It seems that the majority of the players are upper 20’s through their 40’s now.
With Mobile games on the rise and companies shifting focus to those cash cows how is wow going to handle the needs of the younger mobile gamer youth and try to get them engaged in this game?
Can WOW survive on an aging server population that diminishes from year to year.
Lets be honest, servers are not what they used to be. There was a time when I could only play with others on Skullcrusher, and that was enough. Then that changed slowly and server groups were introduced, with cross server groups, etc, etc.
Now we are at the point where even with server groups it seems like we are in ghost towns except on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays for raiders.
Honestly, and god forgive me for what I am about to say, maybe a mobile pet game would draw people in. They could play the mobile game and earn rewards in the desktop version. Seems like a win-win.
Honestly, I think the ship has sailed and we are looking at the sunset of our game. I hate to even say this but I think we have 1, maybe 2 expansions tops left.
Warcraft is long, dated, boring. People want flashy, new, updated and immersive. It’s why FF14 has been gaining popularity after their rebuilding.
But truth be told, the MMO genre just isn’t the ‘‘it’’ thing now and the masses flock to free to play shooter games now with loot boxes - cosmetics that make your character look ____ or do weird things.
There really isn’t anything WoW can do short of a total overhaul.
(Before someone says it… no… new blood don’t want CLASSIC or Wotlk)
Yep. Doesn’t help that WoW’s character customization leaves a lot to be desired. Without even logging in to the game it’s obvious how old and dated it is.
That’s the truth though, the amount of comments I read on this forum and others that I’ve flipped through when I was bored, where people bring in their friends for the first time or are new, really just get turned away from the game after the first few minutes most of the times.
Too many others that get into this topic mistake new players for returning players and put in fixes based on their own gripes with the game and not seeing it from a new player perspective.
The graphics are dated, the genre isn’t the hot item now, and the game isn’t twitchy enough for gamers who jump from one FPS to another every couple of weeks.
I started playing WoW in patch 1.2 and played with 7 IRL friends that also made up the core of my old guild. As of right now, I am the only one who has remained playing and I haven’t been able to keep new friends playing around for very long. I dragged a few new IRL friends into Legion, but they stopped playing a few months down the line.
I still often game with the 7 IRL friends I used to play WoW with, but we tend to play a few matches in RTS games or we end up playing games from other genres that have matches or modes of play that don’t require much long-term commitment like a MMORPG.
Most of my friends ceased playing because we no longer had the time to stay on top of everything like we used to. Some of them weren’t content with only having time to play for a couple hours, if that, a day. Two of my seven friends were altoholics like I am and enjoyed sinking a bit more time into the game to play on additional characters, but they weren’t fans of how easy the open world content of the game started becoming after TBC. One friend is a lore-hound that swears by the lore and faction asymmetry of old and wasn’t a fan of the Horde and Alliance becoming more similar to each other. He’s big on Warcraft I through III though, just not a fan of where WoW has gone.
Concerning the more recent IRL friends that I have convinced to at least try WoW, most of them just don’t believe that they have the time required to stay on top of things as much as they want to in order to remain satisfied and invested. Perhaps MMORPGs are merely falling out of grace as the former target market is evolving in accordance with their lives? I’m not sure, tbh.
Go back to a sandbox type WORLD, get away from the Hero/Champion model.
The best part of Vanilla was feeling like you were IN Azzeroth, that the world existed independently. Over time players have become more interested in the meta and care a lot about mechanics, tuning, and balancing.
Dungeons have become more like hallways.
Content is linear and gated.
The entire universe now revolves around the player, instead of the player exploring a fantastic world.
The sense of wonder and immersion has gradually given way to constant anxiety over RNG and sim parses.
Without that suspension of disbelief being active and carefully nurtured… WoW is just a hugely complicated game where your success is measured by your ilevel.
For the US at least, life expectancy is well over 70. Looks like there are a few decades left. Don’t forget that people have more time to game once they retire.
What Warcraft needs to bring in and keep new blood is release a faction warfare expansion like Battle for Azeroth but have all the kinks worked out in advance, instead of spending the first two patches working out the kinks while bleeding subscribers. Retention would have been a lot better if they’d had the war mode balancing mechanisms at the beginning of 8.0 instead of 8.1, and similarly the Azerite system sounds like it will finally be worked out in 8.2, which should also have been done before 8.0.
Update graphics because 2004 look like terribad even for the most modest machine of nowadays. Update lore so the whole bubble times just die out because they translate ot nothing more and nothing less than literally not caring about lore in a RPG. Stop treating new players as the dude whom loves to grind a lot so he can fly in outdated content or make people grind useless stuff so they can fly on new content. Stop giving allied races overpowered racials and re-do the whole racials system would also make people less likely to quit.
Oh and give people content because warfront, island expedition and cassino m+ rewards is sure a way to make people just leave the game.
Ion has told us that the reason there aren’t many new players is because potential new players want leveling tuned to be a constant challenge to the most experienced and well-geared players, that levelers want to die a lot and get crushed unavoidably by wandering elites. They want to have to stop and eat and drink between every trash pack. They want to have quests so hard that they can’t be completed on their own, even if there is no one to group with.
Well, he didn’t say all of this, but it’s certainly what the forum echo chamber has been trying to convince us new players want.
Maybe he’s right, and there’s tens of millions of potential new players out there who were so thrilled to hear they had 3 expansions of pathfinder to grind through that all they needed was level scaling to sub.
Personally I think wpvp throughout the life of the game has been one of the biggest discouragers, along with dead zones and constant confusion.
Nah we got a few more expansions than that left. That being said I don’t think new blood is going to roll into WoW very often. The game has had a long history and very likely anyone looking to pick up a MMO has tried it already at least once if not a few times.
There’s not much Blizzard could do other than making it a different game entirely to draw new people in.
![:sweat_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/sweat_smile.png?v=6" ":sweat_smile:")
That’s the truth though, the amount of comments I read on this forum and others that I’ve flipped through when I was bored, where people bring in their friends for the first time or are new, really just get turned away from the game after the first few minutes most of the times.