This is essentially why everyone quits WoW at some point or another. I got out after 2 years. But I'm willing to bet even the most veteran of players are starting to feel the withering of the years of the same ol' grind.KeyMaster45 said:
World of Warcraft Subscriptions Continue to Slide
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WOW is still an amazing game, regardless of how easy it has become. I quit a while back simply because I don't have the time anymore, but I still consider it to have an amazing aesthetic, great gameplay and it has plenty to do. It's definitely never been challenged like it has before, though. Not only are games like Rift, Tera and when it finally comes out, The Old Republic a factor, but the many many high quality free mmo's are posing a real challenge, as well. I could see WOW becoming a free 2 play game in the future (not for a while, though). I think once it does that, it'll be at the very top again. But, it's definitely facing challenges.
I was trying to be helpful and point out that actually the 11.1 million does not include any free accounts and that actually 11.1 mill is the number of accounts that are currently paying the monthly subcription fee and therefore the number that they're down to 'for real'. But its nice to know that you completely ignored that part of the post and posted something that both does not make any sense and does not actually reply to my comment atall.Sarah Frazier said:And how many of those billions are people who once had the money to run multiple accounts but had to let one or more go due to lack of funds? That's not even counting the untold numbers of trials made by spammers and bots...savandicus said:I think you've missunderstood, that 11.1 million is the active number of accounts paying the monthly sub, if they counted free accounts and inactive accounts they'd probably be in the hundred of millions.Vrach said:So they're down to 11.1 million, which is actually the number counting free accounts (you know, those things people don't pay for?). I wonder how far they're down for real. Cause this ain't LOTRO where those free accounts are paying microtransactions or some shit like that, it's just a trial account.
Good to see it losing it's stranglehold - it'll make way for the new and better MMOs that are coming in '11/'12
Never trust a sub count.
OT: With even half the number of active subs it has now, WoW won't go belly up for a few years and it won't be because of some new game otherwise WoW would have gone under already. The reasons people are leaving now are too many to list, but with an MMO that's turned into a chat room with mini-games to play with friends, the effect is likely to snowball as more people leave to join their friends elsewhere. It will take more than another 5-10 level expansion to get people back and keep them. It will probably require a whole re-working of even the way things look in order to really grab people's interest and convince them to stay a while just to see the new pretty things.
Let me explain to you some definitions in a simple way so you might understand what a subcription count is and what the things that you are pretending it is.
Subcription count - The number of ACCOUNTS currently paying the monthly fee for wow
Total number of accounts - Any account made by anyone (A useless number for anything which you started off thinking was the sub count)
Total number of PLAYERS - The number of accounts that log in each week (Not to be confused with subcription count (again) because this one includes all free and trial accounts that do not pay any money to the game aswell as those who do) This is the thing that you confused with subcription count in your reply. This number is useful to know how many people are playing the game on a regular basis but will usually be slightly off due to people having multiple accounts or multiple people playing one account and is the only number that you can claim as 'difficult to trust' as its hard to measure.
I hope this post has been informative to you and that you might stop confusing the three different counts, i've put the two words in caps that i think are most important in the hope that you might notice them.
I played far more than I would like to admit during Wrath, and I had a blast. But then my guild blew up before Cata, and the new heroics tended to contain far more trash than I wanted to deal with as a tank. I don't mind a bit of trash in a dungeon, but having to try and tank with 2-3 random people (I always brought a healer and usually a DPS) sucked. By the point I was actually doing randoms in Lich King, I could pretty much solo the content so I didn't mind the people fresh into heroics in greens. The bosses could pose a challenge at first, but they didn't have the insta-death moves that they almost all have now, and when I'm looking through the particle effects of 4 other people, it can get pretty hard to see that tiny purple zone of death. I'll still come back and play when the next expansion comes out, hoping for a return to what made Wrath enjoyable, but that's pretyt much it.
I agree about content becoming redundant. It's a problem that every level based MMO has to deal with at some point. You either keep the level cap the same, which sucks because that means you are admitting that your current end-game is going to stay exactly where it is, or you end up constantly trying to one-up your former epic endgame raids and dungeons.Scrumpmonkey said:
And that's a tough choice to make for a developer. They naturally want to develop more and more and more and let people keep and expand their characters to infinity, but when you've billed every other epic final bossfight of doom as being more epic than before, you are setting yourself up to disappoint, and if you disappoint, the players are invested and what was a good game just becomes grinding for the hell of it.
Now im not saying that's exactly whats happening here. Wow account numbers have always been a bit dodgy at best to me because they are always ambiguous at what counts as an account (trial ? lapsed ? alts ?) and a drop off in the summer (ie when younger people are out getting drunk in the woods) isn't at all surprising.
However, I do think that Wow is going to hit this problem like a brick wall in the next few years. As the end-game (and thus the actual cool bits like pvp and epic raids) gets further and further away, but at the same time the top end content drops off in quality (or at least is underwhelming and little different from before) then subs are going to drop until the game dies. This is a problem with all level base MMOs and the only reason that WoW has avoided it up until now is that it is the starter MMO for almost everyone. Popular breeds popular, everyone knows people who play WoW, and they give it a go.
Nothing is going to take WoWs crown, so calm down you fanboys, because of course it built its massive sub base in a completely different era. Every one and there mother has a mmo out now, but when WoW was new there wasn't much else on the market that could easilly compare and in fairness its a pretty good game.
you're too good at it, basically.Xanthious said:
honestly ive played wow since launch and i can play my mage so well at this point i can solo whole sections of 5player dungeons the game just isnt a challenge, because if it's possible i can do it
there's a buff i can steal in a part of twilight bastion that makes me immune to all damage, i was once in a pug raid that wiped there once i just killed the entire room while they rezzed by keeping the buff mob alive
pve, is a joke.
pvp just comes down to stats if you have a truckload of resi and a healer in your bg, you win
if you don't then you failed, dismally.
i quit wow because there is no more cool silly mental things to do like grind 'the insane' title
they took all the hardcore things away because the socials don't like them
therefore they loose all their original fan-base, minus the fan-boys who would buy a blizzard branded turd.
I last played wow some time in the middle of 09. It was a fun couple of years but eh between the never ending loot arguments, sheer flood of noob players that came along with lich king and the overall feeling nothing had really changed much between 2006 and 3 years later I just stopped caring for the thing. That and my time/money needing to be spent on other things lol.
Weirdly I would totally get hardcore in to another mmo if it offered an equal or superior experience and I wasn't obligated to be online all the freaking time to be able to experience the parts of the game I want to. Hoping the 40k mmo turns out decent, assuming it actually releases in 2013.
Weirdly I would totally get hardcore in to another mmo if it offered an equal or superior experience and I wasn't obligated to be online all the freaking time to be able to experience the parts of the game I want to. Hoping the 40k mmo turns out decent, assuming it actually releases in 2013.
The latest Firelands patch was a little disappointing, though, the game still remains as well put together as it ever has. Honestly, part of what turns me off about Cataclysm is the theme. While Deathwing is a name that should strike a little excitement into the minds of older fans, he falls short of being intimidating, even when one is consumed by his flames. Despite seeming more lethal than the Lich King, his presence in the expansion and characterization isn't as well done as the Lich King was in wrath. After all, beating back the demonic burning legion and scourge prior, elementals seem a little tame.
A little lore for the road. Were you aware that the reason behind having no forsaken or undead children is because the original scourge harvested them for parts as they couldn't be used for labour? Most abominations are created by these harvested organs and limbs, including the brain, which is why Abominations seem so stupid. In Naxxramas, there is an abomination named Thaddius, who is made solely from the flesh of women and children. When Thaddius nears his death, if you have the ambience cranked and the sound and music off, you can hear the screams of women and children, which cease when he dies. It's little things like these, I believe, that make WoW so good.
If you visit the WoW forums, you'll see that a lot of people aren't sold on what they don't like about the expansion. It could be burnout, sure, but there is definitely something.
A little lore for the road. Were you aware that the reason behind having no forsaken or undead children is because the original scourge harvested them for parts as they couldn't be used for labour? Most abominations are created by these harvested organs and limbs, including the brain, which is why Abominations seem so stupid. In Naxxramas, there is an abomination named Thaddius, who is made solely from the flesh of women and children. When Thaddius nears his death, if you have the ambience cranked and the sound and music off, you can hear the screams of women and children, which cease when he dies. It's little things like these, I believe, that make WoW so good.
If you visit the WoW forums, you'll see that a lot of people aren't sold on what they don't like about the expansion. It could be burnout, sure, but there is definitely something.
People leave because they make the game incredibly easy. I am ofcourse talking about 5 man heroics and raids. Most of my friends, along with the majority of my guild (myself included) left the game (again) not long after the release of Cataclysm, specefically when they both nerfed the 5 man heroic dungeons aswell as the raid content that we had just started on.
As both a tank and a raid leader, I absolutely hated it when they made the encounters less difficult, which as some might have guessed, also made the very same encounters terribly boring.
I am not sure that I will return for the next expansion, as I doubt that they will leave the difficulty where it belongs.
And no, I am not longing for the return of the 40 man raids, as the only real difficult they provided, was how to deal with the semi-afk guild memebers during raids. No, I simply want them to stop making the encounter so easy that they fade from most peoples memory as soon as they leave the area.
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As someone else mentionend, the arch enemy of Cataclysm falls a bit short compared to the Lich King. I did however enjoy most of the new areas, and thought that most of them had a very unique and interesting feel to them.
As both a tank and a raid leader, I absolutely hated it when they made the encounters less difficult, which as some might have guessed, also made the very same encounters terribly boring.
I am not sure that I will return for the next expansion, as I doubt that they will leave the difficulty where it belongs.
And no, I am not longing for the return of the 40 man raids, as the only real difficult they provided, was how to deal with the semi-afk guild memebers during raids. No, I simply want them to stop making the encounter so easy that they fade from most peoples memory as soon as they leave the area.
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As someone else mentionend, the arch enemy of Cataclysm falls a bit short compared to the Lich King. I did however enjoy most of the new areas, and thought that most of them had a very unique and interesting feel to them.
Personally, I don't think WoW is still alive because "it is a good game" but because of the fanbase. There are so many people that will fight to the death for WoW, and it doesn't matter what Blizzard does to the game.
Also, I don't think as many people as you think care about the "storyline" in WoW. Many people who play have never even played Warcraft (including me).
Another thing that annoys me is dailies and the point system for obtaining gear. All it is, is just a blatantly obvious way of forcing people to play the game longer than they normally would.
Don't get me wrong though, WoW USED to be a good game, but it's very obvious that all they are trying to do now is make money, instead of just trying to make a fun game.
Also, I don't think as many people as you think care about the "storyline" in WoW. Many people who play have never even played Warcraft (including me).
Another thing that annoys me is dailies and the point system for obtaining gear. All it is, is just a blatantly obvious way of forcing people to play the game longer than they normally would.
Don't get me wrong though, WoW USED to be a good game, but it's very obvious that all they are trying to do now is make money, instead of just trying to make a fun game.
I think it's not that surprising that the WoW numbers waiver as time goes on. With as many new MMOs as they've developed in recent years, they have to have come up with things that will appeal to people more than WoW. A lot of MMO players, though, will stick by the one that's stood up to the test of time (so far) but eventually I think WoW's numbers will drop to a certain amount as its competitors develop their own gimmicks to appeal to people, whether it's a storyline they like more than WoW's, different art styles for the visuals, a more appealing gameplay structure or different character classes, just to name a few ways to vary from WoW.
A sequel to Warcraft would be interesting, but the question would be how they would connect one to the other. Would it remain on Azeroth? Would it be a sequel or a prequel to the events of the Warcraft series? If it's a sequel, how far into the future would they jump? Would a big jump result in a change in genre, say, from fantasy to more of a steampunk/gaslight game ('cause finally getting a real steampunk/gaslight mmo would kick ass.) It would take some really hefty writing and backstory to pull it off. Plus, I imagine a lot of players would want some sort of reward for having played so long in WoW (like the heirloom stuff they've been talking about for Guild Wars 2).
A sequel to Warcraft would be interesting, but the question would be how they would connect one to the other. Would it remain on Azeroth? Would it be a sequel or a prequel to the events of the Warcraft series? If it's a sequel, how far into the future would they jump? Would a big jump result in a change in genre, say, from fantasy to more of a steampunk/gaslight game ('cause finally getting a real steampunk/gaslight mmo would kick ass.) It would take some really hefty writing and backstory to pull it off. Plus, I imagine a lot of players would want some sort of reward for having played so long in WoW (like the heirloom stuff they've been talking about for Guild Wars 2).
WoW subs are slipping because it's boring as all hell. There is no other reason. Some things in the game are sort of fun (like raiding). But having to do 8 quests every day for 20 days in order to unlock something, then another 9 days of quests to unlock something else? It gets old fast. Then you realize that you have to unlock these things on all level 85 characters you have.
And then you go cancel your subscription, because I will be damned if I have to do busy work in a motherf**king videogame.
And then you go cancel your subscription, because I will be damned if I have to do busy work in a motherf**king videogame.
It had over 12 million right after Cataclysm came out. If WoW loses 300k subscribers every quater, that's 1.2 million a year it'll take a bit more than nine years before WoW has zero subscribers. I think WoW will be profitable for a lot longer than that, because when people start dropping the game, servers will close, which will cut costs. Not to mention that the die-hard fans will still play no matter what.Kroxile said:
I would be very suprised if the progression, or rather regression, were to be linear. Looking back at my old guild the regression was more exponential. I held back buying Cata to gauge the reactions first, and the initial report after a few days from guild mates was disheartening. At first there was a trickle of guild mates unsubbing, which in short order turned into a torrent. I myself unsubbed about a month after Cata was released, and I have never looked back. I actually felt a bit of relief, like I had kicked a bad habit.McNinja said:
I was done with WoW for a while after Wrath came out, but I picked it up again after Cata released. I do think that when people start leaving, the numbers will increase exponentially, but as I sad I think there will be a devoted fanbase who will keep the game going for a very long time. I will not be one of them, because I am on the cusp of cancelling my account.Logarithmic Limbo said: