I was really surprised to see the direction this short went in - I suppose if you’re going to burn bridges, may as well go all-in with Combustion.
Of course it’s all true.
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Part of me hopes that Blizzard will see how many people feel the way Carbot does and rethink their approach to the game, focusing on building a strong community rather than milking the wallets of die-hard fans.
But another part of me knows that this was inevitable in the profit-driven system we currently live in. Blizzard aren’t being evil, they are just doing what makes sense according to the profit motive. “Greed is good”, after all.
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I don’t disagree that Blizzard shares responsibility for the reduction in community feeling in the game, but several things seem disingenuous about this video, particularly that there should be some acknowledgement that the community has also changed.
I didn’t play 2006 wow and I only got to level 30 in Classic, but many of the complaints I saw repeatedly were problems that could have existed in the original game but didn’t. Things like the world buff meta, dungeon boosting/spamming, extreme class elitism. People were different in 2006 and, frankly, worse.
It was kind of sad watching people knowingly optimize the fun out of a not very difficult game, but some things can never go back to how they were and knowledge cannot simply be forgotten.
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I didn’t see those complaints present in OP’s video, so I think the issues Carbot is taking with the game are different from the issues you are hearing about.
I agree with a lot of what Selare is saying and I also think it kind of tiptoes around the fact there is a multi-million dollar industry around World of Warcraft right now that influences it heavily. Streamers tell impressionable players how to play, websites rose, fell, and fought one another to have the most cohesive databases to find anything and everything, data miners work diligently to get the traffic for the first rollout of news, YouTubers and other influencers churn out videos on every whisper, murmur, or speculation in real time so they can be first and get clicks.
Other than that my one comment is the hazy “Group Finder” floating in the background is such an ok gamer take at this point.
[Edit]: Yes I know a YouTuber not pointing out YouTubers are part of the problem makes sense.
[Edit2]: I think it also goes without saying that I think the “Superfan” who subs in vanilla and stays the whole time is a minority bordering myth and expecting the game to capture the hearts and minds of your entire friend’s group for 16 years is a little unreasonable and has definitely contributed to the “Aw, all my friends left” mentality.
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I just came in here after looking at the thread title, to say:
The Game
I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread, with a comment that I don’t expect that Blizz will make any changes to building the game around a time metric system, and that’s probably my major complaint.
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Yes, that’s more or less my point. I think what this video presents is nostalgia for a time in his life, rather than a point in the game but that it is framed as the game changing around him.
It has changed, of course, but I’m guessing that he’s changed more. He’s no longer drawing in his spare time, he’s now a self-supporting animator who was invited by Acti-Blizz to collaborate on making a game product for them. His life, and the time and energy he has to commit to this game has changed dramatically. He and his friends used to have all the time and energy in the world to play and now the game is old and played by old people with old people schedules. Not to mention that WoW is much less of a social network than it was not because it lost features but because of the rise of free competitors like Discord. And also because it’s old and non-trendy.
The thesis that Blizzard’s newfound greedy monetization of mounts and such is what heralded the ruin of WoW just strikes me as willful ignorance. Blizzard has always pushed monetization as aggressively as was acceptable at every point in the game, just that the standards customers were willing to accept and pay for have become more permissive over time. The old wow loot cards are functionally identical to loot boxes. It’s just that it was harder to notice for children who had limited money to pay for them and there was little to no coverage from wow news sites/channels because they didn’t exist yet. Not to mention that children are easier to fool with thinly obfuscated gambling products.
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Yea that’s kind of why I canceled my sub. Once my time runs out in October I’m going back to 07 scape. Wow just feels like an on rails theme park ride now with an emphasis on keeping people playing rather than having fun
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Seeing the conveyor belt of players doing Dungeon Finder while Stormwind has a few AFK players definitely gave the “Haha Owie” feels.
Otherwise, yea to blame this game’s decline on transactions alone would be disingenuous, there’s a whole slew of other problems (both internal and external via players) that has cause this almost 18 year old game’s decline.
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I’m going to say that a lot of people who play WoW these days probably aren’t going to be able to join and maintain a guild with at minimum 40 people and rely on them almost exclusively so they don’t have to “LFG PLAGUEFALL NEED 1 DPS” spam when Friend Number 4 is busy with their child/mom/other game/work/school/whatever.
WoW is an old game and people grew up with it, and grew old with it. As someone who used to spam LFG I would do practically no current content without the group finder system because I just don’t have that kind of time-- and I’m not really alone in that.
The community in this game has also shifted towards a more “I play by myself or occasionally with 2-3 friends regularly and the rest are randoms” and whether you want to blame that on the state of finding groups in the game now or people’s real life obligations is up to you.
A lot of people want to blame Blizzard for changes to systems that they made over time when the reality is that it’s far more likely that times and people changing necessitated the changes Blizzard made.
And as Wolf said, in the past few years I’d blame the decline on the game on far more different things: people moving on, a lack of customization/systems that other MMOs do have, the state of the story, rent-a-systems from expansion-to-expansion or even patch-to-patch. Dungeon finder originally came out with what? 3.3? Didn’t WoW hit a record high with MoP or something? I don’t think it got as high as it did with Wrath but I could be wrong- I haven’t thought about the numbers in a long time.
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My takeaway from the Carbot Video isn’t that it’s glorifying Nostalgia or demonizing Monetization.
It’s a commentary on the decay of the community.
The community started strong at first. It really needed to given how vanilla worked, and that doesn’t make vanilla stronger or weaker. FFXIV proves you can have quality-of-life tools like LFG/LFD/LFR and still have a strong, thriving community.
The video shows how the game lasted such a long time before the sense of community began to break apart. It started with just the one dwarf vanishing, and then over time more of the protagonist’s friends left until they were left playing alone. Then they discovered that the game doesn’t really promote a community anymore. It’s become a money printing factory, more focused on microtransactions.
The video didn’t even allude to the game not being fun anymore, in my opinion. Granted this has all been what I took away from the video. Art is subjective. We all see what we want to see, I think.
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This is actually how I kinda saw it too but there was also a weird fixation on store mounts and boosts too.
There is an overall sense of community decline that everyone is seeing but I suspect how each individual interprets that decline is different. From toxic playerbase, LFG queues, warmode, boosts, borrowed powers, currency grinds or whatever.
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I think its possible you are each finding different problems with the game, and all of them are indeed real problems that have to varying degrees led to the changing and shrinking of the community.
Yes, there were many more issues and changes both in the game and the playerbase than he listed in his video, but I can’t imagine it’d be easy to represent some of those in the dialogue-free video that is his style.
As for the monetization: I think you make a good point that people just let Blizzard get away with a lot more greedy bs than in years past, rather than Blizzard suddenly becoming more greedy than before. I think the end result is still harmful to the game, no matter the reason.
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finally, i’ve become myth
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Welcome to the annals of horrid, smelly cryptids.
I was always here, wedged far inside, buried deeper than sin.
I think it’s a cute, heartful video about one person’s personal experience with a decaying community that’s made a number of people very defensive (not so much here, mind), and that knee-jerk defensiveness says more about WoW’s current playerbase than it does Carbot’s video.
I don’t recall MoP breaking any records, but given how fond Blizzard is of casually tossing around “record high” it wouldn’t surprise me if they said that at one point.
The actual subscriber data they used to release is actually really interesting.
Sub count hit its highest point, over 12 million, in late WotLk (when dungeon finder was patched in) and early Cata, and then immediately started to decline with late Cata having fewer subs than late TBC.
I had also totally forgotten that the record low, just over 5 million, was in WoD (because of course it was) and that they quickly stopped reporting sub numbers after that point (because of course they did).
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I dunno, the game has definitely changed and not for the better. I don’t feel like it was any one thing, but those straws add up.
Also, cosmetic cash shops never bothered me. I find it strange people tend to focus in on them so heavily.
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yeah a lot of the video’s complaints are focused on boosts and cash shop mounts. it’s a very WoW-boomer sort of issue.
people don’t want to admit that the cash shop cosmetics, the boosts, or LFG didn’t ruin WoW. WoW hasn’t changed; their lives have. They’re no longer 14-year-olds sitting in their room on summer break, able to yell for mom to feed them chicken tendies. They’re old now, they have jobs…
It’s why Classic is just a novelty. People will go in, relive some of those experiences, clear everything in that expansion, then quit. They can see the old content that they might fondly remember, but they can never re-capture that lightning in a bottle. They can never go back to being that teenager watching ytmnd and browsing 4chan while waiting for their raid to summon everyone.
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Like I said before, this wasn’t my take-away.
When the Cash Shop first comes up, they’re showing off mounts. The player and their friends are all still there and smiling on their regular mounts, even after the dwarf leaves. It demonstrates they were still having fun with the game and didn’t mind the cash shop stuff. If anything it might show that the dwarf left because they didn’t like cash shop stuff.
Then we get to Shadowlands on the stack of expansion boxes, and then the crowds thin out and all the other friends leave. Cash shop stuff is still in full swing. The main character even asks people about joining a party. No one responds. It very clearly shows a deterioration of community, particularly when you see the claw pick up the one player on a motorcycle mount who gets dropped into a random party for LFD.
Classic comes back and some (not all) of the main character’s friends rejoin them to play again. It’s at this point we see how BC wasn’t left unchanged, how monetization has begun to slip into it. That’s where the video ends.
If anything the video (to me) shows the deterioration of community as well as modern Blizzard being unable to leave things that are fine and working well alone.
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