Is WoW on its way out?

evsknight · 2 Sep 2015 at 15:56

I was playing this for 20 hours a week at points and I found enough content to do but it really was just a treadmill and the 'end game' quite often was really being part of the guild I was in.
But then there wasn't much the guild could do / offer barring raids and when tools appeared that you could join normal/mythic raids without a guild, it sort of made guilds almost redundant.

KiwiTaff · 2 Sep 2015 at 16:14

The days of running around Stranglethorn and Tarren Mill with my level 60 paladin looking for some world PvP action were awesome! Those and the days of always looking over your shoulder in EPL & WPL. PvP servers back then were amazing! I used to spend hours watching Zalgradis PvP videos to try and copy his play style, good times. Good times.

Guerrilla · 2 Sep 2015 at 16:25

Recently cancelled my subscription, not for the first time mind you, but there is nothing at the moment making want to keep playing and the announcements of this upcoming expansion makes me feel that perhaps it's not the game for me anymore as the direction they're going in doesn't appeal.

Never say never but think it might finally be it.

Currently playing on a Vanilla server and very much enjoying it... Hopefully another game will come along to capture my attention like WoW once did.

kration · 2 Sep 2015 at 19:59

traveyb said:
To be honest apart from WoW and GW2, there hasn't been any decent MMO's in a few years. Maybe the market for that type of game is dying

GW1 was a big MMO for me - the free to play model was perfect (as were the character builds and the graphics).

I also loved WOW - especially the dungeons/instances or whatever they were called. It felt like a real team effort with strangers when you were in there.

GW2 is now my default fantasy MMO. But I just seem to level characters - the Dungeons or PvP just don't seem that enticing. There's no real feeling of a 'team' effort.

(The elephant in the MMO room is Elite: Damgerous... but that's a whole different ballgame...)

NexusK · 2 Sep 2015 at 21:02

It's definitely on the decline but will probably still be around for a good few years yet. Other than brief spikes around expansions it's steadily been losing subscribers since 2010 at a rate that will probably see it at under 1 million by 2018/19.

Dano · 2 Sep 2015 at 21:10

I never did get into WoW and never really got the appeal of it, obviously was too much of an Everquest snob lol, however I cannot be anything but amazed at the longevity and popularity of what Blizzard created, I wonder if we shall ever see such from an MMO again.

Watlinguk · 2 Sep 2015 at 21:52

For me every MMO since WOW has not held my attention for long at all. I always compare it to WOW and i hate to say it but Blizzard do a lot of things right. The game is not what it once was agreed but it's still the one and only MMO i return to and kind of enjoy (for so long)....

mmj_uk · 2 Sep 2015 at 22:06

One thing I've noticed with WoW in recent years is how hard it is to make friends with people outside of guilds, when WoW first started it seemed like pretty much everyone you bumped into during questing would be friendly and probably end up on your friends list after a few short quests together... these days it seems like everyone is just so focussed on getting their latest loot that they don't have time to actually socialise with anybody and if you ask to put them on your friends list they probably just think you're a stalker or something.

TLDR? the friendly/social aspect seems to have gone out of it and been replaced by greed/selfishness etc.

jasonsony735 · 3 Sep 2015 at 01:30

Edrof said:
I played vanilla from the get-go and loved it, but I do think people look back at vanilla with rose-tinted glasses. In many areas it was a massive, boring grind. I remember being in BRD groups for whole days and still not seeing the end boss. That just isn't fun. The rep-grinds were simply huge time-sinks. Some classes were ridiculously overpowered in PvP, almost bizarrely so.

The things I miss from vanilla are many, though: I miss the jaw-drop-moments when you enter big, scary raids like Molten Core for the first time. I miss being genuinely proud of myself as I sat on my epic kodo mount in Orgrimmar (back then getting the 1,000 gold needed was seriously tough and I would get so many whispers about it). I miss the random PvP at the Crossroads because that felt like a real-life raid by the Alliance dogs.

I miss the lower subscription fee.

This is 100% how I remember wow and I played the game for 2 years and then quit & have never gone back too it. It was good back in the day , its not the same game anymore, its too easy and the communities and guild I use to be in to longer exist.

FoxEye · 3 Sep 2015 at 02:10

Dano said:
I never did get into WoW and never really got the appeal of it, obviously was too much of an Everquest snob lol, however I cannot be anything but amazed at the longevity and popularity of what Blizzard created, I wonder if we shall ever see such from an MMO again.

There was a different design philosophy.

EverQuest of 1999 to 2001 (ish) was designed as a virtual world. Player convenience did not even factor into it. Remember waiting 30 mins at the docks to catch a boat?

WoW from the outside was a new breed of MMO. More "theme park" less virtual world. It was also solo-friendly, something which old-school EQ did not really cater to.

I don't think we're snobs. I just think that WoW was the start of the dumbing down of MMOs. Teamwork went out, waiting for anything went out, it became about instant gratification and having everything show to you rather than finding anything yourself.

Ironically, EQ in its final years tripped over itself trying to be more like WOW, and in doing so destroyed its own identity. But that was after it had already driven people away in huge numbers with some extremely unpopular expansions (Gates I'm looking at you!).

WoW didn't kill EQ... the constant dumbing down and pandering to vocal whiners killed it. That and the lack of imagination in later years.

Tombstone · 3 Sep 2015 at 12:30

mmj_uk said:
TLDR? the friendly/social aspect seems to have gone out of it and been replaced by greed/selfishness etc.

I think to a very large degree that is something which has become commonplace in most MMOs these days. When I think back to the social side of UO, EQ and Daoc, I remember just how strong the social aspect was. Sitting around in between pulls, waiting for mana/health to regen and talking away to each other whilst doing it. Meeting up with random strangers and chatting away with them before teaming up to do something.

Then what happened is that a portion of people began to complain that grouping was required, we want more solo stuff they exclaimed loudly and often. I want to be able to do this stuff without having to group up and so on. So MMOs began putting in more and more soloability and as they did so, the social side diminished.

JeditOjanen · 3 Sep 2015 at 12:46

NexusK said:
It's definitely on the decline but will probably still be around for a good few years yet. Other than brief spikes around expansions it's steadily been losing subscribers since 2010 at a rate that will probably see it at under 1 million by 2018/19.

At which time it will be fifteen years old and have outlasted three generations of consoles. That's an amazing run by any standard.

Ayahuasca · 3 Sep 2015 at 16:24

WoW still BiS

Captain Fizz · 3 Sep 2015 at 16:47

Raiding in WoW was my most enjoyable gaming experience tbh.

OK, it took over my life for 5 years, went out about 4 times a year

But don't have the 4~5 hours a night to play it any more, if I did pop back it wouldn't be the same.

Edinho · 7 Sep 2015 at 21:23

HybridX said:
A friend and I tried WoW once and we made it out of the starting area only for some random guy to run upto my friend and type "**** shoes, are you poor or something?" then run off. He uninstalled a few hours later and so did I.

A bit like real life then. It's a mmo. You play a character that interacts with the world and players in it, good or bad.

Seriously though online games are full of people like this - its a game. What do you do in Battlefield when someone calls you a ***** noob? Uninstall it?

Cromulent · 8 Sep 2015 at 00:23

FoxEye said:
There was a different design philosophy.

EverQuest of 1999 to 2001 (ish) was designed as a virtual world. Player convenience did not even factor into it. Remember waiting 30 mins at the docks to catch a boat?

WoW from the outside was a new breed of MMO. More "theme park" less virtual world. It was also solo-friendly, something which old-school EQ did not really cater to.

I don't think we're snobs. I just think that WoW was the start of the dumbing down of MMOs. Teamwork went out, waiting for anything went out, it became about instant gratification and having everything show to you rather than finding anything yourself.

Ironically, EQ in its final years tripped over itself trying to be more like WOW, and in doing so destroyed its own identity. But that was after it had already driven people away in huge numbers with some extremely unpopular expansions (Gates I'm looking at you!).

WoW didn't kill EQ... the constant dumbing down and pandering to vocal whiners killed it. That and the lack of imagination in later years.

Good post. I played EverQuest obsessively for quite a long time when I was younger. Managed to get my main character Plane of Time flagged back when that was something to be proud of. I quit after Omens of War was released because I couldn't face the grind to level 70.

I went back to the new Time Locked Progression servers at the start of this summer to try and play again but I didn't have the staying power to play the game. I just don't have the time to spend 30+ hours a week playing a game these days (as much as I would like too).

Now I've pretty much decided to stick to only console gaming apart from proper hardcore strategy games which only really work on PCs (and I still love that genre). Console games are just easier to pick up and play when you have 30 minutes free to play a game.