So by this logic Everquest and Wildstar should have slain WoW years ago.
What happened?
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Why aren’t there 20 million people playing WoW today?
What happened?
Lots of things happened.
Fortnite happened. Lootboxes happened. Players grew up and left MMO’s behind.
The list goes on forever.
But to imagine that LFD was the main cause of millions and millions of lost subs? LOL, no. If that were truly the case the other “WoW killers” would have launched with no LFD (they did) and blown WoW out of the water (they did not).
I don’t have all the answers, but these simplistic hot takes are not the answer either.
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Eh, WildStar the “WoW killer” was just not that appealing in general.
I never said it was “the main” cause, but it, and the garbage that came with it, was certainly one of those reasons. LFR, coupled with welfare epics, gutted WoW, progression, and gave rise to the pervasiveness of WQs and of AP/azerite. Not to mention it was a very big reason for the collapse of the community in WoW.
There’s definitely a lot of factors at play.
1,it’s an aging game and you can only keep people interested in a game for so long, no matter how good it is.
2, the game has gone through many changes throughout the years that either 1 or multiple things have turned lots of people off. A lot of people didn’t like the huge ilvl gap with WotLK and the 10/25 and heroic boss fights. A lot of people have gotten tired of the grind of dailies. A lot of people got tired of the overall repetitiveness of each patch/expac. So on and so forth.
3, The world has changed and not everyone has the same amount of free time they had a decade ago and some just don’t feel like paying a recurring fee when they can just buy other games for 1 price, especially when other mmos have been doing a F2P setup that allows people to play all but some amount of content without a recurring fee.
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Fortnite and Lootboxes happened years after LFD was introduced. Players leaving MMOs behind isn’t an argument when a lot of people playing today are older than you’d expect. There are many many different reasons why players left the game, but LFD was absolutely a major contribution to players leaving in the end - it and LFR brought with it a very different sense of disconnected community that doesn’t mesh well with MMOs.
There are 2 things wrong with your arguement:
- LFD Can’t exactly take credit for all of the money they made from WoW. They make money before LFD.
- It definitely didn’t cost them 0 dollars to implement. Between Development, QA, Cross-realm support, Content modifications(like reworking quests), interacting with customers, and other maintenance, It likely cost them more than a million dollars to implement.
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Don’t forget that the game stopped growing in Wrath and grew little during it - it may have hit its pique in Wrath, but it also didn’t grow as much as it had in the past. And it stopped growing before LFD hit.
Again, I think there is a lot of “I don’t like X about WoW therefore everyone doesn’t like X about WoW” going on in this thread.
Sure, a lot of people think that LFD and LFR ruined WoW. I am unconvinced that retaining no LFD and no LFR would have saved those millions of subs.
Again, I have my pet reasons why Blizz screwed up but I rank LFD much lower and I do not subscribe to any simplistic silver bullet easy explanations.
LFD absolutely hurt server community, and LFR made that worse. Anyone arguing otherwise is flat out wrong. Whether or not that’s a good or bad thing for individuals is subjective, but for the health of the game as a whole it wasn’t. It made it easier and more convenient to run group content, which lead to nerfing of the content which lead to quantity over quality for content when it came to the lower end of the difficulty spectrum.
And no one knows if we’d have still had those subs or not if they hadn’t turned the game into what it is now, but we do know what it is now isn’t working.
nope, it is hardly the ‘doom’ that naysayers try to lay at its feet.
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And after.
Which they made back willy nilly.
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LFD was three things at once:
Dungeon finder
Dungeon teleporter
CRZ
CRZ most definitely is the worst offender. There were no more consequences when people would ninja items.
The teleporter hurt the game, but less so IMO.
A dungeon FINDER was already in WoW with the meeting stones. I still think a server-only FINDER would have been more successful because you’re still on a closed server.
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It’ll be interesting to see if vanilla has stood the test of time and classic can maintain even the population of vanilla at say patch 2.0.
Everyone and their mother were putting out an MMO at that time also.
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The biggest issue is that LFD was also trying to fix dead realms. In retrospect blizzard should have just bitten the bullet then and gone with servers mergers, or as they called them linked realms.
Probably. I can see both sides of it.
It may not have saved them, but it certainly helped drive people away while garnering no positive outcome you can name.
And even if you don’t think it (coupled with a few other things) wrecked the game, you have to admit that it dramatically altered how it is played.
And, regardless of the mechanics of gameplay, it DID help ruin the community.
Let’s be honest, if Blizz took away LFD tomorrow there would be a riot and probably a huge loss of subs. I can’t really imagine a scenario where losing LFD today would drive a resurgence of any kind. In fact, I believe it would be a net negative.
So yes, LFD changed the game. Is it a major driving force behind loss of subs over the last ten years? I would say not as much as some make it out to be. There are other variables that I believe carry a lot more weight in that regard. There are definitely lots of individuals who rate LFD as the reason they left the game, but I don’t see that opinion as mainstream.
Again, I am neutral on LFD, I don’t really care one way or the other.
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