Reasons why WoW fell off in Cata

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
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Multiple reasons. Dungeons were made to be more difficult, 10-man raids were tuned to parity with 25-man raids, and healing mechanics were changed to require a sharply higher skill level.

Meanwhile, the “WoWdad/mom” demographic – which discovered the game in Vanilla and raided a bit in BC until SWP – had finally become convinced they too could clear content after Strength/Warsong let them deep into ICC.

Cataclysm’s changes hit them like a freight train. They couldn’t compete, clearing the broader pug scene and straining guilds. Ultimately, neither the theme nor the story content was enough for many to stick it out, and by March/April 2011 the face of the game had been changed. 4.2 and especially 4.3 were too late for remedies.

Source: I saw it happen right in front of me. Was great for my own advancement but at the cost of the community.

82

RIFT was so good. The best talent system in any game ever. 3 tree slots and you could choose from 11 different trees. Then once you selected the 3 trees, any points you spent in them would unlock skills as well. No restrictions on hybrid specs either. Basically a system that rewarded creativity and intelligence.

Makes WoW’s 8 talent points (rofl) an absolute joke. Truly a room temperature IQ idea if there ever was one. Almost as bland and boring as WoW’s itemization; main stat + stam + 2 x secondaries. Unbelievably boring.

Anyways unfortunately I had to quit RIFT due to pvp queue times in my time zone :<

I will say that I’m happy with the new talent system in dragon flight. A little bit unfortunate that they still feel the need to add restrictions (forcing a certain number of points in class and spec trees) but it’s a major improvement over the current system of colossal fail.

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Well, I’ll tell you the reasons why. It’s not a matter of opinion. If you do your research on the game and the gaming industry at the time you will find consensus about these points.

  1. The big reason. The rise of free to play games in popularity such as league of legends and the changing of the gaming landscape with casino like micro transactions.

  2. Some what of a big reason that people forget about. CATA heroic dungeons were hard and the player base was not prepared for them. This lead to players trickling out early and many of their friends following.

  3. A slightly minor reason. WoW was getting old at that point. Most people had defeated Arthas who was largely viewed as the big bad guy everyone wanted to face off against since Warcraft 3. It was always going to be hard for cata to live up to that hype surrounding wrath.

  4. Game’s always peak and over time start to bring in less new players.

That’s it. Those are the reasons cata fell off. It’s not really hard to understand at all. Especially if you were around at the time.

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  • Leveling was boring You never returned to most Zones
  • Subscriptions still required
  • Gatekept Flying AGAIN
  • Tol Borad / Twin Peaks / BoG was rehashed WSG/AB/Wintergrasp and boring
  • Death Wing destroying the land wasn’t meaningful to Max level. They should have had you level is the old world that was re worked instead of places like Vashj’ir or Deepholm or Lost Isle.
  • LFR ruined the need to actually have a guild.
  • A 3rd rework of talent trees really messed up character identity and feel
  • Raids were Meh
  • RBGs were great but there was still no Arena Solo queue.
  • Nothing “NEW” added to the game to retain / attract players.
  • Blizzard lost focus on the Players and looked only at profits.
  • Archeology was a FLOP it coulda been so good.
  • Dailies were a Chore to keep players logged in, instead of adding enjoyable content.
  • Ect.
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85

Problem Rift had and still has is the terrible optimisation. Can only run 60 + fps on old dual core machine with just as old video cards. Not optimised for newer machines.

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yup entire Rbg’s teams used it just to cap, many players used it to do weekly daily’s if Dungeons or whatever, and alot of people even played arena with it.
it shined in WoD, but it started kicking in during cata.

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Old Azeroth died. Friends quit.

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-every wow expansion has a System&Gameplay which be liked by some / hated by some, people keep quitting and new players keep joining, but it’s impossible for an expansion to suddenly force +60% of playerbase to quit no matter what happens UNLESS game involve real money trades.
-when people see things that break rules yet the company does nothing. “bots & gold selling/buying” those people will quit.

pre2010 gold selling existed but wasn’t famous.
2011~2012 advanced bots joined wow, gold sellers shined & they was able to spam whisper you on free accounts.
2013~2014 everyone is now familiar with the awesome bots, most player used bots themselves cus why not? it lvl me it get me gold while i’m working/sleeping/studding.
2015 to get rid of gold sellers! blizzard started to sell tokens, with all the boosts available in raids/arena, As the game literally became Pay2win in non-direct way & then the game is no longer able to keep healthy player numbers, while at start of any expansion people buy it to try it but they realize that things are still the same as RMT Regine supreme.

classic is following the same path, classic had millions of player who did quit cus of bots swam in 2019, those bots filled the market with gold selling, gold buyers bought that gold to spread it into community via gdkp and now the game looks like a Chinese farmer dream, you can pay to level, pay to get arena gear, pay to get raid gear and who’s to blame? is it just blizzard? Ofc no, community is at fault, if you ever boosted or got boosted or joined GDKP as buyer or as booster it means you joined the circle which leaded to wow destruction in retail and now it’s leading wow classic to it’s ruin. such selfish/greedy community will always drive away any new players and won’t find replacement for quitters, eventually game dies.

in the end, we players can login just to have random fun, doing anything with guilds/friends, trying to achieve something, or just to chat, but if you login a game where you see “bots bots Bots, gold selling at finest, Boosting at every direction” you’ll lose all your motivation. Inb4 game token arrive in classic cus you can’t stop the inevitable.

89

Class homogenization. All class identity was lost at this point.

Too many flavors of raids. Felt obligated to run the same raid multiple times.

Washing machine of gear. No more expansion BiS at the start. Each raid had huge upgrades which led us to the insanse MoP numbers.

Too low of a floor. In Classic, to do the first main raid you had to do X, Y, and Z if you wanted to see Rag die. In Cata, just wait for LFR to watch the big baddie die from a faceroll of an encounter.

PROS: Questing scene in amazing IMO. Story lines and zones were really cool, even if they removed some of the old stuff from Classic. Just would have been nice to have Chromie available to relive some of the old content without it only being accessible from private servers.

But being the Questgiver in Tarren Mill, speechless.

The worst part of it above all else, was the let down. It felt like a extension to keep us playing more, without really progressing the overall story. So many projects that had players hopeful, dropped without any more notice (CoT expanded, Stormwind Raid, Underwater World raid, etc.)

Personally, I was probably one of the most let down players. I worked hard to get a server first overall for leveling. Commited to taking the game to another level to see how it all went, only to find out that Shamans were so poorly balanced for phase 1 of Cata that top guilds weren’t using ANY Shamans.

Consider I started raiding as a Shaman in TBC… I didn’t play most of Cata. Tried again in MoP and after that, casual 100%. They lost my interest in anything “new” from then on.

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Ah, that i didn’t know. It certainly was not as refined until cata from my perspective. I really didn’t see it at any ratings until WoD… Tho thinking bout it now, maybe that was because they dumbed down the game tremendously in WoD? or maybe they just made the bot more advanced? maybe its both.??

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from a technical point of view, honorbuddy enabled custom scripts to work on it Allowing players familiar with coding to make bot playing flawlessly for them in any possible way, i know a friend who made a script for that bot to reach 2200 in 2v2 when real humans couldn’t achieve that easily.

from my personal experience, i believe that the garrison in wod forced everyone to create many characters to get more gold through it and most players sought bots for that reason, later on those players realized that it can be used for everything and not just leveling.

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Was that in WoD? I really didnt see much in the way of botting in arena other than kick bots until WoD. Maybe it did happen, but it was way way more rare in Cata / MoP. Heck even Wrath had bots, but was mostly wall clipping fly hacking underground gathering bots.

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bots been crawling under wow skin since 2006, and was increasing with time, same goes for gold sellers but from what i witnessed is that both really shined in 2011" bots & gold selling"

but my whole point in my early comments was about:
the more bots & gold selling increases? the more subs decrease
because bots & rmt is the worst Environment to drive players away.

edit: cata also had a nightmare for Hacking, not just flying hack or teleporting points hacks, but i dunno how blizzard failed and let hackers run with 1kill hack, some hackers was 1shotting anything anywhere even raid boss’s. this is just simple example from the nightmare during cata.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/hackers-slaughter-thousands-world-warcraft-flna1c6337604

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94

100% agreed! Yet in these same forums you will see people praising the bots and RMT…

this I cant understand, and makes me ask the question… "If you pay someone to do things for you in a game and dont actually play the game excluding a very small sliver of play or RMT some kind of achievement or buy rating, or something like that, well then why even play the game in the first place?

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“We didn’t do any permanent damage,” Jadd writes. “Some people liked it for a new topic of conversation and a funny stream to watch, and some people didn’t. The people who didn’t should be blaming Blizzard for not fixing it faster (4 hours of obvious use is sad).”
And the hacker adds, “It’s not like I added 20000000 gold to everyone’s inventory, and broke the economy; but look at the big Chinese gold seller companies, who are doing this every day. Now ask yourself who is really ruining the game. It’s not us. That’s my justification.”

I mean… He’s not wrong.

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I’ve been asking myself this question from years, but recently I’ve come to conclusion and it’s just my personal thought! can be right or wrong.

1-Not everyone play to achieve something, some people just wanna come home after work or school & login just to do some random bg’s or to group and do 2v2 just for fun or queue dungeon to enjoy dpsing, and since the game depend much on characters stats this lead to “why should i bother waste weeks to gear up if i can just instant buy all gear and spend those weeks to play as i want and have my fun”

2-those who buy fancy items “they just buy what they can’t get on their own” but why would they buy it in the first place? sadly the answer to this question is odd Since everyone among the 8billion people living are buying things they can’t get/make/achieve on their own! i spent money to buy this PC I’m playing game with(i didn’t create this pc) that’s the same logic of someone buy a char full in bis to just have fun with (they only care about how they will use what they buy)

3-buying high rate/mounts/transmog…etc “most people people want to have those just to show Off” and they will try to get what they want to have by any means necessary & you can see some people buy PC worth of 10k $ to use benchmark upload that to show off on social media and never use the pc, it feel the same when someone buy glaives for gold worth of 5k $ and afk next to AH in org 24/7.

4-while some people care to do their own achievements, others just wanna walk with those achievements even if they never did it, when it comes to wow wotlk we will see boosters selling certain achievements boosts and i can guess that many will buy it just to have it “even if achievements is pointless if you don’t do it by yourself” But who are us to talk? we all will do what ever we have to do to get things done.

5- last thing i would like to say is “time = money” some people sell their time&effort (boosters/gold sellers) to get real life money while others who have alot of money don’t wanna waste time & effort so they just buy your time & effort with their money.

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97

That’s pretty simple. Time = money and I value my time more than what I would pay in $.
How long does it take to level a toon? How much do you make a hour? How many hours of work would it take you to pay for a boost? Same for Rating, Same for an Achievement.

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Lets go down the list

Bad raids

Bad dungeons

Classes started to fall off in the fun factor and started the “bring the class and not the player”

Lore and story started to become a joke

Thrall became a heavy metal looking BA shaman to a hippie selling sea shell necklaces in org

Professions started to fall off

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See this part makes perfect sense; its why I think BiS pvp gear should be more accessible.

As for paying for ratings; its dumb to me because its something I think that anyone can achieve to a degree if they put some effort into truly learning their class and also what the other classes can do and how to play with and vs them. When you get there on your own; it just feels good, especially when its your first time on that class because you really progressed to do it.

the people paying for a rating boost are dumb, tho I understand why they want the weapons on some classes like melee its super important. This is why I think the gear needs its rating removed; doing so does 2 things immediately, first it kills the boosting biz harshly and second it makes the arena more accessible and balanced in turn boosting participation. more participation means more fun and games faster and better competition.

As for the pay your way around the content and such, I just dont get it… mostly because WoW characters are like a long term project thar you do over time… why is everyone in such a rush to finish? Dont they know the thing ends? Why not enjoy it?

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i agree with you that putting hardships on gaining things will only make many players take the easier ways to gain those items, this is why gear require rate will promote rate selling and no lfd will only promote leveling boosts / gear boost service.

and you’re right, i do believe that with practice anyone can adapt and achieve his goals, but things is different in term of pve/pvp When it comes to end game raiding? the fights doesn’t adapt on your play-style But instead you adapt vs the encounter to win this is why every single tier raid was super easy in my eyes even current sylvanas mythic, it just need practice and proper conditions nothing more, But when it comes to PVP it’s the opposite, you’re practicing to gain skills/experience and your enemy’s are also doing the same, so it’s too hard to get glad especially when title goes to only top 0.5% among arena teams, i do know a player who was always getting +2400 and never managed to get glad in many expansion, in the end he just bought boost partner to get the title.

but I’m 100% with you on your last point, people need to just enjoy the game and not rush to finish, i still have no clue why do people burn the game for themselves, i was shocked in 2019classic when my guild claiming to be casuals decided to force us to get worldbuffs every week for bwl when we already did clear it first & 2nd time without anyone having a single world buff.

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