How healthy is World of Warcraft's future?

[Osmeric]

I have a hard time understanding this mentality.

It's not difficult to understand. Unless I know their motivation for a change, and have good visibility into their thought processes, I can't be convinced they aren't just doing something temporarily and dishonestly. They have backslid before. I simply don't trust them enough to take changes at face value.

[Soon-TM]

A game that is going on 18 years, shot Blizzard into mainstream knowledge, led the MMO genre for X amount of years, and made billions is in fact a failed product just because people dont like the game anymore.

What was once successful may fail later, what failed once can be successful later. Failures can be minor, major or critical, ditto for successes. I know it may be quite a challenge to understand such things for certain folks, but still it's well worth the effort.

[TrollHunter3000]

Well done for exposing yourself for using buzzwords when you clearly don't know what they mean

How can I signal to everyone how forward thinking and superior I am if no one knows who I actually am? It would be just like me saying I have a supermodel wife and earn 7 figures - it's meaningless when I have no identity

I mean, maybe read my other post that already points out why you're wrong?

it is entirely possible for someone to virtue signal without revealing your true identity. Your identity has nothing to do with it. You are stating an opinion publicly in order for you to brag about your virtues. Whether we know you as "Bennett" on MMO Champion, or your real identity, does not matter.

Thanks for playing.

[TidalConflux]

What was once successful may fail later, what failed once can be successful later. Failures can be minor, major or critical, ditto for successes. I know it may be quite a challenge to understand such things for certain folks, but still it's well worth the effort.

Thus is the challenge of time. A nearly 20 year old game with active players is very rare to come by. No one isnt arguing that game isnt past its prime eras -- I would argue the MMO era as a whole is well past its time as well. But saying that WoW is failure now is kind of an oversell. It makes money for ABK enough to allow it to continue to update, create expansions, etc. That alone would mean that it is still success from from the perspective of a company.

Is it not as widely popular as it used to be? Sure, there have been a variety of reasons for that might be (not just alone to game design). That doesnt mean the game is a failure either. Is the game a failure to the players? Depends on the player. Some people like Shadowlands. Some people dont. Some people outright quit the game to play others -- but you can say the same thing for other expansions since Wrath/Cata.

[Lolites]

Thus is the challenge of time. A nearly 20 year old game with active players is very rare to come by. No one isnt arguing that game isnt past its prime eras -- I would argue the MMO era as a whole is well past its time as well. But saying that WoW is failure now is kind of an oversell. It makes money for ABK enough to allow it to continue to update, create expansions, etc. That alone would mean that it is still success from from the perspective of a company.

Is it not as widely popular as it used to be? Sure, there have been a variety of reasons for that might be (not just alone to game design). That doesnt mean the game is a failure either. Is the game a failure to the players? Depends on the player. Some people like Shadowlands. Some people dont. Some people outright quit the game to play others -- but you can say the same thing for other expansions since Wrath/Cata.

agreed, as for wow making "enough to allow it to continue to update" that made mu chuckle, i would say its still making more money than quite a lot of games did at their "peak"

[Accendor]

My bet is closer to ~1-5% can play without. But even 0.1% wouldn't be especially bad compared to other games. You can look at hardest achievements in steam games and you will see many games have only 0.1% accomplish the highest achievements. Its still cool that it exists. It might not cater to many people but the ones who do enjoy it are glad it exists.

The difference is that on steams games you usually only go for the hardcore achievements in single player games. Beating some mythic encounters during progression IS basically going for "no hit darksouls run" except you do it with 20 people at the same time and you also lose when somebody else gets hit.

I am not saying its impossible (it also gets much easier with gear and outscaling things usw.), but I highly doubt that there is even a single raid group that can clear a whole raid without addons during progression time without MASSIVE amounts of wipes on some bosses (I'm talking 1000 and more).
Dear world first guilds, if you are reading this, I'd love to be proven wrong during the next progression race. Would be VERY entertaining as well.

[Erous]

Blizzard has turned into consumer good capitalism. Make a great product that becomes very popular, sells out quickly and employs a large following. Slowly start taking away and changing minor ingredients: sugar for corn syrup, whole wheat flour for bleached flour; then reduce operational costs, headcount, maybe outsource manufacturing. Hope nobody notices. When sales start to dwindle, make packaging changes, increasing advertising. Sales continue to dwindle, say it's the consumers changing, times are changing, gaming isn't what it used to be, etc., etc. CANT BE OUR FAULT, EVERYONE ELSE IS AT FAULT. points fingers

[neik]

If they keep up with a predatory tactis throwing scraps at peopole and trying to milk that token money, surely they are in huge trouble. It's a fantasy game first, rotation simulator second. The elitist jerks seems got confused at some point or is the corporate goblins that made them do it, I don't know. They better start fixing it soon.

[Soon-TM]

If they keep up with a predatory tactics throwing scraps at people and trying to milk that token money, surely they are in huge trouble. It's a fantasy game first, rotation simulator second. The elitist jerks seems got confused at some point or is the corporate goblins that made them do it, I don't know. They better start fixing it soon.

I think this is the main reason that made the top goblins hire an elitist jerk, actually.

[enigma77]

Not very.

9.1.5? Still no release date even though 9.1.0 come out extremely late and has for most players lost its appeal two months ago.

9.2.0? Lol. Not even on PTR yet, no name, nothing. Only god knows when this thing is coming out, or if it's coming out.

[Kokolums]

Remember, Blizzard never made any official announcement or fanfare when ceasing development of Diablo 3. They just pushed out the necromancer download, then radio silence, and then quietly moved Diablo 3 into the hands of the legacy team.

[Usernameforforums]

Sylvanas is gonna be the lead again for the next three expansions.

[Sinaa]

I think this is the main reason that made the top goblins hire an elitist jerk, actually.

The elitist jerk is spending a lot of valuable dev time on elitist stuff, so that's not exactly a valid argument, is it?

[MoanaLisa]

The elitist jerk is spending a lot of valuable dev time on elitist stuff, so that's not exactly a valid argument, is it?

That's the great contradiction of the game. Created to be an accessible alternative to other MMO's at the time (primarily Everquest) it's always had a tendency starting around Burning Crusade to want to play to the "difficult to master" part of the audience. Theory-crafting took over the game design years ago. Having a number of the top people from EJ managing teams and now the entire game was sort of inevitable.

[sam86]

Right. But the ramblings of 100, mainly ex-, players on a fan forum is also not indicative of the quality and enjoyability of a game with millions of players...

yeah i'm sure u have a better representation of wow community in ur head than this website...
this website doesn't represent wow community yes, but it is the best presentation we have, the tyrannical censor-heavy forums since classic era is why i stopped posting there since TBC after getting ban because of the infamous idiotic blue answer "why we kill illidan - because he drop epix"

[Beet]

That’s really odd, I’ve never heard anyone think religious people are causing any of the sanitation. Pretty sure it’s woke mob kowtowing. Last I heard religious people freaking out was a million years ago when they were burning Harry Potter books and that worked didn’t it?

Late reply but yeah I was being sarcastic. Since it used to be the right wing religious who wanted to censor anything against their personal values and morals and the left would mock them for it. Times change and it’s reversed.

[mbit]

That's the great contradiction of the game. Created to be an accessible alternative to other MMO's at the time (primarily Everquest) it's always had a tendency starting around Burning Crusade to want to play to the "difficult to master" part of the audience. Theory-crafting took over the game design years ago. Having a number of the top people from EJ managing teams and now the entire game was sort of inevitable.

Imo its just the consequence of laziness. People want to avoid difficulty and the lazy choice is to make higher demands to fellow players so you have to work less yourself. Because too many think like that they end up forcing each other into meta to get accepted into groups. Top players never tried to dictate what the average player does, they merely provided the gun with guides and addons helping fellow minmaxers but the casuals took it and pulled the trigger on themselves.

[TovarishMayor]

Wow try tries to give you choices. See covenants soulbinds legendaries talents. But 85% of people pick the best build based on guides

[crusadernero]

Imo its just the consequence of laziness. People want to avoid difficulty and the lazy choice is to make higher demands to fellow players so you have to work less yourself. Because too many think like that they end up forcing each other into meta to get accepted into groups. Top players never tried to dictate what the average player does, they merely provided the gun with guides and addons helping fellow minmaxers but the casuals took it and pulled the trigger on themselves.

Most people just want to play the game and have a good time. In the end, thats what this is - a game. Right now its a mathematical theorycrafted metaslaved to death game were you live or die on your rio/m+ score, what your class/spec is and wether or not you manage to play your class at 100% and never do one mistake at all(if you do, you suck donkeykong ass). Just look how SLs covenants, conduits and all that has been threated. People here went on meltdown cause they couldnt outright metaslave it, now you had choices. Choices that in the big picture dont really matter, cause most people really dont clear mythic raids or high m+ keys. This mindset is so weird, and Blizzard is highly to blame.

Theres a reason why WotLK was very popular and Cata got alot of critique. One was highly accesible with straightforward casual friendly gameplay were you could play with whoever and have a nice time. There were also stuff to collect that wasnt hidden behind some insane high difficulty. The other tried to be hard(catering to good players, with guild/friends), and it tanked hard. Was a huge outcry.

I understand why some people enjoy doing content on hardest difficulty, but I find it hard to believe that most people want that. Most people dont think "oh hey I gotta improve a whole lot now and get better so I can actually take part in this game". Nah, they just either quit the game or drop doing that part of the game.

I have had so many friends quitting the game because of how dungeons have changed after m+. It turned into something very different than it always had been. Dungeons in wow has never really been difficult(bar early cata), and it seems a whole lot of people was fine with it.

Yes, you can do easy mode in wow now to. But those instances drops shit gear and people dont want that, they want value of out theyre time.

The easy answer to this is "git gud lul", and if thats the only answer, then yeah go ahead and see the playerbase keep on dumping. Catering to the Esport scene(that failed, is failing and will keep on failing) and those very few that bother with high m+ keys and mythic raids, is not what Blizzard should do.

[Ashleyxoxo]

Well if WoW dies, MMO-C forums are gonna be a wasteland. We don't want ded forums, do we?