Yeah, sure. LFD only came out a year before subs started to decline though, as opposed to 5 years for BGs.
People attribute the subscription plateau and later loss to all sorts of things; usually whatever their own grievances happen to be.
WotLK, in the grand scheme of things, was really not fundamentally different from BC for the overwhelming majority of the players. Nitpicking over design choices made in WotLK and agonising over vague, intangible, immeasurable concepts is useless. People forget that the majority of the playerbase is extremely casual and ephemeral. Issues causing people to quit and less people to join and replace them have to be a lot more pressing to that crowd than what most of the forums come up with. Basically, what I’m saying is that people claiming that easier raids and RDF caused subscriber decline are generally full of it.
The fact of the matter is the game was likely never going to far surpass 12 million subscribers. It wasn’t so new anymore, it was getting competitition from other MMOs (and a LOT of new game releases in general), and most potential WoW players had already played it or at least heard of it. Essentially WoW had reached market saturation. It already drastically increased the size of the MMO market but there’s only so much it could keep doing that. Looking at Vanilla’s subscriber increase from 0 to ~8 million and assuming they could have kept going with that growth if only they didn’t do x, y, z design decision is delusional fantasy.
As for the eventual subscriber losses: those started happening when Cataclysm launched, so if you want to look to reasons for people quitting it makes sense to look at that expansion. China got Cataclysm late and when Cata launched there they also saw immense subscriber losses, so it’s unlikely any subscription losses can be attributed to WotLK (and by extension RDF); they basically tolerated 2 years of WotLK content drought but quit when they got Cataclysm.
One possible reason is detachment from the story after the perceived “main Warcraft villain” of Arthas was gone, but I doubt it. We can also blame the remake of the old world, but it’s not like the world zones were teeming with players before they remade it by 2010.
One thing’s for sure: PvE content was suddenly a lot harder across the board in 4.0. Cata dungeons were seriously difficult on launch and if you didn’t have a coordinated team with voice chat it was a struggle. Tier 11 raiding was also particularly difficult, too; even on normal mode when compared to WotLK raids. When Blizzard tried to address the sub losses they started with across-the-board PvE nerfs, so evidently they believed high PvE difficulty was a big part of the problem.
I think there’s a different issue that doesn’t get talked about a lot. Going into Cataclysm Blizzard did an immense gamewide review of class design that generally made every spec more distinct and more involved. They largely moved from static rotations to dynamic priority systems. I played a Hunter and a Paladin back then. Hunters went from static cooldown-based rotations with mana with highly dynamic resource-based priorities with focus, with generating and spending being tied together in moment-to-moment management. Protection Paladins went from a static 4-ability rotation (“6969”, referring to the ability cooldowns) to holy power generation/spending and active mitigation. Holy Paladins went from just Holy Light spam to holy power management and a diverse toolkit of many different heals. You can see this across the whole game going into 4.0. Classes got a lot more involved, intricate, and active compared to what we had before. This especially applied to tanks and healers.
Now I liked the new class paradigm a lot. But, again, the overwhelming majority of people who play this game are extremely casual. Like, 1 hour every few days. You have collectors, achievement hunters, roleplayers, etc who do no competitive content whatsoever. Many of them like simplicity and disengagement. They don’t want intricate, complex class gameplay. There was a lot of angst about this new class design direction at the time and I think it was a big part of the subscriber losses.
I won’t be able to find it now, but at the time there was a very popular negative review on a store page (Amazon, I think) for Cataclysm. It was very long and detailed and had a ton of attention. The #1 primary complaint of it wasn’t “erosion of social fabric”, “loss of prestige and challenge in raiding”, or any other weird specific and intangible reasoning the pseudo-hardcore classic purists like to come up with. It was the newfound busywork across classes (particularly healing) coupled with the difficult dungeons. I still wouldn’t have done it differently; I think they needed to move on eventually and the old class design paradigm would have become stale anyway. But a lot of people felt the game was leaving them behind. And I think this was a far more tangible and pressing effect to a far greater part of the playerbase than any wishy-washy nonsense about “no server community” or whatever due to dungeon finder.
TL;DR (this ended up being a lot longer than I thought): People try to tie the Cataclysm subscriber losses to all sorts of things. There are plenty of people in this thread trying to tie it to a broadly well-received WotLK feature added over a year before any sub losses started to come up in Q1 2011. All that loses perspective of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the playerbase is extremely casual and has low engagement in any competitive content or even group content in general. IT’s likely that the sub losses were due to a) a high PvE difficulty spike and b) classes becoming far more involved and active across the board.
P.S. Also new MMOs like Aion, Rift, and Star Wars: The Old Republic started to come out. While none of them did great, that’s quite a bit of added competition that largely didn’t exist in Vanilla/TBC. Rift in particular came out in Q1 2011, smack dab on top of the first inital large sub losses.
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It’s also worth noting that the only other subscription-based MMO that’s held up in the long term and has been seen as a comparable competitor to WoW is Final Fantasy: 14. It has a dungeon finder, flying, extensive cross-server features, extensive linear single-player gameplay through guided, streamlined zones, no excessive reagents/“RPG elements”, plentiful UI conveniences including quest guides/POIs, plentiful teleporting, transmogrification, streamlined and modernised classes (and even the ability to maintain several classes on one character), limited grind mechanics, level boosts, etc. It has every modern MMO convenience that the WoW Classic purists despise and insist brought about the decline of WoW, yet it thrives alongside WoW as the only two MMOs in the industry that can support a subscription-only model.
Again, blaming “modern conveniences” such as RDF for WoW’s decline is mostly delusional fantasy. The average WoW player is extremely casual and non-competitive and doesn’t care about the intangible, ideological issues that come up in all these discussions.
P.P.S.:
- SW:TOR launched with a limited server-only RDF. It performed so poorly and server population declined so sharply that they had to make it cross-server due to player demand. This generally stabilised things but ultimately the game had to transition to a hybrid FTP-P2W/subscription model to keep running.
- Wildstar launched in 2014 and was explicitly aimed at having minimal conveniences and appealing to the (pseudo) “hardcore” classic WoW crowd and restoring the “true MMO experience”. It failed so utterly it shut down just 4 years after launch.
- WoW itself was far more “casualised” than everything that came before it even in 2004.
People have been complaining about various aspects of “casualisation” from the very beginning and it’s pretty much always been out-of-touch delusion.
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Players want 3 hour corpse runs and 2 hours to travel to their dungeon.
We might as well just go player EverQuest.
This is a very accurate assessment of the subscriber decline during the Wrath to Cataclysm transition. I was there and I remember the nuclear meltdown on these forums during early Cataclysm.
Healers went from spamming their fast heals every GCD to having to manage their mana and triage in 5 man heroics.
10 man normal mode in Cataclysm was such a large difficulty spike from 10 man normal ICC it seems like half the raiding guilds in WoW disintegrated within a few weeks.
Most 5 man heroic pugs had to CC just to survive each trash pack on top of failing boss mechanics usually causing wipes.
Cataclysm ironically caused an even worse sundering of the player base between casuals and hardcore players who seemed to have a mutual disdain for each other. Hardcore players tended to enjoy the beginning of Cata and casuals absolutely despised it.
Removing RDF is going to accomplish:
Killing off the rest of low pop classic servers.
1-70 will be an entirely solo experience for players actually wanting to level.
Boosting boosting services.
Split the community even more with reductive game design and even more exclusivity relating to max level content.
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You sound like the level 58 DK character in Nixxiom’s machinima videos. 
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Done.
Subs continued to rise even through the “content drought”. Subs slowing down at that point was NOT LFD, it was the content drought. Even BEFORE LFD, Wrath’s sub count was slowing down, because it was reaching the critical mass of the audience. LFD probably was part of the offsetting of the content drought. Subs did not begin to drop until Cataclysm.
So while it may have happened “After”, correlation does not exist, because they did not decline for the first year of LFD, and many other things happened in that period.
Give evidence you were an actual rank one like you claimed a year ago. If not you are just all bull and lies like you are lying right now. Retail would suit you better btw since it has all the changes you asked for.
Just because the final patch lasted a long time doesn’t mean it was the, “middle”.
And how exactly is my PVP history relevant for this topic?
Everything is proven by the graph the opposition has posted. Do you need help with reading the graph?
No it doesn’t. Are you just even reading my posts? You should actually read them before responding to me, because your comments are non-productive and don’t make sense, given my positions.
I want no LFD. Retail has LFD. Classic Wrath does not.
The irony is that people who want LFD gameplay should be playing retail… it is NOT the other way around.
Post evidence of your claims you made non stop. Oh that’s right you can’t because you are full of it lol. It’s ok Bloom, I’m sure you get some bites with your totally sincere attitude especially during a big announcement like Wrath.
It’s ok retail will be waiting for you.
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Right, well whatever personal grudge you have against me is not relevant for this topic. It won’t be relevant for any topic actually. If my opinions bother you this much, I suggest using the ignore feature.
I will not respond further to you in any thread. Take care.
Rank one forum poster, maybe. All he does is spam in here day and night.
No, because Im one of the ones that specifically came back for LFD with ICC being the cherry on top. #altlife leveling with LFD.
But GG m8.
seems like you need that same help youre wanting to give lol. we get it. you know how to argue with the same thing over and over even after being shown how wrong you are countless times.
the cringe is stronk with this one.
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