Let’s say WoW was becoming too much to consistently make content for, and that it ended abruptly after Shadowlands. Let’s say they rushed in the Void Lords, Naaru light answers, etc in the final patches of Shadowlands and concluded the story in the final patch. From there, they announce that WoW will remain available to play in its final state, but will no longer be producing expansions. Maybe a patch here and there in the coming years, but no big game changing updates. Would you leave the game for another MMO? Give up on MMO’s altogether? Where would you decide to go from here? Just keep playing the game as it is?
EDIT: Alright, and because people can’t imagine this scenario without more detail. Let’s also say the reason they decided to cease WoW content is due to the popularity of Classic / TBC and private numbers show there is much more enthusiasm for these versions than current WoW. So they decide that retail is too detached from those past versions, so will develop a new IP with a fresh team with similar ideas. Granted idc really about a backstory, I don’t ever expect WoW to stop, just playing with a what if scenario.
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I would stay.
This is what we want anyway.
Stop adding disposal systems!
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This is a situation that is too silly to even consider thinking about.
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A time for celebration.
Almost anyone else could handle WoW better than Blizzard could nowadays.
Warcraft is still a strong IP despite it being neglected, in the right developers hands they could turn the show around.
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if they destroyed wow the way they did warcraft 3, people would riot lol
i honestly think they’d lose a LOT of customers and it would be a bad company suicide. that’s my opinion though, i know lots of people want to see that
if servers stayed alive though, i’d stick around, in hopes that someone innovative comes by to give it a rebirth (i can’t see myself not playing zelda, starcraft or wow so it’s weird to think about moving on from any of them lol)
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I’d be sad. At some point people will get tired of doing the same raid over and over and leave. And despite having some very hard disagreements with Blizzard, I don’t want the company to fail.
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It’s impossible to think about this scenario because it is so divorced from the reality we currently live in.
Everything we know about Blizz indicates that they treat WoW as one of its primary money makers. There’s no reason not to continue to make content for the game in its current state.
Anthem was disposable because the game spent something like 5 years in development hell, launched as a massive trash fire, and then failed to meet any of its promised content goals on its supposed “road map.” Of course they decided to cancel Anthem; it was a half-baked idea to begin with.
WoW is still the most popular MMORPG around. We would need to be living in a completely different reality to even consider the possibility of Blizz saying “alright, that’s it, no more WoW.” And at that point, we probably would have had a solid 5 or so years of WoW being in a consistent content drought/decline that we’re acclimated to the idea of “maintenance mode” anyway.
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I’d probably just hang out and play Switch. It is where I spend most of my gaming hours these days anyway 
Sounds like an excuse for a swathe of alts.
Or, perhaps a jump to Classic.
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You mean the same as in almost every boss fight is either in some kind of round room or round platform.
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Good question, to be honest.
Ever since I moved from console to PC gaming over a decade ago I’ve put most of my game time into MMORPGs. And the vast majority of that time has been WoW. I love the genre primarily because I feel like I can put my time into it and not feel like all of that time gets wasted because of a sequel 2 years later or the hype train moving on to a different game. If WoW stopped getting new content entirely, I’d probably do a couple things…
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Take the opportunity to give Roleplay another proper chance. I intermittently did it when I was younger, but I’ve had a lot of trouble justifying it while working full time. If the push for progression dies, I might be able to feel better about jumping into this again, at least for a little while.
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Play WotLK: Classic (or a WotLK Private Server if development on Classic servers ceases immediately as well). I think a lot of Cata and onward changes made this a better game, but I still miss a lot of the legacy systems and design philosophy anyway. My biggest gripe with Classic right now is just that I know it has a finite endpoint. That’s not what I play MMOs for. But if the entire game is now “finished”, well, might as well take the nostalgia blast for a last spin before jumping ship.
Both of these things would be temporary. I have no plans to spend my days playing a dead game indefinitely.
But the “Would you give up on MMOs altogether” question is interesting.
I love the genre. I do. But WoW has been the -only- MMO I’ve stuck with long-term. I don’t know that anything could replace it at this point. Nothing came along that was a strong enough competitor to dethrone WoW, and at this stage every AAA dev studio has abandoned the genre. WoW wasn’t representative of the actual size of the market and they know that now. The remaining big name MMOs are decent, but I don’t know that they could fill the spot that WoW did.
I get enjoyment out of games like FFXIV or BDO (for different reasons), but have never felt the desire to spend more time than I do with them.
Wildstar was the only MMO that I realistically could have seen myself sticking with as a “main game” if I weren’t playing WoW. But that flopped and isn’t an option anymore. Literally the only reason I stopped playing in the first place was because I was approaching endgame and I knew I couldn’t invest the time to raid in both.
So, I’d definitely TRY spending more time in FFXIV (BDO is always going to be a side-game to me, as much as I love its combat), but I do suspect that I’d end up dropping the MMORPG genre down several pegs, effectively losing the “I play them because of longevity” idea.
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This scenario is so unlikely that I can’t even work around how wrong it is.
What’s more likely to happen? First, you’ll see high-level people fired - not just at WoW, but at Activision. Because if you can’t make money with WoW, you have definitely messed up.
Second, in this scenario, WoW development would be offloaded to another company, similar to how SWToR did for it’s last release. One of those companies founded by ex-Blizz employees would likely be brought in to run the game.
Third, we’d finally learn what subscription numbers are like again, including, I presume, the number of people who are still subscribed, fully intending to get back to the game sometime, but haven’t played, maybe in years. If you don’t think this isn’t a large number, you haven’t had a gym membership.
WoW has a lot of ways to get players back before this desperation scenario. I mean, think about the excitement (good and bad) when they announce player housing. (Which I feel is inevitable.)
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That’s interesting… I wonder why it is that FFXIV doesn’t hook you the same way, yet Wildstar (of all games) did… Maybe it’s more art style for you or grind oriented? FFXIV is the only MMO that I’ve personally been able to stick with outside of WoW, and I think it definitely has a load of advantages over WoW and a much better community, personally.
As far as the OP goes, i’d be completely fine with it and would move onto another game or MMO without thinking twice. Would just be weird that WoW didn’t exist anymore is all.
I will say that I quit shortly before hitting endgame (for the reason mentioned already), so maybe I’m being a bit too optimistic about Wildstar. But I should be clear that I’m very power progression motivated in MMOs, and that generally boils down to primarily gear.
Gearing in FFXIV unless you’re running Savage Raids is essentially collecting currencies from entry level faceroll content. Even the (non Savage) raids, which are basically LFR, are currency farms. It’s just a unique currency to the raid. The actual drops from content other than Savage Raids may as well have not existed. That feels exceptionally bad to me. don’t want to farm faceroll content all week for the 2nd best gear. I want to participate in content appropriate for my current gear/skill level and earn gear FROM that content. FFXIV doesn’t really offer that. This is where WoW excels. Even before Mythic+, it had solid options in this department.
Huh? FFXIV doesn’t offer content for the hardcore raiding? I’m confused by this statement because it most certainly does and it has it’s rewards for accomplishing them.
Be glad you quit Wildstar before endgame or you would 100% know and fully understand why it tanked. The grind to get into raiding along was such a chore that most players just quit before finishing it.
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No, no, I’m saying there’s not much of anything between ‘entry level’ and ‘savage raiding’. Either you’re farming their equivalent of Heroic Dungeons and LFR forever or you’re progressing in their equivalent of Mythic Raiding (depending on who you ask, anyway).
I don’t want to play at that (Savage) level, but it’s the only level at which the content itself drops meaningful loot instead of being a currency farm.
I would continue playing WoW for a little bit. Maybe a few weeks or months. Can’t say for sure. But then i would leave WoW and the MMO genre behind. These days i mostly play WoW to waste time while i wait for other games im actually excited about to release. I haven’t been excited about MMO’s for over a decade and none of the upcomming MMO’s speak to me either. Probably because the best “MMO” experiences i’ve gotten in the past couple of years have been from none-MMO’s.
Oh, for sure, THAT I will agree with. It used to be very different back in vanilla FFXIV and Savage Tier was purely for people that were hardcore and wanted to show off the achievement. They kinda did like WoW did in a lot of ways after that.