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Is WoW played out?
Liddokun
Member UncommonPosts: 1,665
In the past few months I have noticed a lot of people that I know have been quitting wow left and right. At least 30 people that I have known have announced that they are quitting (publicly) or suddenly stopped login in. I am wondering if WoW TBC has been "played" out in just 3 months after release. Personally I'm starting to get bored, after grinding all my rep to revered, there's not much else to do except grind heroic instances for that elusive epic drop and heroic tokens. Of course if you're a raider you'll have a ton of raid content to do however if you're a casual player the game pretty much "stops" dead flat once you have mastered the heroic intances and get your epic flying mount.
What are you opinions here?
Comments
As far as I'm concerned, I think the races and lands are just great but capital elements are missing, such as new classes (we SO were looking forward to that and got nothing) and brand new content, an innovative and unseen gameplay (I know it's just WoW right, but I can dream too
I quit. I got bored with it. Did all I wanted to do. Awaiting Age of Conan and Warhammer. Got my flying mount, raiding for gear no matter how you look at it is boring. PVP improved, but other than that I want something new. Granted the game is a great game. I enjoyed my time in it. Just ready for something new. It was a good run.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
I saw this coming well before TBC came out.... I was tired of raiding and nothing new was on the horizon... Figured I'd be in the same boat as some of you so I left before shelling out any more cash.
My son has recently hit the same wall, so we've decided to give LotRO a try until AOC and WAR come along....
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
TBC is almost worse because if people had just left nanturally they may have come back whereas many people stayed after already being tired and that tends to cauzse burnout.
I re-subbed to play the expansion through. It took me a month. Now it's finished I play other games.
I don't stay subbed to games for grinding and time sinks. That just ends in an unhappy divorce. I leave it on good terms and will return again for the next expansion.
...hmm, that's the problem with these MMO's, you're always left with nothing else to do when everything's been done already. there's no real closure to it, it just goes on and on, and eventually no matter how good looking or how interesting the game was, you end up being sick and tired of it.
good thing i wasnt much of a hard core gamer, i leave before i even get bored, this way, if ever i wanted to play again, i could just probly pick up where i left off.
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be a sweetheart, help me dominate the world...
I quit before TBC came out as I did not buy into the whole "everything will get fixed with the expansion" hype. I did however expect to sooner or later give in and eventually buy it but not anymore. My main was a L60 priest with a very good rep in both pvp and pve. The new spells and talent trees had a total of 2 spells that looked exiting to me, both which got nerfed into oblivion. That pretty much killed of any hopes I had for this game to change for the better.
For everyone who still plays and enjoy this game, good for you don't let all the negativity bring you down. Personally I really hope one of the upcoming MMO will manage to shake things up and force Blizzard to start getting creating again. Imo Blizzard has grown to huge for its own good, but that is bound to happen with no competition I guess.
So you have this new content to get from 60 to 70, and then you have two options: raid (with hellacious rep grinds associated with it in order to get keyed) or PvP (and good luck winning at PvP if you do not have raid reward gear, especially as time goes on and more people et that gear). And as a result in other words for people who do not like raiding or don't have the time for it, it's game over at 70. Sure you could roll another character, but most people have already done that in the pre-TBC world and frankly don't have the stomach to do it again. So I think in all honesty that the main issue that the game had pre-TBC wasn't really addressed in the expansion: providing meaningful things for people to do at level cap that do not involve huge time sinks.
People have been saying EQ1 is dead for ages, yet my server (Antonius Bayle) is still busy, and they still release expansions with new races etc. They still update the game. EQ1 is a game that probably has less than 200,000 subscribers - many on a shared subscription with other SOE games, and hasn't grown for years. WoW has 8.5 million.
Even if WoW lost 90% of it's population overnight, there is no possible way on this earth that the game would be "played out".
Debunking prophecies of WoW's doom is fun.
Still waiting for your Holy Grail MMORPG? Interesting...
5 milion + of those subs are asian, and they're grinding fiends, as a stereotype and based upon stuff like ige?
so, it MIGHT lose like 30% of it's subs overnight, which would be north america/europe.
wonder how many of those are north america and how many european...
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
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be a sweetheart, help me dominate the world...
First the fact that the subscriber base has gone from 8 to 8.5 million recently means that no, WoW is not played out. And WoW (and now TBC) keep returning to the top or near top of sales charts in multiple countries.
The question the OP is asking however is 'are people leaving the game' in greater numbers than previously - I think that is the intent anyway. People are leaving but I don't believe it is the end. Leaving posts are not new - people ave been leaving WoW since several months after launch - and how long that is depends on the players but WoW is now getting to be an old game.
Let me say that again: people have been posting 'laeving threads' for a long time. And having such a large number of players means you get a large number of such posts - in pure numbers. Everything about WoW is larger. If 50 people post that they are leaving EQ2 the WoW equivalent number of posts is about 1800.
What will also be happening however is that players will also be returning to WoW as well - some, but not all, attracted by TBC. It happened in EQ1 all the time. Of course if someone left after 12 months say - got the 60 tried the quests etc - and then came back for TBC they also get an extra 12+ months of content packs as well. The experience for some will be bigger than TBC. The content packs help retain current subscribers and help to pull people back in - with an exp pack being a catalyst in some cases.
So yes people are leaving but - unless there is a whole new audience buying it from scratch - people are either rejoining or not leaving - and like the OP says there are leaving posts out there and have been for a long time. (The alternative is no one leaves but this cannot be)
It staggers me that the population is still growing in US, in Europe and in other markets. And i don't think it has cracked Korea yet! Lots of money = lots of new content and probably an extra xpac thrown in.
Don't get me wrong, WoW is a great game. I was sick of starting new games only to do the same treadmill grind I have done in countless others. WoW's was a much easier grind and they did an awesome job of masking it with endless amounts of quests.
I played all the way from beta until the expansion and hit 70 in the expansion. I raided at 60 and had a blast doing it all. Then the expansion comes out and I grind again to 70. I got all the rep I needed to do every Heroic and my Karazhan key. Had my frustration at times, but all in all the journey was a good one.
So, here I am today. I have a great guild, full of great people, but one problem. We were not on the cutting edge of content when the expansion hit. We were farming BWL weekly and were working on the Twin Emps in AQ40 when the expansion hit.
So we take our 40 man raid force and take a shot at Gruul's lair. It did not go well so the guild decided to focus on Karazhan until people can get better gear. So our 40 man raid is now cut to 10 man and people are constantly fighting over raid spots.
I was fine sitting out of Karazhan, but then soon discovered that trying to run a heroic group while a raid was happening was damn near impossible. (We had 2 Kara groups) All the tanks and healers ended up being in the Kara raids.
Now PUG's and Heroics don't mix well. I had friends in other guilds that would invite me along, but I found myself logging in to sit around grinding mobs hoping either to get in Kara or have enough of the right people log on to get a heroic together.
Ultimately I ended up being bored and just canceled my account. I have been trying to find a reason to stay, but the game has just lost its luster for me. It is sad really since my son is now playing the Warcraft 3 expansion and seeing the old story and heroes is still awesome.
I guess the thing that ultimately hurt WoW was the grind was too damn easy and most people could not understand their roll in groups, because it was so damn easy to solo to cap level.
So, while I loved that the grind was easy and I thought it was one of WoW's greatest strengths, it is ultimately also is biggest weakness.
So, while I loved that the grind was easy and I thought it was one of WoW's greatest strengths, it is ultimately also is biggest weakness.
Yeah, I guess I see it the other way around, or at least a different aspect of a similar problem. To me, WoW's main problem has always been the great divergence between its leveling game and its endgame. It's like they are two vastly different games designed for vastly different styles of play and enjoyment patterns: one is casual, the other is not; one is solo-oriented, the other requires large to extremely large groups; one is full of variety with minimal repetition, the other is focused on repetition and running the same instance numerous times; one emphasizes the ability to get things done in a relatively short period and at any time, the other emphasizes the need for strict coordination of schedules with a large number of people and commitments to extended play sessions on certain schedules ... and on and on. The two "games" clash considerably, and it all comes to a head at level cap. Basically at level cap, you raid or you level another character, or you kind of ... go away. Even with the added PvP arena and so forth, there's still a big reliance on gear because gear is simply the fulcrum around which character performance is based in WoW (especially at cap when it's the only way to improve output), and once the really good raid gear becomes more plentiful the arena will also become dominated by raiders. So really what you have is a clash of smushing two different games together into one.
This has been exacerbated by TBC considerably due to (1) mass obsoleting of prior raid gear, which ticked off many, many people and (2) no new 40 man instances in TBC, but instead instances of varying sizes. The second point is ripping apart guilds everywhere on every server. There are 5s, 10s and 25s now, and it's damned hard to manage all of that inside one guild, it just is. So guilds are breaking up over it, and the social glue that held large groups of raiders together is becoming somewhat undone ... and as a result the tie that people feel to the game gets weakened and some people leave. Add to the mix the rather large dossier of nerfs served up by Blizzard over the past month, and you can really see a general sense of malaise starting to spread across the game. Most people are still around, but to be honest you really do get the sense, everywhere, that people are waiting for the next thing to come along.