1901

Isn’t all this nay-saying a little like suggesting that Friends or Seinfeld were horrible failures because they eventually lost their audience?

World of Warcraft is eight years old and still has over 8 million people paying to play it. It has been an unbelievable success. They don’t need to dramatically redesign the game. It would be silly for them to throw out the holy trinity (tank/healer/dps) in an attempt to stem their losses, since that would risk turning off the people who still play.

Maybe it’s just time to retrench, focus on what people love about WoW, and ride this thing into the sunset. With the right studio structure you could run WoW profitably with well under a million subs.

1902

Yeah, that’s kind of what I was trying to say with my “Everest not changing colors” analogy. I think yours works better.

1903

Yeah… pretty sure nobody on the business side agrees with that.

I’m not even sure I agree with that.

1904

WoW is the vast majority of Blizz income. They can’t let it ride off into the sunset. even with subscriber numbers dropping hey still appear to kicking everyone else’s butts. Rift is going FtP now, SWtOR, all of them have done so. I don’t know what Titan is, but it’s been in development for a very long time. My guess would be it’s the next MMO that Blizz is rolling the dice of the future on, so the stakes will be high.

BTW, I finally finished the Divine Bell line on horde and ally side. It’s kind of neat the way it unfolds, gives a ton of rep (about half of revered to exalted) and sets the stage for Garrosh going that last inch to fly off the rails into Sylvanus crazy-train levels.

Has anyone heard if/what the forsaken are going to be doing in 5.3? Sylvanus hates Garrosh, but she’s at least as big a war criminal as he is.

1905

Just a heads up that the Pandaria CE is $34.99 on Amazon right now. $19.99 for the regular edition.

1906

Even if you only get it and play from 85 to 90 I I think it’s worth the price. I still say it’s the best expansion the games ever had, even more so now that they’ve given ways to avoid the daily grind.

1907

From a lore perspective I prefer Wrath, but yeah, Pandaria’s pretty excellent.

1908

Thanks for the heads-up.

1909

Pandaria’s also my favorite expansion. I’m still a newb, mind you – level 89 with my main – but I’m enjoying the beautiful Asian-themed landscapes, the pet battles, the new cooking system, and the couple of dungeons I’ve tried. Have only played a monk to level 3, not far enough to form an opinion, but grouping with them is certainly interesting. Yes, lore-wise I might prefer Wrath, as I think Arthas is interesting, but the stories in this game are pretty good too. I especially like the beer-related story lines. All in all, a superb expansion.

1910

I can agree with favoring Wrath for the lore, but the amount of graphical improvements in Pandaria is pretty immense. Things are just much more dense, colorful, and detailed - even while still being relatively low-poly and in character with the WoW art style. The NPCs are a tad bit more alive too - rather than just standing statically you find some areas where they are actively doing something (beyond just patrolling). Nice touches, even if it doesn’t affect gameplay.

1911

Gamon will save us!. Ahahaha.

1912

Man, after playing WoW for like 9 straight years I quit permanently a few months ago. Lacking a MMO addiction, I recently went and installed a ton of F2P trials:

Age of Conan, Aion, Allods Online, Warhammer Online, Champions Online, DC Universe Online, DDO (the source of my first few hateful posts on QT3 back in '06), Neverwinter, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Vanguard, EQ2, Aion, Star Trek Online, LOTRO, The Secret World, SWTOR, TERA

Man…all of them are garbage compared to how polished is in Blizz’s WoW and stuff you just take for granted like a moddable non-hideous UI. RIFT is about the only thing close to WoW in polish (SWTOR still stinks but my 2-month launch subscription might be enough for me to go back and play free to finish all the class stories) with TERA being a softporn grindfest that has mildly interesting ideas. I hear the Russian Allods Online becomes super annoying later on with Pay 2 Win and it’s the only other game with a well-done UI. It also has an art style close to WoW that looks very good–not quite anime. To be fair, Funcom and Cryptic simply don’t have the amount of dollars to throw at a project but something about their games (even the brand new ones like Neverwinter) make them feel like janky budget titles.

GW2 art is still good but there was never enough non-combat activities or incentive to engage me. Every single other game that does something “realistic” (Vanguard, DDO, TSW, AoC, Neverwinter) ends up making it look terribly ugly even after so called DX10/11 engine updates. They all look like Poser models.

I’ll have to figure out how to get back into GW2 again. Also really want to get into the Wildstar beta. Even with its sub numbers drop, there are still tons of actual people playing (mostly alts though) around to engage with if one returns to WoW–at least for now. The problem is all the wonderful people I played with the first, second go are all gone and it’s never quite the same.

Also SEGA is a year behind in getting their damned PSO2 to launch.

1913

It’s amazing how little attention they pay to the interface yes. And it is and remains my contention that mods are one reason for wow’s enduring success.

1914

So very much this. People love to gripe about how outdated WoW looks. Yes, there is a lot of low-poly stuff around still and it certainly isn’t pushing the limits of modern hardware. But it is still visually excellent (assuming you liked the art style to begin with) and I think is a contributing factor to the games’ longevity.

If you do come back to WoW, consider a high population server if you weren’t on one before (and one in favor of your faction if on PvE). Yes, you might hit queues but the vibrancy of the main towns, auction house, etc., is amazing and really re-energizes the game for me. I’m really hoping virtual realms helps do this for all servers. Friendly guilds do still exist, but I understand the frustration of finding them and reintegrating.

1915

MMO Champion reported WoW is down to 7.7 million subscribers. They rallied pretty well with the annual pass/free Diablo giveaway and got back up to 10 million last year, but now they are melting away at about 600,000-800,000 per quarter.

I still futz around in WoW, but it hasn’t been rush-home gaming for me in a long time now. I have more fun leveling alts by running them through instances than I do grinding lfr and dailies over and over again.

I’ll confess that I don’t listen to the Qt3 podcasts that often, but I was curious this week with the “What is the easiest MMO to get back into if you leave” topic they had. WoW has a lot of little things, like a free level 85 or 90 toon when you come back, but I’m not sure I’d get into WoW if I started it today. It has a combination of being much more complicated while at the same time a lot less challenging than it used to be. Good for a casual night, but when difficult challenges are strictly optional I think it takes something away from the core of the game.

I remember in vanilla WoW we just took it for granted early on in a level 60 instance that we were gonna get wiped a lot while building gear. Stratholme, while fun and challenging and with awesome art, was a bit of a deathtrap, especially on the undead side. Zul’Farak was no cakewalk, either. When the Cataclysm instances came out and were hard it was like getting dunked with icewater. Kind of unpleasant, but still great on a hot day. The trouble is, that type of difficulty really takes forever to mesh in lfg, since there’s no proper teamwork or skill normalizer. I remember the days before the dungeon finder. They sucked. Standing around for hours trying to find a few people for a group, no tanks around, bleh. I like the finder function, but don’t know how Blizz could balance it for the right level of challenge.

Any ideas what sorts of things Blizz could do to re-attract the masses? Or is WoW just dated, and old-looking?

1916

I don’t think WoW is all that old-looking. It has a unique art style that I find appealing. I also don’t have the latest and greatest PC so things like Guild Wars 2 run well, but I have to turn down settings. It doesn’t look any better than WoW to me, visually.

I think my problem is I no longer want a game that is also a time-sink. To enjoy WoW or any MMO I want to spend a lot of time in the game. That makes it feel more like a world. I’ve enjoyed MMOs most when I played them on a daily basis. Once I get away from that they are less enjoyable. I don’t want to commit that kind of time to any game now.

I also am tired of the constant drive to better my character. It’s enjoyable but ultimately feels empty for a couple of reasons: Once I have everything I want and feel like my character is decked out there is nothing driving me anymore. There’s nothing to pursue. The second issue is that I know all my gains will be wiped out when the next expansion releases. My gear will be junk then and I need to climb back on the treadmill.

Some of my best memories of WoW are of stalking the Chinese gold farmers with my rogue on a PvP server in vanilla WoW. They knew the most lucrative spots to farm and it was fun to bedevil them, and challenging because I was always outnumbered. There were even Horde Chinese farmers that used to message me and ask me to gank the Alliance Chinese farmers so they could farm in that area.

1917

I’ve actually seen someone suggest that WoW’s issue is now content coming out too fast. Before, people would play until their character was “maxed out”, then unsubscribe until the next patch. Now, since the next patch is always ‘just around the corner’, people aren’t compelled to “max out” their guy because it’ll all be undone (similar to Mark’s issue above). I have no idea if this would really be true or how it could be measured, but it was an interesting thought.

Honestly, I don’t think WoW can do anything to bring back the numbers. It was a phase (an amazing phase, granted) that has just passed with time. It isn’t like another MMO is stealing WoW’s players - at least not directly/in the US. It is just consumer burnout. MMOs aren’t the ‘thing to do’ anymore. I think a large chunk of that population was casual/family type play which has migrated to tablet gaming. It also depends on the breakdown of how many of those subs were US/EU vs. Asia - MMOs grow on trees in Asia, and since they have different ways of handling cash shop/f2p/etc., they actually might be losing players to other MMOs (contrary to my earlier statement), but so far it hasn’t been one single MMO doing the work, just attrition.

The thing to keep in mind is that it doesn’t matter, until Blizz shuts down the game. UO/Vanguard/EQ/DAoC/etc., all still alive. Sure, they can’t fill 452345 servers anymore - virtual servers will help combine those who remain together so the world stays populated as much as possible.

1918

Does Guild Wars 2 have a proper PvE endgame yet? The levelling experience was vastly superior to Wow, but once I hit max level the dungeon content felt awful. Ended up going back to Wow for casual raiding.

1919

The problem is the latest content has limited replay value and generally just isn’t very good.

For some reason blizzard had a huge urge to fill this expansion with tons of grindy daily rep quests, something which people have complained about since the release of WOW.

after that you have uninspired dungeons and too many bland fights. I never finished the last wing of the new dungeon, but the other wings i did on the first try with pugs on the first night of their release in raid finder. After doing them once i felt no need to do them again for the most part.

1920

Lots of dailies are purely optional now. Sure, there are still the various islands but it isn’t quite the extreme as it was when MoP first came out. Lots of people praise ToT as being one of the better raids created, so ‘uninspired’ is subjective.

As for finding no need to do raiding again - I agree there, but not for the same reason. The reason is LFR. “Back in the day”, you didn’t PUG raids. You went with friends/your guild, and you spent days/weeks conquering a raid. You went back because you wanted to get to the end, and gear up your guild. With LFR, and the reduced difficulty of the instance, you’ll likely get through it the first time. The only reason to go back is for gear, but the only reason for the gear is if you eventually plan to tackle non-PUG raids. If you’re just seeing the sights, you’ve seen it in one shot and it was basically handed to you without any more effort than buying just enough gear to meet the ilvl requirements to get in. And thus people see the sights and then unsub until there are more sights to see. It is the GW2 effect, except in a game with a subscription model.