I suspect SL's hiatus will have the lowest subs in history and it will trigger events

[Soikona]

Then every game that allows trading or boosting is P2W. I can pay anyone in RL to buy gear in game. This includes any MMORPG in existence.

Can’t do it in ESO. You can’t buy a token to sell for gold. So, that’s just wrong what you said.

Same for SWTOR. I’m not sure but I don’t think you can for FF14.

Closest you have was Wildstar but you couldn’t carry in that game due to a lot of damage checks.

Maybe Eve? It allows you to buy something to sell for ingame currency doesn’t it?

So no, not every game allows it….

[Usagi Senshi]

Ff is amazing, but replayability is so low imho..once you beat the MSQ and do all the new raids what is there to even do? .lost ark is way more P2W than wow is how can anybody really even enjoy that game for any extended period of time?

I've stayed subbed since 2013 and some months at a time I just hang in the Gold Saucer (doing it now) and randomly interacting with other players

That alone is worth my $13 a month

I understand where you're coming from though.

[Skylarking]

At this point you're clearly trolling or you need drawings to understand that the company officially making p2w features makes the game p2w in comparison with a random third party behavior a million times less widespread and impactful in the game.

I think you got this game confused with lost ark

[Dioporco]

I like how you only read the part of that post that you wanted to.

Also RokPaNda

As cute of an idea as this is, FF is pretty dead. It's basically at the point that retail WoW is

Write in your native language then

[Nalam the Venom]

There isn't enough competition. Not even outside of other MMOs. What else is there to play this year until Q4?

Black desert

Lost ark.

Blade & Soul.

Vindictus.

Neverwinter

GW2

Warframe.

Not FF14 (Because it’s bad)

SWTOR.

Soulworker.

ESO.

And many more, You don’t always have to play the ”Fresh new thing” there’s plenty of stuff to play through.

The Class stories in SWTOR is worth playing for sure

[epigramx]

Average age was always 35+

I remember that meme and I remember it had no source and it was debunked. E.g. this research appears to show it's closer to 28 http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001365.php.

It makes sense anyway especially when it goes to time-played since most people having the time to play games like this and the intelligence to handle them are at least teenagers (intelligence to handle the complexity) and up to university students (less work).

[cityguy193]

Ff is amazing, but replayability is so low imho..once you beat the MSQ and do all the new raids what is there to even do? .lost ark is way more P2W than wow is how can anybody really even enjoy that game for any extended period of time?

What is there to do in wow? Run the same mythic + dungeon 20 times? Run the same raid 20 times? Both games have completionist aspects to them, the same way wow does.

[Athulua]

What is there to do in wow? Run the same mythic + dungeon 20 times? Run the same raid 20 times? Both games have completionist aspects to them, the same way wow does.

Main source of replayability used to be alts. You ran the raid on your main 15 times and ended the progression. What is there left to do? Alts.
You played a mage, try hunter. Or warrior. Or resto shaman. Get them some gear, take them through the same raid you already know, but you play something very different than before.

This worked well to retain players throughout very long content droughts of WoTLK, Cata, MOP and even WOD.
Because there was very little friction between the player and game's systems. In Wrath and Cata all you needed was gear. If you were in the final patch of the game it could be done in a few hours. I rolled an alt in 4.3 and I could gear him up in full 378 in like 8 hours of grinding Hour of Twilight dungeons (and justice points to purchase some firelands gear off the vendor where I had bad luck - you could even buy 2-set tier bonus!). There, that's it. The character is ready to enter normal Dragon Soul.

MOP introduced friction by adding a legendary cloak quest. Sure by 5.4 a lot of its elements were shortened and boosted, but they kept this fucking 3000 valor point part for some odd reason. They never removed it. Even though that was just a 3-week time gate, flat out. This part served NOTHING, because you would gain Valor Points by simply playing the damn game. They even added 100% boost to your valor point gains but this solved nothing - the weekly cap remained the same! The end reward was quite strong. Mandatory in heroic difficulty, you could get away without it in normal. Oh, and stacking ilvl upgrades that would consume your whole weekly VP allowance for one item. WOD had a similar thing going on with the legendary ring. No blatant time gates this time (like this valor point quest) but it still took quite a long time to get. But again, mandatory mainly in mythic mode on progression. Not in normal - heroic.

And then Legion happened with introduced a whole stacked tower full of systems, none of which were account wide. In late patches (such as 7.3.5) it wasn't that much of an issue - but still the amount of work to do was overwhelming, especially on launch. BFA was even worse. Catchup did not come until late 8.3 (not even with 8.3 release!) and even then it was grinding on top of grinding on top of grinding. If you took your fresh character that got geared to like 470 in heroic nya and mythic+ dungs it would do half of the damage of optimized min-maxed 470 character that was grinding all those systems for months before. The systems themselves were amazing fun to play with, but acquisition of them was absolute garbage.

So instead of re-playing the game with alts people just quit and leave. They don't want to grind the same systems for 100 hours on their alt.
Torghast was the elephant in the room. A feature with so much potential turned into a fucking chore. When it first opened up in 9.0 I was flattened by design choices of progression inside it. I mean, layer 1, layer 2, layer 3 and then do it again on the other wing? SIX torghast runs in one week? What the fuck? And it was like that for like, 6 weeks? Eventually you could get it down to 2 runs per week (layer 8 each). But not on alts, oh no! On alts you had to repeat the torment. Up to sixteen runs of Torghast in a week if you started an alt and layer 8 was already out. Woohoo. What a way to make players absolutely hate such a good feature.

[cityguy193]

Main source of replayability used to be alts. You ran the raid on your main 15 times and ended the progression. What is there left to do? Alts.
You played a mage, try hunter. Or warrior. Or resto shaman. Get them some gear, take them through the same raid you already know, but you play something very different than before.

This worked well to retain players throughout very long content droughts of WoTLK, Cata, MOP and even WOD.
Because there was very little friction between the player and game's systems. In Wrath and Cata all you needed was gear. If you were in the final patch of the game it could be done in a few hours. I rolled an alt in 4.3 and I could gear him up in full 378 in like 8 hours of grinding Hour of Twilight dungeons (and justice points to purchase some firelands gear off the vendor where I had bad luck - you could even buy 2-set tier bonus!). There, that's it. The character is ready to enter normal Dragon Soul.

MOP introduced friction by adding a legendary cloak quest. Sure by 5.4 a lot of its elements were shortened and boosted, but they kept this fucking 3000 valor point part for some odd reason. They never removed it. Even though that was just a 3-week time gate, flat out. This part served NOTHING, because you would gain Valor Points by simply playing the damn game. They even added 100% boost to your valor point gains but this solved nothing - the weekly cap remained the same! The end reward was quite strong. Mandatory in heroic difficulty, you could get away without it in normal. Oh, and stacking ilvl upgrades that would consume your whole weekly VP allowance for one item. WOD had a similar thing going on with the legendary ring. No blatant time gates this time (like this valor point quest) but it still took quite a long time to get. But again, mandatory mainly in mythic mode on progression. Not in normal - heroic.

And then Legion happened with introduced a whole stacked tower full of systems, none of which were account wide. In late patches (such as 7.3.5) it wasn't that much of an issue - but still the amount of work to do was overwhelming, especially on launch. BFA was even worse. Catchup did not come until late 8.3 (not even with 8.3 release!) and even then it was grinding on top of grinding on top of grinding. If you took your fresh character that got geared to like 470 in heroic nya and mythic+ dungs it would do half of the damage of optimized min-maxed 470 character that was grinding all those systems for months before. The systems themselves were amazing fun to play with, but acquisition of them was absolute garbage.

So instead of re-playing the game with alts people just quit and leave. They don't want to grind the same systems for 100 hours on their alt.
Torghast was the elephant in the room. A feature with so much potential turned into a fucking chore. When it first opened up in 9.0 I was flattened by design choices of progression inside it. I mean, layer 1, layer 2, layer 3 and then do it again on the other wing? SIX torghast runs in one week? What the fuck? And it was like that for like, 6 weeks? Eventually you could get it down to 2 runs per week (layer 8 each). But not on alts, oh no! On alts you had to repeat the torment. Up to sixteen runs of Torghast in a week if you started an alt and layer 8 was already out. Woohoo. What a way to make players absolutely hate such a good feature.

Alts exist in both lost ark and FF (with the armory system). But yes, wow strayed too far from its original roots

[Gimlix]

Your first paragraph nails it. WoW can't compete with today's games and is only really popular among addicts and sunk costees.

So it's become more a niche hobby some people are clinging to for almost 2 decades. I think WoW can survive among niche hobbyist, but Blizzard should scrap any ideas of a revival, even an absolutely slapping expansion will not create more first time players, just bring old players back who don't play but still check up on forums and stuff like me.

It's hard selling a game created in 2004 to people born after 2004. It's hard seeing WoWs graphics (people's first impressions btw) be comparable to xbox-360 graphics. People were spoiled by great graphic RPGs like Skyrim over a decade ago, WoW hasn't gotten more popular since then.

Yet the game is known to be the king of MMORPGS to even today.
Yet the game even after 17 years is still topping record over record.

[munkeyinorbit]

Let's face it; most people still around from the early days of the game are 40+ year olds who start not even gaming anymore; the younglings aren't few but they don't tend to stay especially since WoW is nothing too special in the context of new games.

An expansion that just has "dragons and Alex the hot!" is not going to cut it; it might have a small peak at launch but even that may be underwhelming; the new producers will likely pull the plug entirely and possibly try something extremely new.

The nature of "extremely new" is up in the air but I have some predictions; perhaps they will delete all technical notions of 'expansion' and release it only as 'Warcraft'; what do you think they might do?

Evidence suggests that you are wrong. Last expac we had arguably the worst system that wow ever had , corruptions, on top of a borrowed power that most people hated on top of another grindy power system. When prepatch hit wow had the most subs it had in a decade. Blizzard has every indication that people will be back despite the internet shitting it's pants over covenants.

If I had to bet whether or not people will be back in their millions I would bet on Blizzard marketing over some random with short memory.

[cityguy193]

Yet the game is known to be the king of MMORPGS to even today.
Yet the game even after 17 years is still topping record over record.

Record after record in the mmorpg niche that is loosing players. Other genres grew in the last 10 years, mmos did not. Wow lost MAUs during the pandemic, few other top 20 game streaming twitch can say that.

I suspect wow being dominant has led to the genre as a whole dwindling. Owning a greater share of a smaller playerbase is the worst of both worlds. It leads to less innovation and a monopoly. King of a pile of crap is just still a pile of crap.

[Gimlix]

Record after record in the mmorpg niche that is loosing players. Other genres grew in the last 10 years, mmos did not. Wow lost MAUs during the pandemic, few other top 20 game streaming twitch can say that.

I suspect wow being dominant has led to the genre as a whole dwindling. Owning a greater share of a smaller playerbase is the worst of both worlds. It leads to less innovation and a monopoly. King of a pile of crap is just still a pile of crap.

Can't be king of crap if alot of people like it though.
But yeah it's declining for sure but we can only hope that new expansion will bring in fresh air and hopefully people stick around again.

[cityguy193]

Can't be king of crap if alot of people like it though.
But yeah it's declining for sure but we can only hope that new expansion will bring in fresh air and hopefully people stick around again.

Define "a lot," because the last investor call stated that out of all of ATVI's games, Wow lost MAUs. Wow regularly is under 25k viewers on twitch, overshadowed by blizzards own other games, as well as multiple MOBAs, battle royal shooters, fighting games, etc. Lost ark has maintained more than double the average viewers except on select few wow info dump or patch days. Even FFXIV is averaging more viewers this week, and they do not really have that established of a competitive pve or pvp mode.

It will be the first to be axed if it continues to underperform once microsoft takes over.

[Gimlix]

Define "a lot," because the last investor call stated that out of all of ATVI's games, Wow lost MAUs. Wow regularly is under 25k viewers on twitch, overshadowed by blizzards own other games, as well as multiple MOBAs, battle royal shooters, fighting games, etc. Lost ark has maintained more than double the average viewers except on select few wow info dump or patch days. Even FFXIV is averaging more viewers this week, and they do not really have that established of a competitive pve or pvp mode.

It will be the first to be axed if it continues to underperform once microsoft takes over.

Excuse me this is completely nonse. WoW has usually around 30-50k on a daily basis on twitch and sometimes even above 100k while FF14 cant even get above 10k views on twitch. Except atm for whatever reason.

WoW is still their #1 game when you take look at interest.
Shows you the state on their whole company though..

[cityguy193]

Excuse me this is completely nonse. WoW has usually around 30-50k on a daily basis on twitch and sometimes even above 100k while FF14 cant even get above 10k views on twitch. Except atm for whatever reason.

WoW is still their #1 game when you take look at interest.
Shows you the state on their whole company though..

Looks like overwatch 2 is their number 1 game by far, 1.3M concurrent views yesterday. Wow never hit that at any point of its lifetime. It was only matched by lost ark on its release week.

You have to understand averaging 30k views on twitch with such a focus on esports is laughable, when its being beaten by every other household game name, from LOL to apex to even fucking minecraft. Price of a game/sub cost does not matter because streaming inherently shows a interest in a game and is free.

People watch wow for world firsts, mythic raid and mythic + races, pvp, etc, but not really for the everyday gameplay. Blizzard has been pushing aside its casual playerbase to cater to the top 1% of players. When its not even panning out on a daily streaming level, something is wrong. On all other times when some big tournament isnt going on, it does not have much to offer a viewer that cannot be done better by the other mmos.

As soon as the interview with asmondgold is over, wow will come back down to the 20-30k viewer mark and will still be under FF14 and lost ark.

Fyi, FF14 released overhauled its approach to its pvp and a new patch, its numbers have been trending up for a while. Its not "for whatever reason."

[cityguy193]

Nah it's not even close between wow and ff14 imo.

I mean pvp has a proper end-game for starters lol. And there feels like actual character progression in wow, I just don't get that same feeling with ff14 it just feels...flat after I've beaten everything once. Except GS that place is amazing

well thats a difference of opinion, as there is actual character progression in any mmo, its up to you to feel if its worth it. Im sure you will find people that running the same raid/dungeon/arena/bg mindless.

[cparle87]

I've stayed subbed since 2013 and some months at a time I just hang in the Gold Saucer (doing it now) and randomly interacting with other players

That alone is worth my $13 a month

I understand where you're coming from though.

I wish more people were chill like you.

Sometimes I get the feeling that people forget the rest of the game outside the latest patch content exists. And if I dared suggest an alt, or running an old raid for mog, or even just hanging around chatting with friends I'd get crucified. Like you said, just the social aspect is worth 50c a day imo.

[Nyel]

It already has, Shadowlands is performing abysmal as is Blizzard as a company itself. Just look at their latest quarterly results, they're bad. Really, really bad.

People can sugarcoat Shadowlands with it's "aMaZINg firSt dAy SAleS!!!", but it doesn't change the end result.

[epigramx]

Evidence suggests that you are wrong. Last expac we had arguably the worst system that wow ever had , corruptions, on top of a borrowed power that most people hated on top of another grindy power system. When prepatch hit wow had the most subs it had in a decade.

Memes. The general public had lost interest in the game and those peaks you see for a couple of weeks at launches are predictable and nothing special.