Poll: Is it me, or does it seem like WoW is getting desperate?

Hectix777

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*****Before you read this, for you will probably regret it, look down the line for a post by Therumancer. He took a lot of time to write that post and I thank him for it. So you have two choices: Read my post below or Ctrl+F(Cmd+F) for Therumancer. Read mine and you'll get on observer's opinion, read Therumancer's and you'll get the opinion of someone who played Cataclysm, was disappointed, and left some of the friends he made on WoW.



As some people may know from my Guild Wars badge, I hate WoW. I hate WoW, pure and simple. For it's size, linearity, GRINDING, meat heads, and other pricks and gold farmers(what's the point of gold if you don't work for it?). Cataclysm ALMOST interested me in looking at it, but than I remembered what I was talking about, and the flying mounts. Seriously, whoever made the flying mounts must really hate the guys who spent all this time&money making Azeroth because now you just fly over it, it's like taking steroids over working out. I don't hate the artists at WoW, I'm sure some are bored of it too, but I hate Blizzard itself, and what they do to keep WoW going. But what astounded me was when I heard that after a census of the WoW population was made, 500,000 accounts had quit. Sure, WoW is 12 million strong, but just think about 500,000 that's practically the population of a medium-sized city. This was AFTER Cataclysm was released, I felt smug at first and than a bit hopeful that maybe it's time has coming, not now but in the next few years(3-6 maybe). Once I got through reading about the Cataclysm drop outs, I read that Blizzard is planning on releasing MORE expansions at a faster rate. Some of you do play WoW, some of you will criticize my views on WoW and my taste in MMO's(I'm looking forward to Guild Wars 2 if you wanna flame me for it), BUT, some of you WERE disappointed in the new expansion. From what I hear, Cataclysm screwed over EVERYTHING in the environment, maybe they'll retconn Stormwing(or Doomwing?) and the massive amounts of Hell he brought. But some of you found it was more of the same, only new gear, altered raids with same difficulty, the threat of getting killed by a giant AI, loss of depth in the world, more money to pay a month, etc.

Thus, accounts went down by half a million users. This makes me believe, will they keep their promise for their new expansions? If you ask me, Blizzard's come to take the practice of," If it ain't broke, don't fix it, no matter what people say!" Plus , WoW's population is huge, 500 million is barely a dent, but a noticeable dent! WoW has a formula that basically hypnotizes you into playing forever, gameplay is a huge factor but so is the social aspect of it all, the lore (from what I hear, Warcraft's lore is nothing like WoW's), everything. But they're releasing MORE expansions in smaller time frames. We all know that rushing something, anything, usually ruins the final product, so I'm not too worried about the expansions, or afraid, just sympathetic. It's like,"WoW's still good! WoW's still good! Here's more WoW! PLAY MORE WOW!" Y'know?

What I'm trying to say is that maybe WoW is launching some type of stimulus with new expansions in less time to keep itself going for as long as possible, it really wants to take people's money for as long as it can. If Cataclysm didn't change much of the basic core of WoW, why should the people that play WoW trust Blizzard to make BIG noticeable changes and not new gear and environments. It's getting kinda desperate, am I the only one who thinks that?
 

Hectix777

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Feel free to prove me wrong or a timeframe of WoW's life, or introduce me to the possible "When will WoW go offline" betting pool.
 

Bags159

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Releasing expansions means a company is desperate? They've always released WoW's expansions in 2 - 3 year intervals, unless you have some new information that fact hasn't changed.
 

Korahn 27

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I got tired of WoW long before Cataclysm. Basically I had to stop playing because I had lost my job. Eventually, they offered people a free week "welcome back" kind of thing. I played one day and realized that I was bored.

I've also tried Guild Wars but found myself bored of that within the first 2 months I got it. Sometimes I'll play a bit of D&D online but eh. If Old Republic is half as good as the build up surrounding it, I can see myself there for at least as long as I played FFXI.
 

danp164

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First off, let me congratulate you, ive been a member of escapist a while but rarely ever post, that you;ve managed to craft such a interesting, mainly baseless and in places hillarious and just plain wrong rant that I feel I cant NOT respond to it.

To get this out of the way at the start I play WoW and have since mid way through TBC. Blizzard takes my money, a hell of a lot of my money, in fact over the years probably enough money to start construction of my doom fortress ive always dreamed of, so if they're is any "Hate" (and really how many times do you need to say it in a scentance?) for WoW, I claim it. As for the changes Cataclysm brought, the major revamp of the first 60 levels was a MAJOR I repeat MAJOR improvement, if only for the fact it was different for a change. The difficulty of heroics and raids has been upped considerably compared to the lolworthy WoTLK raids and heroics, the 500 thousand subscribers that quit were mainly people who didnt like the return of the diffculty curve, how many subscribers do you think rejoined based on the increased curve, who formerly quit because they found end game content too easy?

Saying 500 thousand people have quit is like saying 500 thousand people have died since last month. Not all of those may be attributed to Cataclysm, similarly you dont have numbers for how many people JOINED over the peroid since cata's release.

And on my closing point, you suggest in your poll that before a voter makes a desicion to do his research, I commend that you did yours in finding a nice big number backed up by someones elses research, but dare I say if your going to make such an in depth rant, you at least take the time to learn who "Deathwing" is, its covered on the back of the box for gods sake.

WoW won't die, the mmo market is survival of the fittest, WoW is the top of the food chain with nothing else even managing to come close to knocking it off the top spot.

But thanks for giving me the oppurtunity to counter rant, I might do it more often :p
 

Gxas

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Hectix777 said:
As some people may know from my Guild Wars badge, I hate WoW. I hate WoW, pure and simple.
This is where I need not read any more and just answer no. You are biased and see it as being desperate. However, if the shoe was on the other foot, and Guild Wars was releasing faster expansions due to loss of subs, you'd be defending the hell out of it while everyone else said what you're saying now about WoW.
 

Chelsea O'shea

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personally i don't like WoW either,but that mostly cause its all grind and its hard to make friends on there if you would rather play other games from time to time,cause of the fact that guild would prefer you to be logged on as often as possible.

idk i mighta had more fun after litch king but i only played up through burning so my opinion is uninformed to how the game is currently.
 

Joe McGahan

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Blizz hasn't said anything about new expansions yet, the only "faster" thing they are officially trying to put out are the major content patches. 4.1 just release a week or two ago, 4.2 is said to my coming out sooner than normal due to Blizz working on both patches at the same time.

If by their promises, you are talking about the "Leaked" product schedule from last year...
http://www.wowheadnews.com/blog=175487/blizzard-product-schedule-leak-or-hoax
I don't think that was ever confirmed.


From the Article:

Blizzard has been averaging about 2 years per expansion at this point.
Classic: November 23, 2004
BC: January 16, 2007 (2 years, 2 months)
Wrath: November 13, 2008 (1 year, 10 months)
Cataclysm: December 7, 2010 (2 years, 1 month)
The product schedule "predicts" that the next two releases will be 1.5 years apart.

Considering Blizzard's past history, that seems a bit optimistic. However, when you factor in how much changed in Cataclysm, then think about how future expansions would likely just be adding new zones, you start to wonder if Blizzard might be able to do it in a year in a half.



My own opinion:
Wow hit a population cap, everything from this point out with take chunks out of it's subscribers. New games, new xpac, new systems.

Blizzard will probably support it at there normal pace, xpacs and content patches ect.
Until the bottom line comes into view, and then people will be shifted to other projects, servers will be shut down or re-purposed, but it will continue on with regular content patches till it's no longer viable money wise, and by then they'll probably already have come out with WoW 2.0


(I quit about a month ago, I just wasn't feeling it anymore, might try again in a content patch or two... or go do something productive instead.)
 

Mudkipith

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"...500 million is barely a dent..." You meant to say 500 thousand right? o_o

OT: Blizzard can do what they want and still make enough money to make Scrooge Duck jealous; I like that Blizzard can make a game however the hell they want to just because they can. While they may be driving it to hell, at least an outside party wasn't making them do it.
 

Syndef

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I guess that makes me one of those 500,000 that quit. Only a few weeks into Cataclysm, too. I realized I would never be able to even come close to being as powerful as the players I see regularly without putting even more time into the game.
I must admit though, WoW really was a fun little timesink while it lasted, especially with friends around. I'll remember those evenings of instances, questing, and battlegrounds...
Damn expensive memories though.
 

jpoon

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I quit wow about 5 years ago, it was a good bit of fun but it just wasn't for me, not worth the monthly charge at all. If they are speeding up the release of add-ons then they may well be getting desperate to get new people into playing and keeping all the people that are burning out on it. I honestly don't care since I got that poison out of my system years ago, I'd definitely like to see something better take it's (WoW's) place.
 

Sharalon

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I'm not playing WoW anymore, but believe me, I have. I think that the last expansion made the game better than ever before and the subscriptions always go down a couple of months after a new expansion. Some people show up to see what's new and try out the new content and leave as soon as they are done.

I would say that Blizzards subscriptions will have to drop another million or two before they will become desperate.

I quit WoW because I simply had more fun games to play and because I lost interest in MMOs altogether, but I would say that it's by far the strongest title on the market and it will be for a while.
 

Daveman

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tbh I think if you get to the point that you have a flying mount, you have probably seen enough of the land to want to fly over it.
 

artanis_neravar

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danp164 said:
As for the changes Cataclysm brought, the major revamp of the first 60 levels was a MAJOR I repeat MAJOR improvement, if only for the fact it was different for a change. The difficulty of heroics and raids has been upped considerably compared to the lolworthy WoTLK raids and heroics, the 500 thousand subscribers that quit were mainly people who didnt like the return of the diffculty curve, how many subscribers do you think rejoined based on the increased curve, who formerly quit because they found end game content too easy?

Saying 500 thousand people have quit is like saying 500 thousand people have died since last month. Not all of those may be attributed to Cataclysm, similarly you dont have numbers for how many people JOINED over the peroid since cata's release.

And on my closing point, you suggest in your poll that before a voter makes a desicion to do his research, I commend that you did yours in finding a nice big number backed up by someones elses research, but dare I say if your going to make such an in depth rant, you at least take the time to learn who "Deathwing" is, its covered on the back of the box for gods sake.

WoW won't die, the mmo market is survival of the fittest, WoW is the top of the food chain with nothing else even managing to come close to knocking it off the top spot.

But thanks for giving me the oppurtunity to counter rant, I might do it more often :p
Thank you, I could not have said it better. Cata brought me back to wow (granted I haven't played in a few months because I am poor), but with cata I was finally able to get a max level character, my first time ever. And the new Cata dungeons are the first time I have ever wiped in a dungeon. I mean a group of 4 of me and my guild mates destroyed Blackrock spire, and I almost managed to solo Molten Core, but Cata added a much needed difficulty level. I do think that WoW will have difficulty comming up with new content to add, like races and classes, and they have to come up with a way to make it affordable, last time i checked stores it cost around $120 just to start playing WoW for the first time. But WoW will never die, if it ever gets close Blizzard will just make WoW2 and start all over again
 

Jasper Jeffs

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You're right, Blizzard is releasing expansions faster because they want all your money, it's pay monthly too so that proves further they want to get every last penny from you. We should all play Guild Wars 2 instead because they are not interested at all about your money. The people at ArenaNet are simple people with a passion for video games, the people at Blizzard aren't because they are a part of Activision and make successful games.

WoW is successful because it's good, Blizzard make interesting content. I don't believe they're releasing expansions quicker. They obviously update the world to keep customers interested, but that's not to say they do that because all they want is your money, maybe they like making enjoyable content for players. Looking at past updates, I'd say the latter is true, they've dumbed down in various ways to make the game more streamlined for casual players, but that's what's good about WoW, it's accessible and at the same time difficult if you want it to be.

On an off-note, I agree that Guild Wars 2 looks good, but I'm getting bored of all these fanboys of unreleased MMO's always arguing x will beat WoW, and then on release comparing every feature to WoW and the ways in which it beats them.
 

Shilkanni

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As someone who plays wow, I would welcome a faster release of content, be it through more frequent expansions or more frequent content patches.

I think I would want that from any MMO.

The fact that you would somehow try to twist this into a negative shows how clouded your view is on this issue.

I'm excited about Guild Wars 2 and if it comes out and it's amazing then I'm sure it won't be long before I'm wishing there is more (probably in the form of an expansion).

They are losing subscribers and I'm sure they're going to get desperate but 'releasing more content' is hardly a good example.
 

AVATAR_RAGE

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Don't play WoW and I don't care for it either. So yeah WoW can rise or fall as much as it likes.
 

Asehujiko

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Remember when WoW was thought to quickly loose subscribers and die in 2-3 month when it was out of beta and started costing money?

Doomsayers have showed up at least once every month since then and you are no different.
 

PrinceOfShapeir

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Yeah, I'm sure GW2 will take down the Goliath, and I'm equally certain that tomorrow, the seals will break and the four horseman will ride across the voice, their battle-cries in the voice of Elmer Fudd.
 

Therumancer

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Hectix777 said:
As some people may know from my Guild Wars badge, I hate WoW. I hate WoW, pure and simple. For it's size, linearity, GRINDING, meat heads, and other pricks and gold farmers(what's the point of gold if you don't work for it?). Cataclysm ALMOST interested me in looking at it, but than I remembered what I was talking about, and the flying mounts. Seriously, whoever made the flying mounts must really hate the guys who spent all this time&money making Azeroth because now you just fly over it, it's like taking steroids over working out. I don't hate the artists at WoW, I'm sure some are bored of it too, but I hate Blizzard itself, and what they do to keep WoW going. But what astounded me was when I heard that after a census of the WoW population was made, 500,000 accounts had quit. Sure, WoW is 12 million strong, but just think about 500,000 that's practically the population of a medium-sized city. This was AFTER Cataclysm was released, I felt smug at first and than a bit hopeful that maybe it's time has coming, not now but in the next few years(3-6 maybe). Once I got through reading about the Cataclysm drop outs, I read that Blizzard is planning on releasing MORE expansions at a faster rate. Some of you do play WoW, some of you will criticize my views on WoW and my taste in MMO's(I'm looking forward to Guild Wars 2 if you wanna flame me for it), BUT, some of you WERE disappointed in the new expansion. From what I hear, Cataclysm screwed over EVERYTHING in the environment, maybe they'll retconn Stormwing(or Doomwing?) and the massive amounts of Hell he brought. But some of you found it was more of the same, only new gear, altered raids with same difficulty, the threat of getting killed by a giant AI, loss of depth in the world, more money to pay a month, etc.

Thus, accounts went down by half a million users. This makes me believe, will they keep their promise for their new expansions? If you ask me, Blizzard's come to take the practice of," If it ain't broke, don't fix it, no matter what people say!" Plus , WoW's population is huge, 500 million is barely a dent, but a noticeable dent! WoW has a formula that basically hypnotizes you into playing forever, gameplay is a huge factor but so is the social aspect of it all, the lore (from what I hear, Warcraft's lore is nothing like WoW's), everything. But they're releasing MORE expansions in smaller time frames. We all know that rushing something, anything, usually ruins the final product, so I'm not too worried about the expansions, or afraid, just sympathetic. It's like,"WoW's still good! WoW's still good! Here's more WoW! PLAY MORE WOW!" Y'know?

What I'm trying to say is that maybe WoW is launching some type of stimulus with new expansions in less time to keep itself going for as long as possible, it really wants to take people's money for as long as it can. If Cataclysm didn't change much of the basic core of WoW, why should the people that play WoW trust Blizzard to make BIG noticeable changes and not new gear and environments. It's getting kinda desperate, am I the only one who thinks that?
I'm a WoW fanatic, or was, so I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum from you. Truthfully a lot of what you consider to be problems with WoW (like flying mounts) are strengths in my opinion. I also really disliked Guild Wars and found it comparably mindless, it's only real strength being no monthly fee, which I think greatly limited it's quality. I'm one of those who consider Guild Wars jokingly the "Ghetto MMO". That said I agree with your overall analysis about where WoW is now.

A lot of people are leaving WoW for other games, while the pattern of tons of people showing up at launch, only for most of them to leave by the end of the first free month (or a month or two afterwads) holds, I think a few more than normal are sticking. None to make any of the new MMOs out there individually a big dog, but enough for it to be noticible, and also for it to have an effect on WoW's player base.


Simply put WoW is getting old, and while a consistant art style can account for a lot, it can't cover a game that is rapidly becoming ancient. Right now the thing that has been keeping WoW alive is it's wealth of content compared to other, more technologically advanced MMORPG games, but even that isn't something that can last forever.

So far no game of sufficient stature to keep an audience of millions has come along, we probably won't see that until "Old Republic Online" launches, and even then it could be a flop.


I've also heard about the 500k user loss for WoW, and truthfully I think it's a bigger deal than you give it credit for. Blizzard definatly seems to be concerned, and is sending out messages trying to get their players to come back. My stepmother got a beg-a-thon e-mail less than a month after letting her account expire for example.

The thing is that Blizzard's user base claims are based on international membership. Blizzard having the advantage of reaching a lot of parts of the world where they are, or have been, the only real AAA MMORPG option in town. There have been plenty of cash shop games in Asia that have held bigger user bases than WoW, it's just that they weren't of the same quality, and were also a lot cheaper for that part of the world. If you followed the Drama about Blizzard's relationship with China and the problems with the client company they worked through there (when they wanted to change who they worked with) there was a lot of interesting information about the international nature of their business, along with factoids like how differant WoW is in other countries, like in China for example where they aren't allowed to have undead due to the laws there, and the "Forsaken" have been replaced by guys who are basically ugly humans, and similar things. Apparently China not being alone in the odd hoops they make WoW and other MMOs jump through, leading to a lot of AAA MMOs never even bothering to penetrate those markets, and of course also explaining why so many people are concerned about being able to get US versions and onto US servers from other countries.

The thing is that from what I've been hearing that 500,000 users is noteworthy because it's from their core user base in the first world. Fluctuations overseas are expected (and their claims are based on their high points for membership), the majority of their cash flow however comes from first world gamers due to the cost of operating in other markets (changes to the game, paying the goverment, etc...). Apparently there are supposed to be about 4 million users through the first world, and a loss of 500k of them is around 12.5% of their core business (assuming I've been hearing right) which is why that is such a big deal, and why they are so concerned about getting people back. That number having gradually arose from the small trickles of people who left WoW and stayed with games like Aion, RIFT, or free to play games like "Dungeons and Dragons Online" which underwent membership booms. The number of MMO gamers apparently grows very slowly, and really you have people grappling over a fairly finite supply of users, one game's gain is by definition a loss coming from somewhere else.

I'll also say that despite the fanboys screaming it's praises, Cataclysm wasn't all that it's been hyped as. The overall storyline is a joke that smacks of filler, and with most of the action taking place at the endgame, updating the general zones didn't have a huge amount of appeal to the players in general. With less endgame content they decided to try and make the heroic dungeons and raids more challenging, so they would take more time to master, but they really just made them annoying for the most part. While it's true that guilds always collapse, usually the people in them reform into new guilds. Before I quit, I noticed a lot of guilds that were collapsing since the people were leaving for other games, and in greater numbers than ever before. When you have fanatics leaving the game that's not a good sign. My guild collapsed (which has a lot to do with why I quit) after being around in one form or another pretty much since launch, and a lot of the people involved wound up leaving as opposed to just forming new guilds. It's a matter of not just seeing it, but being there and watching it happen, as I myself wound up leaving.

I'll also say that I think Blizzard's increasingly towering arrogance over their increasingly aging game hasn't helped matters much either. With Cataclysm came a lot of people saying "hey, if you can do all this with the old content, why haven't you fixed these long term issues that people have been complaining about for years now", only to be met with the infamous "we make games, not promises" attitude. I think that influanced things as well as Cataclysm kind of showed that Blizzard is in it's own little world, and really doesn't much care about what the users want. Forget fixing glaring game balance errors that they even acknowlege exist (they have even said introducing the Arenas was a mistake because it brought a lot of this to a head), they would rather introduce MORE races to the game, and make the game balance even worse. Truthfully it's been a recurring joke about how The Horde has been unbalanced for so long in a competitive game (rolling Alliance being called one of the biggest gips in gaming by Penny Arcade at one point), yet rather than fixing this they decide to add oil to the fire by giving The Horde a race with a haste boost, a racial abillity that can either be a blink (rocket jump) or instant cast DD attack that scales with level, vendor discounts, herbalism benefits, and the abillity to access their bank at any time via a summonable NPC, while giving the alliance a race whose major abillity is pretty much to bend over in the classic anal position (but it's okay, because they are conceptually were wolves which makes everything balanced).... the jokes pretty much write themselves there. I honestly think that this caused a lot of players to quit just going by some of the chatter from retiring players giving their goodbyes. Doing that when you have had people waiting for years for them to balance the game was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back.


Me, it's not just one thing. I stayed for my guild and because I liked raiding. Blizzard's attitude was something I endured. I gave up on Blizzard years ago when I was raiding with another guild briefly (complicated situation where my main guild temporarly disbanded and me and osme other members joined another guild to bulk out it's core raid team) and was part of the second Illidan kill on our server (and close to being first). We farmed the guy for a while but due to raid loot rules I never really won any loot, and had pretty much blown off a lot of world quests including the story arc chain for Illidan to focus on raiding and farming to support raiding. My computer died for a while, and when I came back for "Lich King" I found that Blizzard had decided that because I never won any loot or done that quest chain that I was unworthy of having an achievement for my accomplishment. I needless to say made a big stink about that one, but of course Blizzard basically doesn't give a crap about what's important to their player base. I would have quit, but my old guild had reformed (well actually it never entirely dissolved as we were always all playing together anyway... long story) and I jumped in to keep playing with them, whacked Arthas, and then saw everything disband with Cataclysm with the players leaving as opposed to a guild name dissolution. With nothing remaining for me I quit.

The point of the above rant is pretty much that I think I'm far from the only person that was largely sticking with the game due to inertia, and not wanting to let other players down. Inertia can't last forever though, as it eventually ends. Blizzard's attitude has stunk for a long time now, and I think for a lot of people they just kind of reached the end all at once, and realized "why the F@ck am I putting up with this" when they looked at what Cataclysm actually did for the game... which was a whole lot of nothing. For a lot of the old time raiders like me, their "let's make the endgame challenging again" thing was more a matter of "let's make it annoying and say that this amounts to it being challenging".

At any rate, the point is I think your right, and yes, a lot has been said about their player drop off, and I think it's a player drop off from the most meaningful section of their market. It's not been unnoticed that they are begging people to come back a lot more than they used to, as I said my Stepmother got one right on the heels of quitting (she was however a non-raider and not involved in any of the stuff I was).

We'll have to agree to disagree about Guild Wars Vs. WoW though. Right now I'm dabbling with RIFT which is just okay. I'll probably give "Old Republic" a shot, and if it isn't all that it's cracked up to be, honestly I'll probably be done with MMORPGs for the foreseeable future. To get me to go back to WoW would take the kinds of changes and attitude adjustment that Blizzard just won't ever undergo.