2015 and still "World of Warcraft is responsible for killing the MMO genre".

[Goradan]

Man as I have played WoW from Vanilla to now. I totally Agree with the post. Wow has traded it's soul for easier accessibility and cartering to casual players, like trading a rough Diamond for a perfect fake one if you get my drift. Wow certainly is the most popular and known MMO But it's lacks what made it a success as is just living of hype. reputation and high prices.

[TheDeeGee]

Why is WoW a killer of the MMO genre?

All the other MMOs simply suck at doing their job.

Plain and simple.

[iriecolorado]

Why is WoW a killer of the MMO genre?

All the other MMOs simply suck at doing their job.

Plain and simple.

I'd argue that this Skinner box garrison + raid or die loot treadmill is the worst of all of them. Just because there are a ton of people addicted and too attached to the time they've poured into their characters doesn't mean this is a quality MMO. It's almost sad watching all of the people bored with this game continue to sign on and do the same, pointless, repetitive, un-fun tasks over and over simply because it has become a compulsion for them. "AFKing in my garrison and running this raid loot treadmill simply isn't fun... So, I'm going to level alt after alt so I can AFK in my garrison and run the loot treadmill on several characters. I feel like I have to do something so my subscription time isn't wasted!"

If WoD was "Vanilla" WoW do you think you would have sunk 10 years into this game? I'm thinking that WoD is the WoW killer we've all been waiting for. With the way they've dropped the ball by cheaping out on content coupled with the complete lack of creativity and the air of not giving a fuck that their customers are wildly disappointed. I'd wager that a LOT of the sub losses this time around are going to be very permanent.

[SirBeef]

Man as I have played WoW from Vanilla to now. I totally Agree with the post. Wow has traded it's soul for easier accessibility and cartering to casual players, like trading a rough Diamond for a perfect fake one if you get my drift. Wow certainly is the most popular and known MMO But it's lacks what made it a success as is just living of hype. reputation and high prices.

WoW and all Blizzard games have catered to the casual market since day one. Blizzard has always taken games and made them more accessible to broader market with their own flair. WoW was considered a big casual joke while it was being developed by EQ and UO players. that was until Blizzard ruled the market a few months after launch. All WoW has done is follow the major gaming trends. It has always been accessible to casuals, and now that raiding can be seen by everyone if and when they want, devs can actually justify spending resources on raiding which historically only included 10% or so of all players.

[uopayroll]

With the way society is going and the fact that human beings want everything NOW NOW NOW and they don't want to have to interact with others to complete challenging content I can't imagine any MMORPG doing well without implementing the anti-social features that WoW cultivated. They'd just move on to shitty games. Hell, working at gamestop over a year taught me that people are fickle, loyal fans are few, and even my own coworkers were buying 5 different games a week and playing them for a day or two. That is the average gamer these days. some to zero interaction with other human beings is the NORM and its honestly quite sad.

I miss having to build up a reputation with other players and interact with people in a friendly environment. I don't miss how hard it was to set up groups but we could have benefitted from some better group search tools that made it easier to gather players INSTEAD OF "LFG/LFR". I've also been that guy who played very few games, whether it was because I was poor growing up and just became accustomed to not having many games or because I was a loyal fan to the warcraft universe I've never been a fan of playing tons of games at once. But I'm a dead breed at this point. I am only 21 (been gaming since I was 2 on the super nintendo) and I always tell my brother that he and I are part of a generation of dead gamers. The internet and the majority of gaming culture is a sick, shadow of its former self in terms of comradery, social structure, and has some of the worst taste I've ever seen(though this shouldn't be surprising because the same disgusting levels of taste in pop culture of music/movies has been skydiving the past 10 years as well).

WoW anti-social?? They just added Twitter integration...you know Twitter..a social network.

[Deleted]

TL;DR
It´s Blizzards fault that other companies make shitty games

[Varabently]

Raiding, Pvp, Challenge modes, rare mobs, and just general exploring.

My issue with CMs specifically is that they are designed to be a mini-game. When your gear doesn't matter (that's arguable for CM I suppose since you do need specific gear), and you're tied to a specific ilevel, it's no longer the same game. It's not about gearing up to do the next challenge, it's about "how do we cheese this with a specific class setup, invis pots, etc." To me that's not what I want out of dungeons. I just want challenging encounters that give good rewards, and require communication and coordination. CMs are that, except they give no rewards (LFR-level drops?) and are more about skipping as much as you can and doing it as fast as you can.

[Deleted]

He is right though. WoW community has been getting shittier and shittier, and the game is becoming more and more unsociable. It's easy to engage here in a circle-jerk of ''wow rocks!!! dumb hater!!'', though.

[Chuckadoodle]

TL;DR
It´s Blizzards fault that other companies make shitty games

This X10.... Man I can't believe that Ford and GM were on the verge of collapse.. damn you Toyota and Honda... ohh why don't you make QUALITY cars that are AFFORDABLE (aka accessible) to the masses.

[Deleted]

If WoD was "Vanilla" WoW do you think you would have sunk 10 years into this game?

This is the most insightful comment on this whole thread... re-read it again and again...!

[melodramocracy]

He makes quite a few good and very obvious points, so I'm not surprised that folks here dislike the article

The game, by its design and popularity, attracted players who would never have actually invested time in an MMO prior. The games popularity suddenly becomes viewed as a standard to hit (because that's what people tend to do), other dev houses play follow the leader (because that's what businesses tend to do) to a bastardization of prior works, and most importantly, the game is old enough now to have completely altered players expectations of what these games represent.

A sad thing, but I'm glad I was around to enjoy this genre prior.

[iriecolorado]

TL;DR
It´s Blizzards fault that other companies make shitty games

Don't know about that. I'll take GW2 or FFXIV over WoW any day of the week. If people weren't so attached to the time they put into this game it would be at or near the bottom of the heap. Frankly, WoW isn't a very good game. It's devolved into nothing more than a raid-or-die loot treadmill system now. The engine is stale, the mechanics are shit (Stand and cast? Are you fucking kidding me? It's 2015 FFS) and the developers are just plain lazy.

Like I said, if WoW released today and WoD was "Vanilla" it would die a quick death. If people weren't so attached to their communities and the characters that they've had for a decade now this game would be in the dumpster.

[mysticx]

He is right though. WoW community has been getting shittier and shittier, and the game is becoming more and more unsociable. It's easy to engage here in a circle-jerk of ''wow rocks!!! dumb hater!!'', though.

There's a problem here, though: Other games have tried to be more group-centric, and didn't just fail to take the top spot, they failed outright, went free-to-play or are ambling along with just a tiny fanbase still hanging on, an obvious conclusion here is: players just don't really care about being sociable in a game anymore (Beyond maybe a small circle of friends), WoW may be foolish for embracing that or the other MMO's for denying it, but the evidence so far (In other words, the sub-numbers) point to that WoW has got the right end of the stick here...

[Pony Soldier]

To me that whole thing just sounds like just another QQ WoW hate thread that we see here on MMO-C everyday. How ignorant do you have to be to say something like that? And the way it's laid out he makes it seem like it's a fact instead of just his own stupid opinion. People love to make these kind of claims but they can never seem to come up with the evidence to back up their claim. Hm, I wonder why? Maybe because it's opinionated bullshit? Probably.

[TaurenNinja]

WoW doesn't kill anything because it exists in parallel. It's simply better than the rest, and people tend to prefer higher quality (= more entertaining) over inferior quality. Not always, but certainly in this case. The others die off or have to stick to certain niches because they can't compete. Articles like this make it sound like WoW is doing something massively wrong, when in reality it's exactly the opposite (the others are doing something massively wrong).

[ringpriest]

World of Warcraft is still the King because it is still the most most complete and diverse MMOrpg out there. As simple as that.

Just one problem with that conclusion: while WoW is undoubtedly a popular (and profitable) game, it's not an MMORPG. It's the world's biggest lobby game, that pretends to be an MMORPG.

[DeadmanWalking]

Usually when I find a pile of bullshit on the internet I leave it where it lies and disregard it, I don't bring it home so the fly ridden pile of shit can stink up the room.

[iriecolorado]

Just one problem with that conclusion: while WoW is undoubtedly a popular (and profitable) game, it's not an MMORPG. It's the world's biggest lobby game, that pretends to be an MMORPG.

Yeah, WoW stopped being "massively mutli-player" about 5-6 years ago. It's a single player RPG with no compelling reason to set foot in the open world, with group dungeons.

[Kushana]

My first point is that I don't think WoW has spoiled the MMO genre. While OP obviously has aspects of WoD that he's unhappy with, one of the aspects of the competitive market is that if you don't like WoW you can go play something else. OP tries to make the point that WoW standards have become de facto MMO standards and that this is Blizzard's fault. I think he's correct about the standards, but I think he's wrong about fault. I think it's a characteristic of the market.

One of the things that WoW has done is survived during a transformation of the market. When WoW was released, MMOs were pretty primitive in all aspects including technology, player management, UI standards, and exploits. If WoW 1.0 were released today, it wouldn't last a year. Blizzard was fortunate that while the MMO environment evolved, so did they.

New MMOs do not have that luxury; they need to hit a certain standard straight out of the box. Lag, server queues, load times, visual quality, user interface, player management and feedback, bot detection and prosecution; these all need to be managed at a high level even before your beta users show up. And the amount of effort and resources required to meet that high level means that you need a certain size of player base in order to make money. Which in turn means you can't make money by catering exclusively to small fringe populations like RPers or "screw the casuals."

[Toxigen]

I quite liked the article myself. Pretty much hits the nail square on the head.

Much like this gem: https://flavortextlore.wordpress.com...ecline-of-wow/

As a Day 1 player (and MMO enthusiast since 1998), its kinda sad to see where the industry has gone. For me, the genre is lost...and it will never be what it was from say 1998-2003 (ish). Those were the best 5-6 years in gaming history, never to be repeated again.