World of Warcraft Loses 1.3 Million Subscribers in 3 Months

[NortherWolf]

tl;dr Talents were changed for the better.

No, they really weren't. They were dumbed down and, maybe it's because I've sicne played better games but when I went back to wow for a short stint the talent system just screamed: "LOOK AT ME ! YOU DON'T NEED BRAINS TO FIGURE ME OUT!!!!"

I also like how you ignored the rest of my post. y'know about how I change my talents constantly for PvP depending on team comps. From what I remember I maybe changed talents 2 times in wrath. I got the cookie cutter dps spec and the cookie cutter tank build and never changed them. Because to be viable in endgame PvP or PvE you had to follow the strict builds.

Considering your point was what?
People go the most efficient route, therefore making that route painfully obvious is best?
Word of advice to you friend, the glorious part abotu MMOs is that there are those who'd use the stinks to high heavens build because you know, they're just leveling for fun/rp/social/whatever. You assume EVERYONE is a hardcore pvper or Raider. If that's so I really wonder why I hear lamentations about how difficult it is to get raids together like in the good ol' days now.

 

[DugMachine]

Considering your point was what?
People go the most efficient route, therefore making that route painfully obvious is best?
Word of advice to you friend, the glorious part abotu MMOs is that there are those who'd use the stinks to high heavens build because you know, they're just leveling for fun/rp/social/whatever. You assume EVERYONE is a hardcore pvper or Raider. If that's so I really wonder why I hear lamentations about how difficult it is to get raids together like in the good ol' days now.

My point was you still choose what's "fun" based on how you want to play. If you want to be a purely stun locking warrior then you can. If you want to be an all out crazy burst fury warrior, you can. The choices are there, and nobody is stopping you. I use warrior so much because it's my main, and arguably one of the more boring classes yet I make it fun.

Now more than ever we have actual spells that give character to classes and not just fodder for number crunchers to go through.

But if you want to be taken seriously and do "hardcore" PvP or raiding you need to follow certain builds. That's true of pretty much any MMO i've tried. There is always a cookie cutter way of doing things to min/max dps, tanking, healing etc. And it will continue to stay that way unless they get rid of talent trees all together, which would then be "too easy!!". If we made all trees viable then it would become pointless. And if it's not talents it's spell rotations, and if it's not that it's gear and stat percentages.

It seems like raiders and PvPers are the majority in WoW at least so I don't see the problem with the way things are. And raids are getting harder and harder to put together because LFR pretty much makes true raiding obsolete for casual players. This is true and I cannot deny it. LFR took a lot of the challenge out of the game and truly if you just want to fuck around and have fun then do LFRs and you can pretty much do any build you want. Most of those fights are not dps races, they are just learning mechanics. So you can choose whatever talents and nobody would bat and eye.

Just don't come into my normal raids as a "dps tank" or "healing dps" because it's just not efficient. My guild has fun when we progress. You can have fun your other ways.

 

[Zeckt]

I watched both kung fu panda's shortly before giving pandaria a shot, which pretty much equals to me thinking it as a kung fu panda game now with me liking the movies more then the game. I can never, ever take wow seriously again now. It's a literal laughing stock for me. At least kung fu panda does not have an identity crisis.

 

[Atmos Duality]

1/10 the player base isn't anything to over look, and while I will throw a fucking party celebrating the death of this over glorified bore feast when it's LONG over due death finally comes.

When you throw that party, call me. I'll even bring the pizza. Hell, I'll MAKE the pizza.

And for anyone who thinks I'm being petty...I am. Deal with it.

WoW has done damage to my social gatherings in the years past just because it is so goddamn addictive and time-consuming...and I wasn't even the person playing it. I tried it for maybe a couple of hours.

It's aggravating as hell to arrange for a social gathering, often the only one everyone could have time for during the week, and they'd all just start grinding away doing raids and bitching about how everyone in their raid group sucks.

It's like watching literal insanity unfold before me: where my friends claim to love playing the game, but most of the time they act like they hate it while playing it.

Hell, I still have friends nagging me to join their MMOs, even when I've made it clear those games hold no appeal to me.

 

[EstrogenicMuscle]

I don't know whether this is a sign to rejoice that the mighty World of Warcraft hath fallen so that many other good MMORPGs may ascend to greater notability.

To be horrified that this might be a sign of the decline of the MMORPG itself.

I really don't think that World of Warcraft has ever been worthy of the being the most popular MMORPG. But the industry seems a bit... worrisome for MMORPGs. Mixed, but worrisome. One the one end, in the past few years we've been getting some of the highest budget and dedicated MMORPGs ever. Guild Wars 2, The Old Republic, Final Fantasy XIV, Tera, Blade and Soul. At the same time, it seems it doesn't matter how big an MMORPG is right now, it is destined to fail.

I hope that the industry stays healthy while at the same time World of Warcraft falls far from the top spot. World of Warcraft has long had a stranglehold on the industry that I want to see disappear.

 

[ThunderCavalier]

We're onto you, Escapist.

We want that DeLorean you have.

That wasn't a typo; you simply posted that article in the wrong month. =P



But in all honesty, Blizzard is probably swimming in gold right now. I doubt that, if WoW sunk this year, they'd be crying all that much. Not when there's dump trucks of CoD revenue moving in to fill the void.

 

[Agente L]

The true question is:

Is WoW really starting to fall apart, or has the subscription mmorpg model run it's course?

I sincerely think it's the latter. We gotta wait and see now.

 

[Agente L]

I gave the Panda exp pack a go when it came out and ended up quitting again after a month. Hated what they did with talents. They made it so damn simple into a you can select 1 talent per every 15 levels and alot of the old talents from the old talent trees were baseline when you chose your spec. It was a major killer for me since i enjoyed watching my toon grow in power and i had to think on what talents i wanted since to gain one talent i would have to forfeit another etc.

Ghostcrawler said he changed the talent system to this oversimplified mess because the old system was too cookie cutter, where everyone was the same spec. Ghostcrawler is speaking out of his arse. Its even more cookie cutter and everyone was the same (example being a massive number of warriors chose shockwave and avatar)

Also don't help that it was still world of orgrimar/stormwind/queuecraft. Still no sod outside the main cities doing stuff, all hiding in the main cities in a queue for something. World still felt as dead as it was in cata.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Any serious raider gonna tell you flat out that the new talents are anything but cookie cutter. Most of the raiders change their talents multiple times in a single raid, with a different set up for each boss. Shockwave was overpowered, and got nerfed for it. Avatar is only that useful in pvp.

There was no "choosing" talents, if you wanted to do any kind of competitive DPS. You either picked a cookie cutter build for maximum efficiency, or you were doomed to forever do a subpar performance.

How can you complain that no one leaves the city, when the main complains of MoP are excess of dailies? There are people doing dailies everywhere. I run into people at Isle of Thunder all the time. Were you playing on a dead server?