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.