Nothing really is, not since blizzard stopped reporting sub numbers.
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Because the concept of failure is subjective, in that it depends on the evaluator’s definition of success, their understanding of the undertaking’s objectives/goals.
If the objective is a competitive game, your variables might evaluate skill gradient (apm, reaction time, motor precision, teamwork, etc) or maybe competitive integrity (tournament rulesets, fairness, prize purses, talent attracted etc).
If your objective is purely traction, your variables will be user numbers, user hours, indexed web related search numbers, viewer count*hours etc.
If your objective is purely commercial, your variables will be licenses sold, revenues, profits, expenditures etc. Tons of other potential objectives and definitions of success, from both the customer side and developer side.
A simple example of this is Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. For those that might not know what that is, it’s the 4th movie installment of a legendary American franchise. 180 million to make, 790 million box office numbers. By all accounts a successful investment for all involved, successful production, successful sales numbers. But the movie is doggy doodoo. Never mind the angry customers. It’s a dog taking a big doodoo on legacy.
Exactly this. I know it’s heretical to say this, but I play every day but don’t raid. I level alts and PvP. I know there are others like me, a silent minority if you will who just like to relax and have fun. I wish Blizz would release real pop numbers but they never will.
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Because “herp derp it just got old” is a cop out. Yes there was some burn out and people moved on. But that discounts some of the design decisions that cost them millions of customers.
And the reality is games that stick to what made them popular keep selling out year after year just with minors updates to their winning model(which is what WoW did up until Cata). So just burn out is hardly an excuse for WoW’s decline.
Retail does a few things right.
- The gameplay feels smoother and more responsive.
- The talent system is actually better now
- Multitude of QoL updates that I wish they would just put over in Classic that are harmless (AoE Loot, AH revamp, UI overhaul - toggle for modern/Classic -)
But there are also a lot of areas where Retail fails.
- Game is now designed around fast, twitch gameplay more akin to an action game than an RPG aimed at the eSport crowd (Gogogogogo mindset which I find cancerous)
- Lore is dead and gone. While objective, the story is horrendous and retcons have destroyed the Warcraft universe beyond repair.
- Classes feel generally the same with different names of skills and different sources of ‘mana’ but ultimately are all very similar
I wish I could take the content of Classic and add the QoL and updated features of Retail. I sometimes switch Chromie time to BC or WotLK and roll an alt and just play through the old content in the modern game. It’s very fun until you get warped to current Dragonflight content. Then I just abandon the toon.
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I don’t live in the past. I play games that are currently good and it’s a great time to be alive since there are far better games than Retail WoW.
I’m just over them trying to make the game a single player RPG for all solo content, i got maybe 10 minutes into DF and I was already sick of all the cut scenes and RPG quests. There’s simply better games for that.
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Outa morbid curiosity, what are the active population of retail now?
Not high enough blizzard is willing to publish it 
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About 2.3-2.8M recorded characters have done a M+ in 10.1 as per raider.io
Down from 6.7M recorded characters from season 1 (10.0)
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Rofl. I say it there and you act it out here. I am a real life wizard.
WoW’s design didn’t change. It refined its expansion cycle, leaned into its successful systems, and responded to realities unfolding within the playerbase. Vanilla itself is not a replicable installment for a hundred different external reasons, but even just the game parts of it can’t be replicated with expansions because Vanilla released as a standalone game and the expansions are expansions.
The general outline for them, however, hasn’t changed since TBC, which is the product of work by the original dev team well before WoW had reached commercial peak. The expansion cycle that exists is the expansion cycle they envisioned. And you can call it a copout all you want, but the game aging and amassing iterations carries with it very real and unavoidable consequences and challenges. The leveling process became a disjointed mess after two decades of content being added to an unchanging foundation, and for a while that was a real blemish on the game. Now, however, they’ve ordered things pretty tidily with the Chromie Time system and the “Classic: Spark Notes Edition” leveling system is pretty solid all things considered.
So much this. The UI being “classic” was and is beyond asinine.
This is a relatively accurate description of the downtime of the modern game. I disagree that it’s a bad thing and with framing it as an eSport thing, but yeah.
Lore is definitely off-the-rails. I don’t really ding them for it so much, however. What they needed to do was hire an actual writer to handle the story for multi-expansion arcs, but as it is I just treat it as the product of the hodge-podge of ghostwriters that it is.
This I disagree with entirely. I’ve never understood this idea that everyone using the same mana resource = good, but everyone using a more interactive secondary resource = bad. At worst it’s a wash, but rogues and warriors don’t own secondary resources just because they had them first. It’s one possible building block of a spec’s design, and what defines each spec is how they’re put together. Cakes and brownies and cookies use effectively the same ingredients, but how you put them together produces significantly different results.
But Vanilla classes play a billion times more similarly than anything that came after. I didn’t play MoP much, or Legion or WoD at all, so I don’t know if it peaked even higher, but I have 6 classes at cap in Dragonflight, and am actively leveling one of each remaining class. The only specs I have come across which feel similar are Devastation and Augmentation (two specs of the same class). Even between those two there are critical differences, but I am definitely of the opinion that need to be differentiated quite a lot more. They’re two DPS specs of the newest class, however, so it seems pretty obviously a matter of growing pains with a new class rather than an indictment of general class design. I haven’t seen the issue anywhere else.
/shrug they’ve obviuosly made some major mistakes with that outline
That’s why, when they were still reporting sub counts, we saw several massive drops, not a steady decrease which is what it would be if it was just burn out as you claim.
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Not claiming they never made any individual blunders. WoD is a famous one. I’m not sure why you think the drop-off would be steady, though. I would expect large groups of people to reach their churn moment at similar checkpoints: later in patches, between expansions, after a certain amount of time has passed during a particularly bad content drought, after having enough time to discover that a hyped patch/expansion/system didn’t live up to expectations, etc. Certainly there would also be trickle leavers, but I would expect lots of waves as well.
It’s not just burnout either. It’s burnout and the game and player diverging, or inertia finally losing its hold. How many people do you think played WoW for years when it was basically the only RPG PvP in town, who then started playing MOBAs as they exploded, but who continued to play WoW as well out of habit? Eventually they realize that they’re scratching the main itch WoW was scratching, but better, with League or DotA, and they quit. The specific moment that they quit is probably a moment that was shared among a lot of people in a similar situation: some raid or patch was a particular slog and it caused them to question why they’re still here raiding and keeping up with the gearing treadmill when it was never even their focus, and now their PvP fix isn’t even in WoW anymore. So they quit. Lots of them quit within a compressed timeframe because their circumstances are similar and they’re reacting similarly to the same stimulus.
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Mostly agree with you.
Retail feels (PvP review here only) really arcade-like. Older gamers will know what I mean. Combat is super fast paced and feels very generic. There will be tons of dots on me that do next to no damage and I will live a long time, but it doesn’t feel rewarding at all.
Also, the graphics look terrible. Not so much in general, but the character models. They look really weird and too anime for an older gamer like myself.
I have no problem with LFR, RDF, transmog or some of the other stuff. But Classic does the old style PvP and talents better than retail, which is the main thing for me.
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I agree the game and the old players are diverging, so design differences in some cases in massive ways like WoD and Cata(we don’t know if there have been other major events since they stopped publishing subs), and in others just the constant small changes that add up. Like I said earlier I basically quit retail because it plays like a bad single player RPG now.
And whatever blizzard is doing differently is simply not bringing in the number of players to replace them. So they’re failing at retention and new acquisition, something they were succeeding at for quite awhile after vanilla.
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I can’t post links or I’d be more helpful in that way. I’m not sure how one gains that capability.
Question: is your extension telling you all those posts are from me or my same battle.net account? If so, I regret to inform you that the only character in those results from my battle.net account is this one. So that it doesn’t appear to be working. I’d ask for a link to that extension, but not only does it seem to not work(if understand you right) but it also misinforms you.
Wish you well fren
Shadowlands was nail in the coffin for me. Theres not a very specific reason either but for someone like me who started playing og wrath in like 2011 in the time since then every expansion slowly got worse and worse with all the changes to abilities talent trees and the button gloat for some classes was too much.
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You should be happy you left then. It’s wild, but the bloat has gotten worse. Devs and their favorite streamers/theorycrafters thought it’d be a good idea to add multiple covenant and previous artifact abilities to the button bloat. Many classes rotations don’t even fit on a 12 button MMORPG mouse. The only decent rework I’ve seen has been the paladin rework. The newest class, evoker isn’t too bad on the bloat, but probably only because the devs couldn’t cram in over a decade of old, eliminated abilities.
Yes, me and millions of other people.
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Hey everyone I brought some cheese for this whiney thread.