Its perfectly feasible that they could have kept increasing sub numbers if they took a different course…or didnt get bought out by Activision.
I think they thought they were invincible going into cata. Those bad cata decisions just kept putting themselves deeper and deeper and then they couldn’t find a way out.
Also, lots more competition didn’t help.
4 Likes
This is what actually happened.
By ICC, the game turned in an endless, mind-numbing grind for badges to get gear so you could raid. Dungeons were trivially easy, and was the first expac where the “s**u go go go go go” mentality truly settled in. Heroic lockout suddenly mean nothing for dungeons, and it got so bad that when Cata launched, everyone revolted because dungeons required CC.
Then the nerfs came and the rest is history.
LFD will kill WoW again.
I have. And you are doing your best to exaggerate them. They are not perfect. But they are way closer to an actual 1 to one exoerience than what you are trying to make them out as.
This is the truth. I have actually created ignore lists of players on my own server. Made enemies because of the discussions i have had with some. It sucks that i have to ever even see them again. Yes i have had idiots in lfd. Not as many though. Most are very pleasent. Not a lot of conversation in either. Some are a lot. Both. The social part for or against lfd is a total fallacy. The arguments ppl make up are based on what ifs that they turn into facts.
1 Like
You completely missed my point. I didn’t say anything about a new expansion bringing a bunch of changes, I said every patch in Wrath brought huge changes. Every. Single. Patch.
Cata changed the entire game when it launched but patch to patch wasn’t all that different besides the introduction of LFR at the end.
The only reason to run Ulduar once ToC launched was for the legendary, completely killing the PuG and casual guild scene. People were also running ToC 4 times a week so you really had to be hardcore to tack on a full Ulduar clear on top of that just for a shot at frags.
This isn’t a “my opinion” thing, the forums were filled with people complaining about the 4 lockouts a week of ToC.
Are you seriously trying to argue that subs flatlined in Wrath because they hit some imaginary ceiling and couldn’t go any higher? And why conflate Classic server performance with factual data from the original Vanilla-WotLK sub numbers? I’m not arguing how popular TBC-C is but original TBC’s successful growth is right there in real data.
I personally love Wrath and enjoyed my time playing it significantly more than original TBC but I wish people would stop pretending it didn’t have some serious flaws and set the stage for a lot of later missteps.
We can speculate as to the exact why but the straight up fact is that subs barely grew and then flatlined throughout the expansion until the Cata lead-up. Since a ton of people starting playing in Wrath, that means a ton of other players were also leaving.
1 Like
If it truly was the downfall then it wouldn’t have sustained and would’ve seen the crash that cata saw. But it sustained the ENTIRE EXPANSION.
Market saturation isn’t an imaginary number, but it is very difficult to pinpoint and I won’t pretend to guess what that is for WoW. That 12 million player peak was probably as high as WoW could ever get. There is a significant barrier to entry for WoW that many other games do not have and only so many players will try the game.
For the average player back then. Especially a new player, would they have even cared about the LFD tool at all? I don’t think so. Subs tanked in Cata because heroic dungeons and normal mode raiding was too hard. It destroyed the Pug and casual guild scene.
1 Like
WOW was always built to be accessible and somewhat easy to be honest most people forgot it came after Everquest which make anything wow hardcore look like hello kitty iland.
It was built from the ground up to get the casual market.
WOW was always built to be accessible and somewhat easy to be honest most people forgot it came after Everquest which make anything wow hardcore look like hello kitty iland.
It was built from the ground up to get the casual market.
This is true but WoW (especially early years) requires time investment. Some people don’t want to do that investment, also another thing is the Sub was a turn off with an accessible gaming market and the rise of FPS games dominating.
Please stop putting words in my mouth. Where did I was that Wrath was the downfall of WoW? I feel like you’re trying to so hard to stereotype me into some TBC bro and I don’t really understand why. It’s particularly funny because Wrath is one of my top two expansions along with MoP, yet I can be objective enough to recognize the expansion’s flaws for what they were.
It could be argued that a year of 30% ICC buff and 15 minute AoE fest heroic dungeon clears contributed to making the blowback from a return to harder content as severe as it was.
That doesn’t excuse the absolutely disastrous job Blizzard did with tuning that first Cata raid tier between 10s and 25s or that they really went too far in scaling up dungeon difficulty of course.
WotLK was famous for alienating seasoned players to the point where new players coming in could no longer mask the impact of older players quitting.
Which is it?
Ummm, how else do you explain the sub numbers leveling off? It’s either that or no new players coming and we both know that ain’t true. Just because you don’t like how it sounds doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.
Lol. Wrath was when the sub count flat lined. The new players got offset by the older players being absolutely put off by what Wrath did to the game.
“Wrath baby”. Ring a bell?
1 Like
Pretty sad considering hello kitty island now is relatively hardcore.
There really is a Hello kitty island??!?! (that jokes was going on before wow launched I really didn’t think it was a real game).
lol. no no. I was just saying while WoW was the scrub MMORPG in the eyes of everyquest players, the players of today/Wrath babies took scrubbiness to a whole new level by viewing Vanilla as tedious, grindy, etc. haha …that’s all I was saying.
Hello Kitty Island? That’s some serious stuff right there.
ahh I kinda miss EQ, friend got me started on it when it first launched (Bristalbane) I can still hear the starting song in my head…
When WoW first launched, I was playing MuDs at the time and was told, “hey there’s a graphical mud now for scrubs like you.”
I remember those (also BBS’s) when I first started playing I also was on dialup (dear god the zone loads).