People all over the world have played World of Warcraft and quit for various reasons. My opinion why players have left might be new to some of you.
I believe a majority of the people who has quit World of Warcraft is due to the rise of eSports. They want the GAMER DREAM, in which you get paid to play video games. So naturally people migrate to League of Legends, CS:GO, Overwatch, Hearthstone, Fortnite, DoTa 2, or any other games that have high viewership on Twitch/youtube. Those games also have another thing in common besides viewers on Twitch. The companies dish out a decent amount of money for tournaments, and/or Leagues.
World of Warcraft is not that type of game for players to make huge bank off of. So the people who want to game for a living don’t really pay much attention to WoW.
eh my food for thought
Or it could be the pruning, class imbalance issues, and the cold hard fact that wow graphics suck, and people have so many shiny new looking games to choose from.
I always find this reasoning a funny joke.
I have nearly 30 keybinds of unique abilities.
I think you’re the one dreaming pal.
Yeah, there’s hearthstone, eat food, drink water, astral recall, farsight…
I don’t want to be paid to pay video games. Here is why. It then becomes a job. And a job is a job. Lots of people who were pro gamers will tell you that being a pro gamer at the point of being paid is very stressful. Right now I can relax and play wow how I’d like.
None of those I have keybindings for… 
People that complain about pruning generally are ignoring the amount of abilities we do have, and are only focusing on what we have had taken away. Some how thinking we had “complicated” rotations in early WoW. Which we didn’t.
Of all the countless reasons for someone who at any point was into wow then chose to quit, I honestly think “it’s not competitive enough for my e-sport dreams” has to be like the smallest percentage of them
From what they’ve said over the years, the majority of the over 100 million subscriptions sold have ceased playing in the first 20 levels of the game. For some people it’s just not the game for them. That’s fine.
For the rest? People tend to leave when they’re not having fun. That’s a massive over-generalization, and the reasons why they’re not having fun are varied.
The important thing is how you’re feeling about the game. Not trying to speak for all those before you.
I’m going to go with Aska on this one.
Not to sound out of date, but what do you mean by pruning?
Pruning is what we call it when Blizz removes abilities from a class, or otherwise dumb it down. The first few xpacs, very few (if any) abilities were removed from a class, just new ones were added. Blizz thought the number of abilities were getting out of hand so they started to remove them. Then in WoD/Legion they really pruned things down so you basically had a 3 button rotation. And they split the specs up entirely, so like frost mages couldn’t use any fire spells anymore.
A number of people on the forums feel the game has been too dumbed down or the classes are boring, or almost exactly the same, since a lot of special abilities have been removed.
Don’t forget.
The key point in the “pruning” complaint is one must completely ignore abilities that have been added, and completely ignore how simple rotations where in classic/tbc/wotlk.
Because if one took a rational look at the issue, they’d see it makes no sense.
I play 2 classes. Prot Warrior and Ele Sham. Neither have anything close to a 3 button rotation. Both have over 20 key binds. I am sure I used over 20 keybinds in my last raid alone as Ele Sham.
I also dabble in resto sham, holy priest, and enhance shaman. None of these classes come anywhere close to a 3 skill rotation.
No. People were leaving (albeit at a slow rate) at the end of WotLK, when, the notion of paying people to play a video game was laughable.
Folks in game may enjoy watching others play WoW. I don’t for various reasons.
Unless this is a tangential way of attempting to justify the “pets for esports” paradigm.
Also, bots.
I’m assuming it varies from class to class and spec to spec. And I myself don’t mind the pruning much, I just adapt to whatever is available.
But when people say a simple button rotation, I think they mean if you ignore cooldowns. I also have numerous buttons hotkeyed, but if I’m not popping cooldowns (or interrupts) I have mutilate, garrote, rupture, envenom.
The only pruning that bothered me is how they completely separate spec abilities. Like not putting poisons on my weapons if I’m in Subtlety or Outlaw spec. To me that kills class fantasy a bit.
I only count things over 1 minute as a “cd” to be ignore. That being said, I still have a solid 5-6 abilities as elemental in my normal rotation.
The “pruning” argument just bothers me because WoW has a long history of many classes being incredibly simple. This is nothing new. Are some classes equipped with an incredibly simple rotation? Sure. But so were some classes in the early days.
If we want to talk about class flavor abilities that have been removed, but don’t ultimately change things (as far as your rotation for example). Thats different, and while I understand I consider them minor.
I just see the pruning argument thrown around so often, while seriously questioning what the person is even referencing when I look at my keybind list.
What does it matter what kind of rotation people had in the early days? Not, trying to be salty but if people did not play in the early days they only know one or two types of rotation. If that is the rotation they feel in love with then having it changed is a problem. It also does not matter what your personal keybind list is. It is great that you have a large list but it ultimately means nothing to people that complain about pruning.
List your keybinds or rotation. Maybe it is the greatest thing ever or maybe it is sub-optimal for how people want to play.
It matters when the issue being talked about specifically is “pruning”.
You can not compare the rotation of today, and call it “pruned” without comparing it to rotations of the past.
If I have a large list…doesn’t that literally contradict people that complain that abilities are pruned down? How does that even work? You can have a ton of abilities, but because they aren’t abilities you personally want to use…the class is pruned?
If you dislike the abilities you have, that is not liking class design/balance. Not pruning.
My class has been pruned and I still have a large list but a lot of those spells are situational. They are not the spells that I used in a rotation all the time. The spells I did use all the time have been pruned away either from my class or spec and I miss a lot of them.
As for rotations it matters when a person started playing. I don’t know anything about classic rotations but I know about mid-BC rotations. Time frame does matter, telling me about something I never played is not going to change my mind.