First of all, the state of the genre is cause of us, the people from the 90's are the people that made this genre in the first place, so all of the children who have been playing these games for the past 10 years can thank us for supporting the first games to make this genre huge. In the end, Wow was made for the EQ and DAoC players because we wanted something new and to a point something more intuitive/easier and it wasn't made for all the teens that hopped on after it was a huge hit.
I disagree, the reason isn't us, it's those making the games. They are no longer making MMORPG's. They're trying to cater to everyone, kids,teens,adults,pvp players,pve players, console players, etc. They're not trying to focus on a specific audience, they're no longer working on mmorpg's with originality, they're no longer making mmorpg's that push the boundaries, come up with new ideas. That's why so called "mmorpg's" of today are failing to keep players.
No it's you. The games aren't failing to keep players, they're failing to keep you and a few others like you. The fact that the genre is increasing in players and revenue indicates more people are satisfied with current and past offerings. If the majority are generally happy or satisfied then it's not the game it's you.
The only reason first gen mmos were original is because they were the first offerings. They weren't even that original. UO being an online Ultima and Lineage / EQ being DIKUs. For some reason a small demographic expected every new game to be a completely new iteration. That doesn't seem realistic to me.
Anyway, it's obviously your prerogative to be unsatisfied with how current games are created, but since you're in a small minority, it's only honest to acknowledge that it's you, not everyone else that is out of step.
You can go back to any of the old mmorpg's there's so much more to do than anything out there today, with maybe the exception of WoW, because it's been out so long and has so many expansions/content updates. The fact is today's devs/companies are lazy, they're looking to cash in quick and trying to get everyone instead of certain groups of mmorpg'ers, try to keep them and keep them happy for years to come, that's why they keep failing. They're no longer looking at creating a game world you can lose yourself in. Most mmorpg's today are set up like single player games with a chat box and a lfg tool, with boring, lifeless worlds.
They'd rather reskin another game and add 1/10th of the content, slap a name on the game, and let it go live than to be more creative. People that put up with mediocrity mmorpg's of today are another problem. As long as people accept mediocrity they'll keep putting out the $%*! they've been putting out the past few years, and their games will keep failing.
1. little/no or bad community - players make the game and if you have no one to play with or the players are complete jerks... time to move on.
2. lack of support/activity - If the developers let a game float with no updates or fixes and it gets full of bugs and players that exploit it becomes no fun.
3. greedy host - if everything in the game including simple game functions start to require real life money and it cost over $9000 a month to play normally.... I move on.
4. crawling progression - if it takes 6 months to reach level 5 and you find out that to reach level 6 you have to grind for 8 years... yeah time to go.
5. lack of content - if a game is built to be nothing but a level grind and you reach level cap and there is nothing to do but make a new character... time to go.
companies need to stop copy and pasting the same game over and over with a new theme and come up with a little imagination. all fantasy games do not have to be the same exact game.
If Devs are reading this, most exit surveys suck and do not provide you to really articulate the reason you are leaving, and those of us leaving really do want to tell you why. There has been many reasons why I have left games over the years. Currently I am playing GW2 and I will leave this game because ANET decided to make a game so casual friendly there is no challenge at all, no competition, and certainly no guild wars.
The games I have played for a significant amount of time were:
Planetside 1 (8 years)
Guild Wars (4 years)
WoW (on and off for maybe a total of 1-2 years)
Guild Wars 2 (Since release)
They are all very different from each other. There were games in between of course. I remember playing games like KAL online and RAN online, Rappelz, among a hefty list of other sub par f2p mmos. Those were all my first mmorpg experience. They are all the same game and far too similar.
For me I either last 3-4 days in an mmo IF:
The game feels less like a world and more like a system
Poor production quality (UI, controls, animations, sounds, etc)
Very basic and rehashed character creations, races, classes, beginning quests (first 5 hours of gameplay is killing bees, boars, cows, and slugs)
I Seem to last a significant amount of time (my perception of significant is at least a solid year of playing) IF:
The world is immersive
Character progression has growth
Plenty of social aspects and COOP type gameplay AND OR
Great PvP mechanics
Biggest thing for me is feeling attached to the character and immersed in the world. If the developer manages to do that then they have my full attention!
Originally posted by Arskaaa "when players learned tacticks in dungeon/raids, its bread".
I personally think its world of warcraft fault the game is way to dam polished and made for all players heck there even updateing the models increaseing the poly count ext.plus most of the mmo genre flocked to wow when it first came out its not so high now but 7 plus millions is a pretty good chuck of the mmo genre on one mmo.
I usually leave when I begin to notice the repetition. It varies from title to title, how long until that point is reached, before everything feels "same old". Obviously more content tends to retard the Crash. Alt-itis can be a working distraction, too.
Classic sword-and-dragon fantasy doesn't take very long at all, these days.
1. little/no or bad community - players make the game and if you have no one to play with or the players are complete jerks... time to move on.
2. lack of support/activity - If the developers let a game float with no updates or fixes and it gets full of bugs and players that exploit it becomes no fun.
3. greedy host - if everything in the game including simple game functions start to require real life money and it cost over $9000 a month to play normally.... I move on.
4. crawling progression - if it takes 6 months to reach level 5 and you find out that to reach level 6 you have to grind for 8 years... yeah time to go.
5. lack of content - if a game is built to be nothing but a level grind and you reach level cap and there is nothing to do but make a new character... time to go.
companies need to stop copy and pasting the same game over and over with a new theme and come up with a little imagination. all fantasy games do not have to be the same exact game.
I agree with you, but I think everyone is saying roughly the same sort of things.
However, it would be more constructive to post solutions.
My one big fix would be to include a 'random world generator' that could expand the area of gameplay infinitely in one big sandbox.
1. little/no or bad community - players make the game and if you have no one to play with or the players are complete jerks... time to move on.
2. lack of support/activity - If the developers let a game float with no updates or fixes and it gets full of bugs and players that exploit it becomes no fun.
3. greedy host - if everything in the game including simple game functions start to require real life money and it cost over $9000 a month to play normally.... I move on.
4. crawling progression - if it takes 6 months to reach level 5 and you find out that to reach level 6 you have to grind for 8 years... yeah time to go.
5. lack of content - if a game is built to be nothing but a level grind and you reach level cap and there is nothing to do but make a new character... time to go.
companies need to stop copy and pasting the same game over and over with a new theme and come up with a little imagination. all fantasy games do not have to be the same exact game.
1-3: Fully agreed.
4: Quite the opposite. These games are meant to be played for a long time. If it takes 8 years from lvl 5 to 6 and the game has 20 levels, there's more than enough content for the rest of my life. Can't see how this is a bad thing.
5: Again, quite the opposite. In my ideal game people never reach max level, so there's always ways to progress and improve your character. Leveling up =/= grinding infinite amount of mobs, but the current MMOs are designed poorly, and leveling is meant to be a necessary evil to go through in path to endgame.
The game begins at the end game in modern MMOs because you can't outlevel content like you do before cap, so the entire end game stays relevant and fun. If the progress in those early levels is slowed down enough, every level plays almost like a mini end game, and suddenly that leveling content has a purpose.
So, for the question 'Why do players leave MMOs'? - Players leave a game when the content it provides is consumed, and for the most of the games this happens too soon.
The only game I ever truely loved playing day after day was City of Heroes. My exit moment was when the plug was pulled. I have not had the desire to really start any new MMO due to that moment. They told me When I had to stop. All those hours and all the money I invested was just gone!!!! I guess I knew the risk when I started but it does not make it any better.
Cheers Matt you and your team were amazing to all your players and fans
Originally posted by JohnR I played City of Heroes pretty much daily from when I started (Issue 15) to when its publish, NCSoft, shut down the fun. During that time I dabbled some with LOTRO and I enjoyed it, just not nearly as much as CoH. I would still be playing CoH but for NCSoft--most of my online friends and sgmates were multi-year veteran players of CoH. My interest in LOTRO and all MMORPGaming kind of ended since nothing replaced the fun I had in CoH. Heck, I even dreamed about CoH (and still do occasionally). LOL! I can certainly understand losing interest but the two things that kept CoH fresh and fun for me were 1. my online CoH friends and 2. the diversity of characters one could create. I am no doubt way off topic, but /em holdtorch! Matt, thank you and rest of the development team once again for the Superhero magic that was City of Heroes.
This is strangely similar to my experience. I played CoH from about 4 months after launch until they turned off the lights, and I'd still be playing today if I could. Subbed the entire times.
As for others, I've played a lot of LotRO, but it's more of play for awhile, drift off, come back and play for awhile, drift off, etc.
Played WoW for awhile, got a char to around 70 and just got sick of the whole thing. What I /liked/ about WoW was the epic size of the world. What drove me away were the actual....residents of that epic world.
Its a noble cause you wrote about, considering how mmos are going up and down like light bulbs nowadays.
But if you think for a second that many mmo's are left without countless tickets/mails as feedback to support of any mmo, you are wrong.
I know for certain that many many advices/pleas etc went to LotRo, Forsaken World, Tera, SWToR are ignored becouse they involve changes too drastic for game designers to react and adapt it.
For that exact matter those titles are going to fall, even if they call them "FTP" and revolutionary, amasing, they still lack basic things, designers choose to ignore.
Personally, in most MMOs I enjoy most of the game but only to a point. Someone else once described WoW as "it keeps giving you candies, but after a while you want the meat, but there isn't any". I think that is a fair reflection of all MMO's. Many of them have nice touches, dynamic events, flying mounts, some fun quests, some nice loot rewards and so on. But at their heart these are still games, not virtual worlds that you can shape and influence in any large way. I suppose EVE comes as close to the ideal but but there are certain aspects of that game I just don't like.
When a game starts becoming boring and the community starts becoming unsocial then that is when I go find better things to do. I'm a social type of person. I play mmos to have fun and be social with others.
Some I just drop off because I'm no longer in the mood for them, I felt I enjoyed them and am simply ready for something else. Here are a couple of the ones I remember leaving for a specific reason...
LOTRO - "Solofication" of the game and an ever more brazen and immersion breaking cash shop (even for VIP's) .
WWII Online - Performance Issues, bugs and a lack of diversity in the environment ( It's a realistic map, so alot of different setups in terms of towns, woods, fields etc....but there are only so many times you can fight in Flanders in the Summer of 1941 even if every battle is different before you want a bit of a changeup.)
Planetside 2 - I would still play on occasion if it was easier to find significant scale combats.
Originally posted by Spike_Spunk The only game I ever truely loved playing day after day was City of Heroes.
RIP CoH, was such a great game
Eh, I was never impressed by CoH. CoV on the other hand was the first MMO where I bothered to play long enough to get a character to the level cap.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.
Most exit points for me lately boil down to the same thing: The feeling of "been there, done that... already played that game before, just with a different name and skin". A few "new" gimmicks might be enough to pique my interest at first. However, once the novelty of those things falls away, what I'm left with is the actual game I'll be playing for the next (ideally) several years. If *that* isn't enough to keep me interested, then I'm gone.
So, to wrap up most exit points for me lately? "Game is too derivative. Stop playing "me-too", and try to actually stand out, rather than blend in".
The most significant exit event for me was with FFXI. I'd played the game loyally for almost 8 years and would still be playing it, except for SE having a serious "derp" moment, losing complete sight of what made their "most profitable game" successful in the first place (hint: it wasn't playing "me-too", like everyone else around them), and deciding to try and hop on the "casual-friendly and more casual" bandwagon, thus undermining and un-doing what they'd spent the better part of a decade creating and building. FFXI's undoing was called Abyssea, it was the dumbest thing they could have done with that game (they even admitted screwing up with it later), and they have never been able to recover. It was my "exit event" from that game. I tried going back.. but it's just too different.
They tried to right the ship with their last expansion. Sadly, all they succeeded in was further demonstrating that they'd lost the plot and forgotten what made XI their most successful and most profitable MMO in the first place
I lefft Wow because of the raids and the attitude of the players who did them.
I left Eve Online because of the constant pvp and blob warfare. i really like Eve Online but after a while it all becomes very much the same. Get in a pvp fleet and wait at a gate. Or get in a fleet and sit in a pos for a few hours until people are ready to take a system.
I am looking forward to Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous though and hope they can be something different than Eve Online.
There are subjective people who think many games are good, becouse they personally like them, there are the ones who are paid to say and or promote games with their keys and stuff.
None of them will ever know how to put it, nor come to senses, what that specific game is lacking, becouse they are blinded by urge to play, be part of something.
THE REAL PROBLEM HERE IS THAT WE ARE GETTING THESE LOW BUDGET GAMES, OR THE ONES WITH CLOSED CIRCUIT ENDGAME CONTENT WITH NO REAL PROGRESS ON THE MATTER OF REVOLUTION IN GAMING, THE ONES THAT DONT HAVE RESOURCES TRY TO LIVE UP TO EXPECTATIONS LIKE "PATH OF EXILE", WHILE MANY OTHERS SIMPLY CONSIDER US AS WALLETS, AND THEIR "NEW"CONTENT 99% CONSISTS OF COSMETIC UPGRADES IN CASH SHOP'S AND RESPOND TO COMMUNITY FEEDBACK WITH ALL KNOWN WORDS:
"Thank your for your feedback, we will look into that matter." Like players matter at all
Gaming industry is bombarding community with bad, uncomplete, no content/stability software and only 1% of games live up to their expectations.
wake up, either play the right game, or go on with your life and wait for it to come to you
1) When all I have left to do is boring repetitive chores to feel that my character is progressing (which it is not).
2) When I get to the point where I cannot advance my character without paying real money. I dont mind paying for cosmetic or boosts, but if I have to pay to progress or pay for content that is not an expansion I happily leave and uninstall. NOTE: DLC content in mmos the way TSW and DCUO do it is OK with me because it is completely new content that would be part of paid expansion in other games, not locking common content behind paywall. I dont buy Swtors DLC because they lock character progression behind the paywall.
I am goal orientated so when I cannot make measurable progress with my character, I leave.
So for a game to keep me for a long period of time, I imagine it would need to always have lots of room for growth. Not sure if that is possible without daily fixed time caps on progress.
-WL
This is the biggest reason for me, and measurable growth in reasonable time is key. If I have to grind for 60 hours for a .001% increase in performance where I used to get 1% an hour, I'm gone. There comes a time when the reward from leveling and playing the game isn't enjoyable enough compared to the effort.
It should also be noted, that the reward is not just an increase in character performance, but to be able to explore new content that was previously unreachable due to not being strong enough.
I mostly leave MMOs when they are callously closed down by NCSoft. Which is why they'll never see my money again.
Reasons that I don't stick with MMOs are things like bad interfaces. The worse the interface, the better the game has to be to make me stay. Non invertable mouse is pretty much an instant delete sign. I am not going to retrain my reflexs for your one game, sorry. Non-choice pvp is also a no go button, unless it absolutely fits the world and game design. And even then.... Bad world design is another thing that wears down my interest. Sadly, lots of MMOs, even the old classics, have rather poorly written universes and campaign settings. Poor character customization is yet another.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Comments
You can go back to any of the old mmorpg's there's so much more to do than anything out there today, with maybe the exception of WoW, because it's been out so long and has so many expansions/content updates. The fact is today's devs/companies are lazy, they're looking to cash in quick and trying to get everyone instead of certain groups of mmorpg'ers, try to keep them and keep them happy for years to come, that's why they keep failing. They're no longer looking at creating a game world you can lose yourself in. Most mmorpg's today are set up like single player games with a chat box and a lfg tool, with boring, lifeless worlds.
They'd rather reskin another game and add 1/10th of the content, slap a name on the game, and let it go live than to be more creative. People that put up with mediocrity mmorpg's of today are another problem. As long as people accept mediocrity they'll keep putting out the $%*! they've been putting out the past few years, and their games will keep failing.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
there are 5 reasons to make me quit an MMO...
1. little/no or bad community - players make the game and if you have no one to play with or the players are complete jerks... time to move on.
2. lack of support/activity - If the developers let a game float with no updates or fixes and it gets full of bugs and players that exploit it becomes no fun.
3. greedy host - if everything in the game including simple game functions start to require real life money and it cost over $9000 a month to play normally.... I move on.
4. crawling progression - if it takes 6 months to reach level 5 and you find out that to reach level 6 you have to grind for 8 years... yeah time to go.
5. lack of content - if a game is built to be nothing but a level grind and you reach level cap and there is nothing to do but make a new character... time to go.
companies need to stop copy and pasting the same game over and over with a new theme and come up with a little imagination. all fantasy games do not have to be the same exact game.
The games I have played for a significant amount of time were:
Planetside 1 (8 years)
Guild Wars (4 years)
WoW (on and off for maybe a total of 1-2 years)
Guild Wars 2 (Since release)
They are all very different from each other. There were games in between of course. I remember playing games like KAL online and RAN online, Rappelz, among a hefty list of other sub par f2p mmos. Those were all my first mmorpg experience. They are all the same game and far too similar.
For me I either last 3-4 days in an mmo IF:
The game feels less like a world and more like a system
Poor production quality (UI, controls, animations, sounds, etc)
Very basic and rehashed character creations, races, classes, beginning quests (first 5 hours of gameplay is killing bees, boars, cows, and slugs)
I Seem to last a significant amount of time (my perception of significant is at least a solid year of playing) IF:
The world is immersive
Character progression has growth
Plenty of social aspects and COOP type gameplay AND OR
Great PvP mechanics
Biggest thing for me is feeling attached to the character and immersed in the world. If the developer manages to do that then they have my full attention!
Originally posted by Arskaaa
"when players learned tacticks in dungeon/raids, its bread".
I usually leave when I begin to notice the repetition. It varies from title to title, how long until that point is reached, before everything feels "same old". Obviously more content tends to retard the Crash. Alt-itis can be a working distraction, too.
Classic sword-and-dragon fantasy doesn't take very long at all, these days.
I agree with you, but I think everyone is saying roughly the same sort of things.
However, it would be more constructive to post solutions.
My one big fix would be to include a 'random world generator' that could expand the area of gameplay infinitely in one big sandbox.
What would your one big fix be?
1-3: Fully agreed.
4: Quite the opposite. These games are meant to be played for a long time. If it takes 8 years from lvl 5 to 6 and the game has 20 levels, there's more than enough content for the rest of my life. Can't see how this is a bad thing.
5: Again, quite the opposite. In my ideal game people never reach max level, so there's always ways to progress and improve your character. Leveling up =/= grinding infinite amount of mobs, but the current MMOs are designed poorly, and leveling is meant to be a necessary evil to go through in path to endgame.
The game begins at the end game in modern MMOs because you can't outlevel content like you do before cap, so the entire end game stays relevant and fun. If the progress in those early levels is slowed down enough, every level plays almost like a mini end game, and suddenly that leveling content has a purpose.
So, for the question 'Why do players leave MMOs'? - Players leave a game when the content it provides is consumed, and for the most of the games this happens too soon.
"Why Do Players Leave MMOs?"
Because there is no mmo on gaming market. I suppose next gen mmo devs never played 90's mmo T.T
Cheers Matt you and your team were amazing to all your players and fans
This is strangely similar to my experience. I played CoH from about 4 months after launch until they turned off the lights, and I'd still be playing today if I could. Subbed the entire times.
As for others, I've played a lot of LotRO, but it's more of play for awhile, drift off, come back and play for awhile, drift off, etc.
Played WoW for awhile, got a char to around 70 and just got sick of the whole thing. What I /liked/ about WoW was the epic size of the world. What drove me away were the actual....residents of that epic world.
RIP CoH, was such a great game
Currently playing: Eldevin Online as a Deadly Assassin
So.. you think your experienced, right Miller?
Its a noble cause you wrote about, considering how mmos are going up and down like light bulbs nowadays.
But if you think for a second that many mmo's are left without countless tickets/mails as feedback to support of any mmo, you are wrong.
I know for certain that many many advices/pleas etc went to LotRo, Forsaken World, Tera, SWToR are ignored becouse they involve changes too drastic for game designers to react and adapt it.
For that exact matter those titles are going to fall, even if they call them "FTP" and revolutionary, amasing, they still lack basic things, designers choose to ignore.
And i know.. oh i know.
Some I just drop off because I'm no longer in the mood for them, I felt I enjoyed them and am simply ready for something else. Here are a couple of the ones I remember leaving for a specific reason...
LOTRO - "Solofication" of the game and an ever more brazen and immersion breaking cash shop (even for VIP's) .
WWII Online - Performance Issues, bugs and a lack of diversity in the environment ( It's a realistic map, so alot of different setups in terms of towns, woods, fields etc....but there are only so many times you can fight in Flanders in the Summer of 1941 even if every battle is different before you want a bit of a changeup.)
Planetside 2 - I would still play on occasion if it was easier to find significant scale combats.
Eh, I was never impressed by CoH. CoV on the other hand was the first MMO where I bothered to play long enough to get a character to the level cap.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
Most exit points for me lately boil down to the same thing: The feeling of "been there, done that... already played that game before, just with a different name and skin". A few "new" gimmicks might be enough to pique my interest at first. However, once the novelty of those things falls away, what I'm left with is the actual game I'll be playing for the next (ideally) several years. If *that* isn't enough to keep me interested, then I'm gone.
So, to wrap up most exit points for me lately? "Game is too derivative. Stop playing "me-too", and try to actually stand out, rather than blend in".
The most significant exit event for me was with FFXI. I'd played the game loyally for almost 8 years and would still be playing it, except for SE having a serious "derp" moment, losing complete sight of what made their "most profitable game" successful in the first place (hint: it wasn't playing "me-too", like everyone else around them), and deciding to try and hop on the "casual-friendly and more casual" bandwagon, thus undermining and un-doing what they'd spent the better part of a decade creating and building. FFXI's undoing was called Abyssea, it was the dumbest thing they could have done with that game (they even admitted screwing up with it later), and they have never been able to recover. It was my "exit event" from that game. I tried going back.. but it's just too different.
They tried to right the ship with their last expansion. Sadly, all they succeeded in was further demonstrating that they'd lost the plot and forgotten what made XI their most successful and most profitable MMO in the first place
I lefft Wow because of the raids and the attitude of the players who did them.
I left Eve Online because of the constant pvp and blob warfare. i really like Eve Online but after a while it all becomes very much the same. Get in a pvp fleet and wait at a gate. Or get in a fleet and sit in a pos for a few hours until people are ready to take a system.
I am looking forward to Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous though and hope they can be something different than Eve Online.
Next time you are to troll community, go pro
There are subjective people who think many games are good, becouse they personally like them, there are the ones who are paid to say and or promote games with their keys and stuff.
None of them will ever know how to put it, nor come to senses, what that specific game is lacking, becouse they are blinded by urge to play, be part of something.
________________________________________________________________________
THE REAL PROBLEM HERE IS THAT WE ARE GETTING THESE LOW BUDGET GAMES, OR THE ONES WITH CLOSED CIRCUIT ENDGAME CONTENT WITH NO REAL PROGRESS ON THE MATTER OF REVOLUTION IN GAMING, THE ONES THAT DONT HAVE RESOURCES TRY TO LIVE UP TO EXPECTATIONS LIKE "PATH OF EXILE", WHILE MANY OTHERS SIMPLY CONSIDER US AS WALLETS, AND THEIR "NEW"CONTENT 99% CONSISTS OF COSMETIC UPGRADES IN CASH SHOP'S AND RESPOND TO COMMUNITY FEEDBACK WITH ALL KNOWN WORDS:
"Thank your for your feedback, we will look into that matter." Like players matter at all
Gaming industry is bombarding community with bad, uncomplete, no content/stability software and only 1% of games live up to their expectations.
wake up, either play the right game, or go on with your life and wait for it to come to you
FOR COMMUNITY
AS a consolation i think that YOUR mmo, the one that suits you is comming.
Black Desert, Archeage, Everquest Next as FTP or Wildstar /Star Citizen/ESO etc
You will prolly find yourself here, thats as close as it can get to a good mmo these days,
so good luck to you all
There are 2 reasons why I leave MMOs:
1) When all I have left to do is boring repetitive chores to feel that my character is progressing (which it is not).
2) When I get to the point where I cannot advance my character without paying real money. I dont mind paying for cosmetic or boosts, but if I have to pay to progress or pay for content that is not an expansion I happily leave and uninstall. NOTE: DLC content in mmos the way TSW and DCUO do it is OK with me because it is completely new content that would be part of paid expansion in other games, not locking common content behind paywall. I dont buy Swtors DLC because they lock character progression behind the paywall.
This is the biggest reason for me, and measurable growth in reasonable time is key. If I have to grind for 60 hours for a .001% increase in performance where I used to get 1% an hour, I'm gone. There comes a time when the reward from leveling and playing the game isn't enjoyable enough compared to the effort.
It should also be noted, that the reward is not just an increase in character performance, but to be able to explore new content that was previously unreachable due to not being strong enough.
I mostly leave MMOs when they are callously closed down by NCSoft. Which is why they'll never see my money again.
Reasons that I don't stick with MMOs are things like bad interfaces. The worse the interface, the better the game has to be to make me stay. Non invertable mouse is pretty much an instant delete sign. I am not going to retrain my reflexs for your one game, sorry. Non-choice pvp is also a no go button, unless it absolutely fits the world and game design. And even then.... Bad world design is another thing that wears down my interest. Sadly, lots of MMOs, even the old classics, have rather poorly written universes and campaign settings. Poor character customization is yet another.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
i leave an MMO when i get bored of the world
i don't escape to an MMO to do the same thing i do in real life ("grind" for money/gear/lvls)