You’ll get a bunch of different answers and it’s just a bunch of opinions anyway.
So my opinion is the game is simply old. I know several people that left the game saying “ok I’m done it’s the same old same old”. They didn’t particularly bad mouth the game but just they did the wow thing for ten years and that was enough for them.
One thing no one can really dispute with any credibility is yes there’s been expansion gimmicks (artifact weapons, various borrowed power systems) but the fundamentals of the game hasn’t changed.
You get abilities you learn rotations. That’s it in a nut shell. Then of course you play the content to gear up.
There’s nothing revolutionary about wow.
Not now. It was special in 2004/05. Look at the calendar…it’s 2023.
100% this. its no longer a MMOrpg. its turned into esports game.
add in i been telling people don’t bother because everything is a time sink to get you to pay more. I’m tired of grinding rep just to get more of the story. i’m getting to the point i just don’t care and done.
This is an interesting point. What do you all think- is WoW getting a bunch of younger players in their teens to play the game as they did in the past? In classic, TBC and WotLK I’ve noticed that many of the players are 30ish plus. That’s just my observation, but I wonder if the average WoW player age for retail skews older now too.
Doubt it. My guess the bulk of what is left of this playerbase are the same folks that have played since 2004, or at least TBC, wolk years. Guessing this game will get the occasional new fly by player who will dabble with it for a little while, then go back to games like Fortnite, Overwatch etc, and never look back. Play, and save games also I guess. Where you can pickup where you left off, and not feel left behind like games like wow tend to do. Until catchup mechanics are added anyways lol.
Crafting Sucks. M+ is overtuned and they raised the cap from 15 to 20, which 1% of players who got KSM in SL even did past +15
So they once again built an expansion geared towards people with no lives where the only way to enjoy the expansion is to stop living your life and devote it entirely to this game.
The game has been pushing towards this extreme e-sports mindset because apparently this entire game is built just for one guy named Ion to enjoy and his friends only.
People with wives, lives, jobs, responsibilities in life, are the enemy.
It doesnt matter how skilled you are. I have carried pugs to grt KSM the past several seasons except where I quit in S2 of shadowlands. I got 2100 RBG as a paladin healer.
But apparently skill isnt the only issue. You also need to delete your life and join a clique of no lifers because the overtuning is so bad, unless you can devote the full 8-12 hours every single day to making attempts over and over again until you get lucky enough to succeed, you just don’t.
It’s not even about skill anymore. At this point it’s more like a slot machine to where skill is the currency. So unless you have skill AND a ton of free time to keep “rolling the slot machine of failure”, you just dont get to have anything.
It seems certain people at WOW recognize the need for people with no lives outside of wow to have something to make themselves feel relevant, otherwise they just arent, and what’s the point of devoting your entire existence to a video game if you can’t go and justify your lack of a life by rewarding them with things only attainable by those with no life.
Ever been to McDonalds and gotten the hotcake breakfast platter? It’s the sorriest excuse for a pancake derivative there is. Simply put, hotcakes are gross, and no rational person would go out of their way to purchase hotcakes if given a reasonable alternative. Now flapjacks? Thats something people line up around the block to buy, especially down here in the south. People just can’t get enough of flapjacks and country ham.
So to compare this expansion to god awful poor selling soggy wanna be pancakes is unjust. You should be asking, why isn’t this expac selling like LimeLife mlm direct sale beauty products! Now that is a product people can’t seem to get enough of.
However, this and most of the other criticisms in this discussion weren’t in the reviews, which were very positive. A more mundane answer is that WoW is 18-years-old and has plenty of competition for time and money with other entertainment.
You guys are really blaming the lack of activity on alliance/horde beef? I can guarantee you that the majority of people outside of the forums don’t actually care about the merge.
What they DO care about is:
being able to play with their friends.
not being stuck in a server that is only 20% alliance.
More queues
There is a very loud minority of entitled people that want to prevent Blizzard from implementing possitive changes that actually benefit new players. for once I’m glad that they didn’t listen
not only no new features, but they removed a bunch. this is the most feature-poor expansion since Cataclysm. tweaks and redesigns isn’t nearly enough to bring back people who have quit.
No, we’re blaming the lack of box sales for Dragonflight on an absence of recognizable characters in the marketing and the removal of the game’s core narrative.
Please read the thread, it’s been well-explained, here.
There are recognizable characters, the dragons. It’s just that many don’t have any interest in them.
In Shadowland, you had the promise to see Arthas, Uther and Garrosh with the promotionnals cinematics. It was not really the same league.
As for the core narrative, BfA showed the absudity to keep pushing it: The writers don’t know how to write a proper war lasting an entire expansion.
Even worse: They managed to anger both side.
The Alliance players to not give a proper payback for Tel Drassil.
The Horde players to have been forced to be the villain and going to another rebellion like in MoP.
I still believe that Shadowland did so much damage to the story that it cut the attachment for this universe rather than DF lacking important characters.