When did WoW start to go down hill?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Subscriber Stagnation
It was the first expansion that was not reliably growing WoW’s subscriber counts, only replacing sub losses at a 1 to 1 ratio, with a small bump when the ICC patch released due to Arthas’ massive popularity. This means that Wrath was dissuading just as many players as it was persuading, which caused the stagnation visible on the popular subscriber graph.
“The Merge”
Activision and Vivendi Games merged to form Activision Blizzard in July 2008, just a few months before Wrath. This needs no explanation. We all painfully know this story. The base work for Wrath was not terribly influenced by this event, but all of the decisions following absolutely were.

I don’t think you can really blame Blizzard Activision with that; remember the stock market had just crashed just months before release and people were losing jobs left and right, losing their homes

Bring the player, not the class
Wrath was the expansion where Greg Street introduced “Bring the player, not the class” as the over-arching philosophy of raid design. This was the beginning of the mass homogenization seen in WoW’s class design to this day. This resulted in a loss of class identity, where the only identities players could hold on to from this point forward were raw number output, and the graphical representation of their class on screen. The effects in arena were similar, causing a lot of arena play to feel dull.

Don’t think it was that big of a deal, except the fact that the 1st ever “hero” class did have to be toned down quite a bit, so others could enjoy the classes they loved playing.

Heroic raids
Many other retail-esque systems were introduced in Wrath as well. We saw the first raid difficulty difficulty setting which ballooned into the Mythic system known today.
Heroic raids, continued…
Raid difficulty in terms of mechanics took a massive upswing after the introduction of difficulty settings, giving us extremely difficult Mythic raids which many see as being a product of retail. While I personally do enjoy a good challenge, I can still fully admit this kind of game play is a retail feature.

A new difficulty mode, which I’m sure players enjoyed. I certainly did at least.

Microtransations
The beginning of microtransaction bloat began in Wrath (no, the sparkle pony did not outsell the entirety of Starcraft 2, that was poorly interpreted data) which resulted in the justification for the game to contain an ungodly number of mounts and pets. Someone recently told me there’s over 3,000 mounts in the game at this point in time. I can’t imagine caring about seeing any mount in retail at this point.

I really didn’t mind it, since it wasn’t overwhelming. This is why I felt Wrath was at it’s peak. After that, it started to get ridiculous.

LFD, RDF, LFR
Looking for Dungeon and Random Dungeon Finder were introduced in Wrath, which eliminated any social aspect of formulating a group and also eliminated any open world requirement to travel to your dungeon. This later blew up into the deeply unpopular Looking for Raid apparatus, which is a hallmark of what people believe “retail” to be.

There’s a lot more casual players out there than you think, including myself. Those that couldn’t adhere to a raid schedule and sit at the computer for 3-4 hours playing, really enjoyed this feature. I certainly appreciated it.

Achievements
Achievements were introduced in Wrath, which brought about a massive growth (I say bloat, due to the number of junk achievements) to the amount of instrumental play available in Wrath, which some criticize and being contrary to the spirit of an open world MMO. Instrumental play is defined as a type of game play that’s driven by explicitly listed goals to achieve, rather than choosing your own activities and adventures which is a hallmark of “Classic”

This made people go back and explore and engage in older content. The world was big, yes, but you actually felt some sort of accomplishment for things you may have missed.

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It was bad, terribly bad even, but it had its fun spots. THe fun was more up to you to find, and it was harder because of all the “not-improvements” to interfaces and inventories. I remember haiving fun in Draenor, but I’m an atypical player, and did for instance not touch the Garrison Quesltline at all - Yes this means I played through all of Draenor without a Garison.

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For me I can pin point the exact moment I felt like I was done with WoW originally.

It was near the end of WOTLK, I just remember it felt like the whole game simply became sit in Dalaran and do dailies every so often.

I felt like there were shades of this in TBC with Shattrath and the Isle, but back then it felt like people were more encouraged to leave Shatt and go do stuff in Outland and the Isle felt like a real PvP zone so it masked what became totally obvious in WOTLK.

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This condition will be true of any game you play. Hell, any activity in your life.

Although the sentiment is laudable and more people should definitely be thinking like that I.e controlling their own destiny by doing what they think is fun and not what’s efficient, I was thinking the topic was more trivial than player psychology. Hehe WoD bad :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yes WoD bad - me stubborn!

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Apes together strong.

If you want a serious answer, I had/have fun in pretty much every version of wow I’ve played. Because (leans in your ear like I’m revealing a dirty secret) I like playing wow. That’s why I’ve unsubbed and resubbed like a dozen times.

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I like playing WoW too, but the changes in BfA made me quit, because it felt too little like WoW to me any more. I resubbed for Classic and have had fun ever since. And realize how much I had missed the freedom of Classic WoW.

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lol mecha-panda patriarchy-breakers

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For me, it was WoD. That was when I realized Blizzard used all its established characters and it felt like it was scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas.

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For me it was BFA, in my opinion the most fun i had with an expansion was in Legion. I played classic (rerelease, not original) and i also had a ton of fun in that as well. The leveling experience was done so well and the journey.

But BFA is what turned me off of retail altogether. I still play sometimes because of pvp, but ive recently hopped back into cata for MoP to see how it plays as when i first started playing wow, mop was in middle of expansion.

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WoW has had ups and downs the OG 3 part Classic Trilogy was amazing, than CATA-MoP-WoD were a down turn with MoP being decent, than Legion was arguable the best expansion released, than BfA and SL almost killed the game, now with DF/TWW we are entering a new golden age of retail as the first back to back great expansions since TBC/Wrath.

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For me it was the Cataclysm pre-patch. Something about it just killed all interest I had in continuing onwards. To me, vanilla/TBC/WotLK was and still is peak WoW, warts and all.

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That’s when I ditched this suckhole of a time sink, too.

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lol it’s complete opposite :expressionless:

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Lmao. What could you possibly be doing in classic wow outside of raid logging? Farming gold for consumes to raid log XD. At least TBC offers dailies that give rewards for gear.

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ICC wrath was peak, it was difficult enough on heroic that very few people could full clear but easy enough on normal that almost any somewhat consistant group could defeat the lich king.

The story in Wrath was peak, and it was the last time it felt let a big bad was properly built up through the leveling zones and prior raids while not making the players overly powerful.

RDF is the best feature that was added to the game post launch and wrath heroics had the right amount of balance so that they were fun the entire time.

Cata lost traction for the same reason it did this time, the content was too hard then, and too hard now for what is mostly the same aging playerbase. By the time MoP/WoD/Legion were happening the playerbase was very different than it was for the original trilogy and the game was developed for them instead of for the og players.

So if you ask original players, cata and if you ask retail players, BFA.

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the 2008 financial crisis > merger with activision > focus on maximizing profits over other goals as the markets adjust > switch to demographic chasing and hype to secure market share > Homogenize game and make raiding a guaranteed stage so no one feels left out because hype wasn’t lived up to > switch to microtransactions and whale hunting as a basis for income hollowing out player base while promoting entitlement culture > 3rd parties take advantage of the whale tank and become barnacles > success in game is now more about sinking cash than playing a game reducing sense of enjoyment > sell game to microsoft > ???

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Game fell off to me in MoP, even though I liked the expansion it felt like more of a change than Cata was.

For when the community at large fell off, when they released the original Classic 1-60.

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Also the same expansion when the population plateaued and started to decline and then blizzard promised more “TBC like” Raids and Dungeons that were “harder” and they were, but the wrath babies cried and sobbed so Blizzard buffed the gear to obsolete the difficulty of the dungeons and raids south of Dragon Spine (in cata).

Wrath was the highest subscribers values, but it also saw the least growth of any of the big 3 versions being Vanilla, TBC and Wrath… Vanilla had the best growth followed by TBC with second best growth and Wrath by that standard was ok, but not great, and in reality its kinda been a down hill run since Wrath, because blizzard lost its way in just about every aspect of WoW design.

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Yeah, that’s it. Let’s only ever do naxx! Horrible