Shirastro said:
Seventh Actuality said:
The worst you have to worry about with Warcraft is that it will become more like other, smaller MMOs that people are mentioning as alternatives anyway. No way is Warcraft a sinking ship in the sense that it's actually going to fail or be cancelled or turn into a ghost town; the negativity you see is, depending on who's talking, wishful thinking, alarmism or just a product of how how insanely succesful WoW was compared to how it can realisticly continue to be.
When i mentioned that WoW has passed it's golden age i didn't mean strictly in the terms of number of players.
I'm sure wow still has many many years of market dominance, but there are certain things that a new player will never experience like the old ones did.
No endless Vanilla Raids with 39 other clueless people. No epic arena battles in TBC or the drive to kick Arthas ass. No discovering all the little silly things that made WoW great. No Leroy Jankins, or 10 hours long Arathy Basins. No Death and Taxes or Nihilum dominance.
The community has simply moved on. There are very few new players and everyone knows everything.
Everyone has done everything, and most of the old players don't feel the same buzz as they used to.
Of course there still shit-loads of contest and plenty of thing to do, but i just feel that joining WoW now would be like watching the last 30 minutes of a really good movie.
The last sentence there is basically correct. I was a WoW player since the beta and the current WoW experience just can't reach that same level as it had back then. The gameplay is generally better now and so is the 1-60 content, but the community just isn't the same. There's no sense of shared wonder and exploration of something new. 1-85 is fairly irrelevant to 95% of the playerbase and is currently just something to trudge through to reach end-game. This isn't so much the game's fault as it is the community's fault. And I can't even blame the community for it, since it's the only path they can follow.
It's ultimately the failing of any content-based MMO. Sooner or later the playerbase will be 'old' and will have seen it all. The majority will just be doing the same old grind in end-game or trudging through the 1-85 with new characters again, while waiting for the next content expansion/patch from the devs. All the content-based MMOs suffer from this.
There's basically no one left to be excited with about things you see and encounter.
That's why I've moved on to sandbox-based MMOs like Eve Online since the content is rather irrelevant. There's no 'end-game' with raids or whatever. There's no waiting for the next expansion to finally get something new to do. It's just a giant sandbox where there's a structure and framework for the players themselves to create whatever the hell they want. Using Eve as the example here: Want to create just a small hardcore group of PvPers out to pirate people for money or maybe do mercenary work for people with money but no PvP capability? Sure. Want to create a giant empire with thousands of players in it, carving wealth and power out of nullsec space? Sure, but you'll face others doing the same, probably more powerful than you. Want to just relax with your friends, doing manufacturing and trade in high security systems? Hell yes.
The amount of play you get out of the game isn't dictated by the content, but by the playerbase. There'll -always- be players out there that wants to do something similar to what you want to do and there'll be room for it. Politics, combat, trade, manufacturing, roleplaying, whatever... It's not limited by levels or by content patches. Hell, there's not even classes. Anything anyone can do... you can do, if you train it. You're completely unlimited in what you can do and what you want to do.
This is why I don't think I can return to WoW at any point. I'm just too used to the endless feeling of 'well, this is new. I'll try this.' I get in sandbox MMOs.
And even when it is, it's not really in competition with the others since there's no subscription fee.
