People been sayin this line since the game came out with all the people complaining about how their dark gritty rts was now a stupid kids game piggybacking on the mmo craze. If theres one thing thats as constant as death and taxes, its people complainin about BACK IN MUH DAY.
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I wasn’t trying to present it as some truth, it was just a poignant quote I heard, I probably should’ve included that it wasn’t from a Blizz employee. But, I mean, I think there is some truth to it. There’s a lot of changes, especially recently, that seem like they’re trying to limit the top end players
The problem with talking about “roots” and “core audiences” is that everyone thinks THEY are the roots and the core audience.
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The OPs post is posted just about every expansion now for the past several with my memory seeing rhe sentiment showing i WOD first.
First the point of RPGs especially mmorpg is character progression…which loot has a,large part to do with.
There has to be a hamster wheel to some extent…that’s the genre of game we are playing.
The problem with the OPs post and most posts of the kind…
How does (s)he know the core audience? I’d argue its not that simple. You cant say well this,how i play the game so it should just cater to my needs.
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I think the success of WotLK and Legion both laid down foundations in bad directions.
WotLK kind of started a shift towards more linear, you’re the hero story telling and Legion brought in rented powers and soulless by the numbers system designs.
And the result reminds me of the line from the matrix where the smith is explaining how they made a perfect world at first and nobody liked it. Everything seems hyper perfect and purposed to give you the perfect movie set experience, but the world feels hollow now.
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They have been out of touch since the end of wrath…but the good news is that I still touch mys…TMI
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I don’t think WoW has a core audience. Thats kinda what happens when you try to appeal to everyone. Not gonna say if that’s good or bad but it will get you a player base that wants many different, often conflicting things in their game.
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I’d love to know how many devs vote on or how these bad decisions get pushed through. Do they actual believe in these decisions? Are they under pressure from above to do certain things?
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The problem with discussing WOW’s decline is that nobody is going to take an objective look at the entire picture.
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Unfortunately, modern game execs don’t ask that question so they can make the product that is failing succeed again. They ask the question so they know which game to kill off.
Sorry, but this such a poor way of looking at it, and it’s not really proving the point you think it is. How many retail realms are there? A quick google search shows roughly 240+ (no idea the exact number). Classic has… 41? Of which, literally 1 is marked “full”.
The AQ event was just released, so classic is seeing a large spike in players. It will die back down soon until Naxxramas drops.
Not saying Classic is bad or failing or anything… Just saying that comparing the status of 41 realms (which probably over half are dead realms. I know my classic realm is) to the status of 240 isn’t really fair.
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What is the objective look at the big picture? Not trying to be a jerk just curious.
GD and Reddit are not WoW’s core audience.
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i’d say yes, they are out of touch. my proof is the declining sub numbers year on year. notice how wow subs only went up and stayed up after classic was released? retail wow has become an episodic game where you come for a few weeks and then leave while classic is a game where you come for the story and gameplay and stay to hang out with people.
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When I said nobody, I include myself. But I will go as far as to say there is no core audience. WOW appeals to many different groups looking for different things. Maybe the game is being developed around trying to balance too many systems with each other. In the end, nothing feels like it is done right.
EDIT
For example, what happens in pvp affects pve and vice versa. When a change is made to one, the other is affected.
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That is partially true. You had to step into Heroic (Edit, required re-reading) to get the Mythic level rewards, if I remembered correctly, from said “phone game”.
It was still a Raid or Die fiasco.
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It never did.
It was created as the easy MMO anyone could play.
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Every end of expansion lull sees an increase in player apathy, restlessness, boredom, burnout, whatever you want to call it.
Threads like this are an extension of that.
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Most people also love to ignore that back then Blizzard pumped sub numbers with a payment structure in Asia where if you buy 5 hours of game time you count as a “sub”
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I think World of Warcraft’s core audience is waiting for TBC servers. You know when the game was great. The perfect expansion to a great MMO.
If they make Retail like TBC/Wrath then they will appeal to the core audience again.
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