Ex-players cheering for the game to fail.

[arr0gance]

It has an audience that is clearly declining dramatically. The google trends bump for this expansion was the smallest for any expansion, and the falloff after has been equally unprecedented.

Wow classic is now outperforming shadowlands nearly 2:1 in trends. As of this month FF14 has basically caught up despite FF14 being at the end of an expansion and wow just releasing one a few months ago.

There’s a serious problem here, and the issue is not people who wish the game to fail. The issue is the people that refuse to recognize how badly it is failing. The game is going to lose resources, and likely already has. Huge delays between patches is going to become the norm, smaller expansions are going to be the norm, and the people sitting around declaring wow is always king and wow can’t fail and everything is fine are going to be very confused.

The only "serious problem" is you trying to use Google trends to prove things. Stop. Please.

[NineSpine]

WoW always trends downwards after between patches. It's done that since the beginning of time. It'll keep doing it. It's just one more in a long line of really stupid things WoW players try to associate the "game dying" with because lord fucking knows we need proof of that.

Nobody is talking about the “game dying” except you.

[arr0gance]

Google trends is an analytics tool that is the basis for huge amounts of serious business and scientific work. Twitch is not. The comparison is comically absurd.

I don’t think you quite understand what google trends is or why it is important, and at this point it is likely a purposeful ignorance to avoid having to face reality.

Lmfao and you still can't actually address what I showed you. I know why, though. You don't want to admit that your precious Google trends is somehow flawed. It's cute. But it really isn't.

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Nobody is talking about the “game dying” except you.

How the fuck else do you interpret "It has an audience that is clearly declining dramatically"? Jesus man.

[NineSpine]

The only "serious problem" is you trying to use Google trends to prove things. Stop. Please.

Your ignorance isn’t impressing anyone. You are making yourself look foolish by discounting the importance of the most powerful popularity analytics tool that exists.

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Lmfao and you still can't actually address what I showed you. I know why, though. You don't want to admit that your precious Google trends is somehow flawed. It's cute. But it really isn't.

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How the fuck else do you interpret "It has an audience that is clearly declining dramatically"? Jesus man.

Because “declining dramatically” and dying aren’t the same thing. Everquests audience declined dramatically. Is it dead? Nope.

I get it now though, your whole schtick here is weird sophistry, word games, and declaring victory by ignorance.

[arr0gance]

Your ignorance isn’t impressing anyone. You are making yourself look foolish by discounting the importance of the most powerful popularity analytics tool that exists.

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Because “declining dramatically” and dying aren’t the same thing. Everquests audience declined dramatically. Is it dead? Nope.

I get it now though, your whole schtick here is weird sophistry, word games, and del wrong victory by ignorance,

Brother, knock off this appeal to authority bullshit with Google trends. Google trends is good for a lot of things but it isn't good at telling you how many fucking people are playing WoW. You can post all the fucking Google trend data in the world and it will never tell you how many people are playing WoW. Because it can't. It's not designed to tell us this.

edit: Post #6 of you avoiding discussion of why viewership of WoW is 10x that of FFXIV.

[NineSpine]

Brother, knock off this appeal to authority bullshit with Google trends. Google trends is good for a lot of things but it isn't good at telling you how many fucking people are playing WoW. You can post all the fucking Google trend data in the world and it will never tell you how many people are playing WoW. Because it can't. It's not designed to tell us this.

Yes or no question, which I know you will not actually give me a yea or no answer to:

If I overlay google trends and the subscription data we have from the first few wow expansions, will it match?

[ellieg]

Who goes to Google and types in "world of warcraft " lol

[arr0gance]

Yes or no question, which I know you will not actually give me a yea or no answer to:

If I overlay google trends and the subscription data we have from the first few wow expansions, will it match?

Somebody already did that (in 2019):

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comment..._google_trend/

But here's the thing: Blizzard stopped reporting data right around the time that it became increasingly more sporadic (and therefore less accurate). Shortly after the WoW token was released as well, which surely has had an unknowable impact on the subscriber levels. This is all just sophisticated guess work. And even then, it doesn't fucking matter because without access to Blizzard's own retention data we have no way to know the actual reasons people are quitting. You're trying to plot unknowable information to support a foregone conclusion. That shouldn't be how you approach an argument. We can talk about the ways WoW can improve without relying on information that cannot be accurately substantiated.

[NineSpine]

Somebody already did that (in 2019):

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comment..._google_trend/

But here's the thing: Blizzard stopped reporting data right around the time that it became increasingly more sporadic (and therefore less accurate). Shortly after the WoW token was released as well, which surely has had an unknowable impact on the subscriber levels. This is all just sophisticated guess work. And even then, it doesn't fucking matter because without access to Blizzard's own retention data we have no way to know the actual reasons people are quitting. You're trying to plot unknowable information to support a foregone conclusion. That shouldn't be how you approach an argument. We can talk about the ways WoW can improve without relying on information that cannot be accurately substantiated.

I never said one word about why people were quitting.

I simply pointed out that the data we have supports the idea that the game is in trouble. This is google trends, superdata, and blizzards own statements that can be used to infer numbers, such as their statements about what wow classic did to sub numbers. Putting that together with the fact that the game clearly has a resource problem (we had a very small expansion followed by a very long wait to a fairly small patch) and the picture is quite clear. Is it absolute and definitive? No, but the game is far more likely than not in trouble.

I didn’t say anything about why, but I can give some educated and experienced analysis: The game is stuck in this halfway point between a traditional MMO and a looter. It refuses to lean into either side and ends up making very few people happy as a result. It ends up having the worst of both worlds rather than the best of both worlds.

For example, the huge gear ladder with it being impossible for anyone to achieve BiS without doing the most extreme content is a very old school MMO system. Most similar games have successfully moved away from this model, but wow has doubled down on it. It works fine in a traditional MMO, but once you start adding massive amounts of scaling and difficulty tiers of the same content, it ends up feeling remarkably unrewarding for the average player.

You also have a pretty awful story told in a really awful way (follow around more important people and watch them do things).

Finally, the game is convoluted and full of esoteric, obnoxious, mostly temporary systems.

[TheFirstOnes]

people cant learn if they are surround by nothing but an echo chamber of praise.

failure always people to learn from mistakes.

You can criticize the game's issues without doomsaying it, however.

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Your ignorance isn’t impressing anyone. You are making yourself look foolish by discounting the importance of the most powerful popularity analytics tool that exists.

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Because “declining dramatically” and dying aren’t the same thing. Everquests audience declined dramatically. Is it dead? Nope.

I get it now though, your whole schtick here is weird sophistry, word games, and declaring victory by ignorance.

You and Arr0gance sound like redditors right now.

Literally all you guys can say is: WoW is flawed, players are leaving or are playing Classic or are just staying, WoW isn't dead however the decline exists (Albeit due to a LOT of reasons outside of the generic "ACTIVISION KILLED WOW" excuse that makes no sense whatsoever).

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Literally no one really cares about "analogs" or shit like that when they mostly don't even matter to begin with.

And before I see any of you talk about FFXIV, they're 2 different games, and FFXIV is both apart of a beloved franchise and isn't 17 fucking years old.

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People have been stating this for a good number of years now, and nothing notable has come from it.
I've been a wow player since the beginning, and I habe played ff14 quite a bit too.
I enjoy ff14, I won't say it's bad because it's actually really good.
But.
It won't appeal to a lot of wow players, the game is very different, a different kind of grind too.
Its just a different game, at the moment I'm not playing it and are enjoying SL a lot.
But I will probably go back again in the future if I start to not like wow again.

My point is, ff14 is not a wow killer or is not stealing masses of wow players.
They are different games and one is not going to kill the other.

Holy shit, there's hope.

[NineSpine]

You can criticize the game's issues without doomsaying it, however.

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You and Arr0gance sound like redditors right now.

Literally all you guys can say is: WoW is flawed, players are leaving or are playing Classic or are just staying, WoW isn't dead however the decline exists (Albeit due to a LOT of reasons outside of the generic "ACTIVISION KILLED WOW" excuse that makes no sense whatsoever).

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Literally no one really cares about "analogs" or shit like that when they mostly don't even matter to begin with.

And before I see any of you talk about FFXIV, they're 2 different games, and FFXIV is both apart of a beloved franchise and isn't 17 fucking years old.

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Holy shit, there's hope.

FF14 is 10 years old. For it to be on the upswing now very cleanly puts to bed any notion that wow has to be in decline just because it is old.

Wow can still succeed and bring in new players because it has the pieces to still be a phenomenal, legendary game. However, those pieces are scattered and broken and need to be shored up.

The designers need to get away from this toxic notion that you design the game for the most hardcore and then work backward from there to make it work for everyone else. They need to stop thinking that the game has two players: the hardcore guy and the casual guy, and the hardcore guy wants the hardest possible content while the casual guy wants new battle pets.

[TheFirstOnes]

FF14 is 10 years old. For it to be on the upswing now very cleanly puts to bed any notion that wow has to be in decline just because it is old.

Wow can still succeed and bring in new players because it has the pieces to still be a phenomenal, legendary game. However, those pieces are scattered and broken and need to be shored up.

The designers need to get away from this toxic notion that you design the game for the most hardcore and then work backward from there to make it work for everyone else. They need to stop thinking that the game has two players: the hardcore guy and the casual guy, and the hardcore guy wants the hardest possible content while the casual guy wants new battle pets.

I mean, FFXIV is kinda lacking in Endgame content outside of some quality of life shit, but I guess I get your point?

Also, that's not the main issue with WoW. The MAIN issue is that the game keeps re-inventing its designs each expansion.

[arr0gance]

I never said one word about why people were quitting.

I simply pointed out that the data we have supports the idea that the game is in trouble. This is google trends, superdata, and blizzards own statements that can be used to infer numbers, such as their statements about what wow classic did to sub numbers. Putting that together with the fact that the game clearly has a resource problem (we had a very small expansion followed by a very long wait to a fairly small patch) and the picture is quite clear. Is it absolute and definitive? No, but the game is far more likely than not in trouble.

I didn’t say anything about why, but I can give some educated and experienced analysis: The game is stuck in this halfway point between a traditional MMO and a looter. It refuses to lean into either side and ends up making very few people happy as a result. It ends up having the worst of both worlds rather than the best of both worlds.

For example, the huge gear ladder with it being impossible for anyone to achieve BiS without doing the most extreme content is a very old school MMO system. Most similar games have successfully moved away from this model, but wow has doubled down on it. It works fine in a traditional MMO, but once you start adding massive amounts of scaling and difficulty tiers of the same content, it ends up feeling remarkably unrewarding for the average player.

You also have a pretty awful story told in a really awful way (follow around more important people and watch them do things).

Finally, the game is convoluted and full of esoteric, obnoxious, mostly temporary systems.

Once more, you're inserting your opinions about why WoW is declining and using Google trends as your proof. Why? I'm not disputing that the game has problems but I'm not arrogant enough to imply that I know better than anybody else. I ask you for now I think the 8th post in a row: If your Google trends data is so accurate, why are 10x the people watching one game over the other on twitch? If you can use murky, totally unclear data to support your position, why can't I do the same to prove the opposite?

[NineSpine]

I mean, FFXIV is kinda lacking in Endgame content outside of some quality of life shit, but I guess I get your point?

Also, that's not the main issue with WoW. The MAIN issue is that the game keeps re-inventing its designs each expansion.

FF14 doesn’t act like endgame is the only thing that matters, and it also makes most of its content evergreen. It’s not like every patch everything else becomes worthless like in wow.

The constant new systems are just awful and always feel half assed. It’s been four years since the last time they made any advancements to any core system (adding M+).

The question is why they keep doing this, and my understanding is that it is because they don’t know how to make satisfying gear progression for anyone except the top end so they struggle to create alternative advancement systems to engage people.

[arr0gance]

The question is why they keep doing this, and my understanding is that it is because they don’t know how to make satisfying gear progression for anyone except the top end so they struggle to create alternative advancement systems to engage people.

Or maybe they don't give the faintest fuck about casual players' gear progression and are perfectly happy letting them sit at normal mode raid gear item level because the game should encourage its players to engage with parts of it that require organization (ie, M+, raiding above the LFR or rated PvP). You can say this is a "bad model" and point to all the Google trend in the fucking world but you're still just guessing because, hey, you still have no idea why people quit WoW and (more importantly) whether Blizzard is happy or dissatisfied with the way it is right now.

[NineSpine]

Once more, you're inserting your opinions about why WoW is declining and using Google trends as your proof. Why? I'm not disputing that the game has problems but I'm not arrogant enough to imply that I know better than anybody else. I ask you for now I think the 8th post in a row: If your Google trends data is so accurate, why are 10x the people watching one game over the other on twitch? If you can use murky, totally unclear data to support your position, why can't I do the same to prove the opposite?

I don’t think it is arrogant for me to say “hey, I’ve worked on and shipped multiple AAA games, so I have some opinions on this”.

I don’t have any reason to believe that twitch viewership is correlated to anything we are talking about. In fact, I have good reason to believe there is no correlation. Dead By Daylight is very popular on twitch. In the last 30 days it has 56,000 peak players on steam. War frame has a peak of 79,000 on steam. Dead By Daylight usually has around 15 times as many people watching it on twitch.

So, can we please move on from this weird twitch argument now?

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Or maybe they don't give the faintest fuck about casual players' gear progression and are perfectly happy letting them sit at normal mode raid gear item level because the game should encourage its players to engage with parts of it that require organization (ie, M+, raiding above the LFR or rated PvP). You can say this is a "bad model" and point to all the Google trend in the fucking world but you're still just guessing because, hey, you still have no idea why people quit WoW and (more importantly) whether Blizzard is happy or dissatisfied with the way it is right now.

If your argument is that not giving the faintest fuck about the majority of your players is good game design, and then you want to accuse me of not knowing what I am talking about, alright. You have fun with that.

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Or maybe they don't give the faintest fuck about casual players' gear progression and are perfectly happy letting them sit at normal mode raid gear item level because the game should encourage its players to engage with parts of it that require organization (ie, M+, raiding above the LFR or rated PvP). You can say this is a "bad model" and point to all the Google trend in the fucking world but you're still just guessing because, hey, you still have no idea why people quit WoW and (more importantly) whether Blizzard is happy or dissatisfied with the way it is right now.

It’s amazing to me how many of you Luddites think the game design principles are just “like someone’s opinion man” and that designers go to conferences, teach courses, write books, and do all this work to advance the art of science and game design for no reason whatsoever because... it’s just like opinions man so nobody knows better than anyone else.

[arr0gance]

I don’t think it is arrogant for me to say “hey, I’ve worked on and shipped multiple AAA games, so I have some opinions on this”.

I don’t have any reason to believe that twitch viewership is correlated to anything we are talking about. In fact, I have good reason to believe there is no correlation. Dead By Daylight is very popular on twitch. In the last 30 days it has 56,000 peak players on steam. War frame has a peak of 79,000 on steam. Dead By Daylight usually has around 15 times as many people watching it on twitch.

So, can we please move on from this weird twitch argument now?

Yawn, more appeal to authority bullshit. The twitch argument isn't any better than your fucking Google trends because just like Google trends, it's not designed to give you the information you're using it to support. So no, I won't drop the "weird twitch argument" because you think my imaginary numbers are less relevant than your imaginary numbers.

If your argument is that not giving the faintest fuck about the majority of your players is good game design, and then you want to accuse me of not knowing what I am talking about, alright. You have fun with that.

That's nice of you to assume you know what a majority of players want from the game. You have no way to know whether gear progression matters at all to casual players.

[Stormwolf64]

Well there are in fact proper constructive criticism as well to be found on this forum. The problem is that fans will still call that irrational hate and use all kinds of slurs while defending the game. Because oyu know, the game has no faults. And that is why your praise will fall on just as deaf ears as real hate.

[NineSpine]

Yawn, more appeal to authority bullshit. The twitch argument isn't any better than your fucking Google trends because just like Google trends, it's not designed to give you the information you're using it to support. So no, I won't drop the "weird twitch argument" because you think my imaginary numbers are less relevant than your imaginary numbers.



That's nice of you to assume you know what a majority of players want from the game. You have no way to know whether gear progression matters at all to casual players.

Google trends isn’t imaginary and is used across the globe for serious analytics work in science and business.

Your unwillingness to accept that, and your condescending rage at the idea that anyone would accept that, isn’t really an argument or a point.

You don’t even know what an appeal to authority is. Citing numbers isn’t an appeal to authority. Saying “here’s my opinion based on my relevant experience” isn’t an appeal to authority. Take a fucking Xanax dude.

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Yawn, more appeal to authority bullshit. The twitch argument isn't any better than your fucking Google trends because just like Google trends, it's not designed to give you the information you're using it to support. So no, I won't drop the "weird twitch argument" because you think my imaginary numbers are less relevant than your imaginary numbers.



That's nice of you to assume you know what a majority of players want from the game. You have no way to know whether gear progression matters at all to casual players.

If the argument you want to fall back on is “we don’t know if players care about progression in An MMO”, I don’t really know what to tell you. It’s starting to sound like you just want to insulate yourself against any possible disagreement by appealing to some fringe freak chance that the most rational explanation is always wrong.

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All I can say is: enjoy a game that keeps declining because of people like you. People like you are why I’ve had so little success getting friends into wow. When my wife tried, people like you raged on her and threatened to find and rape her for trying to learn to play.

[ellieg]

Google trends isn’t imaginary and is used across the globe for serious analytics work in science and business.

Your unwillingness to accept that, and your condescending rage at the idea that anyone would accept that, isn’t really an argument or a point.

You don’t even know what an appeal to authority is. Citing numbers isn’t an appeal to authority. Saying “here’s my opinion based on my relevant experience” isn’t an appeal to authority. Take a fucking Xanax dude.

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If the argument you want to fall back on is “we don’t know if players care about progression in An MMO”, I don’t really know what to tell you. It’s starting to sound like you just want to insulate yourself against any possible disagreement by appealing to some fringe freak chance that the most rational explanation is always wrong.

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All I can say is: enjoy a game that keeps declining because of people like you. People like you are why I’ve had so little success getting friends into wow. When my wife tried, people like you raged on her and threatened to find and rape her for trying to learn to play.

Are you calling him a rapist? I think you're the one that needs the Xanax.

We will continue playing the game thats "declining " lmao