I've been playing since Vanilla and I have literally done it all; hard-core, end-game raiding in progression guilds, PvP (both BG and Arena), pets, mount collecting, achievement farming, you name it. The reason people are leaving is because there is nothing new under the sun in WoW. The few things they introduce that are new, like pet battles, feel like cheesy little stopgap measures that are only brought out to entice the young crowd. Races like the Pandarian, which started out as a joke, are now a part of the game, and there's a whole lot less encouragement for immersion than there used to be. Roll playing used to be a fairly significant portion of the game, but Blizzard has done nothing to encourage it. So rather than players creating their own story lines, we're stuck with rehashes and dumbed-down content so everyone can play on a similar level. Things like CRZ have helped in some respects, but I often find myself wishing desperately that the morons from other servers would go away; there's a reason I play where I do, and part of it was to avoid those other people.People have gotten sick and tired of the same old quests with slightly different objectives (collect X number of Y) and the mount and armor reskins are past the point of annoying. Until they give us something actually new, they're going to keep loosing people.
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Well mark me down as +1 to the subscriber base. I came back after a year break... let's see if they keep me interested, though.
Here we are again. As I said many moons ago...trends don't zig-zag, they have slow arcs up or down. Since the peak of 12 million at the Uludar patch...we have seen a declining arc. That's 4 years.The scary part is that Blizz did so much right with MoP and still the subs are declining.Not much i can add that I didn't say with every other subcription thread...when the game went from having the community be the face of the game, to mechanics and contents consumption being paramount, Blizz dug themselves into a hole, that they can't seem to dig themselves out of. MoP maybe be too late in bringing back the "WoW" player who carried this game to it's glorious heights. You can read in the comments of the "gamer" who are the overwhelming base of today, the trouble Blizz is facing. Constant feeding and consumption. There is nothing else to build upon. CRZ just adds more anonymity to the mix but doesn't provide a platform to build acquaintances on. What's happening to WoW is what happens to every game that takes on a console type platform.When the game contents has been consumed there is very little else to keep players interested.The hanging out with "guildies" which was so prevalent during my TBC/Wrath days has disappeared for the most part. I can not emphasis enough how much this was a big part of the charm of WoW. The social medium.Blizz says this is mostly a loss coming from their Asian market. Why not then show us the numbers from the NA/EU market? If they are stable why be afraid to show us. Also posters should stop taking the current sub number and multiplying by the cost of a monthly subscription. That's not how they do it in the Asian market. You also can't compare apples to oranges to justify market strength, you can only compare Blizz against itself.As revenues continue to decline and expenditures continue to climb one wonders at what point they start to consider pulling out of certain markets completely or even selling off Blizz.
This is one of my complaints too: no real community left in-game. At one time, we all had to group to do certain quests. Now, even though the game is still pegged as an MMO, it has been geared to solo play more and more. I have literally gone weeks without interacting with anyone outside my guild, where, at one time, especially around the end of Burning Crusade, I would have been in 5 or more random groups per day to finish quests, whether it was to down an elite required for a quest or just to speed up farming 30 of whatever I had to kill.
looking to make returning to the game smoother? how is that supposed to get people to want to return? the reason people leave is there's nothing to do. dailies are boring as hell and the content isn't fun. WoW isn't a fun game, it's just a time sink. It is still the best MMO out there but it's not exactly a fun game, you just do the same thing over and over. Once you get past the initial huge gob of story that is 85-90 leveling there is nothing interesting holding the game together. What does this game have to offer? pet battles? eh why not just play pokemon? raiding? oh great have to do just the right thing at just the right time.. BORING.. dungeons meh ten times and they are dull as #$%^.. questing/dailies.. ten times boring as &*!@ let alone you need to do them hundreds of times.. battlefield barrens... 8 hour grind with damn good gear once a week for 8 weeks... BORING.. crafting.. have all the gear why do it?THERE IS NOTHING TO HOLD YOUR ATTENTION AFTER A FEW WEEKS.. stop focusing on how to make getting back into the game easier and start focusing on making things more fun. there are so many characters somewhere in the worlds that are never seen anymore, give them a multitude of things to do and rotate who you see. add more new classes. figure out how to bring in the things that were promised in previous expansions and never delivered (path of the titans/ hero classes anyone?) bring in more playable races.. or here's a really cool idea, how about an in game goblin/gnome hot rod shop where you gather materials to make x# of new vehicle mounts with custom paint jobs. how about being able to tame new mounts? how about racing games on different types of mounts all over the worlds? bring out even further character customization with skins, colors, armor coloring so you can change how it looks with paint jobs.. how about new kinds of weapons? there is so much that could be done that they just haven't.
Heh, well 5.2 has broken it for me. Farm: zandalari, dailies, rares, fables, minipets, dinosaurs... I probably missed something, like crafting and thunderforged.The raid is good though, as long as they keep PvE in quality and keep PvP somehow balanced - unburdened fans will remain, and WoW will still be among most popular MMOs. Not an emperor, no longer, but not a F2P. I doubt that WoW will fall below 2-3mil subs any time soon, and this is still a high number for mmos, so no need to call it.They should really consider renewing the game. Sure, WoW II would take a lot more investment than a mere expansion, but what about the sales? Their only shame - Deeblo 3, and even it managed to set world record at sales. Even if people reconsidered Blizzard, there should be enough fans to give another try.I doubt they will ever do it, however, with their prospects of Titan or whatever new MMO is. To keep up cybersport SC2, bot-oriented D3 and WoW, along with a new MMO launch? We've seen what happened in May 2012. They will have to turn something down.Doing an expansion or two is fine, but after 10 years? They incorporated scenarios and other activities, but they still behave under the rules of original WoW. Under the rules of item balancing, tiers and stuff. They should make something fresh, just like WoW was at first. It might seem like visiting still same Azeroth, but when you don't have a many year old char with botox and sillicon to raid\pvp top end content, instead starting fresh new in a new system - it could work. I wish they did it instead of Cataclysm. They remade the world, they just had to shape it not as an expansion, but as a new game.Ultimately, it comes down to what they see WoW as. If it's a game - it will die. It's just a business project. But if it's a World, which they so far have been saying, then they have to keep it up. If not anything else - THIS will put them over other MMOs, who have their peaks and falls. The ability to preserve it's franchise, and not just drain it out.But after the incident with Deeblo 3, especially the way my friend explained it - Jay rallied profits from RMAH as long as he could, then got moved to do the same to a new game, while an actual developer will polish D3 to be stable; I doubt that they have any interest in WoW, when it will not sell Cinder Kittens and other assorted a**holery for the fans.
The problem with Crz is that although it was a good idea to get more people in low level areas, it still falls short to help low pop servers. Meaning we've had issues with nothing to buy before it went live on AH and now.... its even worse. People from cross realm come, farm our resources and then go home and make profit while we still suffer. If they are gonna cross realm resources they should also cross realm AH. And now we have people who manipulate the game by asking to join group in 90 areas only to break group and go farming on our server as well. AGAIN taking away our resources! I have a solution to low level areas becoming dead.... make new professions also include low level mats to complete. It would get everybody moving throughout the entire world again. And combine two low pop servers instead of crossrealm. It would make players feel better about losing that mine or herb to someone else knowing atleast if they cant farm it they can most likely gets mats needed on AH! :-)
Well, this isn't surprising. With crz being really trashy.. Why not just merge certain servers rather than screw most people over, mat farmers, pet farmers, etc etc? Think most people are quitting due to the servers dieing and the game becoming extremely repetitive again. Don't get me wrong.. not a lot are quitting because of that but it's a major factor. If people are against merging, then they need to open up free xfers hard. My server for example, is crap. It's extremely inactive and there's only 3 decent raiding guilds. 1 horde and 2 alliance. It's impossible to even find a team to pug the older raids. So.. if you ask in chat for a pug, 90% of the time you're gonna get some jackass who will make fun of you. Which pushes people away. Then again, maybe blizzard is trying to get more money off people xfering off low popped servers.I'm mostly irritated at the loot drops in lfr. 12 bosses in tot and I get 1 item?.. That I used a bonus roll for. That's a tad silly. And the fixing coin drops isn't going to do much honestly, It only effects bonus rolls. How's that gonna work when you have 3 coins and 12 bosses+nalak+oondasta? Plus you can still get really unlucky and get 1/3 coins towards loot. They NEED to make stuff tradeable again. That might fix a lot of issues. I mean you might get some jerk who refuses to trade it, but still, the option is there. Allowing more people to get the Ilvls to get into bigger raids=reducing wait time=win for everyone. I dont think the respec stuff is gonna work all that great. It'll probably still screw up queue times and I'm sure that's why blizzard mostly did it.Another annoying issue that makes me not wanna even try anymore is the legendary quest chain. Brand spanking new 90's are pretty much doomed from the start. I know blizzard is "making it easier" but how's that gonna work when the chain is insanely requirement demanding? Here, collect 10 of these and 10 of these. Give or take itll take a month. Then the valor, which is going to be 3. Then winning the bg's, (my bg realm is terrible..) that's atleast a week.. And then the tot items you gotta collect? Added up is like what.. 20ish? Give or take another 2 months. So just roughly sketching it out, gonna take 5-6 months to actually complete it all assuming your luck doesn't crap out.. And by then something better will be there or a new xpac. Blizzard needs to reduce the quest chains a lot, not make them crazy easier, just really reduce them.. like 5/5 and 10 runetones. And get rid of the damned valor part! Thatll give people time to actually get there and benefit from it. But blizzard will probably give some lame excuse about late players joining in. Great way to get more subs.Although! The change to pvp is nice, it might bring back some skill requirements in pvp and bring back some oldschool pvpers. Maybe making my bg realm less suck. :D
I hated seeing the old leveling zones so empty and complained about it because it seemed like nobody was playing. But now we've got CRZ and all these jerks are suddenly all over the place, stealing my nodes (that respawn at a rate dependent on the number of players on the zone)!I didn't like that there wasn't enough to do outside of raiding at level cap, because it just got really boring. But now I'm bored with all these dailies and I want them gone. I was upset when I wasn't getting things in Cata LFR because everyone else was ninjaing what I wanted. But now I'm more upset because I'm still not getting what I want even though if what I want drops off the boss I will get it.tl;dr- CHANGE IS BAD AND I DON'T LIKE THINGS.(Where's the /sarcasm tags on here?)