World of Warcraft Suffers Biggest Subscriber Drop in History

[EbonBehelit]

Actually happened with a lot of classes. I really hated how they "pruned" all the situational abilities away. For DPS classes, especially, their "rotations" are now a joke, consisting of maybe three or four buttons no matter what spec. Yes, it make the game less convoluted and easier for newer players to understand, but it also made it horribly boring for anyone who regularly raids as DPS.

...and yet, in GW2 you can only have 10 abilities on your bar at once and it still feels a helluva lot better to play than WoW does.

Blizzard had the right idea when they decided to trim the fat for most classes but they failed rather spectacularly in execution. Hell, they didn't go nearly far enough in my opinion - DKs in particular had almost nothing removed.
No amount of rejiggering that Blizzard does is going to breathe life into a fundamentally ancient combat system though, especially when you have to stand still to cast spells and most abilities have no real animations of their own.

 

[Xerosch]

Despite having registered every WoW expansion up until now, I've never max leveled any of my characters. The farthest I've gotten so far is a level 65 or something Blood Elf that's never seen more content than the maps of the base game and Burning Crusade.

There's just something that bores me quickly whenever I subscribe for a month (which is very rarely at best). On the other hand I'm a very active player of Final Fantasy XIV in which in two years I had only one unpleasant encounter. I was dropped from a group because I was a level 50 archer and not a bard. A class of which I wasn't aware that I could gain it through my archer's job quests.

That may be one of the biggest problems with MMOs. Some people who are really into it forget that there are players who 'only' want to enjoy the game and not read through hundreds of strategy guides.

 

[Max_imus]

Adding to the chorus of "Yeah, not surprised".

If I didn't have the raid groups I participate in, I'd have unsubbed about 7 months ago.

What's especially frustrating is that they had so much potential with the garrisons. As it stands, I had much more fun grinding rep dailies in MoP (never thougt I'd say that) than logging in once or twice a day, sending my guys out on missions and collecting stuff. And the funny part: the rep grind is still there, just without dailies.

A damn shame, all things considered.

 

[laggyteabag]

Not exactly surprising. People come back for new content, leave again when they are done with it. The exact same thing happened for MoP, and I would wager that it will happen with every new expansion from here on out.

 

[Eirreann]

I know that I cancelled my subscription a few weeks ago in order to devote more time to the Witcher games, in preparation for The Witcher​ 3. I wonder if I was the only one to unsub for that reason?

 

[alj]

I am not surprised at all , the game has been getting steady worse since Wotlk, imo BC was the best but still wrath was good , every expansion they make the game less fun imo.

 

[CrazyCapnMorgan]

Despite having registered every WoW expansion up until now, I've never max leveled any of my characters. The farthest I've gotten so far is a level 65 or something Blood Elf that's never seen more content than the maps of the base game and Burning Crusade.

There's just something that bores me quickly whenever I subscribe for a month (which is very rarely at best). On the other hand I'm a very active player of Final Fantasy XIV in which in two years I had only one unpleasant encounter. I was dropped from a group because I was a level 50 archer and not a bard. A class of which I wasn't aware that I could gain it through my archer's job quests.

That may be one of the biggest problems with MMOs. Some people who are really into it forget that there are players who 'only' want to enjoy the game and not read through hundreds of strategy guides.

Ditto here on the FF14 thing. Been enjoying the hell out of that game and can't wait for the expansion to hit later on in the summer time. Quit WoW during the end of Rats of the ***** Queen and haven't looked back; just never wanted to play Holy Paladin anymore. My lalafell White Mage on FF14, OTOH, is all I need for my MMO experience.

 

[Kahani]

And with each new expansion, the upswing will be smaller and the drop afterwards will be bigger.

Everyone is aware of this, right?

Certainly no-one who looks at the graph in the article will be aware of this, since it's the exact opposite of what's happened so far - the last two expansions have had by far the biggest upswings. I expect that trend to continue, since it's driven by people who have stopped playing coming back to look at the new content - the more people who have left, the more former players there are to come back for each expansion.

Not exactly surprising. People come back for new content, leave again when they are done with it. The exact same thing happened for MoP, and I would wager that it will happen with every new expansion from here on out.

Exactly. A lot of people seem to be desperately looking to blame Blizzard for doing something wrong, but the fact is that people like new things and WoW is now 10 years old. People who started playing in their teens or as students are now hitting their 30s with jobs, children, and so on. And regardless of their age, very few people are happy to play the same game over and over again for years on end. It's always been completely obvious what would happen to WoW - it will grow old and slowly die out as people get bored of it and move on to new things. Throwing new content out from time to time can keep people interested for a bit, but as long as the game looks and plays the same that will never be enough to stop people eventually getting bored of it.

Also important is that there's no meaningful churn going on - the old players leaving aren't being replaced by new ones. To start with, there's little reason for a prospective new player to pick WoW over any other MMO. There may be no ultimate WoW killer around that gets everyone to migrate to a new game en masse, but there are plenty that are just as attractive to new players as WoW (after all, the whole point of the term "WoW clone" is that a game is basically the same as WoW). On top of that, WoW is old and famous. Everyone who might want to play it already has, there simply isn't an untapped market full of people who might desperately want to play WoW if only they had the chance.

So yes, WoW is in decline, and no, it's not Blizzard's fault for making bad expansions. People get older, their tastes change, and they get bored of doing the same thing all the time. There's nothing Blizzard or anyone else can do about that.

 

[MonsterCrit]

Hmmm.. Can't say I'm surprised. Blizzard's focus on end game content has pretty much screwed the game over and their rush to get people to the end game content quickly has double screwed them.

Cataclysm wasn't a bad Expack because it actually made you want to go through some of the earlier levels to see the new changes.

This is the problem with the model Blizzard has sunken into. Each expack doesn't add anything in terms of depth and honestly people can't really get into a narrative they have no real ability to affect. Blizzard made a ke mistake. They focus on the MMO and not the RPG. IN a decent RPG you feel as if you're accomplishing something each step of the game, you feel as if you actions matter....unfortunately in WoW it's the opposiote. You're practically trained not to care and the story, mechanics and player base more or less beat it into you that nothing below level 70 matters.

Thusly people just pay to skip levels or power level through it. Hell once you Unlock dungeon instances you literally never have to leave you capital except for material grinding. When you can pay to skip levels you basically wind up shortening your content experience whioch means they spend less time getting drawn into the skinner box which in turn makes it easier for them to break out of the box.

Cn WoW fix this? Sure...but the player-base they've cultivated will probably get hives over them. FOr starters. Give players some hard choices to make. Blizzard has spent so much time making it near impossible for players to make the wrong choice that the player feels no investment in the choices they make. Advice;. Go back to the Vanilla approach of having certain skill sets for each class earned as quest rewards Secondly, Make some of these choices binary ...Thirdly, for god's sake add some variety in your gameplay... YOubasically made a linear game where only 3 skills actually matter, for any class.

Sadly I doubt any of this will get fixed. Blizzard has ironically been trapped by their own developmental skinnerbox. Not to mention they've cultivated a playerbase of asshats where it's practically expected that you've read every aspect of the metagame... I'll say it right now. WoW players are second only to MoBa players interms of their fixation on the meta game but the kick is, even in Moba's there's more openmindedness about new tactics and play styles

 

[Karathos]

A whole bunch of my friends quit because of the PvP balance situation. The arena situation is worse than it's been in quite a few expansions. Certain classes that shall go unnamed roam 2v2 and 3v3 like a plague, winning games solely on the merit of the spec, class or combo they're playing. I'm not naive, balance is always going to be a problem, but right now it's in the worst shape I've ever experienced. And I've played since vanilla.

 

[JayRPG]

They had consistent gains and several big jumps during TBC, and they threw that all away for a relatively tiny gain and an almost complete plateau in Wrath.

Wrath was where it all started to go wrong, I think people overestimate how good ICC was, because it was pretty average really. Ulduar was the best raid of WotLK and almost all of TBC's raids were better than Ulduar.

I won't tout about how good Vanilla WoW was because it wasn't that great, it was good, but they got it right in TBC and then decided they had too many completely dedicated players, they needed to open it up to casual flakers who'll drop the game just as quick as they picked it up.

T9 (that argent tourney shit) in wrath was so bad I left to play Aion throughout that entire content period, and it says something about your game when a player from day 1 and raider in a top 250 world guild would rather play fucking Aion of all things.

Came back for ICC, which was about 3 good bosses, and many, many mediocre (and worse) bosses. Got realm first 85 Undead, Rogue, and Horde and played through until Heroic Firelands and decided the game just wasn't for me anymore. It isn't even world of warcraft, it's a completely new, worse game, in a WoW wrapper.

Edit: On the topic of balancing, I never understood why they tried so many stupid and fruitless things like special resilience pvp gear, pvp power etc etc. That was never going to balance anything, all they end up doing is balancing a class for either pvp or pve and then completely fucking them over in the one they aren't balanced in (like my precious Rogue, so many times, being nerfed in to the ground because of PVP shit I couldn't care less about).

All they had to fucking do was make abilities work differently in pvp, that's it. Are rogues doing too much damage in pvp but they are just right in pve? then reduce the damage their abilities do while in a BG, Arena, or designated pvp area. Mages have too much CC for pvp but it's needed for pve? give some of their abilities a longer cooldown in a pvp setting. It really isn't that hard. Make pve and pvp separate, stop trying to balance every class against every class while also trying to balance them against every dungeon and raid boss in the entire game at the same time.

 

[Loop Stricken]

had any other MMO had 3 expansions in a row as badly received as Cata, MoP and WoD have been they would've been dead by now.

Now now, Mists of Pandaria was a very good expansion - people just hated it because of the Chinese-themed aesthetic and lolpandas.

... and the things gated behind a crapload of dailies, even though everyone seemed to love the daily-based progression of Isle of Thunder.

 

[Vanished]

I'm teetering on the edge of unsubbing again myself. They cut out a lot of the daily quests, but garrison chores/followers have taken their place so you still feel the need to constantly login or fall behind. I'm horrible at tanking and healing (and live with net hogs, resulting in lag spikes) so I play dps for dungeons, however I have maybe once every week or so that I have to time to wait through the dps queue for anything AND actually run the content. I enjoy(ed) playing casters the most, but they decided to remove caster mobility, slow cast speed and super rng the stats. Speaking of the stats, versatility is on everything. Every time I get a box from a raid mission or a item token I sit there chanting "please not versatility," which tends to get followed by the item having nothing but versatility. It needs to get killed off and not replaced with another stat. As it is, I've just given up trying to optimize my characters and just throw on whatever has a higher item level, unless by some grace of the gods I'm granted an item of higher/equal level that's not sopping in versatility.

 

[Vanished]

Now now, Mists of Pandaria was a very good expansion - people just hated it because of the Chinese-themed aesthetic and lolpandas.

... and the things gated behind a crapload of dailies, even though everyone seemed to love the daily-based progression of Isle of Thunder.

I liked the pandas personally, but I understand why some people don't. I think my favorite questline addition was the Landfall one. The pace just seemed right on progressing through the storyline. Blizzard even commented on people enjoying that progression as if signifying they were going to continue at that pace and then just seemed to throw darts at what they did next.

 

[Coreless]

I have no drive whatsoever to play WOD and I want to like it because I enjoy playing WoW. Once I saw the first Draenor videos I knew what to expect, I loved Mists of Pandaria and knew once the expansion hit it would be nothing but nostalgia driving it forward instead of actual content. The Garrisons turned out exactly like I thought they would, a silly Facebook style chore that becomes necessary and grindy and separates the community. The Ashran PvP I hear was also a huge disaster and I know that is where I would have spent most of my time had I played, Blizzard has all but abandoned making decent PvP content it seems.

 

[Alex Baas]

How long has this game been out? All things run their course. Blizzard is aware of this I am sure.

 

[happyninja42]

Could it possibly be that since they introduced the "Pay gold for game time" mechanic, that people are simply dropping their subscriptions and going month to month with the coins? I mean, that was kind of the point of introducing the EVE Online-esque system, so that people could pay by playing. And considering the amount of gold some people have on some of the more bloated servers, why wouldn't they drop their subscription. I've got a friend who is a pretty dedicated player, and he's nowhere near as hardcore as I know some people are, and he's got enough gold sitting in his bank account to pay for an entire year of gameplay.

So yeah, loss of subscribers, around the exact time they introduce a pay mechanic that would let players drop their subscription seems pretty much a "well duh" kind of situation. xD

 

[Loop Stricken]

How long has this game been out?

Hit the ten-year anniversary not long ago.

 

[Loop Stricken]

Could it possibly be that since they introduced the "Pay gold for game time" mechanic, that people are simply dropping their subscriptions and going month to month with the coins?

Even if that were so;

1) those accounts would still be considered 'subscribed'

2) The chart, and by extension the information this topic is based upon, does not include that data as it's too recent.

 

[happyninja42]

Could it possibly be that since they introduced the "Pay gold for game time" mechanic, that people are simply dropping their subscriptions and going month to month with the coins?

Even if that were so;

1) those accounts would still be considered 'subscribed'

2) The chart, and by extension the information this topic is based upon, does not include that data as it's too recent.

How do you know it doesn't include that data? The chart just shows listing based on expansion, there are no dates given. For all we know, it's up to date, and including the month or 2 since the introduction of the coins.