You guys have friends? Haha…ha…
…
Whats that like? 
Only one of my IRL friends even likes WoW but all he does is play low level zones for the story. He never does end game stuff. Kind of sad. The friend who got me into WoW in 08 hasn’t played in years now.
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There are so many other things to do now - all the streaming services like netflix and online reading services like Amazon kindle. Although I have kept playing wow since vanilla, after completing the Dragonflight story line it just seems more of the same for me and I really have not played much after that.
A lot of people just overthink this question. The core of the game hasn’t changed and people just grow tired of it. You level up, start rep grinds, complete repeating daily quests, run raids and dungeons for power gains.
The core of the game never changes. They moved on. The ones that stayed have fun or the other group is just pissed all the time and can’t leave because of their FOMO disease.
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My friends from the UK got me into the game but they decided to marry each other rather than continue playing and totally ditched me. (jk they didn’t ditch me, just got busy with life things.)
I went to the U.S. realm thingys for ping reasons and I’m still here I guess.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
I think the drop after Wrath happened for three reasons:
- the veteran players from vanilla and tbc started to burn out naturally
- the WoW phenomenon in popular culture want to decline in after peaking for a year naturally. General population just doesn’t enjoy regrinding when the new expansion starts. My guild just stopped playing when Wrath ended.
- it was a natural conclusion to the modern Warcraft story popularized by Warcraft III.
It also didn’t help that Cata tried to pull back at group content accessibility with difficult raids and heroics at launch, which was an opposite direction with Wrath.
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This. No game can stay “the it thing” forever. MMOs do not appeal to today’s young gamer and those that were playing back in WOTLK no longer have the time to commit numerous hours to a video game. WOW was a unique phenomena that will not be replicated again in this genre.
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My friends didn’t quit after Wotlk. They played all the way through MoP and loved it.
WoD was the dealbreaker. I can’t even get my brother back to the game, and he’s the one that convinced me to start playing to begin with during BC.
Hot take - Cata has old world flying so it’s better than Wrath. Dungeons were actually challenging too.
Nah, MoP wasn’t popular with a lot of people at the time, because people were giving Blizzard crap about pandas and the general tone of the expansion, along with the endless stream of dailies with endgame progression tied to them, and it continued to bleed subs which was a trend that started in Cata, and it lasted until Isle of Thunder released, then the bleeding all but stopped for a while. The sub loss wasn’t excessive by any means at the time, but it was still constant.
The wait between SoO and the next expansion was also one of the biggest content droughts this game had ever seen up until that point, which resulted in more people leaving. Most of them came back for WoD though and the player base was over 10 million again. 6 months later, that number was cut in half. A few months after that, they stopped reporting their sub numbers completely. Estimates around that time were about 2-3 million players, I believe, and still dropping fast. Most of those people never came back.
MoP is remembered way more fondly nowadays as a result of past and worse expansion blunders, but it wasn’t always this way. MoP was and forever remains my favorite expansion, but at the time I was in the minority.
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exaggerations
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I really dont understand when people say this since there is only like one set of choices of talents for optimal performance in any expansion that people choose so it dosent matter how many choices you have
That because of the community , and wow is not a respectable game … I think CoD is more respectable than WoW
The two biggest factors are that:
- The main story points from the RTS era were resolved with the defeat of the Lich King.
- Raid accessibility (and dungeons to a lesser extent) took a major hit.
A lot of RTS fans who were around for the story left for #1 because everything else that came out since feels like fan fiction without a new RTS to lean on. A lot of more casual friends-and-family raiders who didn’t care much for the IP itself left for #2, moving on to other more accessible games or real life commitments.
I had a couple of friends I started with. One quit in Cataclysm, the other MoP. WoD was the end of my friends, I made a lot through OQueue but most didn’t come back and the ones that did didn’t stay.
Many who grew up on Azeroth grow out of it, if that makes sense. Average and median wow player age is somewhere in the 30s depending where the data comes from (impossible to know for sure since Blizz doesnt care much about age, just whether your credit card goes through).
Those who have stayed found reasons to, good guilds, friends, pursuit of progression, streaming, etc.
When my guild calls it quits I will be graduating from wow as well, but we’re mostly in our mid to late 30s now so I think we have a few more heroic/mythic tiers left in us before we need to retire from adventuring lol.
Finding a “home” in an established mmo is hard though, depending on what your goals and interests are I would almost say it’s more involved than finding a job. Video game hobbies are all about passion so finding a like minded cohort is extremely important, and the goal centric gameplay loops of wow just doubles down.
Even finding a casual social guild is not easy, casual and hardcore are sliding scales of mental and physical investment and it’s all relative. Are you going to be so casual you never want to group? Do you want to pursue things eventually? How many people are with the team? The questions and complications are endless.
All this to say, it sucks that your friends moved on OP, I wish there were better advice to give, but it just comes down to how much effort you want to put in to finding or building a place for yourself in wow, or finding the motivation to move on from it.
I too have noticed a decrease in social connectivity within WoW as time has progessed. Some people that I played with in Vanilla that I considered life long friends are either no longer in game or have lost contact. There has been a significant decrease in popularity of online internet chat rooms and meaningful online connections as whole. I think it’s this new generation and a sign of the times. I hope everything will return to the way it was in early 2000’s but that doesn’t seem likely.
I haven’t had a friend in game since MoP. I play alone or with stranger pugs in DF. I’m sorry I don’t have helpful advice. Unfortunately its just a sign of the times.
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I actually quit during WotLK.
ppl just get older and do other things
the game is a million times better rn than it was in wotlk.
No way. The story was a million times better in Wrath. No comparison there. Not even close.
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ye the lore was great in wrath ill give you that.
the gameplay imo is just way better these days. Even just playing wotlk classic feels… bad.
not enough to do.
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