World of Warcraft down to 7.7M subscribers (600K decline in 3 months)
- Thread starter maniac-kun
- Start date
Rogue_Ledr
Banned
You know ....... I find it baffling how this games can continue to lose millions of describers, but still have 7.7 million left.
Sheeeesh! How many did it have at its peak?
Sheeeesh! How many did it have at its peak?
Aquamarine
Member
The highest milestone World of Warcraft ever reached was 12 million subscribers in October 2010.
It is now only 64% of what it once was.
I'm an expert
Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
Motherfucke! Wrong wow thread!
Yes, Kara was great. But there was nutin like the races for BWL, AQ40, and Naxx. Conquest was on my server so we watched them with MC and their infamous videos that got them banned.
Yes, Kara was great. But there was nutin like the races for BWL, AQ40, and Naxx. Conquest was on my server so we watched them with MC and their infamous videos that got them banned.
My computer couldn't even make out what the hell was going on but I loved every single second of that.
Also the old school AV. Sneaking up as a rogue to the graveyard ahead to sap, blind, and cap a flag just momentarily enough to change the course of the stalemated fight.
SillyEskimo
Member
9yrs later and still the #1 subscription MMO in the world by a landslide. Insane.
Napalm_Frank
Member
I'm think I might give WoW one last go when they finally do another Outland expansion with storyline being finishing off Kil'Jaeden. I missed the Burning Crusade sadly and I liked the demon/outland lore in Warcraft. That and it would be probably the final loose end that still connects Warcraft 3 (one of my favourite games ever also!) to WoW.
Gentleman Jack
Member
The market for enchants, 16 slot bags, and consumables would be hilarious.
SatelliteOfLove
Member
Back in the day, dozens of assholes in hundreds of high-ranked guilds, shitting on the less progressed, all because they were powerful and you weren't. Often, they'd get shut down by their leadership worried about the guild's reputation or general human decency, but just as often those wouldn't.
For the last 5 years, thousands of assholes period shit on everyone, for every reason from low iLevel to hatred of the current game, because...they want to? No one stops them, they answer to no one. No one cares about reputation. No one to care about human decency to put a stop to them.
The problem of elitism didn't die with the Funwell patch, it multiplied. EVERYONE can be an elitist asshole! Yayifications! PROGRESS.
I mean, shit, at least those assholes who shit on us on our road upward had actually DONE something that could at least attempt to justify their ePeen waving other than catch windfall of bad game design dogma...
That jump is because there's rarely anywhere to hone one's PvE skills now. Lowbie dungeons are woefully undertuned and shot thru by groupmates clad in heirloom loot and everyone has OP talents. CC is meaningless. Threat is meaningless. Speccing is meaningless. The heroics and raids are where one farms for loot, can't stop the gravy train here! Just leaves hard mode, and OMG THERE'S A WALL. "Best nerf that shortly after release so as not stiff casuals." "Wait, why are people of all walks of in-game life still quitting?" "What is 'player psychology'? Can you eat it?"
Speschal K
Member
Everquest, circa 1999 until whenever they came out with mercs (NPCs you could "hire" by paying gold to group with you). Only 2-3 of the dozen or so classes could actually solo to max level, and although that was a viable option, it would still take longer. It was actually more beneficial to form groups than it was to solo. And that's what made socializing mandatory. Sure, it will always be an option in any newer MMO since WoW introduced quest-based leveling. But while forcing the player to interact w/ others may seem restrictive, when done right it defines what makes the MMORPG genre unique.
I loved playing WoW, but unless you played EQ you will never understand the possibility for community in this genre, and why WoW felt like such a decline in that regard.
A few things really. The content was balls hard when it launched, the second half of wrath trained everyone to use the LFG tool for 5 mans, but, heroics at the launch of cata were pretty much undoable in pugs unless you managed to group with players that weren't terrible. Not really a problem if you played with friends, but, a lot of people used the LFG tool so there was a lot of complaints. This only rolled over into raiding where the equal ilvls of 10s and 25s meant that the faceroll easy 10 man normal modes of wrath became a lot more difficult and unforgiving, it pretty much killed off most truly casual raid guilds.
For the more hardcore players there was just a lack of any content really. The first raid tier was pretty good and well received (there was a lot of hardcore raiders that said it was the hardest tier ever at the time) but the second tier (firelands) only had 7 bosses. A lot of people didn't like how small the tier was and honestly the tuning was fucked beyond belief for heroic. Eventually blizzard said fuck it and instead of fixing the bosses they just made insanely major nerfs to every boss save the last one. I am talking to the point where guilds that were just entering heroic difficulty were killing 5 or 6 bosses on heroic in under a week. Then everyone just got stuck on H Ragnaros for months because he was mostly unchanged.
Then Dragon Soul came out and was completely embarrassing. The fights themselves were mostly fine but the raid was entirely reused assets in every way possible. The landscape was a modified Dragonblight + a few other reused locations (such as EoE and the Maelstrom) and again it was a tiny raid tier, only 8 bosses, this time it was even worse though because ALL of the bosses save the final one (Madness of Deathwing) used generic enemy models. First boss was a giant rock man you see walking around deepholm, one boss was just a female orc, another just a dragon, another just a tauren. All that combined felt really lazy. There is more to the story than that, but, I don't want to type like 5 more paragraphs.
Also this is all stacked on the fact that outside of raiding/5 mans/pvp there was nothing else to do. There was one real daily hub added the entire expansion, no new features outside of LFR and transmog (which admittedly is one of the best features added to the game), and nothing to do in the world really, there wasn't even a need to farm gold or mats/flasks for raids because guild perks just gave you them for (basically) free. With how small the second two raid tiers were it was pretty easy to cut back on raiding hours too if you weren't super hardcore. I played 9 hours a week myself. I logged on and did 3 hours a night 3 nights a week of raiding, and then did not have a single other thing I could beside leveling alts (which I did, I had 9 level 85s at the end of Cata).
Honestly I didn't even hate the expansion as much as people (for starters I enjoyed the sharp difficulty spike in 5 mans and 10 man raiding), but, there wasn't shit to do at all. Casuals had no content for them at the start of the expansion and hardcore people were treated with some raids that was either broken as fuck or looked really lazy. People have other complaints as well, but, I'd say this is what the majority of complaints were through Cata.
Mammoth Jones
Member
I subscribed on launch day. Was off and on at the end of Cata. Didn't bother with Panda's until a few months ago. Finally hit Lv 90 this week and am just in awe at all the content there is.
Just sucks that after all these years it's content I've pretty much seen and done. Although it's nice to pvp in random BG's and gear up that way.
I'm still sad they never embraced player housing or player boats.
Just sucks that after all these years it's content I've pretty much seen and done. Although it's nice to pvp in random BG's and gear up that way.
I'm still sad they never embraced player housing or player boats.
Mammoth Jones
Member
I had more fun in WoW before the cross server-LFG tool destroyed the community. Before that you could make a name for yourself being damned good at your class in LFG. It was fun to meet new people and remember their names because you had a great time with them or get invited to raids because they knew you knew how to play your hunter without pulling extra mobs.
From the perspective of someone that would likely be on the casual end of the spectrum, this is all true, but wasn't everything. For the past two expansion packs at this point, the last boss in heroics dropped an epic item. In Cata, this was done away with. Also, you could more quickly gear yourself up with badges in the prior two expansions and with the valor cap, it became a lot harder to efficiently gear ourselves up with 5 mans to try and throw ourselves at the new 10 mans...which we ended up never really doing much anyways because in WotLK, our guild would fill 1-3 slots in our raids with people from 25 man guilds, which we could no longer do with the shared lockout (we weren't successful at recruiting). With 10s and 25s now sharing a lockout, with 5 mans being the hardest they had been since Sethekk Halls and the least rewarding ever, we found ourselves without a game to play at the level cap.
Blizz did a small about face to some extent 8 months in or so but by that point we had all quit.
MoP is actually rather similar to earlier Cata from my perspective, as someone who finds LFR to really be a poor replacement for appropriately tuned content.
Matrix XII
Member
I put far too much time (and money) into WoW lol
Got to give it to Blizzard, they have done some amazing things.
To lose millions of subs and still have 7.7M is quite an achievement.
Got to give it to Blizzard, they have done some amazing things.
To lose millions of subs and still have 7.7M is quite an achievement.
Mists is a great expansion (utterly fantastic in a lot of regards), but I think WoW is broken to its core and theres nothing Blizzard can do except for taking away power from the players again instead of trivializing everything they make.
I imagine a great number of players are like myself, where I resubscribe to see new content and then piss off until the next new patch. The funny thing is the only reason I stick around is for my attachment to my character and the RP community on Wyrmrest, which maybe says a lot more about the game than anyone wants to admit.
They should make some kind of hardcore server where LFR and LFG are turned off and everyone is stuck playing with other players on the *same* server. I think theyd see one of the healthiest communities theyve had in a long time, and theyd be players whod stick around, too.
I imagine a great number of players are like myself, where I resubscribe to see new content and then piss off until the next new patch. The funny thing is the only reason I stick around is for my attachment to my character and the RP community on Wyrmrest, which maybe says a lot more about the game than anyone wants to admit.
They should make some kind of hardcore server where LFR and LFG are turned off and everyone is stuck playing with other players on the *same* server. I think theyd see one of the healthiest communities theyve had in a long time, and theyd be players whod stick around, too.
Gentleman Jack
Member
Why should they do this if it will do absolutely nothing to stem the hemorrhaging of users at its current rate?
People want a community, or at least thats what I want, and why current WoW is nothing like old WoW.
Meaningful player interaction is the key to the kinds of MMO memories people still talk about to this day. Create a game people look forward to playing, and feel connected too, and theyll come back to keep playing.
charlequin
Banned
Kind of ironic that after years of talk about "WoW-killers," the only MMO that could kill WoW ultimately proved to be WoW itself.
I'm still crabby that they never gave us an Emerald Dream raid.
I'm still crabby that they never gave us an Emerald Dream raid.
Heart Attack
Member
I used to play WoW for a couple of months before the first expansion came out. It was one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. There is so much content nowadays, and the world has changed so much, that i just don't feel like playing it. I would love for a vanilla server to happen and i would gladly give blizzard my money.
This is a good summary of the situation.
To add to it, the 5 man tuning was bad. There's a difference between making a mistake that hurts, but doesn't take you out of the fight, and making a mistake and dying in one shot. So many abilities from bosses would one shot you if you made a mistake. The reason we have rings on the ground to tell us where a dangerous ability ends is because of this. Not saying it wasn't needed, but it was a bandaid to the larger problem of punishing players for things that were sometimes out of their control. A little bit of server lag would mean you were dead when an ability went off and there would be nothing you could do about it. Fights were also pretty tight This meant that if one person died, it was pretty much a wipe.
During Cataclysm beta, there were numerous threads about how ridiculous the tuning was, but the general sentiment was that players should just deal with it. It came to no surprise that once the expansion went live the problems with the new 5 mans really hit home. Even the developers were basically telling people to L2P. It was sad as I had a lot of respect for the dev team. The punishing difficulty lead to some really crappy situations and heated arguments. I have to admit that there was a lot of player interaction during that time, but it basically wasn't good.
Eventually they fixed it, but to be honest, even better gear didn't make it all better. I remember trying a few dungeons near the end of Cataclysm and people STILL had trouble with those dungeons. Ozruk still destroyed damage dealers. Mainly because the one shot and dead mechanics couldn't really be out geared. Their overall response to this were the final set of dungeons that came with Dragon Soul. They were so damn easy, anyone could go through them blindfolded. This is also not what people wanted. Some kind of balance would have been nice. The sad thing is these are the same guys who made Wrath dungeons and it's like they forgot how to make them or something. Sadly this same mentality bled into Mists as the new dungeons were so easy why even call them heroics?
We survived the beginning of Wrath, BC, and even vanilla Wow with a good balance of difficulty, so it's not like people are not good enough to learn new things. I hope they do a better job in the next expansion.
Also, they decided that "leveling was too easy" so mobs hit for some insane amount of damage. They improved it at some point, but leveling was a pain.
I wonder if we'll see "No proving grounds gold, no Flex for you" in the future
(You probably only need silver at best for Flex, but standard requirements inflation of the pug community...)
Yoshichan
And they made him a Lord of Cinder. Not for virtue, but for might. Such is a lord, I suppose. But here I ask. Do we have a sodding chance?
Yup, I've always said this.
That is a substantial drop
WotLK was the game at its peak, not necessarily quality wise since that is subjective, but from a subscribers perspective, its not a opinion, its a fact.
Then one can start to wonder why Wrath of the Lich King? Is it perhaps because everything was leading up to that expansion? Not just WoW, but Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne too, WoW Vanilla was the aftermath that slowly built up to the confrontation with Arthas.
Its like when (Star Wars spoilers)
Luke, Vader and the Emperor had their final showdown in Jedi, it all lead up to this very moment.
If WotLK was Jedi, then Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria feel like Han Solo going around caves on whatever god forsaken planet him and Chewie were selling drugs on, looking for treasure after the whole conflict was over, anti climatic would be the right term to describe it.
Ofcourse most would reply with "MMO players do not care about the story", "lollore" and "blue spacegoats bro!" but perhaps the vast amount of players sometimes do care about the setting more than people give it credit for. Maybe its not about the smaller balance issues on how X class is doing better at PvP while Y class is doing better at PvE, how this tank is better than that tank.
I do not know about people here, but i never cared about the lore, i never read the quests or paid much attention, i had some understanding of the story, yet i still felt like i needed to see Icecrown, i needed to kill The Lich King, even though i was predominately a arena player who played 3v3 on my Holy Paladin and Resto Druid.
Maybe this stuff matters more than hardcore MMO players and Blizzards think. Burning Crusade was cool because we finally got to go to Outland, it wasent just a bunch of leveling zones that Blizzard writers came up with just for a expansion, that place has been referenced since WarCraft 2, it was exciting going through the portal to see what was on the other side.
UnblessedSoul
Member
After wrath blizzard got lazy, they spread themselves too thin to make titan and put out less meaningful content because of it. they didn't expand the warcraft dev team and instead pushed lazy content thinking they could ride peoples wallets for years to come, all 3 of their main IP's suffered because of it, D3 was a disaster, Wow subs declining and the whole ordeal with starcraft.
Five-man tuning at the start of Cataclysm was perfect; running those dungeons near launch with a group at the minimum ilvl requirements was some of the most fun I've ever had with WoW. The lack of normal modes to choose from was a problem for PUGs, but there's no reason a group of five random unskilled players should be able to one-shot the most challenging five-man content in the game. Players were just spoiled by Wrath, and had learned that "heroic" should mean "trivial." Pandaria solved the problem by making heroics the new normals, and by replacing true heroics with challenge modes.
I'm not currently subscribed, but that has nothing to do with the current quality of the game. It's just plain old; there's only so many new ideas Blizzard can come up with to keep it feeling fresh, and they're running out.
I'm not currently subscribed, but that has nothing to do with the current quality of the game. It's just plain old; there's only so many new ideas Blizzard can come up with to keep it feeling fresh, and they're running out.
Angelus Errare
Banned
nvm
Eventually quit because various small changes made my casual raiding guild go from 50-60 people in vanilla to around 15 in Cata. Eventually it kinda died in Cata, which made me pretty sad. Had some very fun years playing with mostly the same people. I did not even like some parts of the game in the last few years, but stayed around for the guild. When that died, it was game over for me...
mysteriousmage09
Member
Cata killed the game outright.
I'm an expert
Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
Vashj'ir killed the game outright.
I guess the name of the expansion pack was very apt...
Never even managed to get to level 86 when i later tried out MoP. It just felt soul draining looking at the empty guild
.I guess the name of the expansion pack was very apt...
Never even managed to get to level 86 when i later tried out MoP. It just felt soul draining looking at the empty guild
I think that might account for why people have different opinions about the state of WoW currently. My guild is fine. It's small, but dedicated, and the members get on well with one another. It's persisted since TBC; it's smaller now, but still very much a viable group. So... I don't really feel like there's been a mass drain of people, and indeed we occasionally have members reappear after a *long* absence and get back into the fold because our guild is still intact. It formed mostly in-game; I have never met the other members in real life, but we get on fine.
Should the guild ever completely fall apart, that would probably be it for the game for me - but it's survived some rocky times reasonably well, so long may that continue!
Guilds are peoples' connection to the game, and when that gets severed, it becomes hard for the game to hold on to that person. Which is doubly frustrating for guilds like ours, because we do still constantly want to recruit - but I get the impression that a lot of people whose guilds collapse just don't have the mindset to move on and make new friends in another guild; one of the things I try to press into my guild every expansion is to go out there while levelling, meet new people, and make sure they know about us - but that's only a week or two of being able to spread the word well.
Trojita
Rapid Response Threadmaker
World PVP died when the BG's came out. It was still there a little bit, but in coordinated efforts died. There should have been better bonuses for taking out a faction leader.
I don't think that's true. When Blizz released the last 3 5-man dungeons at the end of Wrath, I thought those were the right difficulty. Sure, we eventually out geared it, but it was something people could work out. Especially Halls of Reflection which was hell on tanks. Still, people had no problem sweating it out as the difficulty was right for the iLevel. Couldn't say the same thing about Cataclysm. Some of the mechanics were downright brutal and with lag and all that it could quickly become a lesson in frustration. Which is why it ended the way it did. The brutal play simply drove people away from the game and even reasonable people stayed away. Those were the only days I remember LFD queues being over 45 minutes long. And what was worse was finally getting a group only to have it break up a few minutes later because of some drama. Those were dark days of WoW.
I remember the early days of WoW where we used to 10 man Strath and the Baron would cause people to wipe, but at least then people felt like it was doable so they would stick it out. Cataclysm dungeons were a whole different ball of wax.
Oh, and the original Wrath dungeons were a pain in the ass. Heroic Loken. First boss in Gundrak (poison snake guy). Brann event in Halls of Stone. Jousting event in Heroic ToC. Or the famous Oculus. How many times was that place nerfed because people would leave it if popped up. Before LFD no one even bothered to run that place. If it was the daily dungeon run, then getting a group for it was a pain in the ass. It's part of the reason we ended up with LFD in the first place. Yeah. Those were fun times. By the end of Wrath we outgeared those dungeons by a large margin, but in the beginning they were pretty tough.
Whoa. This is exactly my experience. Only that my guild was around since Vanilla / Molten Core. We also had plently of people taking breaks and returning after a few months or even years. In the end we were too small, and too many people left at once.
Sadly we were never succesful at recruiting many members. We pretty much bled out slowly. We recruited, I guess around 10 people, which stuck around long term. But that's not much over the course of 4-5 years...
Regarding the bolded, I really would want this, but I think I would need a new MMO to do this in. Perhaps find a group of friends across several MMOs. It's just that "my WoW" was with those people I played it with for so many damn years.
Additionally, the game has become a bit too samey for me, especially coupled with the issue of having to stick around long enough before these new bonds/friendships/guild relationships form and intensify.
I'm an expert
Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
Yeah I definitely don't get the attachment to a guild.. I know they're out there but it's still very unlikely a guild has stuck through all the expansions. Even in vanilla I jumped guilds all the time to raid. I couldn't imagine playing with the exact same people for that many years. Having just switched servers it's a blast getting to know new guilds and names.
Totally respect that!
WoW was the first mmo in which this happened to me. In all others I also guild hopped whenever I felt like it / things got stale. But I must say it was quite a magical experience to enjoy a game with the same people for such a long time...
I'm an expert
Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
I had the same guild all through end of BC to Wrath, so I know it's a solid feeling, but I don't get why people would stop playing the game because their guild isn't there anymore. There are still tonssssss of people playing, tons of guilds out there. I equate it to a guy losing his girl and being like noooooo I'll never be able to find another oneeeeeeeee... get real.
I can only speak for myself:
I wasn't really having that much fun with the game anymore. The guild was the only thing keeping me in the game. Thus, staying around in the hope of finding new people to play with was not a very appealing prospect. Also, in those few years I build up quite a big backlog of other games i wanted to play.
I'm an expert
Formerly worldrevolution. The only reason I am nice to anyone else is to avoid being banned.
Well that's a different story too, I quit for all of Cata for the same reason. Not liking the game is fine, my issue is with people who are still quite invested in the game but don't want to go through making new friends or even finding a new server.
SillyEskimo
Member
I'm still in the one and only guild I have ever belonged to in WoW. We've been together since about 6 months after launch. The core has always been solid and our revolving door of other members is pretty much non existant. People stay for years. I think a lot of that is due to our strict age policy as well as how we handle "friends and family" of guildmates.
Our guild is still active and progressive on the Thunderhorn server. There is a special strength that comes from knowing the person behind the toon. A good player translates well into any class or spec they choose to play. No one doubts or second guesses anyone else. It's a pretty tight unit of folks with jobs, spouses, kids, and a shared love of all things WoW.
This is likely why I have never once felt WoW is dying. My guild has had a full roster and been strong since the very beginnings of the game.
SatelliteOfLove
Member
That zone was one of the prettiest, but hollowest zones I have ever played in in any MMO. Oddly, it spent the most time talking to you about its lore and atmosphere yet couldn't walk the walk.
And then the Vault doors close once more till the next expansion...
Like I've been saying, railroading the game into being a completely Descartesian model of everyone being self-sufficient save for only the most elite of activities like newest HM and top-rated Arena (there's That Wall again...) damned this game far worse than any other mistake by Blizzard or the playerbase.
A guild is there for you, you are there for them. Plus, they're my friends. We play other games together, not just MMOs.
To add to the criticism of Cataclysm, it took them fucking FOREVER to release any content after the launch. I think it was what, 6 months or so before we got new stuff? And even then it was just retuned/retooled ZG/ZA.
I was running a casual raiding guild that did 10 mans and we were able to clear all the raid bosses in 3 months or so. The hardest part was getting people motivated to continue to play after we did everything (the people were good but not up to heroic good for most fights) and people lost interest and quit.
I was running a casual raiding guild that did 10 mans and we were able to clear all the raid bosses in 3 months or so. The hardest part was getting people motivated to continue to play after we did everything (the people were good but not up to heroic good for most fights) and people lost interest and quit.
AnathemicOne
Banned
I played WoW from the the beginning of vanilla to middle of Wrath just when Ulduar was released. Very nostalgic times but I still remember the pain of 40-man MC.
It's pretty damn amazing that WoW has been running for so long but in my mind no one but Blizzard can achieve that, even with the lackluster game that was Diablo 3 but even that game still has a steady playerbase. I can't think of another company that achieved massive success with every game it releases and in different genres too.
I haven't even head about Titan being delayed but still awaiting what it will have in store. Warcraft 3 will forever be the best PC game of all time imo, Battle.Net 1.0 + custom games ftw.
It's pretty damn amazing that WoW has been running for so long but in my mind no one but Blizzard can achieve that, even with the lackluster game that was Diablo 3 but even that game still has a steady playerbase. I can't think of another company that achieved massive success with every game it releases and in different genres too.
I haven't even head about Titan being delayed but still awaiting what it will have in store. Warcraft 3 will forever be the best PC game of all time imo, Battle.Net 1.0 + custom games ftw.