Yeah, I don't play it anymore.
Yes, I want it to die.
No, it's not because I want it to be "punished", it's because I want the genre to move on to the "next" WoW. If that's WoW 2, great. If not - oh well. The game needs to die so the genre can live and thrive. WoW killed the competition thoroughly and absolutely. Dominated the genre so hard that everyone just stopped really trying to make an MMO.
Not really using my ancedotal evidence...most of my friends who quit (including me) left because
*life got to busy to devote to this
*guild broke up because of above and dont want to bother finding a new playgroup nor trying to PUG
*Could now afford to do something other than play a video game
*medical issue makes it hard to play
Now do you have access to friends who used to play? What do they say?
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The sad thing if wow were to actually collopse the MMO as a genre in the west is more likely to just die then make way for a better MMO..hell Rocket League and League of Legends had a bigger hand in the MMO markets demise than wow did
You DO understand that even in Vanilla there was turnover of players right? It happened in TBC and every single expansion afterwards. Why did people stop playing in Vanilla or TBC? Was the game garbage? Based on your reasoning that is the only reason someone quits this game.
Again, you DON'T KNOW the amount of the playerbase, you can only guess at it as do many people on this forum and elsewhere. Does your enjoyment become less if there is only 7 million people playing instead of 11-12? Like what does it matter? If I'm able to do dungeons and raids or pvp or whatever content and I can find people to do it with, that is good enough.
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Like you have zero evidence of why people quit playing WoW. Zero evidence of the sub numbers and so on.
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Pretty much, even in Vanilla there was a turnover of people playing. Not everyone loved the game, not everyone wanted to play it every day or multiple times a week and they went on to do other things. Some people liked the game a lot and just stopped playing to do something else. Shit happens, RL happens, people aren't mindless drones that buy the game and sub for the entire duration. Zyky really misses the point.
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Sure thing man, the game is still around and will be around for years. Hate on it all you like it won't change that fact.
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I guess we better all stop playing the game then, because you say it is not worth playing. You can say you speak for the casual, or other players but you really just have your own warped opinion here.
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Says the person staying to play this shit game.
Millions of people have played over the years. Theres ALOT of people that has spendt so much time playing this game, it could be considered a hardcore hobby or even addiciton at times.
Theres no surprise that many of these get upset when a game(hobby/addiciton) is being changed into something they dont recognize. So what do they do? what can they do? they can unsub(can be hard if you really are passionate about the game) and/or take part in community interaction on official or fanmade forums.
When so many people takes part in the game, someone gotta be angry about something.
It doesn't matter why you quit or why other people quit. What matters is that if the game was good new players would take the place of the players leaving, the game is bad and not drawing in a new clientele.
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You do understand that if a game is good, regardless of turnover, it keeps getting an increasing amount of players. Turn over is greater than the new players coming in, if a game is good, the players are there and will play it, if the game is bad the turnover outweighs everything else and we've seen this several times over this games lifespan, look at WoD they lost 5m players in 3 months.
Oh please. That's not what the OP is even talking about. He's talking about the losers who stalk the forums for a game they stopped playing with nothing but a desire for it to fail doing nothing but bad mouthing the game, the devs, and the players who still enjoy something they do not anymore.
Has nothing to do wanting to remove criticism.
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Also see the product lifecycle curve, which WoW has followed closely, which has not much to do with quality. As well as, WoW reached a saturation point. 100M+ accounts, with 12M concurrently subscribing players at some point. I think it's ridiculous to think WoW could have had continued growth or realistically sustained 12M accounts long term.
The new player experience is bad...most new players probably never reach the end game where "current game is bad" matters. This is not and never has been entirely blizzards fault...this is
Part newer generation doesnt want a game where you have to do this long list of shit to do in order to get to the max level stuff and the MMO genre as a whole on the decline.
Part a historically hostle community who sees a lot of the newer players more as a liability than a benefit...not to mention chats that are half shit like this and half boost ads
Part Blizzard for struggling to keep the new player experience working after exiles reach
But your gonna argue its all the game is bad so Im just gonna say Im done
On top of this, and likely a contributing factor to the general decline, i believe chinese subs were counted differently at the time. I think that changed in wrath or cataclysm from anyone who logged in even for an hour (game time could be bought in hour increments i think), to actually holding a sub for an extended period. Im not 1000% sure of this, its now a hazy memory of times gone past.
Even at the peak, i think us subs accounted for about 3-4 mill, whilst europe was 2-3.
Mate its simple, alotta people are, probably just tired of wow, myself included, changing in a direction that is no longer for them, the game used to have a faithful and loyal audience but the games changes and constant lack of care for its playerbase gradually alienating it and making it even more and more about trying to make an exclusive vibe that only a specific group of people will appriciate have all but destroyed the faith the player community has in wow.
Its not that its a loud minority anymore, its more than half the player base universally agree that the game is *old* even those that still love it cannot deny that it has got to a point that certain things cant always be defended, business practice/bad form developer behaviour.
This is primarily on the fault of Activision for its publishing systems, but its also on Blizzard, especially Ion, whose taken the game too far away from its origional roots to make it into something it fundamentally isnt.
Ion is also the primary reason the design of the game has shifted so heavily in favour of raiding and mythic + over content for everyone, because Ion himself is an elitist raider, he was part of an entire community of them back in TBC before he joined wow.
Ultimatley? Id rather not let Ion keep running WoW, frankly, its time someone with a vision to give the game life for everyone existed, not just a specific niché demographic that only appeals to 1/3rd of your total player audience.
I'm KIND OF an ex-player - took a long break, and now my old laptop can't run WoW anymore.
Do I cheer for the game to fail? No.
But I have to admit I wouldn't mind seeing it come to an end. Not because I don't want people who still love the game to have it in their lives, but because I just have this weird need for closure in general. For me most of WoW has played its role at this point, and I'd rather see, at least the story, end at a point where it still goes out as something I'm fond of and care about.
Of course I'm in no way actively trying to prove anyone to quit or hate it, I just keep the feeling for myself. I think maybe others feel the same way; that sometime we'd prefer it if things could end while it still felt like it mattered.
https://www.youtube.com/@DoffenGG
Gaming and WoW stuff
How should the number of subscribers in Cata and the number of sold SL copies at launch give us any data on how fast SL has lost subscribers/users after launch compared to other expansions? You need to compare cata to cata and SL to SL to see the relative loss of subscribers.
And let me expand your quote from wowhead:
"World of Warcraft player numbers fell back to normal levels as the excitement around November’s Shadowlands expansion subsided. From November to January, revenue fell by 61% and user numbers declined by 41% (these figures do not include China). This roughly matches the pattern seen for the past several expansions, though Shadowlands had a bigger launch." [my bolding]. The bolded part you left out when you quoted from Wowhead.
So if Wowhead, that quotes Superdata, is to believed then the decline in SL is more or less "standard" for WoW now. Nothing in that article from Superdata suggests that the post-launch decline is abnormal.
While I do agree with you that the wiki-article says that Cata had considerable less percentage-loss of subs after launch, but on the other hand Superdata itself claims that the post-launch drop in users (user, not subs) is normal for WoW for the past several expansion, so at least standard for BFA and Legion. Maybe even WoD.
Coming into this convo a bit late, but figured I'd give my opinion on it since people seem to often misrepresent me, or misunderstand the points being made.
It's almost never about hating or trying to punish the game. It's about loving the game and being passionate about it. And when earnest, well-though, well-intentioned feedback and suggestions gets ignored for literal years, there's a certain amount of satisfaction, or "I told you so", when the game starts doing poorly by not listening to that feedback.
I don't doubt that there are some number of bitter, jaded ex-players that honestly just want to see the game fail out of spite. But I highly suspect that the vast majority of people expressing disapproval of the game, and celebrating its failures, are players who just want the game to go back to being a quality experience made by devs who actually give a damn. Instead we get a merciless corporate-fueled cash machine that has no soul. And so it's no wonder that people are angry at it. It's because it's not a good game any more.
I believe they were always counted the same. If a player had 1 min of game time they counted as a sub for the entire month. Regardless. It's always amused me that haters would always point out that subs were inflated due to Chinese players, as if they don't count as people playing the game. But then point to 12M when bashing WoW for not having as many subs now.
Again it doesn't matter if they're producing quality content, the playerbase sticks around and new people get drawn in, every single expansion they attempt to reimagine the game and end up making it worse with their convoluted systems and excessive grinds. There's a reason they swapped the WoW success metric to be based on "time spent in game" instead of "players playing". Shadowlands is terrible, BFA was terrible, If they keep providing lackluster garbage players will continue to leave and the game will feel more and more dead; look at 9.1 they're releasing Korthia, which is literally the size of 1/3rd of Bastion and a good 30% of the terrain is impassable mountains so really it's like 1/5th the size of Bastion. The new raid has had "2" nights of testing, one night was entirely scrapped because of a bad build and the other night they had to delay the first testing because the crucial part of the encounter wasn't working. And I'm starting to believe that they're going to push Tazavesh to 9.1.5 based on how little of it is actually there, the small preview we saw is only a small portion of the mega dungeon, they're still missing half the encounter areas and the main area is still missing textures.
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And yet people flock to and crowd Classic lol. The playerbase knows what it wants and what it enjoys playing. Nobody wants this garbage drivel that they're putting out, nobody wants halfassed bandaid systems that don't even fix major problems(valor), nobody wants these obnoxious multipart world quests, nobody wants multiple RNG encounters that also punish you for your DPS being too high(there's 3 of those this tier btw). The expansion as a whole is garbage, it's unenjoyable and it's showing by how dead the game feels when you play it.
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I used to enjoy every aspect of the game, but overtime they've been degrading other kinds of activities. Leveling is no longer enjoyable, PvP has been gutted since WoD, I used to clear world quests off my map every single day in Legion but how they design world quests now is obnoxious and unfun 90% of the time, alting isn't fun at all because you can't just level and jump into playing the game, you have to spend several days/weeks just grinding up your renown/heart/artifact among other forced systems like Legiondaries/Torghast/Visions/Essences. I used to spend dozens of hours every week playing my main and a couple alts and it was nice having the freedom to do so, now if you want alts and want them to be taken even remotely seriously you'd need to not have a job or a life.
Ah there it is, your true colors showing. If you think the players have stuck around with no new content in classic and aren't just waiting for TBC I dunno what to tell you. It is the same thing as in live, people get bored and unsub for X reason or Y reason and come back when new content comes out be it a patch or a new expansion. Classic is no different than live in that regard.
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Nobody wants X is just a way to show that you have no fucking idea what you are talking about. People want different things, that is just a fact and you know it. What you think sucks someone else might think it is great.
Just as in the case of Cyberpunk, COVID conspiracies or flat earth posters I just assume those people are bots or paid shills.
You see so much negativity around any Cyberpunk video but CDPR's data says only around 30,000 copies out of 20 million were refunded. Like... there's no way all those 30K are on the Internet complaining about it while the 20 million are enjoying the game. They have to be bots or some PR rep from Rockstar.
Same goes for WoW. The majority of people I know who hate WoW barely played it outside of Private Servers. Most Private Servers stayed at 3.3.5/WOTLK because the other versions are unstable. Is it a coincidence that people who say modern WoW sucks also think WOTLK was the best? I don't think it is. Frankly I think those people are just mad they never got to properly play Cata on a bug free server, because they couldn't afford a sub and Private Servers blew beyond WOTLK.
Has nothing to do with stuck around, I'm not a Classic Vanilla player, I will be a BC player, though you can see a visible difference just logging into Classic in terms of how many players are around and playing. Classic offered players who liked that a different way to experience the game and it's clearly successful otherwise the game wouldn't feel full.
And yet all of the things listed are universally disliked by the vocal majority across several forum sites including the official forums. You can say "people want different things", but the reality is the majority is all that matters and Blizzard thinks they know better and it's costing them subs quarterly.