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

[Deleted]

Only a few raided in classic. MC was seen by 15% (source: Chilton) of the players at the end of classic. Naxxramas classic was seen by less than 1% of the players (source: Hazzikostas). Less than 1% saw sunwell in TBC (source: As well Hazzikostas). People mainly quested solo and skipped group questing content. Which was the reason blizzard removed it.

Source for that numbers: Blizzard.

I am one of the players what didnt get to see this content and yet i dont want **** like LFR and other matchmaking *** in the game.

Dont get to see content was never issue. Problem is when players have nothing els to do. Blizzard should focus create exclusive content for this kind of players and no butcher pve aspects for others just for sake of masses. Becouse at the end this butchered experience become hollow, pointless and boring.

[Deleted]

I am one of the players what didnt get to see this content and yet i dont want **** like LFR and other matchmaking *** in the game.

You dont have to play it. Join a raiding guild and have fun. Play dungeons with your friends only.

Infact, blizzard favors your playstyle currently. You got 3 raiding difficulties which adress organized groups only.

[reliefsan]

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.

QFT!

Well said sir

[lolpve]

WoW has a lot of things going for it which for some reason most other MMO's have failed to compete with.

-It's extremely polished. Movement especially is fluid and intuitive, where other games in the genre usually feature clunky movement, poor animations or non-intuitive mouse/keyboard controls that can't be changed.
-Addon depth. Is there a game out there in any genre as heavily modded as WoW? The way blizzard have embraced addons and even incorporated the better ones into the game is to be respected.
-Customer support. People complain about having to wait hours for a GM to respond, but most other MMOs I have played there isn't even an option for GM ingame support, only an email service and huge levels of corruption and GM favouritism.
-It's cheap, unlike the plague of F2P mmorpgs out there. Before WoW I played Knight Online, and being to achieve anything in WoW with only the £10 subscription is peanuts compared to needing to spend about £300 on items before even being competitive in knightonline, leaving aside pvp buffs only sold in a premium shop. It's to blizzard's credit that the subscription hasn't increased in price for as long as I am aware.
-Content. There's so much actual content in the game when consider that a lot of MMOs don't even have a proper endgame. They might expect you to just pvp endlessly or go to a special high-level zone but the enormous wealth of content in WoW is unparalleled (leaving aside the failure of WoD). Most level 100s haven't come close to finishing all the quests or achievements, and the vast majority of players are far from having mythic on farm. I personally run old raids every week for extra gold, and I never get bored of it.

[Deleted]

@no socialising

Big numbers kill socialising. Just look at small village vs big city. Whenever people start working with thousands of different people instead of a small number socialising dies out. There's no point in trying to build connections with people you will never see again. All the random group finder mechanics do exactly that, there is no need for longterm relationships if you can just get random people to effectively act as better npc's. The only exception are raids,rbg/arena but that's a niche. The wast majority does not play that content. (lfr doesn't count, thats again just a group finder activity)

[moremana]

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



Except that wow is not diverse. Any decent sandbox game has 100x the diversity of wow. I read the article and I agree with it. And the last time I checked, Everquest, Ultima, Daoc, are all still going.

Face it, wow today is a browser based dungeon grinder with no required social interaction. That is not an mmo, that is an online action game.

This persons reply is the best comment on the story.

The only people here defending wow and where it is today are the players he speaks of.

The basement dwellers and people that are to insecure to be social. Instant garatification is what all the new players of wow want, and blizzard feeds that. That is why wow is still averaging 7M subs, yes there are that many unsociable people in the world. Subs peak when xpacs come out because somewhere in the back of everyones mind, the term MMO is going to be rejuvinated in wow, once we realize it hasn't, we unsub.

No one beats wow because everyone tries to imitate it which is why no one succeeds.

WoW is not a MMO, it lost that title when WoTLK ended and Cata started.

[Deleted]

But that isnt a causal effect.

Yes, it is a causal effect. MMORPGs are persistent virtual worlds which depend on their community to survive; without a strong community, the game ends up being dependent on players not being burned out by the content (which at the current rate means each expansion only has longevity lasting a couple of months)

To provide another Ghostcrawler quote, from his Twitter account in 2013, one of the effects of Matchmaking has been that the "sense of community has suffered" - going on to say that trying to put the community and social aspect back into the game is their next problem to solve (and it still hasn't been solved).

Blizzard are well aware of how important the community is to the long term viability of the game - they recognise that players who have no social ties are most likely to play for a couple of months and then unsubscribe until the next expansion pack (Again, you may recall another Ghostcrawler tweet from 2013 mentioning his concern about players who never interact with others in the game)

The fact is, if matchmaking hadnt been introduced after realm communities vanished in tbc, people would have only be able to play in guilds. As it became more and more hard to actually find groups in PuGs. At the end of tbc, finding tanks took up to hours. That even rose during WotLK.

As you can see from the current success of the Premade Group Finder tool, matchmaking is just completely unnecessary for PvE. If the current implementation of Premade Group Finder implemented for patch 3.3 instead of matchmaking, then that would also have solved issues faced by PuGs, and it would have avoided the resulting fallout of players being subjected to the toxic behaviour which suddenly became rampant as soon as the Dungeon Finder had been introduced.

As far as realm communities go - they were strong throughout TBC and the early half of WotLK, reinforced by having a lot of large guilds for all kinds of things aside from raiding - levelling, dungeons, PvP... Server communities started to falter as Blizzard introduced all kinds of changes which created isolation among players, including matchmaking, CRZ in low-level zones, and the Guild Perks - server communities really went into freefall during Cataclysm.

When LFR was added in late Cataclysm there was a stabilization of sub drops for 3 quarters and even rising number of subs.

Subs always increase for the release of new content. The same also happened in MoP for Siege of Orgrimmar, and it will happen again in patch 6.2 when they release the Tier 18 raid.

Without matchmaking, the subs would have dropped even more.

No, that's a non-sequitur argument based on two things which have no logical connection to each other, as you can see from the fact that subs always increase when there's a new content patch.

No, thats just plain wrong. MMORPGs are about massive multiplayer online gaming. In the special case about Role playing games. There is no definition that only defines organized MMORPGs as real MMORPGs. Thats just your own personal confirmation bias.

Your definition of "MMORPG" as "an RPG which allows players to form large groups" is just inaccurate. Imagine for a second that Diablo allowed groups of 40 players - that still would not classify it as an MMORPG; Diablo is a dungeon crawler, and it's a dungeon crawler irrespective of the group size.

WoW is an MMORPG for the reason that it is a game based in a persistent virtual world with thousands of other players occupying the same world space. As Chris Metzen has recently said "The world is the most important character in the game". It is far more important than whatever arbritrary group size you seem to think would be classified as 'massive'.

MMO is defined based on the group size. "Massive" - "Multiplayer" - "Online". Every game that has massive group content actually is a MMO per definition.

Raids are not "massive group content" - there's nothing massive at all about a group of 20 players - even Quake 2 back in 1997 could support maps with 40+ players, and that certainly was not an "MMO".

The "massive" part of MMORPG refers to the fact that you have many thousands of players within the same virtual world at the same time - and the fact that any of those players could potentially encounter any other players while they are playing the game.

No it wasnt, as the devs had to put way too much effort into creating raids. And they had no justification to do so, as raiding just wasnt popular and therefore not successfull. That was the reason they tried to make raiding more and more accessible over the years, as they knew they cant continue to create raids on that scale if most of the players would never see it.

I Don't know how much effort they put into making Molten Core, but it looked to me like a generic dungeon environment with some upscaled mobs. At the time, raiding was irrelevant to the majority of players in the game, and Blizzard's budget for creating raid content rather clearly matched that fact. The original intention behind raiding was to give players something 'extra' to do when they had essentially beaten the rest of the game. WoW was so huge and time consuming at the time, only a small percentage of players even reached maximum level - many of them preferring the outdoor world, and the dungeons. Most players simply didn't care a bit about being at max level, and they certainly didn't care about raiding.

Raiding wasnt successfull before LFR was being implemented. Then it finally adressed the number of players which paid the development.

It was successful for its purpose - giving maximum level players something extra to spend their time on. WoW wasn't a game about raiding at that time, it was a game about a virtual world, and of the millions of players who enjoyed WoW during Classic/TBC got a huge amount of enjoyment from the world, the dungeons, from being part of a vibrant realm community, from roleplaying, from meeting other players, hanging around in the chat channels, etc.

Before that, raiding was parasitic. The raids for a few raiders were payed by a large majority who would never see it. Still considering that, many raiders nowadays want to get LFR removed, even if they would remove the only incentive for blizzard to create large raids nowadays. Infact, the raiding community should be happy about LFRs existence, as it helped them to save raiding. Nowadays, raiding is not parasitic anymore, as most of the players see the raid content.

And now it's Matchmaking which is parasitic by eating away at realm communities, pretending to serve "casual" players when in fact it has helped in diminishing all of the things which casual players used to care about and enjoy.

There's no reason whatsoever for matchmaking to be the basis for creating groups for new or current content - particularly now that we have a premade group finder. Matchmaking has nothing to do with raiding - it's a tool. The LFR difficulty of raiding would be equally popular without the matchmaking tool - as you can see from the way that players use it to create groups for Apexis Crystals and World bosses.

I don't really see why you think raiders care about LFR - it hasn't affected Raiding. The real impact has been on the average casual player who has had both the outdoor world content and the dungeon content made largely irrelevant, the realm communities broken up, and all of the great MMORPG gameplay from Classic/TBC replaced by endless repetition of a banal "raiding LITE" dungeon-crawler-type experience set within a highly toxic environment.

Sure the reason was they did not find groups, so they mainly played solo quests. How do you get the idea this would change nowadays, when everyone focuses on endgame?

The game focused on endgame because Blizzard decided to shift their focus to Raiding, instead of supporting the playstyle which the majority of their players actually enjoyed - e.g. being out in the world and in dungeons, and playing with friends.

No, they died in tbc already, when people focused on guilds. And, additionally to that, guilds locked their doors as linear progression was very demanding, and guilds had to butcher other guilds to find raiders which fit to their progress.

Didn't you just post statistics showing that only a small minority of the population actually enjoyed raiding? Why does it matter what some small minority of raiding guilds were doing back in Classic/TBC? There were literally hundreds of guilds on every server who were formed around levelling, dungeons, PvP, RP, or sometimes even just players who met each other sitting around IF/BB/Org/etc. - all kinds of reasons which were nothing to do with raiding.

Again, the virtual world and the realm communities were and still are far more important to the game than raiding. Players having social ties in any kind of game is the thing which keeps people subscribed even when they're a bit bored of the content. Raiding really isn't as important to an MMORPG as you pretend it is, I don't know why you keep bringing it up. There were hundreds of guilds on every server which had likeminded players who had no interest in raiding.

Linear progression dealt a lot of damage to both guilds and realm communities. Realm communities already vanished by mid TBC.

No, realm communities were going strong up until the end of WotLK. Whatever may have happened to the "raiding community" at that point really didn't have much of an impact on their wider realm communities - actually, realm communities continued to strengthen throughout TBC, and reached a peak mid-WotLK when the game was crammed full with PuG-friendly content.

Again, you seem to be fixated on raiding, despite the fact that only a small minority of players even cared about raiding. Actually, if you take a look at other MMORPGs (not the so-called "WoW clones", but the ones which actually dare to be different to WoW), it's clear that raiding itself is rather inconsequential to the MMORPG genre - there are even plenty of other MMORPGs which don't even have the concept of 'raiding' at all.

And dungeons were the real endgame for many in tbc. Only a few played raids those days. Even karazhan was only played by 10% of the players. Heroic dungeons were minority content. Many people stopped at normal dungeons.

Exactly, yet you seem to be fixated on raiding. Your argument is seeming more and more contradictory and incoherent.

You acknowledge the fact that players didn't care about raiding, and you're suggesting that the game should continue to push an unpopular playstyle down the throats of the millions of players who really aren't interested in it by using convenience tools and excessively overtuned rewards to incentivise players to do things which most of them don't enjoy. - All of this coming at the cost of the rest of the game being diminished, in terms of open world content, dungeon content, and in terms of community.

But you think it helps to put a great emphasis on a social darwinistic meritocracy called "raiding community"? Where playing with friends is being replaced by playing with those who help you to defeat the pixel boss?

At which point did you decide that "raiding community" had anything to do with realm communities? How on earth do you think that a playerbase where 90% of the realm had never even seen a raid would even care about a 'raiding community'? Server communities were not based around raiding, they were based around players in an MMORPG meeting each other, playing together in content which they enjoyed, helping each other out, and using the virtual world as an online meeting place or 'hangout'. Only a minority of people in realm communities were "raiders".

[ro9ue]

World of Warcraft is not responsible for killing the MMO genre. I reject that whole premise.

Greedy publishers and developers with no balls are killing their own games. Publishers see the money machine that is World of Warcraft and want to mimic it. Developers cave or honestly don't give a fuck, so they make it. Generally no one has been trying to innovate, and no one wants to take risks.

That is not World of Warcraft's fault.


When a band gets big with a new sound... MANY more bands follow and try to sound like them, but they are always just "another band that sounds like the big band". Then another big band arises that carved their own sound and gets huge, and a bunch more motivated by all the wrong reasons emerge to try to mimic them... instead of doing something unique.

Guild Wars 2, was IMO the best attempt so far at doing something different and fresh. They sort of didn't get far away enough from WoW, though.

Look at FPS games. CoD is undoubtedly king. Yes, they put out pretty much the same game every year, and that's fine. It's what the customers expect...

If you want to make a FPS game, you don't try to be CoD (Medal of Honor, Battlefield, etc)... you do something different (Wolfenstein, Bioshock, etc). You carve out your own identity.

People may say "well WoW changed the community, the vast majority of people want quick and easy shit". If you were making an MMO, WHY DO YOU WANT THOSE PLAYERS IF YOUR MOTIVATION ISN'T SOLELY MONEY????

Just because McDonald's sells the most burgers and lots of people want them in 2min for under $3, doesn't mean if you wanted to make your own quality burger shop you should just pack it in. THERE IS ALSO A MARKET FOR YOU.... you just need to care about making the product you want and finding your own niche.

By trying to get EVERYONE you lose so much more.


Edit: Just want to add while I reject the whole initial premise that WoW killed the genre, I feel the article is pretty much dead on as valid criticism of WoW itself. Most of it sounds like shit I say on these boards all the time. But drawing the line from that to blaming every other MMO that came and failed afterward doesn't make any sense at all. I'd even go so far to say that lots of MMOs HAVEN'T failed. If the standard is 12m subscribers... ok... but if it's just a good gaming experience there are plenty.

[Deleted]

lol xD lol

[Deleted]

That wasnt really fun. Collect 10 thick leather. Rinse and repeat. And at the end only one guy got a mount.

Read: *Better version of*. The concept itself is amazing.

That only works on PVP realms. I cant remember people really had fun defending or attacking the towers in tbc. Special regions like Tol Barad and Wintergrasp was a way better solution to allow both pvp players and pve players to play seperately.

Tol Barad & WG were forced playpens that don't matter. The objectives were weak & the reward was getting to farm a 'raid' boss that was the least challenging thing in the game.

You want organization .. for world boss pugs? What about no? Most players give nothing about organization. They could not participate in world bosses anymore, while open world always should adress as many players as possible. Also, you cant force people to interact to play the game. That never worked. As the raid participation rates in TBC should have shown you.

If people give nothing about organization, the boss doesn't die. That's the point. I'm not forcing them to kill it by just zerging with a group of 40.

Local realm communities will not come back if you remove CRZ. Local realm communities died in tbc, because of guilds replacing them. And linear progression, which made guilds mandatory to play any kind of group content.

Guilds replaced jack shit. Realm communities lived on way, way into wrath, and only truly died with the implementation of CRZ and stupid guild levelling, that hey presto, recently got removed because it was so god awful and so harmful to the social side of the game.

With the removal of flying, the world turned into a 2D environment.

Actually the opposite, with the implementation of flying, the world turned into something you could just travel across with no risk or immersion. Using a drake to fly over zones isn't a 3D experience, it's travelling across a plane with no object interaction.

It wont just hurt "ultra-casuals", as you call your stereotype here, it hurts the biggest part of the community that plays World of Warcraft. Removing LFD/LFR would return group play into stone age, and lockout millions of players from content. Also, most people dont like to play for a challenge. And your idea to force and remove things also would not really evolute the game, but let it return to the inaccessible early years of WoW, which is a step back in its game development. And there is a difference between "incentives to socialize" and "force anyone to socialize to even play the game".

Haha. Boo fucking hoo. Inaccessible my ass, if people enjoy the game, they'll find their way to the instance portal. This attitude is so pathetic. Inaccessible to millions? Are we really playing alongside primates who don't know how to operate a keyboard? Or are they just that level fo stupid to the point where they don't understand that the world is supposed to exist outside of queueing menus? Fucking LOL. If this was the stone age, god forbid whatever you called the golden age.

That never worked and will never work. The only result of enforcing people to socialize will be million of players being locked out from playing the game. And rather being forced to play in a group, many would just quit the game. While i would like to ask if your incentive to remove anything isnt probably more about exclusivity than the real wish to bring back the past based on a very special understanding of nostalgia.

'Wah Wah, I don't know how to into instances in world, no menu buttton-pressy ;'( time to cancel subscription.' Come the fuck on. It isn't anything to do with nostalgia, it's to do with pure immersion at the basic level. Stop hounding me for liking something I could be actually immersed in in an online MMO. It is not a cardinal sin, it isn't a fantasy, it wasn't something that was banned from existence 5 years ago, it's something that casuals and greedy, stubborn developers have refused to let exist due to their own pride in terms of the systems that are currently in place. You're proud you beat a raid on LFR and got some arbitrary tokens for some nothing gear you'll get to parade around in your non-customizable garrison to all the NPCs? Good fucking job. Go play a single player game if you want that. Let us have multiplayer back.

Do you actually have ideas where you dont want to force other people into your understanding of gameplay? And where you dont remove anything million of people play every day?

I'm projecting the original unique selling point of World of Warcraft, and what that entails. It's not my understanding, it's what Blizzard's used to be. And that USP sold. Is WoD having the impact that their original vision had? No. Because WoD's impact was to spike subscriptions by delivering nothing but false hope, and trying to ignite nostalgia by getting players to think that this expansion would bring back what they'd missed for so long. That spike brought in 3.2 million subscribers. They aren't all at home feeding their babies or in a cubicle somewhere being stuck in a dead-end job. They aren't cut off from WoW, they're people that couldn't bring themselves to pay for this shit anymore. And they're going to lose that market forever without a return to that original understanding of what WoW was supposed to be. But we won't get that. Because 'evolution', 'QoL', 'pandering', 'LFR', 'farming old raids is new content', etc. We'll never get that again from Blizzard. Only from a developer that has the balls and/or the money to do so.

There still is social interaction. But it got moved to guilds. And whatever you do, whatever you take away, whatever you want to remove or destroy, you wont bring back the realm communities of the start of world of warcraft. As it is a natural development that people stick to smaller groups, once the game community is being setup.

Hi, Guilds have existed since Vanilla. The realm just mattered in addition to those internal communities. Now, the game is like playing fucking Quarantine or something, /s and public channels are a dustbowl and everybody's locked up inside of their guilds, most of which are just as unsociable and useless. It's like the black death hit WoW or something.

Your ideas are destructive. And dont really help to get you back to vanilla.

They're intended to be destructive, there's a lot of things that need to be rid of, and a lot of things that need to be added. Destruction, god forbid, is necessary sometimes. Just not in Blizzard's line of thinking, where they remove perfectly good instances, remove content without warning, and just be generally reckless. You can be destructive without being reckless. They don't follow that philosophy because they your money, not your satisfaction.

If you actually value socialization over gameplay, you should probably think about visiting your local pub more frequently. Or discussion forums. Or social media. Or you just get out into the world playing in a sports club. There are so many possible ways outside of playing computer games. And even computer games allow you to join player guilds and clans to be able to socially interact. Its all up to you to really care about it.

All respect given, I go to my local pub more times than I should, mainly to necessitate the need to drown my sorrows that arise whenever I remember what MMORPGs could've been in 2015. The point is, you can't socialize in the same atmospheres as WoW once allowed you, and encouraged you to, back when those atmospheres mattered. That's gone now, and that's what I miss. That isn't nostalgia, it's a thirst for immersion.

Traditionally, gamers arent social heros. Many of them sit at home and play computer games rather than focusing on social experiences where they have to interact in large groups. WoW adresses the typical gamer from start, by matchmaking, by allowing them to play the game no matter if they wish to organize. And i think that the level of organization should just have no effect on the content you should be able to see.

Gamers weren't social heroes in 2005 either. It's just that they were a lot less pandered to and put up with a challenge or two. That's where we disagree. I think organization, or in easier terms, collaboration, should matter to an extent, since it's a multiplayer game. In my eyes, if you play the entirety of WoW on your own, which the vast majority of people do today, you're missing out on at least half of the fun you could have if you played with somebody else. Hell, I played with my friend who was new to the game early last year, I rerolled for her and we got up from 1 to cap, and that was the most fun I'd had in 5 years. But not everybody gets to do that or go through those experiences, because the realms don't matter anymore. I honestly think bringing them back into the limelight would do worlds of good for the community. That, and CRZ knocking your friend off of your sandstone drake in the middle of a zone is god damn annoying.

Since start, WoW always supported both social interaction and unorganized approaches. While in classic and tbc raiding was limited to organization, but PVP was accessible to matchmaking. Mainly based on the fact the game was new, and many people leveled their characters, and that there just was no demand for a massive amount of endgame content for anyone. Thats different nowadays. Everyone wants to see the final plot. And no matter if someone tries to avoid socialilizing or if he is the social hero of the year always surrounded by friends.

People are naturally greedy, by which I mean they take the path of least resistance. My solution is for the developer to resist to an extent. I think if everybody just picked up books like WoW fans and flicked through the pages until the final chapter, true fans of that franchise paying witness to that would be mighty pissed off. Because it's not even greed, it's sheer sloth. The journey matters and should be equally as important as the endgame, not in terms of quantity, but in terms of being a quality, entertaining experience. It's a shame that with the advent of auto-cap boosts, or near to it, that Blizzard is actually offering you to pay them $60 to skip out on some of the most fun parts of the game. It's baffling to me.

/10charact

[Deleted]

-snip-

I agree with you of what killed the genre.

[Deleted]

Yes, it is a causal effect.

Have you got any proof for that, or did you just pull that out of the air?

MMORPGs are persistent virtual worlds which depend on their community to survive

That is just your idea of what a MMORPG should be. Nothing else.

without a strong community, the game ends up being dependent on players not being burned out by the content (which at the current rate means each expansion only has longevity lasting a couple of months)

Still it doesnt define MMORPGs, it is just the effect you think will happen. Nothing else than confirmation bias, once again.

To provide another Ghostcrawler quote, from his Twitter account in 2013, one of the effects of Matchmaking has been that the "sense of community has suffered" - going on to say that trying to put the community and social aspect back into the game is their next problem to solve (and it still hasn't been solved).

I actually think the community suffered way more by turning the raiding community into a social darwinism based meritocracy, and replacing playing by friends with playing by those who help you to defeat a pixel boss. The wish to be successful as highest possible goal instead of playing a game with or even without friends.

As you can see from the current success of the Premade Group Finder tool, matchmaking is just completely unnecessary for PvE. If the current implementation of Premade Group Finder implemented for patch 3.3 instead of matchmaking, then that would also have solved issues faced by PuGs, and it would have avoided the resulting fallout of players being subjected to the toxic behaviour which suddenly became rampant as soon as the Dungeon Finder had been introduced.

The Group finder just advocates selection. One of the main problems the raiding community suffers from. I dont think that the usage of the PuG finder should be enforced even more than blizzard already tried. Matchmaking is way more fair than the group finder ever could be, as it doesnt deselect players for content they could play without any problem.

The PuG finder is nice for finding missing roles in guild groups or members for a world boss PuG. But surely not for completely fresh organized raiding groups. And as the normal raiding difficulty currently is way too demanding, setting up PuGs never ends in actually completing the raid, but only in wiping over and over, which isnt in the interest of a typical pickup group.

Server communities started to falter as Blizzard introduced all kinds of changes which created isolation among players, including matchmaking, CRZ in low-level zones, and the Guild Perks - server communities really went into freefall during Cataclysm.

That is - once again - nothing but your confirmation bias. In fact, guilds start to centralize in TBC, when raid content asked to build groups that stick together. I still remember discussions from mid TBC, where players talked about the fact guilds got butchered by other guilds, and that the realm communities started to vanish by the start of TBC. No wonder, as people had to organize in guilds to even play something like normal dungeons, as there was just nothing like matchmaking. Setting up PuGs took hours at the end of TBC, mainly based on the fact that the role choice of the players was most times damage dealers, but rarely tanks or healers.

Subs always increase for the release of new content. The same also happened in MoP for Siege of Orgrimmar, and it will happen again in patch 6.2 when they release the Tier 18 raid.

In the phase after WotLK, the subs number were in constant decline. They only stabilized short after LFR was being implemented.

Imagine for a second that Diablo allowed groups of 40 players - that still would not classify it as an MMORPG; Diablo is a dungeon crawler, and it's a dungeon crawler irrespective of the group size.

Sure it would be a MMO then. Any kind of game that allows to form large groups, even just up to 8 or 10, is called MMO. See the recently release MMOFPS Destiny for example. LoL is also a MMO, even if its just a group brawler. Even ESO is a MMO, where the focus is on solo questing. MMO covers a wide range of games, and really just the fact you may build large groups (>5) to actually play content.

MMORPG in special is just a MMO based on role playing game components.

Anything else is confirmation bias. You want a MMO to be for organization only. Well, no problem, but dont act as if only that would mean MMORPG.

As Chris Metzen has recently said "The world is the most important character in the game". It is far more important than whatever arbritrary group size you seem to think would be classified as 'massive'.

I thought its the raid boss, and not the world, in World of Warcraft, as every endgame is raiding centric. If they really would focus on the world, it would offer way more gameplay, dont you think so?

World of Warcraft is currently raid centric. Neither open world centric, nor lore-centric, nor small group content centric, but only catered to raids at the end of the game. Any single activity ingame ends in playing raids. While blizzard really could do a lot more to cater to the words of their vice. But they just dont do it, mainly based on their own personal preference.

The "massive" part of MMORPG refers to the fact that you have many thousands of players within the same virtual world at the same time - and the fact that any of those players could potentially encounter any other players while they are playing the game.

Well, GW2 is a MMORPG as well. It uses heavy phasing, and sometimes you dont even meet people from the same realm.

Let me just quote Wikipedia:

A massively multiplayer online game (also called MMO and MMOG) is a multiplayer video game which is capable of supporting large numbers of players simultaneously. By necessity, they are played on the Internet.[1] MMOs usually have at least one persistent world, however some games differ. These games can be found for most network-capable platforms, including the personal computer, video game console, or smartphones and other mobile devices.

Usually means, they dont have to have one persistent world. MMO is really just defined as a game that supports large groups of players.

At the time, raiding was irrelevant to the majority of players in the game, and Blizzard's budget for creating raid content rather clearly matched that fact.

No, they actually created raid content for a minority using the budget from a majority. Let me quote Ion Hazzikostas:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/23/b...g-progression/

The existence of LFR justifies the creation of more raid content for casual and hardcore players alike.

Most players simply didn't care a bit about being at max level, and they certainly didn't care about raiding.

Right, and bllizzard needed to change that to allow them to continue to build epic raids in the size Ahn Qiraj or Naxxramas had. Those raids allocated a lot of resources while they were only seen by a few.

http://www.cnet.com/news/world-of-wa...n-hazzikostas/

Another Quote from Hazzikostas:

If you look at the course of the game, Kel'Thuzad at the end of classic World of Warcraft, at the end of the classic version of Naxxramas, was killed by something like 3,000 people in the world. Illidan was the signature initial villain of Burning Crusade, with the famous trailer with Illidan standing atop Black Temple saying, "You are not prepared!" Turns out most actually weren't prepared, because if you didn't have 24 friends, you weren't going to kill Illidan. And if you didn't have 24 very good, organised friends, who committed to a fixed raiding schedule, you weren't going to kill Illidan. You weren't going to see Illidan! Whereas, with raid finder, millions of people killed Deathwing. They saw the end of that story

It was successful for its purpose - giving maximum level players something extra to spend their time on.

Sure those who saw it liked it. I mean if million of players pay for something only i could see, i surely would not say no, wont i? What i would not do, though, is to act as if i actually should always have exclusive content, just because i want to feel like a special snowflake. I would say "thank you" to the people who allowed me to play a parasisitic gameplay style.

Today, many people ask to remove LFR, even if the content they played actually is only justified, because the LFR players pay for them.

WoW wasn't a game about raiding at that time

WoW was always raid centric at endgame. See the XXL-edition raids Naxxramas and Ahn Qiraj. While infact only 3000 people played Naxxramas.

The good thing was most of the players still were leveling up. So noone really missed raids.. until tbc. When blizzard had to start to make raiding more and more accessible to also allow access to people who wont organize in 40 man groups.

And now it's Matchmaking which is parasitic by eating away at realm communities, pretending to serve "casual" players when in fact it has helped in diminishing all of the things which casual players used to care about and enjoy.

Matchmade raids still pay the content of the organized raiders. That didnt change at all. 70% of the people play LFR, and 26% of the people managed to kill Immerseus at normal raiding difficulty.

The game focused on endgame because Blizzard decided to shift their focus to Raiding, instead of supporting the playstyle which the majority of their players actually enjoyed - e.g. being out in the world and in dungeons, and playing with friends.

Believe me, i would like to see more content outside of raiding. But currently, blizzard seems to focus on it, and its really hard to convince them to add other broad audience gameplay. Which would actually surely help to survive content dry phases as like the current one.

Why does it matter what some small minority of raiding guilds were doing back in Classic/TBC? There were literally hundreds of guilds on every server who were formed around levelling, dungeons, PvP, RP, or sometimes even just players who met each other sitting around IF/BB/Org/etc. - all kinds of reasons which were nothing to do with raiding.

Still blizzard created large epic raids which told the final plot. And wanted to continue to do so. And to be able to do that, they actually had to adress enough players to manage that. And not just 3000, that played Naxxramas classic. Out of 10 million players.

Server communities were not based around raiding, they were based around players in an MMORPG meeting each other, playing together in content which they enjoyed, helping each other out, and using the virtual world as an online meeting place or 'hangout'. Only a minority of people in realm communities were "raiders".

Yes, we all were friends in tbc. Zhevras everywhere. It was so much better in the good old times, wasnt it?

No, sorry, it wasnt different to what it is today. At the very early start in classic the game had a short period of strong realm communities, but that was mainly due to the fact that players did not focus on guilds of any kind. TBC finally broke the neck of the realm communities, when guilds became more and more interesting. Thats a normal process. People form small communities which actually adress their special playstyle rather than trying to play in large communities. You see that everywhere you face human communities.

[Lochton]

I am sitting here, chuckling at this.. article.

WoW didn't touch any of the competitors, unlike some of WoW's competitors (I'm looking at you, Rift). Blizzard has stated that they would welcome competition openly, not their fault the competition can't handle it or keep up.

And sadly, some things have become a golden rule in an MMO, and sadly WoW was the one that introduced us to the certain small things that is a golden importance (I.e. Hundreds of complaint threads for SWTOR not having speechbubbles at launch).

But all in all, you cannot blame a game that is sitting on it's chair and watching all the kids (other MMO's) run around, screaming and trying various things to fish in people or notes from Blizzard.

Many of the other MMO's also pulled themselves down by the lack of communication and announcement.

[Deleted]

I actually think the community suffered way more by turning the raiding community into a social darwinism based meritocracy, and replacing playing by friends with playing by those who help you to defeat a pixel boss. The wish to be successful as highest possible goal instead of playing a game with or even without friends.

I wonder why you keep bringing up raiding and the raiding community. WoW was not about raiding back in Classic or TBC, it wasn't even about 'endgame'. You might have been in that tiny minority back then who cared about raiding or endgame, but there were millions of other players who didn't care and didn't even have a character at maximum level. Players enjoyed all kinds of things, including the outdoor world, professions, PvP, dungeons, meeting other players in their community. - however raiding genuinely didn't concern the vast majority of players at all - and it had a reputation for needing to be "hardcore" and do a lot of grinding, which actually put people off even wanting to try it.

The Group finder just advocates selection. One of the main problems the raiding community suffers from. I dont think that the usage of the PuG finder should be enforced even more than blizzard already tried. Matchmaking is way more fair than the group finder ever could be, as it doesnt deselect players for content they could play without any problem.

Once again, you keep on bringing up raiding even though only a tiny minority even cared about it. Matchmaking for dungeons really wasn't ever necessary at all.

Selection is a very positive thing for the game - if I formed a group for a dungeon during TBC, then I'd be avoiding anyone who spent their time trolling in the /Trade channel, or who came from a guild whose players had a reputation for bad behaviour; and if someone misbehaves in a group, then there's a human leader to remove them. Player selection based on gear/achievements/etc didn't happen at lower levels, and it didn't happen in dungeons - it was only a perceived problem for the few who cared about raiding, and who also wanted to be carried by other players - and even there it's a positive thing to allow players to exclude anyone who isn't suited to the content.

The PuG finder is nice for finding missing roles in guild groups or members for a world boss PuG. But surely not for completely fresh organized raiding groups. And as the normal raiding difficulty currently is way too demanding, setting up PuGs never ends in actually completing the raid, but only in wiping over and over, which isnt in the interest of a typical pickup group.

Again, you're focusing on raiding, which the majority of players didn't care about.

That is - once again - nothing but your confirmation bias. In fact, guilds start to centralize in TBC, when raid content asked to build groups that stick together. I still remember discussions from mid TBC, where players talked about the fact guilds got butchered by other guilds, and that the realm communities started to vanish by the start of TBC.

No, this is you, once again, obsessing about "raiding". If you take the minority activity and the minority of raiding guilds out of the equation, server communities were actually doing really well throughout TBC and the early part of WotLK.

No wonder, as people had to organize in guilds to even play something like normal dungeons

This is nonsense. As a hunter from a tiny 5-man guild during Classic and TBC, it was fairly easy to put together a group of other players from my server for a dungeon using the LFGroup tool. The time taken was about the same as it now takes to sit in a queue and wait for a dungeon group to form using LFD. The only difference now is that it's faster to get inside the instance with a teleport.

Setting up PuGs took hours at the end of TBC

No it didn't - it would take around 10-15 minutes most of the time during TBC - and less than that if you had other players on your friend list to invite to fill the spaces - the reason being that server communities were thriving and a lot of people had tens or even hundreds of other players on their friend lists right across their server, and we had the original (Pre-3.3) LFGroup Tool which always had plenty of players using it to find Dungeon PuGs. On average, it would take about the same amount of time it takes in WoD to sit in a queue and wait for a group.

Anything else is confirmation bias. You want a MMO to be for organization only. Well, no problem, but dont act as if only that would mean MMORPG.

No, that's a strawman. PuGs are not organised, and most friends+family guilds weren't organised. The majority of players who enjoyed WoW during Classic/TBC were not organised at all - most were playing at lower levels - so they didn't use voice comm, they didn't schedule groups, they didn't read dungeon guides on websites, etc.

Sure those who saw it liked it. I mean if million of players pay for something only i could see, i surely would not say no, wont i? What i would not do, though, is to act as if i actually should always have exclusive content, just because i want to feel like a special snowflake. I would say "thank you" to the people who allowed me to play a parasisitic gameplay style.

Except that most of the content in WoW at the time was actually out in the world and in the dungeons. Most players didn't care about raiding, they didn't care about reaching maximum level, the game had hundreds (maybe even thousands?) of hours of gameplay without ever setting foot inside a raid. The game had a tiny minority who wanted to rush to the endgame and see the raids, everyone else just enjoyed the rest of the game at their own pace, with friends, and with others on their server.

WoW was always raid centric at endgame. See the XXL-edition raids Naxxramas and Ahn Qiraj. While infact only 3000 people played Naxxramas.

But very few cared about endgame. WoW was not endgame-centric, and raiding didn't matter to anyone except a tiny minority - that's the big difference.

Yes, we all were friends in tbc. Zhevras everywhere. It was so much better in the good old times, wasnt it?

No, sorry, it wasnt different to what it is today. At the very early start in classic the game had a short period of strong realm communities, but that was mainly due to the fact that players did not focus on guilds of any kind. TBC finally broke the neck of the realm communities, when guilds became more and more interesting. Thats a normal process. People form small communities which actually adress their special playstyle rather than trying to play in large communities. You see that everywhere you face human communities.

Actually yes it was very very different throughout TBC and early WotLK. Players on realms depended on each other a lot more for all kinds of things - including PuGs, but also professions, trading, help with quests, and generally talked to each other in all kinds of places around the world. The fact that most realms had a population the size of a small town or village meant that players would recognise others on their server, would recognise guilds, and word-of-mouth reputations for bad behaviour would spread quite quickly, and people would talk to each other even if they weren't "friends".

The raiding guilds may have been inward-looking, but that was only a tiny part of the realm population. It wasn't at all the case for the rest of the players on a server, who were still very much part of their realm communities.

[ryanmahaffe]

Wolfshed writes,



Continue to http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/the-d...d-of-warcraft/

For me his article is allot of hogwash; if we take any MMOrpg at a time, whether it is Everquest Online, Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Star War Galaxy and so on and so forth, they all have one thing in common; they were responsible for their failure and not WoW.

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

The mmo genre is bigger now than it ever was, with many games having there own good communities like
RIFT
Archeage
ESO
Wildstar
TERA
GW2
ECT.

MMOS are in a good spot now thanks to the unique amount of mmos.

[l33t]

No, people with money who are too sissy to risk their moneys at developing original projects are killing MMORPG genre.

Also, in my opinion, MMORPG genre must change, the sooner the better. We should get rid of level-based character progression. That was a good idea back when the genre was born, but it is not good in 2015+. A process of leveling gives nothing but frustration and generally feels like a chore, a hard work you need to do before you're allowed to actually play the god damned game. It takes away a shitton of time. It complicates playing with friends who are new to the game. We should have more MMORPGs in sci-fi settings, because fantasy elves and dwarves are so not original. We should have more sandbox elements in MMORPGs, and maybe completely get rid of class systems.

IMO, first team who actually manages to make a decent innovative MMORPG, will drown in money.

[Aqua]

No one wants to front the money, time and effort to bomb WoW out of the water. And I don't exactly blame them. It's a mammoth task.

They have to do everything WoW does and do it 5x better in order to get those players to abandon 10 years of their invested free time.

[metasine]

No one wants to front the money, time and effort to bomb WoW out of the water. And I don't exactly blame them. It's a mammoth task.

They have to do everything WoW does and do it 5x better in order to get those players to abandon 10 years of their invested free time.

No that's the problem. People try to copy wow, when your best chance for success is to be nothing like wow.

[Hellishreaper]

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



Except that wow is not diverse. Any decent sandbox game has 100x the diversity of wow. I read the article and I agree with it. And the last time I checked, Everquest, Ultima, Daoc, are all still going.

Face it, wow today is a browser based dungeon grinder with no required social interaction. That is not an mmo, that is an online action game.

yeah except all those "other" sandbox games are shit

[IxilaFA]

World of Warcraft was not responsible for killing the MMO genre. The genre itself was. Today's environment is rife with instant gratification, thousands of ways to entertain and occupy ourselves, thousands of alternate video games and genres to choose from that offer easier to attain status and rewards and more compelling gameplay.

MMOs are the 2015 equivalent of text-based RPGs in the late 1990s. They're a dying breed that once spoke to a large population because of their diversity, hitting up the right people at the right age (when a lot of software "geeks" were in their late teens / early twenties and had a lot of time on their hands) and their unique appeal. Now it's hard to get anyone to sit down at a computer or video game console or TV or anywhere for longer than an hour and the original MMOs required far more than an hour of effort a day.