I agree with the sentiment, but in truth…the same concept holds true if you look at MMORPGs before WOW. Ultima Online & Everquest were niche gaming experiences that were deeply satisfying for their player base, but had game mechanics that turned most gamers off…which is not efficient from a business perspective.
Blizzard steps in and lowers a lot of barriers to entry for PC gamers with pre-expac WOW, thereby broadening the playerbase of the games before them. (UO set a world record for MMO pop in 2000 with 200,000 users!)
Since then, Blizzard (particularly after merging with Activision) has made changes to the game to continually remove aspects of the game that could potentially turn players away…which they approach by making more of the content accessible…despite cheapening those experiences for the core playerbase.
It’s the natural evolution of things…someone comes up with a great service / product, titans of industry get a hold of it, change the service / product in a way that attempts to min/max monetization of it, and thereby fundamentally transforming it to something different than what made it popular in the first place (See demand for Vanilla WOW)
Totally agree with you on pretty much every point you made. So here’s the question then:
If Blizz is just trying be as efficient as possible financially, they why would they not stick with what originally brought the huge influx of players? If they are min/maxing monetization, then it follows that they would essentially do just whatever would attract the most players. But back in the day what Vanilla had WAS what attracted the most players no?
So the real question is what has changed about the player base to make them less open to the true MMO experience and more open to the serialized version that retail WOW has become? Why was Vanilla through WOTLK era WOW so able to bring in new players, but now that game is just not appealing to the majority of people who haven’t already played? Or we just at a point where Blizz has moved past trying to provide what the majority of players want, and are just trying to be as financially efficient as possible by massively downsizing the scope/complexity of their projects?
The numbers (that have steadily been declining since early Wrath) suggest that the players preferred the older version to the “new and upgraded” version but the stubborn devs just keep doubling down on their track of making changes antithetical to the original game…
It’s not as simple as a 1-to-1 post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc dynamic. There are a ton of reasons why the game started to slog off at that point in time. That timeframe also lines up with WoW’s brief dalliance with pop culture (South Park, celebrity advertisements, product cross-promotions, etc.). WoW was hot for a minute…and then it wasn’t. That had zero to do with the game itself and everything to with the pop culture zeitgeist moving on to the next “thing.” This happens all the time.
Think about the video game market in general. Since mass production of video game hardware became a thing, how many paradigm shifts have we seen in that 30-year period? Too many; there’s always something newer and cooler less than five years away.
I do believe that design decisions played a small role in people leaving, but not nearly as severe as people seem to need to believe. Too much other stuff matters more. Hell, you know why my raiding guild ended during the Wrath years? Because most of us finished college, got married, had kids, got jobs and moved on with our lives.
Edit - I would add this: most of my former guildmates who left around Cata ended up coming back at some point, seeing what the game had become and promptly said “Uh, no. Not interested.” If you want to say that design decisions have played a major role in scaring away returning players, I’m right there with you. Most of us don’t recognize the game at all anymore.
I can agree with most of that. I myself got married and have a 9-5 job and a kid. But I still play WOW and raid.
One paradigm shift that I definitely think has come about is the idea of “maining” a particular game. Back in the early 2000’s id say up till a few years ago many of the most hardcore gamers specialized in a specific genre if not a specific game. As an example I myself enjoyed playing many games, jumping in to Starcraft, Halo, turn based rpg’s, etc…but I dumped at least 90% of my overall gaming time into WOW, and then later did the same thing with League of Legends. So despite being a lover of games in general, I always “mained” one. And I was definitely not the minority in that.
Why do you think that kind of gaming style has gone out the window over the past 5 years or so?
Also why do you think WOW recoiled from pop culture exposure?
There are a couple of challenges retaining your player base…
There will be a certain number of people that will get board with game…regardless of how good it is. In this case, changes keep it fresh and introduce new challenges
Your player base is getting older and are incurring additional responsibilities that make it hard to devote the same amount of time and attention to continue playing. There are a lot of old WOW players that like the fact that they can now jump in for 30 min and complete a dungeon, BG, or knock out several quests
You’re looking to other demographics to replace the losses, which means you have to compete with the other forms of entertainment they are into.
The Activision CEO made a public comment a while back about World of Warcraft having to compete with Farmville. People thought he was crazy, but didn’t realize what he meant was that the people they were looking to expand the game to were casual consumers of entertainment…and WOW had to match that.
So essentially we’re saying that we are at a point technologically now that we will probably never ever see a top production studio create and support a game primarily geared towards a true “gamer” ever again?
Guess I’ll have to rely on passion projects like Pantheon to restore my hopes.
Sure, plenty of people do. I worked full-time during the height of my raiding life (I was 3-4 years older than most of my guildmates and the guys who were my age almost all had wives/kids). Families introduce new priorities into your life. For me, I just lost interest…all this other stuff that had come into my life was more interesting than WoW. That’s how it is for me now (I don’t WoW, I alternate between LoTRO and D3 maybe once a week or so) and that’s how it was for the guys I raided with in TBC/Wrath.
There’s just so many options now and the prevailing attitude of this generation is to have no attention span whatsoever. They whip their phone out and hundreds of thousands of games are available to them while they’re on the can or at lunch in the cafeteria. Games like WoW just won’t appeal to most of them.
Because that’s what pop culture does…it moves on to the next thing. Warcraft, boy bands, you name it. Something else gets cool and people move on to that.
Yes I its co-op to me and racing another guild to see who finishes is a good kind of competition because there are no real rewards for doing so. When there starts to be real prizes (even things like titles for firsts) you inevitably end up with some people who take things too far and rather than just working towards doing their best also start working on sabotaging the other side or finding a way for their side to get an unfair advantage. Not everyone will do this of course but when a win at all costs attitude becomes prevalent you end up with a community that most people would no longer refer to as a great community. Now usually small rewards like titles or unique cosmetics dont cause a general shift from positive to negative but there is a tipping point somwhere when the rewards for winning become large enough that a win at all costs attitude becomes generally acceptable.
I would say in this case you felt most connected because you were active, spending lots of time together with people and building positive relationships built on accomplishing a common goal with a group of other people… ie teamwork. I also think you would have had a great time even if you were the only progression guild on the server.
When I talk about exclusivity as a divisive force it comes down to how exclusivity can create virtual classes of winners and loosers. Better gear doesnt just make it possible to work on the next raid tier, but it also makes many other things much easier, things where you still ineract with people who dont raid. Things like farming mats goes faster for instance, or when you want to run dungeon x for fun you have an easier time getting a spot in a group vs someone less geared that would have had the spot otherwise. In vanilla if you raided you also got to destroy most people in pvp.
When the advantage of raiding spills into all other parts of the game and the advantages get noticeably large you create what amounts to a loosing class out of people that were not even involved in a competition. Read about all the people who talk about how seeing gear inspired them to also go get it, well for lots of people that was simply not an option. When you start turning people enjoying a co-op game into virtual loosers for things they didnt or couldnt do you usually end up with problems.
Watching competition would be the primary source of entertainment. Most people dont actually do the competing when it comes to sports. We also have just as much history showing that people always accomplish far more when working together rather than against one another.
First of all, in WOW, how can you go about sabotaging another guild you are competing with? Or even sabotaging an individual player?
Also you said that the reason I enjoyed my WOTLK experience had very little to do with the competitive aspect and most to do with my own social habits/behaviors, which actually supports my claim that being very competitive DOES NOT harm the social aspect of the game.
And lastly you talk about a class of people who feel like “losers” because they feel like they lost a race they were never even part of, but here’s the thing, EVERYONE GOT AN INVITATION TO THE RACE. Literally every single person has an equal opportunity to participate in all content in the game and the only question is do you want to or not? What are your priorities? What do you enjoy doing with your time?
I hardly ever play basketball because I didn’t play in any leagues after like elementary school. But a lot of my good friends played in high school and college, so when they invite me to come play a quick pick up game with randoms at the park I smile and say yes. We almost always lose for obvious reasons. Do i get upset when I lose? No. Why? Because it’s not that important to me, and I don’t spend time practicing. If it was important enough for me to care about winning and losing, I would take more of my own time to play and practice, but it’s not. But I still play with my friends because it’s a SOCIAL experience that I enjoy.
I’m not sure about the technological part… But the landscape of gaming has changed dramatically since WoW was launched in 2004. Top production studios (especially US-based ones) are much more concerned with getting games out quickly and having as many ways to make money as possible within the game.
It’s mostly Japanese game companies (Square, Nintendo, etc.) that are taking more time with their games and releasing more “games for gamers”.
Honestly, the most money to be made in the modern gaming market is in micro-transactions, and P2W. Just a fact of life in gaming now.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re heading for another Gaming crash like 1983. But, casual is king.
I think we’ve seen less advertisement of WOW in pop-culture because it’s not as relevant with the prime demographic of gamers anymore.
The concept of MMORPGs (playing online with a massive number of people, in a perpetual world) is not new tech anymore, and the casual entertainment industry has done a really good job at selling itself to the prospective consumers of MMO games like WOW.
Fortnite is the new WOW of the ages 7-19 demographic…and there will be another game that up-seats it as the mainstream title that found a way to tap into a massive audience.
That doesn’t mean that deep satisfying games can’t be made…they just can’t require huge sums of money that put you in a situation where you’re having to make a game palatable for the lowest common denominator, in a massive audience, in order to break even on the project.
Every player wants to be the hero - Every game makes money by making you feel like the hero.
There are still amazing players, though.
Just with Transmogrifications - you can no longer tell at face value who is good and who is not.
Also - Content is better known.
WoW has actually become HARDER and more complex - the only reason we perceive it to be easy is because information is more accesible.
Wait for Classic to come out - the participation rate for raiding, and PvP will be massive.
Near 90% of capped players will be raiding.
As an MMO? Probably not; they cost too damn much. There are still a lot of good, mostly indie, dev studios putting out some solid single player (and multiplayer, but I tend towards SP) games though. The “games for gamers” market isn’t dead, but you can’t go looking at Blizzard, Activision, EA, or any other big company for that market anymore.
There are plenty of players who don’t want the game telling them what a great hero they are at every turn.
That’s been a somewhat frequently stated reason for liking Vanilla’s design around here. It didn’t paint the player as the god slayer hero of the world every expansion.
Even in other games. the Resident Evil 2 remake has sold 3 million copies and it certainly doesn’t make me feel like a hero. It makes me feel like I’m barely getting by on no bullets in a zombie apocalypse simply trying to survival and get out.
There are some game genres where being all hero all the time doesn’t really suit it.
Indeed. In an mmorpg this type of storytelling makes no sense. When everyone is a hero, no one is a hero. It’s okay to be part of something greater than yourself. To have players stand above, be exceptional, give others something to aspire to.