What would it take to tople WoW from its throne?

[spartandude]

people finding nerds sexy would stop wow

sex> than wow

or maybe if ToR was free to play but then again its EA and they would destroy the universe before giving something to the people who pay their wages

 

[Toaster Hunter]

There will be no single game that destroys WOW. It will be several games that pulls WOW's population away bit by bit. Nothing will destroy it all at once.

 

[WanderingFool]

Maybe Project Titan? Granted it's being developed by Blizzard as well but it only seems like a game developed by Blizzard can be the only thing that will actually be able to kill their top game. Though saying that TOR may actually be able to match blows with WoW. It feels... fresh I guess. Though I guess only time will tell.

Thats what I was going to say. Really, the only game that could dethrone Wow is a game being developed by the creaters of Wow.

Also, Captcha: Thrall's ackgni

 

[son_of_x51]

A well-made Pokemon MMO. I guess I don't know about "toppling" WoW, but it would certainly sell like hotcakes.

 

[manic_depressive13]

I was under the impression WoW's throne was already crumbling. Hasn't it lost thousands of subscribers since Cataclysm? The flame, once so bright, has burnt itself to mere embers. It was indeed a cataclysm of the worst kind. One that destroyed an empire.

 

[silver chocobo]

About 2 - 3 more years.

I give it a year tops

 

[Quesa]

WoW's pretty clearly burning out, but no it wouldn't have been toppled the way it toppled EQ because EQ was an easy target and Blizzard studied it well. Blizzard's constant dumbening of the game prevents anyone from coming in underneath them on difficulty and accessibility (without being too sugary sweet to sustain themselves, at any rate), and games trying the substance route can't gain traction.

WoW was very familiar to EQ players without being frustrating; trying to be familiar to WoW tends to breed contempt, and dis-similar requires developing a new paradigm that connects with a large base.

 

[KiruTheMant]

World of Starcraft?

I can't honestly say, but it is slowly getting a declining userbase. With Mists of Pandaria or the expansion thereafter, the game will either end or become immensely depopulated. That being said, most people will do what they always do and become WoW immitators, so you'll need to keep your eye open for the next innovative thing. However, the next MMO might be an MMOFPS, because real world shooting would give everyone a kick.

 

[Wolfram23]

The only thing that can kill WoW is for it to get stale or for Blizzard to really, really fuck up on new content.

Or maybe time, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that WoW has less and less new subscriptions, just a really solid fan base. Eventually people will grow out of it, so then it would slowly decay.

I haven't played it in years, but I know how fun and addictive it is. Especially once you make a few "friends" in game.

 

[zumbledum]

time or gross ineptitude

its the most casual and accessible mmo in existence so there's no doing what wow did to EQ and just dumb it down and go for a lower common denominator.. unless the game actually starts to play itself.

but all things have a lifespan things just get old and boring after you do it for x years ,i would expect to see wow continue to shrink at a fairly steady pace from now not that wow will die i mean EQ still has a respectable player base still has a subscription payment model and is 15 years old.

we might not see another king MMO like wow infact i hope we dont. Blizzard came into a market with 1 competitor that was old and not looking to innervate. its hard to imagine if you were not there what blizzards rep used to be at the time WoW was released they were the undisputed kings.
they were the first to mass market and bring it to the non nerd player base , all those for who wow was the first MMO that was a market blizzard made and monopolised.

Today any MMO release faces half a dozen competing clones and iterations on the ideal and theres no great untapped market to spread to, we all have PC's and consoles now, EQ was back in teh day when you paid dial up connections you built a PC for a game it was expensive and technically difficult, compared to plug and play of today.

so in all i doubt we will ever see a massive front runner again and wow might well sit there as the top MMO for a decade more simply because of the fragmented way of the market as the maximum an MMO sub base hits drops from 10+ million to 1 million as the competition continues to grow.

 

[Chefodeath]

The same thing which makes mountains crumble and mighty empires fall.

Time my friend, only time.

 

[thejackyl]

Considering the decline in quality (imo), or the fact that the game itself is too easy, and it gets boring after you've ran X dungeon a few times and can clear it in your sleep. and THAN it takes a year for new content (aka a new grind to level cap)... I think WoW is going to end up just dying out. I mean their user base has already dropped several million hasn't it?

On top of that, the reason I don't play WoW anymore (apart from the fact that the fun died out) is because all of my friends quit playing(because the fun died). That's one of the reasons why WoW had such a monopoly over the MMO market. Most of the fun in an MMO is playing with your friends.

Once people realize they are playing a game that is no longer fun for a piece of gear they won't care about in a few months they usually stop playing.

 

[N7 Ruiz]

Like someone said on this thread it has became a social thing now it cant be killed its like like a virus its here to stay its formula is i hate to say it perfect SWTOR i hate coro and Taris and the sith counter to taris it feels too long when im looking around for stuff to do while im playing then you have made a mistake and Swtor is going to die on one point in wow i wanted to group with people this one....ehh i really dont they should of made SWTOR into KOTOR III but nooo we have to replace that failure SWG perhaps the Star wars uni should remain in the singleplayer market they want me to feel like god but here is the big but I cant feel like god if my story is well everyone elses story

 

[Sylveria]

1) It is entirely possible for games of the same genre to coexist quite profitably

2) The only thing that would lure Warcraft players away from Warcraft is for it to stop being fun for them, and as a fan, I can say that that certainly hasn't happened to me yet.

Yet for so many of us, it stopped being fun a long time ago.

People play WoW because people play WoW; it is a casual experience that can be enjoyed with friends. I think you'll find the vast majority of people who play WoW also play other games because WoW's current design only provides, on average, ~2hrs of "content" a night unless someone is a hard-core farmer or hard-core raider.

What would topple WoW? Blizzard turning the game into a pure-hardcore experience, thus making it completely inaccessible to their gigantic casual audience. Not just raiding, mind you, but from level 1 to level cap and everything in between being EQ1 vanilla levels of frustration and grind.

Basically, as long as WoW fosters that small group play for a few hours a day with near-instant gratification play philosophy, it'll never be topped until a game comes along that does the exact same thing so much better that it prompts whole communities to drop WoW for greener pastures which, unfortunately, I can't see that happening.

As I've said before; WoW is the McDonalds of MMOing. Everyone can go there and leave relatively satisfied, if not a little sick, because it is made to appeal to the vast majority. If you want something a bit more sophisticated or just different, you can go elsewhere, but occasionally you'll still want that BigMac.

 

[Sleipnir]

I'm going to say the total annihilation of the human race, I mean, unless people's pets take over their accounts, I'm pretty sure that'd stop WoW.

 

[Aprilgold]

Give it a few years and it'll topple over on itself. Its dying out due to people who have been supporting it have played it for so long that they probably just want something new. And with all these new MMO's coming out, their separating to join in and help these younger kin.

In a way, hasn't WOW already been knocked off the throne?

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114283-League-of-Legends-Muscles-Past-World-of-Warcraft

lol isint a MMO
and there have always been games that have sold more then wow so i dont see how you can compare the two

Not in the traditional sense, but it very much a MMO, which just means Massive Multiplayer Online Game or something to that affect.

 

[Imper1um]

I keep on saying this...the killer of World of Warcraft is....World of Warcraft.

See, the thing is, while we are saying that X game or Y game will kill WoW, ultimately, the problem is that the game is completely out of ideas, and cannot expand on their universe without the jaws of life inserting more story into it. Heck, they couldn't even think of a protagonist to attack with this newest Pandaren expansion.

The thing is, World of Warcraft is too big. People have scrutinized every move, and it has come down to that World of Warcraft is killing itself. It is committing sepoku on itself by releasing more and more content. Meanwhile, they are racing to develop Titan. They have said multiple times that it isn't WoW2, but you know that, eventually, they will have to turn it into WoW2 to keep the profits from the game from spilling out.

The bleeding is already starting to show. While 1million players isn't much in the size of World of Warcraft, it is showing a shift of power out of WoW and into other games.

 

[NightHawk21]

Just time. They're already seeing a drop in players. My friends just left a couple months ago. People will just eventually grow tired of it and move on, and likely not play another mmo when they realize all the time they just wasted. *shudders*

 

[johnsom]

Don't think it will go anywhere probably take people getting sick of the formula like me. The only reason I stuck around so long was I couldn't raid in the early days and got to the point I was desperate to. Eventually, I was able to raid with a bandwidth upgrade and I found it boring. To much waiting didn't like being committed all the time and the fights feel like hokey pokey.