Most people I talk to experienced playing the game with a RL friend or friends. I did myself, it was truly the peak of the game for me. Eventually though… Around Cata they quit…MoP knocked 1 or 2 remaining stragglers.
Seems to be a similar story with others. “Everyone quit after WoTLk”
Why is this? What happened?
I know the talent system got dumbed down… But Cata did amazing things for old world quests, and introduced transmog…
Why didn’t people stick around?
Out of curiosity is there any of you out there that still have RL friends or family you play with every day?
9/10 times if I mention I still play WoW with people or friends talking about games, I’m either kinda laughed at or questioned, usually with a little laughing.
Sometimes I wish I wouldn’t have stayed, and left when my friends did. As harsh as that sounds I don’t think I would have regretted it. My quest to find a good social circle since then in-game has been a joke.
I try newer MMORPGs and it’s just pointless. None really beat WoW. Especially in combat. Most do way better story but when it comes to core gameplay I can’t find anything to replace it. So I stay, hopeless and abandoned.
way off. mop was booming. subscription numbers in mop was just over 10 million subs.
the straw that broke the camels back was the removal of 10 man end game heroic raiding right at the end of 5.4 mop in siege of orgrimmar. 10s upon thousands of 10 man guilds crumbled almost instantly. the rest hung around and managed to get more players to fill the 20man mythic roster. they went into wod and the elevator slowly went down.
You need to look at the MMO market as a whole. Though I loved Cata, it was a mess when it was introduced, but as WoW’s population declined, other MMOs weren’t picking up all those players. WoW during the WotLK peak was a bit of a pop culture phenomena that nobody, least of all Blizzard, expected. Much of the decline is that unexpected surge levelling off to more sustainable levels.
If those millions of players had all jumped to other MMOs, I’d say the fault was Blizzard’s, but only a fraction appear to have done so. That doesn’t let Blizzard off the hook for some of their truly boneheaded decisions, and the appalling work environment they created, but it does keep some of the sub number declines in perspective.
One theory I have is that most people who started in Vanilla in 04/05 did so while they were in college. By the time 2010 rolled around, most of those people had already graduated and moved on with their lives (e.g. careers, family etc.) and so they just slowly quit.
Now, of course this doesn’t apply to everyone as blanket statements that start with “everyone” are asinine to begin with. But, that’s my theory.
Sometimes it’s the player, not the game. I’m very curious if mmo’s are a generational thing. Whatever the reason might be, I think the game has never had a steady flow of incoming players.
We often use our own grievances as the absolute reason that the population has declined over the years, but I believe the reasons are numerous, and that there are more external factors than internal.
Anyways, I had something similar happen. Good observations OP…
For me personally I took a break around halfway into og Wrath, took a break from the game mid-2009 and yeah… what gives? When I came back to the game around 2015 (on this account, since I no longer have access to the 2006 account) I noticed everyone was gone, not a single player was still left from the tight-knit/socially active guild I was in 2007-2009
I guess you could say I left a vibrant, tightly-knit social scene (WoW in 2009) and when I came back in late 2015 it was like stepping out of a time capsule 100 years into the future… I didn’t recognize the social scene at all, and noticed everyone seemed more anti-social
Cataclysm butchered most of the old zones and left some awful quests in their place.
Why didn’t people stick around?
Dumb plot, thin on the content. Lack of consistent content. Blizzard did a bad job making Deathwing a compelling character and unlike Arthas he didn’t have an entire video game prior to WoW building up his character. To top it off, Cata was when Blizzard started aggressively catering to hardcore players and offering very little to help bad players get good.
Really, though, I think the problem was Blizzard’s content pipeline started to wear thin on players. People aren’t going to stick around for nearly a year between content patches and expansion releases and the lack of consistent content delivery post-release usually infuriated players when problems would be identified and then have no useful solution for months on end.
MOP released with 10 million active subs. By the end of it, sub numbers were back to late '06 era numbers.
This is a fair point but it should be framed as, “Blizzard failed to attract as many new players as they were losing old players.” World of Warcraft enjoyed continuous growth for about six years after release.
WoW’s endgame accessibility sucks. Many people don’t like large-scale raiding, so we don’t want to do that anymore. M+ key system and vault sucks so we don’t stay interested in that for long. Even most people who still play WoW only play at the start of an expansion and then quit before the second season and never come back until the next expansion.
There’s too much gatekeeping of even attempting content for the game to be fun for long.
Add onto that this game costs as much on its own as many entertainment subscriptions cost with a great deal more games/content and it’s a hard sell to keep people paying to play a game that makes it hard for people to enjoy the things they want to do.
My main gripe with Dragonflight is the talent tree design created to give every class a ton of AoE talents, and you are literally forced to take those in most dungeon runs if you want to succeed. It makes me feel like I’m playing Diablo, and while I enjoy Diablo for what it is, I do not want that type of playstyle in my MMORPGs.
I also hate how they made classes a bit complicated with excessive button bloat to appease a small minority of elitists bored of simpler PvE rotations.
When I quit (which might be soon), those will be the main reasons. I literally can’t find a class I enjoy playing because of the forced AoE talents I need to take for the majority of content.
Feels like I’m playing a dps meter parsing game rather than an MMORPG.
A lot of people aged to the point in their life they had no real time for an MMO anymore. Wrath was an end of a huge story that was 1st started in Warcraft. People came to see its end. What happen after that no one really cared anymore. You had your WoW players that just was going to play until they got burned out and those who left after Wrath.
Most of the people who leave now, it wouldn’t matter how great the xpac is, they are simply burned out after playing WoW for so many years. There is a lot of times I will even say, does this really matter anymore, at my age sleep is more important than a stupid online game.
Everyone didn’t quit after WotLK, though there was a gradual decline beginning around Cata. MoP was still good, but WoD was where the steep decline hit.
Vanilla-WotLK was a combination of the initial launch of WoW to the conclusion of one of the more storied elements of the games entire saga. Most everyone knew about Illidan and Arthas so BC and WotLK were explainable successes.
Not as many knew about Neltharion/Deathwing so Cata might not have had as much hype.
The biggest issue that Cataclysm had is that it followed WotLK. Compared to anything released after MoP, Cataclysm is an excellent expansion.
Vashj’ir and Uldum are two of my favorite leveling zones in the game.
My son still plays this game. He was just a youngster when I started playing but he still plays today.
However, my experience is probably similar to yours in some ways. I stopped raiding when the guild I really liked being in disbanded. The people in it, the goals, it just changed. We got older, had families, and I just have zero desire to go down that road again.
When I think of the hours I spent in front of a screen instead of out with people, I’m sad that I didn’t control myself more during that time. If Blizzard treats us as a number, how can we expect others to invest in us? It’s a truly disastrous system they have in place in this game, where you chase gear and timers instead of forming bonds over fun content.
They released info, I think in MoP, that WoW had over 100 million players during its lifetime.
So when you think of that, and how at max it only has 12 million concurrent, and I think WoW pretty much always bled a lot of subs even when it was growing. It just reached the inevitable point where new people weren’t going to make up for the people quitting.
At some point it slopes down to your core audience like any product lifecycle graph.
04-10. Period of six years. Enough time for teenagers and young adults to grow up and start having responsibilities that drag them away from WoW. So, the end of wrath was the point where many of that first generation of WoW players fell off.
The thing Nuwala pointed out about high tier ten man content dying really, really didn’t help either.
