There are a ton of reasons this is happening and most of them directly point to Blizzard’s choices with P2 and how on edge the Classic community is as a whole with how they’ve handled things since 2019.
SoD is quickly looking like a “okay, you get one more chance” situation with a lot of players like myself.
PVP isn’t fun when everyone is doing more damage than a fresh Era toon walking into MC at 60 does.
Expanding on 2, we don’t have the HP pool to justify the damage output and NONE of the gear reflects this.
FOTM has turned into FOTW (week) with the constant nerfs and adjustments being made. This is almost as bad as what the OG Cata team did during tier 11.
STV isn’t fun for the general population. Sorry, I know some of y’all love this thing, but it’s toxic and has a TON of issues across the board that have been ignored.
STV was the wrong zone to do this in. Arathi would have been more appropriate since, like Ashenvale, it’s a lower population and side leveling zone. Not a main zone that everyone is funneled into for nearly 20 levels of content.
Gnomer isn’t fun. Bellular recently did a good video on how Mythic retail raiding is dying. The root cause from other streamers and WoW enthusiasts for retail is due to the add on requirements, in addition to the time commitment, in addition to the twitch mechanics, in addition to the binary mechanics, etc, etc etc… Why the push to make raiding in SoD move in the direction of retail was made is baffling. BFD was fun because it didn’t require addons, unless you wanted them, and you could easily clear the thing even with people doing green parses. (IE: Pug friendly) Gnomer is pushing that, “must have” addon line and minimum performance requirements above the average player line.
The community is obsessed with logging and parsing. Blizzard needs to step in at this point. Cool, you got a 90+ parse, want a cookie?
MMOs fail when the silent members of the community stop logging in. No amount of changing how we level to 40 is going to change that. Nor will lowering the mount prices.
The issues that are causing people to walk away are simple; getting farmed and one shot in PVP isn’t fun and raiding in a Classic environment should be a relaxing experience and right now it’s stressful.
Everything they did this week might result in a small uptick of activity, but it won’t last. Because you can look back at every time Blizzard does this and their solution eventually reaches a plateau and the activity rates return to their nose dive.
The players who were giving Blizzard their last chance after being jerked around since 2019 are done, and it’s going to take a ton of good will and community outreach to them to get them back.
I thought they were going to make the P1 runes easier to get once P2 released? Like make them all purchasable with gold, instead of requiring a group or requiring to travel all over the world.
This was another big miss by the dev team that should have been a slam dunk.
There are zero catch up systems from P1, you have to do P1 to do P2. And while it doesn’t take that long, that’s still a good couple of days for leveling and going out to get the runes for even an above average player.
I think it took me about 3 days to get my hunter alt 100% during P1 with gold support from this guy. Figure that, then P2 content that doesn’t have the leveling pug scene from launch for SM.
Everything fails when it fails to move in a dynamic world. The PC market is done. Microsoft is going multi-platform. We can repackage this and sell it to billions. PC wow is played out. It really boiled down to peripherals. Steam and Asus forced that hand. Mobile wow will be fun.
Well, for starters, putting a no attack aura around the turn in locations so they don’t get AOE farmed.
Second, put the opt out/ opt in NPCs in the capitol cities.
Third, remove the incentive to farm Mobs during the event so people can actually use the zone for it’s original purpose, leveling.
This was being said from 2014 to 2019 until Classic launched. Just because Devs are doing a bad job doesn’t mean the genre is dead. Classic breathed a lot of life back into it where WoD sucked a lot of it away.
So you can believe this, times are a’ changin’ narrative all you want. But remember, studios still make Metroidvania games 25+ years later. So it’s not a genre or platform problem, it’s a player / developer disconnect problem.
Nothing you said was even remotely true. You can literally level from 1-40 in like 2 days now and getting runes takes a couple hours at most. I literally just leveled a mage from 1-40, got all the runes i needed, and got into gnomer in the course of 3 days, while working and sleeping like normal.
If gnomer is requiring an addon, you are bad at the game. It is a skill issue, and not because the raid is hard, which it’s not, but because you are very very bad. Also, green parsing groups can easily clear gnomer. The main thing that made it hard week 1/2 was mostly just people not knowing the fights. At this point taking fresh 40 alts into the raid and clearing it is pretty normal.
I mean when you blatantly lie on your post and say gnomer requires addons when at most it requires basic communication, it just baits someone to straight up tell you youre probably struggling because you’re bad. Maybe don’t lie in the first place?
And what addon would you possible need for gnomer? Please enlighten me.
1st boss: tank and spank
2nd boss: tank and spank with a little movement and kill some adds
3rd boss: tank and spank but dont stand in an obvious frontal knockback
4th boss: tank and spank with 2 ranged dps moving in and out to bait lightning
5th boss: tank and spank with some movement, a few kicks, and a small stipulation that 4 bosses must die within 20 seconds of each other
6th boss: tank and spank with relatively similar phases, some button pressing, designating someone to kill some bombs, and some minor movement (phase 1 and phase 4 requires a bit of movement from tank).
at what point is an addon needed rather than people just talking in discord?
No it doesn’t. It shows the population is currently rising. Are the number of raiders the same as Phase 1? Of course they aren’t. But that’s a far cry from ‘massive decline’.
Week over week, population numbers on EVERY server have been rising since the start of Ironforge’s tracking of Phase 2.
Numbers will also continue to rise week over week thanks to the March 5th changes making leveling to 40 twice as easy.
Anyone who expected Phase 2 to have the same number of lvl 40s as Phase 1 had in lvl 25s had frankly ridiculous expectations. But nearly 300,000 raiders as of last week is more than fine for a seasonal game mode like SoD.
