closer to tinfoil hat than provable fact. Why does everyone insist on using their pet peeve as the "reason" for sub decline? Theres hundreds of reasons.

@The OP. It was new and exciting then. Now you kind of know it all either through seeing it quickly or sneak peeks from outside media. Maybe all the people bitching about not being able to fly will get back that feeling you had!

I believe you are generalizing the issue a bit too much. While I understand the argument could be equally attempted on lets say class design specifically, im merely pointing out that during the era of grinds, running your ass off, no cross server, ect, wow had better growth and retention.

I understand forum users dont generally understand the concept of "systemic" but that is the only way to discuss wow issues. In the end, Blizzard went too far with most qualiy of life changes, and whats worse is now people try to hard to copy the "The now wow" vs what made it the king.

[Tyraena]

Simple. First, you had to walk everywhere, second the landmass was smaller, third there were far less servers to play on, so the ones that were around were packed for quite a while, and lastly, people had to congregate to do anything, since we lacked the social/queue systems the game now has.

[hakujinbakasama]

Right, let's bring back enchanters who charged outrageous prices for their services, that you had to portal to in order to get your enchant done, and god forbid you need a rare enchant and the only three people on the server who can do it aren't responding in trade.

Buying enchants on the AH is worlds better than it used to be.

I never liked the enchantment change. As someone who only got deeply into WoW due to professions, this change really sucked in my eyes.

[IxilaFA]

I never liked the enchantment change. As someone who only got deeply into WoW due to professions, this change really sucked in my eyes.

That's pretty sad, to tell the truth. Almost every MMO I've ever played as a more extensive and in-depth profession system than World of Warcraft does. It is problem the one area I think that WoW can't compete with other MMOs.

[MeteorPunch]

People were out in the world doing stuff because that was the only way to do it. Nowadays you can do almost anything from a major city.

[hakujinbakasama]

That's pretty sad, to tell the truth. Almost every MMO I've ever played as a more extensive and in-depth profession system than World of Warcraft does. It is problem the one area I think that WoW can't compete with other MMOs.

Indepth doesnt mean "good" automatically. Ffxiv had an indepth crafting system and it was fucking awful to experience. Rift has a similar one to wow with only one improvement being the dismantle feature. I know Aion had an interesting on, but like guildwars it was surrounded by a game unappealing to me.

[schwarzkopf]

Because "alive" is a subjective value you made up based on your own personal experiences.

The first time I ever had a nice Chicken Korma was awesome, then after eating one every day for 9 years - I no longer find it as tasty.

Of course - I know that I have to keep eating it, because I used to like it ...

[Sliske]

Because the game just started. Everyone was at point A, the beginning.

Now, you start, and theres some people at point A, B, C, D, .... X, Y , Z

and then theres people who've got to Z and made a new character.

This happens in every online game, and it happens on every launch. Its part of the reason why expansion launches are so fun. Everyone is equal for a brief moment in time. Its fun looking at someone with more blues than you and going "woah, hes good geared"

[clevin]

Right, let's bring back enchanters who charged outrageous prices for their services, that you had to portal to in order to get your enchant done, and god forbid you need a rare enchant and the only three people on the server who can do it aren't responding in trade.

Buying enchants on the AH is worlds better than it used to be.

Whine whine whine. If you were in a half decent guild you asked in chat and someone online could do it for you. Yeah, you had to travel vs sending mats and getting a scroll but meh.

face it, a lot of the nice convenience features also mean you don't need other people and that's a stupid design direction in a massively multi-player game.

[lawow74]

The game was shiny and new as were all the players(not necessarily in an MMO experience sense, but in the WoW sense), so you had a higher percentage of players feeling that enthusiasm about it because it was new.

Fast-forward to now and you have fewer and fewer new people coming in as more and more old people leave. The game is nearly 10 years old. People tend to be jaded, crusty and insular if they're not toxic trollmongers.

I believe you are generalizing the issue a bit too much. While I understand the argument could be equally attempted on lets say class design specifically, im merely pointing out that during the era of grinds, running your ass off, no cross server, ect, wow had better growth and retention.

I understand forum users dont generally understand the concept of "systemic" but that is the only way to discuss wow issues. In the end, Blizzard went too far with most qualiy of life changes, and whats worse is now people try to hard to copy the "The now wow" vs what made it the king.

How ironic you say this, because my thought is that forum users generally don't look beyond the scope of WoW to ascertain why it's had falling subs for a while now. It's not any one thing or combination of things WoW did, because WoW does not exist in a vacuum.

I know, shocking concept, isn't it? There ARE other games besides WoW.

Games that they have to compete with.

Games which are not (another big shocker, brace yourself!) always MMO games.

And the number of those games and the people who play them have grown, grown, grown. WoW is diminishing in an ever-expanding pool of available entertainment material.

And its numbers are only going to continue to diminish. Sure, there will be spikes at the start of xpacs, but the numbers will continue to trend down over their lifespans and there's not really anything that can be done to stop it. Just slow it down.

[hakujinbakasama]

The game was shiny and new as were all the players(not necessarily in an MMO experience sense, but in the WoW sense), so you had a higher percentage of players feeling that enthusiasm about it because it was new.

Fast-forward to now and you have fewer and fewer new people coming in as more and more old people leave. The game is nearly 10 years old. People tend to be jaded, crusty and insular if they're not toxic trollmongers.



How ironic you say this, because my thought is that forum users generally don't look beyond the scope of WoW to ascertain why it's had falling subs for a while now. It's not any one thing or combination of things WoW did, because WoW does not exist in a vacuum.

I know, shocking concept, isn't it? There ARE other games besides WoW.

Games that they have to compete with.

Games which are not (another big shocker, brace yourself!) always MMO games.

And the number of those games and the people who play them have grown, grown, grown. WoW is diminishing in an ever-expanding pool of available entertainment material.

And its numbers are only going to continue to diminish. Sure, there will be spikes at the start of xpacs, but the numbers will continue to trend down over their lifespans and there's not really anything that can be done to stop it. Just slow it down.

Sure, but equally one has to discuss the topic of new player growth. I understand more than most the external factors. Wow startec when console gaming was not only at an all time high, but at its infancy of online console gaming. Despite all of that Wow peaked at 12 million subscribers. It did so at a very interesting time (global financial crisis).

Look at Rift though. The biggest complaint I have and I have heard echoed is the ghostland of vast proportions for new players. This is something that started to hurt new player interests in WoW too. I have spoken to people who have become less interested in WoW because of the levels required. Not only that, but socially, as a starting player you are useless. That is a deep well of a topic but to surmise I think wow went too far in trying to keep players and not enough in bringing in more.

[Dasani]

I would say it has to do with how convenient everything has become now.

Back in vanilla, Ironforge was always packed to the brim with people everywhere because it was the only city with an auction house so everyone kind of made it their home to be near that. When people wanted groups, they kind of stood around in iron forge in the looking for group channel advertising that they needed a tank or healer or whatever, and finally got a hit from someone on their server to go, but untl that time they were just kind of chilling.

Group content was also basically the only thing to do at max level. You either ran dungeons or your raided, that was pretty much it.

Nowadays everything is detached. You don't need to care about finding groups or spend any time waiting on a group, you just hit a button and boom, your group is made. People aren't from your server so it doesn't even matter how you treat them or how they treat you, less consequences for behavior than ever before. There are is also other shit to do outside of dungeons and raids which keep people venturing around in the world instead of being in town. People fly around looking for rares, doing pet battles, doing daily quests, doing timeless isle shit, and so on. Lots of random little things for people to do that don't involve being in town.

Until the CRZ bullshit, the leveling zones have been dead and barren for years because of changes in philosophy. Originally it took much longer to level up through content and you could always run across people in the same level range as you doing the same quests as you or just seeing these leveling zones populated by people who were all working on it. I still remember the group missions in Hinterlands where you had to kill tons of those elite trolls up there and needed a solid group to do it, but despite needing a full group, there were prettymuch always people there to group with. I remember getting in groups quickly and easily every time I needed to do that and sometimes there'd be 2 or 3 groups at a time up there. The world was more populated because leveling was slower.

Now you can go from 1 to 60 in a few hours without a whole lot of effort, the whole leveling experience is lightning fast so those zones are more or less dead. CRZ helped because it basically throws anyone anywhere who is in that zone together on the same realm and gives the illusion that it's densely populated.

But these days you get to level cap stupid fast, then you just go out and do what you want to do, then log out. Literally EVERYTHING in this game can now be done solo. Even group content like dungeons and raids you are simply thrown together with random people on your whim and most of the time, most people don't even say anything to each other. It has all become very detached and non-personal. Everyone has become tools everyone else uses instead of being people you actually cared to get to know. It also lets you do all content without needing any friends at all, which in my opinion is a horrible design choice. yeah it's convenient and nice for people who almost never play, but at what cost?

You used to befriend people you liked in dungeons because having friends who could tank, heal, or dps well and wanted to do those dungeons was useful for throwing together new groups later on. People made lots more friends back then and communities came to rely on one another. Now everyone are interchangeable, meaningless cogs. You don't need friends, you don't need to count on someone, you just hit a button and whatever you need materializes in front of you. It kind of reminds me of science fiction stories talking about how bad that kind of thing is for a society as a whole. When your culture no longer has to work for anything and is simply given everything it wants, life becomes dull and boring, loses it's meaning. Same thing for games really. When you're spoon fed everything in a game, it is no longer fun.

I guess that's getting a bit off topic though. But yeah, there's really not much reason for people to need to interact with each other anymore, that is why the game feels dead most of the time. Even when you "see" people out in the world, they are all off doing their own shit and wouldn't give you a second glance as your very existence is meaningless to them these days.

[IxilaFA]

Whine whine whine. If you were in a half decent guild you asked in chat and someone online could do it for you. Yeah, you had to travel vs sending mats and getting a scroll but meh.

face it, a lot of the nice convenience features also mean you don't need other people and that's a stupid design direction in a massively multi-player game.

Just so you know, I was in a good guild back in BC. Still had problems getting enchants done without having to pay ridiculous "tips" to enchanters.

[hakujinbakasama]

Just so you know, I was in a good guild back in BC. Still had problems getting enchants done without having to pay ridiculous "tips" to enchanters.

Love when people single out enchanters. Everyone required tips. Enchanting was the worst profession to level. The cost to level it was ridiculous compared to everything else. And I say this as someone who leveled every primary profession to max during tbc.

[Nurabashi]

A new game has new players in the starting zones. You take that, coupled with limited servers, meaning you run into people a lot more.

Blizzard is trying to bring that feeling back, desperately, with connected realms etc., but it will never feel the same.

[Banzhe]

Because people actually had to walk on the ground to get around so you saw them riding past you all the time? Also, cross realm changes things.

The game is actually more alive, you just don't see them in the way you did way back in vanilla.

If by alive you mean; Que pops > Hey, there's <insert random number> randoms I am 99% guaranteed not to see ever again -Then yes, totally agree

[Thallidomaniac]

Indepth doesnt mean "good" automatically. Ffxiv had an indepth crafting system and it was fucking awful to experience. Rift has a similar one to wow with only one improvement being the dismantle feature. I know Aion had an interesting on, but like guildwars it was surrounded by a game unappealing to me.

Normally, if crafting/upgrading in an MMO involves RNG, it's usually going to either be super great if RNG is on your side, or utterly awful otherwise. That brings back horrible memories of scrolling in MapleStory. Imagine that there's was a chance that enchanting Jade Spirit on a weapon could fail, or even worse, permanently destroy the item.

Cross-realms also seemed to brought back life into the world too. I still see people doing the Argent Tourney dailies at level 90.

[Nathreim]

It was a brand new world with so much to discover. We also had fewer servers that were rapidly growing.

Now we have way too many servers spreading the declining population out.

[Deleted]

Right, let's bring back enchanters who charged outrageous prices for their services, that you had to portal to in order to get your enchant done, and god forbid you need a rare enchant and the only three people on the server who can do it aren't responding in trade.

Buying enchants on the AH is worlds better than it used to be.

One of many reasons why I dislike how World of Warcraft is now compared to then.

This ''I must have it instantly'' mindset is sickening.

So what if you couldn't get this enchant day 1 when you finished gathering the mats. Building your character was a part of the game, and if you couln't get the enchant instantly, you might have needed to wait an hour, or two or even to the next day to finish it.

It build up suspense for the enchant you wanted, it was something special.

I myself was an Enchanter back then, but I didn't have the Crusader enchant. Once I finally gathered the mats for it, I had to wait around 12 hours before I found someone with the formula. The tip wasn't crazy, it was my own mats + 10 gold.