That’s a start but the depth of this problem is far deeper. Stepping into dungeons even not having leveled with any other classes means you don’t know them. You don’t even know how your class is supposed to synergize with theirs. If you chose to play a healer or tank and don’t know how to do it good luck getting patience from seasoned players.
I have mentioned this routinely it’s a 99:1 problem. 99 of your 100 hours played cannot be solo content. Nothing in that 99 prepares you for the 1 that will ultimately break you and you won’t want to go back.
The game needs to go way back in time to EverQuest to understand how to build community. The carrot must be locked behind community participation. That’s the only way to do it.
I wish it was that simple, but I doubt it is. Image the resources the dev team had when 12 millions subscribers were pouring money into the Blizzard coffers.
Now image the resources they currently have with only 1 to 2 millions subscribers, maybe even less.
Blizzard has to design Wow with less content and has more replayability. They are desperate to slow down content consumption and make subscriptions last longer. Even when these game design changes are not well received.
Wow will never be what it was when they had 12 million subscribers.
If that were really the case they would eliminate LFR and cut down the rewards for World Quests and Em caches substantially.
Time gates suck. If we have two choices: Time Gates vs Community and challenge driven Progression the choice is clear. Of course the current leadership will never do that and they will coddle those few casuals who still subscribe pretending that WoW is just “too old” for success.
I agree. The current design has one goal and one goal only: funnel players into raids. World Quests and incursions provide catch-up gear for raids, and LFR is a tutorial for raiding. Casual content is all about collectibles: pets and mounts. For everyone else there’s raiding, raiding, and more raiding. Pre-WotLK had one difficulty of raid content. Now we have four of them. That’s three too many.
Less raiding, more mage tower / M+ / scenarios that actually challenge you and reward you.
Just look at Mage Tower. There was no need to time gate it. It was designed with a specific skillset and ilvl in mind. That’s it! Let players groom themselves on the content if they really want that carrot.
You are right. This very much does benefit the raiders the most when it comes to recruiting availability as well as speed of access.
This lends itself to a large criticism for the current game that is there is nothing for non raiders to really do. Pvpers are the own group that always have that but for the rest of the PVE players? not much is left outside of raids. Mythic+ exists and is definitely a good thing but it simply isn’t enough. There should be challenging world content to tackle. There should be things like the mage tower from legion.
oh I believe we can reach 12 million again. It will take work and time but it can be done.
However I do know it can’t be maintained that high for multiple expansions but I do believe they can keep the game above 10 million if they design the game right.
Well the game is going down hill because companies are ran by accountants who are only concerned with stock value… I don’t work for activision, But I would bet they have less people working on the wow dev team then earlier in the life of the game, All these games count on the fact that so many of us feel invested in the game after all these years,…… me I just want to fly… LET US FLY HOW MANY 120’s do you expect me to have?
Those games were made a decade after World of Warcraft and targeted an entirely separate demographic.
Fortnite has like 80 million players but it’s also free to play.
But the point is, the market is saturated with games now, Warcraft has a pay gate, Warcraft is only on PC, instead of multiple consoles, Warcraft is going to have dips in subscriptions when other games have expansions, content drops, etc.
How many people that were WoW players just play Overwatch now? etc.
There are things Blizzard can do to get more players, like releasing on more consoles or removing the pay wall (Which they don’t need to do. They could be profitable on a really small number of players, like 50,000. They’ve got way more than that.)
Battle for Azeroth literally set sales records.
How many people were making threads like this when they were playing Legion?
How many players normally stop playing 5-6 months after a major expansion content drop? Especially considering they tend to get smashed every other expansion anyways.
Right now people are arguing that because people are prophesizing doom on the forums and because they’ve got less than Wrath of the Lich King numbers Blizzard is doing bad…
Halo and Call of Duty have eaten it since then. This is just how the game industry works. When WoW came out and everybody was playing it, and every bodies little brother wanted to play it, they got to 14 million subscribers.
I can play and have fun in any expansion and have done so since vanilla. The problem I have is so many others I played with have quit due to various reasons involved with this expansion.
They aren’t separate demographics entirely. People who played EverQuest also played Diablo. People who played WoW also played League.
The gaming industry is growing but still working off a shared demographic of 15-40 year old gamers. We don’t all play one game exclusively for years. The games that do the best to capture our interest get the largest share of our time.
At present WoW is doing a horrid job of that.
Well if you count every player that once subscribed to WoW, WoW has probably had just as many unique players over its history.
The market was saturated back in 2006, too. WoW was coming out at a time where EverQuest was holding onto 300,000 subscribers in consecutive quarters. A time where we also had large battle royal and first-person shooters.
The difference today is those new games are doing a better job of making a community-driven experience than WoW. If you look at the most popular games out there they are all community-driven.
Well well. A good example of what I mean. Why is Overwatch more fun than WoW?
Overwatch doesn’t have dailies, world quests, 1-120 clvl grind. Overwatch gets you right into the community action working with others to increase your rank on the boards.
Of course WoW is more than leader boards. It’s also an RPG but currently it does a terrible job of including community in the RPG elements.
WoW still has millions of players interested in it. They just dislike BFA. If things improve and drive closer to community and further from these awful time gated and trivialized single player scenarios then they will return.
5-6 months on a 2 year release cycle isn’t bad. BFA didn’t do that. BFA retained maybe a month or two in a 2 year release cycle. Like WoD before it.
Less? Try a fraction of those Wrath numbers. It is a big deal. You either drink the kool aid and think WoW is too old or you recognize the design flaws in it currently.
Call of Duty is still reasonably popular. Fortnite took some proven elements from other games and improved on the Battle Royal model. It’s currently the best game out there as it hits the most buttons for gamers. It’s community driven, it has an interesting progression model with a world you can modify. Basically it combines a lot of what made games successful like Tribes, Fallout, Borderlands, WoW and others in a much more attractive gaming experience.
People wanted player housing and in WoD we got garrisons. If that doesn’t tell you how poor the WoW design is currently nothing will.
Which brings up an excellent point. You could be “successful” in early WoW and still have time left over for other games. Over the years, the design has increasingly demanded more time of its serious players to the point where there is no room for anything else. Here’s this week’s TODO list for casuals:
Five timewalking dungeons
A bunch of Island Expeditions
Seven Emmissary Quests
Fourteen Incursions, some of which are at really oddball hours
LFR
If you’re a raider, add about twelve hours of progression raiding to that. Having too much crap to do overwhelms players to the point that there’s nothing they really want to do anymore.
Do you think maybe part of the reason that Lich King was so popular was maybe not because of game mechanics, although I admit I loved the game mechanics, but more so because of the story?After we killed the Lich King pretty much the entire story from the RTS game was done. Everything moving forward with stuff that they drew from tenuous connections in Lore or just made up.
There is an easy fix going forward for all this. Release expansions to classic.
This game won’t attract new players anymore and the people who have been playing for years want to play the game they enjoyed not whatever garbage Activision has turned in into.
BFA has just gone way too far down the garbage chute and there is no climbing back up. I’ll play classic but there is nothing Activision could do to get me to purchase another expansion.