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

[Copenhagen23]

Because the game was growing and the devs constantly improved the game. Right now it seems like they're more in a damage control phase. They are just trying to keep people playing, rather than focusing on innovating. It's clear their philosophy has changed since 2004. I think the next 6 months we will see another huge drop in subs. ESO just came out and Wildstar is right around the corner. I think Wildstar will bring people in because it offers a lot that WoW does not. Right now we are in an end of expansion funk so the community feels very dead. Why Blizzard thinks its a good idea to let the last raid carry out for an entire year is beyond me. They better have some tricks up their sleeve for WoD, or else the community won't feel anymore alive than it does right now.

[zephid]

I remember starting WoW in Nov 2004 with a bunch of people I played SWG (star wars galaxies) with back in 2003/early 2004.

The world/game in general felt thriving and huge to me...even coming from another MMORPG..

I'd say this feeling lasted from 2004-2007

NOTE: I am not saying the game was BETTER OR WORSE, im just saying it felt more "alive", the game is far better now...to a gaming point of view...tons more things to do, tons more features....a lot more things fixed...many useless things now playable...i am not denying this fact

Now when I log into the game I just feel like im walking around in a museum or something....the game just feels dead...even though theres MILLIONs of more subscribers...I wish I could explain it better but I guess you sort of have to be around MMORPGs a long time.


I am not talking about inner guild communities...thats normal..im talking about the community as 1 entity...it seems dead. And please don't think your private raiding guild chatter/banter makes up for this....i am talking about server wide community here.

The server communities died when they introduced the LFD tool since there were no reason to talk to each other anymore.

[Deleted]

It was more because the community. All the best fame i've played community wise usually had the smaller player bases. You would see the same faces in trade district, the same enemies in pvp and you would run dungeons with regular groups, you would add good people to play with again and develop friendships. Because you formed these alliances and friendships and even rivalries, the game felt far more alive. Also things were difficult alone, things were complex, you couldn't just waltz in to BWL to use the alchemy table. The world didn't revolve around you like it does in a lot of modern MMO's, you revolved around the world. A good example of this is airships/boats, if you miss it, you can't just talk to an npc, see a load screen and be there, like the portals do now. You would wait, the world felt alive and you were part of it, not the world just bending to suit you best

[Chaosturn]

Because you didn't know all the zones and quests, so the world was full of surprises.
What horde player doesn't know about the Bonechewer Blood quest in Hellfire today?

[Conscious]

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!

Yeah right, when flying doesn't do it they're going to remove something else, and when that doesn't work, another.

Whatever FOTM argument the vocal minority wants to use in order to try and domineer this game again.

[jakeic]

Because you didn't know all the zones and quests, so the world was full of surprises.
What horde player doesn't know about the Bonechewer Blood quest in Hellfire today?

this isn't true. i haven't fully leveled a character through the redesigned 1-60 because of how mundane, lowest common denominator, and disjointed it is. the zones and the quests themselves are inadequate to give that feeling of being alive.

[F4ulty]

My Alliance server is a quiet RP realm that still has a few characters you notice in trade chat. Like very small time celebrities, almost. It's fun, but the server as a whole is meh.
My Horde server is a lot more populated, and 'better', but the last time I recall remembering a character was the first week of MoP, when only the dedicated few of us had managed to hit 90 on our Monks.

[Forumchibi]

The server communities died when they introduced the LFD tool since there were no reason to talk to each other anymore.

This was my thought as well. Before that, you were forced to stand in town spamming 'LF tank/healer for <insert instance name here>' for hours on end. You had to sort through random spam and silly conversations, religious debates, political debates, Chuck Norris jokes, linking achievements and making dirty word jokes... now you can be wherever, with all of your chat channels off, and get into groups just by waiting for half an hour or so.

Plus the leveling process is easier now with a majority of the elite quests gone or soloable, so the world is a bit more quiet than it used to be as well.

Also it's just a matter of the game getting stale. I get on for raids a few minutes before our scheduled time, and log off immediately after, never bothering to get on otherwise since there's no need and not much to do. Looking forward to WoD and the garrisons though, hoping that renews my interest. As much as I love WoW, I'm just biding my time with other MMOs most of the time.

[Deleted]

Because people were out in the world, you met players, not 95% of the playerbase (not real numbers) was semi-afk in their city waiting for their queue.

[DriveKnight]

With the introduction of LFG/LFR and things alike, unfortunately the games community was slowly turning in 'fat slobs', avoiding so many opportunities engaging and meeting new players, where it was back then when everything was so open and adventurous, nowadays everything is just too fast faced.

[Deleted]

My guess? Long story short: there were less idiots around when the game was young.

Success attracts FotM-retards who only do something if it's popular. Then their weight starts pulling the game down and we get stuff like MoP.

[Worgoblin]

Flying mounts are a huge part of the problem. When I play on Vanilla servers, the world immediately feels larger because at most I'm cruising at +100% speed. And the game is more alive in Vanilla. PvP happens all the time, everywhere, because you can't just mount up and fly over it.

[Auberdeen]

easy to answer. higher concentration in a few areas.

[Deleted]

Reminder that after 4 years of WoW from 2004 to late 2008 wotlk release, sub number kept growing, peaking at 12 mil subs with wotlk release, despite all the stupid arguments how game was bad because <insert lazy casual's reason here>. And then in wotlk when Blizz started making raids more accessible and putting in different raid sizes, difficulties, item levels sub number suddenly started going down, peaking only once again when Lich King patch was released, because let's face it, everyone wanted to be there for that moment.

Past that point, numbers kept rapidly going down and I blame Blizzard for driving away people who cared about the game and attracting lazy people looking for cheap fun.

[Osmeric]

Reminder that after 4 years of WoW from 2004 to late 2008 wotlk release, sub number kept growing, peaking at 12 mil subs with wotlk release,

It peaked at 12 million a few weeks before Cataclysm release. Kind of blows the rest of your argument out of the water.

The catastropic sub decline started in Cataclysm when they apparently thought everyone not in the top 10% should do leveling content or archaeology for their expansion. For some reason, that design didn't go over well.

[Pandapuncher]

Because everything is automated. The road to hell was paved with good intentions

- - - Updated - - -

It peaked at 12 million a few weeks before Cataclysm release. Kind of blows the rest of your argument out of the water.

The catastropic sub decline started in Cataclysm when they apparently thought everyone not in the top 10% should do leveling content or archaeology for their expansion. For some reason, that design didn't go over well.

Quit the bitching, nothing in Cata was hard. I felt no difference from Wotlk heroics to Cata heroics. Probably because I had friends to play with. So the shit was still easy. The game had to be dumbed down for friendless people who don't know how teamwork works.

If teamwork was hard at all, LoL wouldn't be the most successful online game in the world

The only mistake that was made, was not realizing that challenging content could only be completed by people who knew how to work together. As a social game should work.

This is why TBC heroics weren't hard as all, but for some reason, with LFD everything became a challenge. Because anonymous jerks, are bad at the game


You play league? You don't get rewards for solo queue, none, you get them for silver and up

[TehOccifer]

All the things blizzard has implemented has basically killed the social part of WoW. With cross-server, LFR, LFG, and all that stuff. Im not saying its bad necessarily, but back before that stuff, you were forced to do that stuff and interact/talk to people on your own. And as the posts before have said, flying adds to it too. everyone flies all over the place. Back when there werent flying mounts, you had to walk everywhere. Not to mention leveling is so much easier than it was back then. And again, most people use LFG to get to the higher levels, meaning you dont see them out in the world.

[York]

Community. WoW has grown in a lot of ways over the years, but at the cost of small tight knit communities that, as you said, made the game feel more "alive". Things like LFD/LFG/LFR/cross-realm bgs/servers being tied together, etc. have all taken away from the community in favor of ideals such as ease-of-life improvements and other shallow things that cater to more casual players.

And at this point in time that community feeling will likely never return to WoW. I realized that (and a lot of other things too) and thats why I am done with the game. I still find myself here for Diablo 3/Hearthstone stuff, but every time I see WoW related news I just don't really get excited. If anything, WoW at this point feels like WoW: 3 or something. The game really changed after the end of WotLK.

I know people will say "rose-tinted glasses" or something, but WoW truly was more fun for me back in 2007 when it was just Vanilla and BC. Everything seemed like a challenge back then. Leveling was way more challenging than it is now, and was quite time consuming (no XP bonuses/no heirloom gear), and max level content wasn't just readily available to you. You had to prove yourself worthy of doing the endgame content. You had to show your guild/PuG's you had what it takes to keep up with their raiding group. And if you didn't had what it took it meant grinding more dungeons, which meant grinding more heroics until finally you could start gearing up in Kara to do Gruul/Magtheridon.

And back then if you were raiding SSC/The Eye (can't think of the name, the one in Netherstorm)you were in a good guild. If you were doing Black Temple or Sunwell you were in the best guild (on your server of course). Now most all guilds are capable of accomplishing normal raids. Most are even capable of progressing a little bit on heroic raids it seems. There is no sense of "prestige" anymore in the game.

Anyways, I'm rambling. I don't like WoW for what it is today, and I know that it will likely never be what it was. I think nothing lasts forever and that WoW is getting into it's final years as the most popular MMO (it'll still be around for a while but something new is going to come up, whether it's by Blizzard or not).

But yeah. Those are my thoughts from from someone who played from the first half of 2007 to the late half of 2013.

This is exactly why. Perfect response.

[Osmeric]

Quit the bitching, nothing in Cata was hard.

Morhaime, Chilton, and others at Blizzard said otherwise. They would know, so stop it with the well-debunked bullshit, mkay?

[Constraint]

Of course it felt more alive, lol. Everyone who played then knows that - but it was a completely new experience. There weren't guides for everything, for dps, for rotations, for every boss - it was YOUR world, to do what you wanted. It wasn't dependent on perfect balance amongst every class. Now it's just.. stay to the beaten path. Do your pre-assigned damage/healing numbers. Receive your recolored gear based on which difficulty you're doing. Perform your extremely similar rotations. Key in your whole 6 talent "choices".

TL;DR - imbalance was fun, the world was new, everyone in the world was new. Of course it felt more alive.