Just go look at the character creator for dracthyr. LMAO
They should have saved themselves the money and had visage form be a choice between all the wow races. Instead we got drag queen story hour and body type 1 and 2.
The feminization of wow is a big issue and leads to the feeling that this game is not what it once was. So players who return to try it out leave or play classic. Even the new starting area for new players has you reporting to mommy from the get go.
In contrast, look at WoD and the aesthetic it had. That led to a spike of 10 million subscribers from the 5-6 million low of MoP.
And despite what you hear this recent cultural trend is not popular. It is not even popular in America, and it certainly isn’t popular in the rest of the world.
WoD was bringing back some big name charcters. But they had no solid plans for where to take the story and that made them cut the expansion short. Seriously go watch the WoD Blizzcon panels. We were promised so much yet they delivered on less than a quarter of what they talked about. Same with BFA and Shadowlands. Stories had little substance and no legs. BFA also wasted Azshara and Black Empire potential.
I hate to say this, but the Blizz of the days long gone has given way to a brand new development team, brand new employees, all brand new, most of whom have no personal experience with ye olde WoW. The “old guard” is gone, and so is the quality we’ve come to enjoy with WoW and WoW xpacs throughout the years (hint: let’s bring back Chris Metzen as a creative consultant - this move alone speaks volumes).
For some it is, small pebbles add to the pile. Dragon Riding is core to a theme throughout this thread - blizz adds something new but leaves behind old things…no small number of sales are to folks that upgrade more than one account each xpac, I know none of my friends that have done that with DF and dragon riding and the limitations on tactical mobility are part of that calculus for them, and me.
What a shock, you mean people don’t love how they basically took The Broken Isles layout and placed it on the floor and tossed handfulls of Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow marbles to decide those are where the NPCs are going to be?
And again, the washed out color pallets they are using makes everything look and feel the same. No matter which area you are in.
Better games with better game directors and devs who listen to their players.
WoD, Legion(the Ap grind), BFA, and SL did too much damage to wow’s rep. Some people are 100% done with WoW.
Continued bad decisions like timegating normal flying.
DF isn’t all that good. At the end of you day, you have 5/7 days of the week with NO open world content, so you once again spend your time in PVP/raids/M+.
Reown grinding sucks.
And Garrosh! Then they threw them away in a single cutscene like disposable garbage characters.
The game has enough content to do in each expansion. The achievement points don’t give enough rewards. It’s just not part of the hamster wheel and this is a problem.
Ya I don’t see the made up politics either. All I see is an unappealing npc/creature. If I don’t like how the vehicle looks… I wouldn’t purchase it. I don’t like how the new race looks… so I am unwilling to play it. It’s not hard to understand. I asked them politely several times to address it. Not sure if they ever will.
I have personally have lost trust with this company. I can’t speak for other players. They had a chance to make a stellar product with more time and funding. They didn’t want that route. They wanted to sacrifice for a quick buck. (Even though the topic of dragons is one of the most popular fantasy tropes. You would think would’ve been worth investing in properly… but who knows what happened there. ) I would imagine it has to be making some sort of profit… still I feel popularity has really fallen off. I know when I checked my list last it was pretty empty.
While I have been losing trust with this company and them offering the bare minimum. Let’s see what they need to compete with… I could go to an ingame store on a console (or Steam (PC)). Any console really… get a game advertising 12 zones several different end game activities. A long with other features for 20$ or…
I could get a WoW expansion 4 zones, no end game activities for 80$ plus a subcription fee of 15$. They have some games on the stores that offer even more than the one example I listed. It’s just a reality. A reality WoW has really cut back content, not only the amount of content but the quality. This is a heavily recycled expansion in many different ways. The only thing that hit favorably with reviews is the Dragon riding/gliding which surprise is a new feature to the game.
Why TF are we talking about sales and logins lol. All the servers I play on are suddenly packed compared to what they were in shadowlands. Haven’t seen these numbers of people logged on at once since BFA. Maybe more than BFA, idk. So not sure where you’re getting your numbers or if your focus is on garden variety normie servers but my servers have a lot more activity than SL. That’s without going into the problems this expansion has. For one thing the graphics arje worse for sure. I see someone complaining about it in trade every other day, and rightfully so.
They gotta go a long way to earning trust. Also, there’s good competition out there now. What WoW refuses to offer that some folks are looking for is likely already done in another MMO.
NPC dungeons, housing, big story content, etc… I believe that WoW still does group PVE content and combat the best, but it falls short with nearly everything else that I’m looking for, personally. That or it doesn’t even provide it.
Right now I log into WoW for story content, mostly. When I feel like story content is dry for me, I don’t log in as much. The repetitive world content is amazing the first month of a patch, but it has incredibly diminishing returns afterward.
Also, I can’t be the only one just kinda falling out of love with the MMO genre. Rewarding end-game content is just not as accessible as I’d like it to be. I replaced raid nights with TTRPG nights and I mostly just log in here until I exhaust the interesting solo content. If my wife didn’t play, I probably wouldn’t.
I think the catalyzing event in Blizzard losing consumer interest was Diablo Immortal. They completely missed the mark on two fronts.
Firstly, Diablo Immortal has every single dirty trick ever used in a scam monetized product. Usually even the worst offenders will pick like 3. Blizzard should have done a pick 3 misanthropic monetization, and not made a 25 scam gumbo.
Secondly, Diablo Immortal experimented with trying to bring classic WoW toxicity and cliques to Diablo, a famously solo player friendly franchise. Servers are hardcore locked down, no transfers, no crossplay. Instance content is group only with no matchmaking, outside of the starter difficulty. To progress the raid codex, you need a set group of 8 players. It effectively could not be more un-Diablo.
Now when people think of Blizzard, they think of this betrayal. Diablo Immortal was more than a misfire. It was a suicide bomb.
In BFA players complained about story being timegated behind progression. They had story chapters/ campaigns. It wasn’t that bad - at least it was linear and everyone had a chance to see the story when it was released by following the questchains. And everyone got the same questchain when it dropped regardless of their progression.
Shadowlands seemed to not only ignore this feedback they made the story an integral part of a singular renown progression. That was even more annoying because it was forcing people to grind out renown, even if it was only 10 renown points at a time to see the story unfold. Many people dropped out of Shadowlands early on because of this.
Even though that was major feedback for players not completing or abandoning Shadowlands. They decided to go ahead with Dragonflight where the story is locked behind Four renown grinds to 30, this is something you can only achieve by grinding daily, weekly, and special scenarios.
They have finally made WoW so inaccessible to anyone who cannot be a full time WoW endgame player, that many casual players feel like there is nothing to do once they hit 70. if there’s nothing but tiresome grinds when you hit 70 where’s the incentive to play? just to see a cinematic that will be released on Youtube as soon as it’s unlocked by more dedicated players?
) I would imagine it has to be making some sort of profit… still I feel popularity has really fallen off. I know when I checked my list last it was pretty empty.