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World of Warcraft: Is Blizzard Losing Its Community?
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In Guild's Eye View this week, MMORPG.com columnist Sean Stalzer checks up on and takes the virtual pulse of the World of Warcraft community. Is the WoW community in need of heroic life support measures or is it as vibrant and healthy as it appears? Check out Sean's thoughts and then offer up a few of your own.
All of that matters because it begs the question of "is Blizzard in danger of losing their community?" If there is one thing Blizzard is not known for it is being fast at creating content. While many would say they create compelling, polished, entertaining, top tier content (and I would agree) they are far from fast at doing so. When WoW first came out, there was a public commitment to 1 expansion per year. In actuality there has been about one every 2 years. The first new major content patch (the 4.2 patch that adds a new raid zone and a new crop of daily quests) is still in testing. Blizzard is not fast at creating content.
Read more of Sean Stalzer's Guild's Eye View: Is Blizzard Losing Its Community?
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Comments
They already lost their community a long time ago.
Now it's just a bunch of people playing the same game.
-Azure Prower
http://www.youtube.com/AzurePrower
World OF Warcraft was once a great game, but Blizzard Expand the game way too quickly unless you were a hard core 8+ Hour a day farmer maybe even played longer.
I enjoyed wow, I bought wow when the first game was ever released before BC,Lich, or Cata, and I enjoyed it, but once BC came out their game went all down hill for me I mean they threw in stuff that didnt even belong in the WOW Story line like Draeni, and Blood Eleves, finally I was like Okay I will add this to my RP, and Lich king brought a death knight never fit into the story, and then finally Cata with a Wolf race, and Goblins, okay now I am seriously pissed off, Cata Changed every skill set revamp everything not something I was looking for.
Blizzard Listen to so many complainers OMG MAGE if over powered NERF NERF, yet mages are supposed to be able to do more damage than any other class in 1 hit, but no they ruined the mage, gave priests, and Warlocks and hunters more advantage, and then they ruined Twinks, said hey you cant use this Skills and that skill together anymore as a mage, I QUIT wow screw it I will never go back period and they killed the game and the community Blizzard had their chancce.
Now all they have left is Micro Transactions, and I bet they regret ever doing those because now Blizzard goes down hill, and Rift is the new World OF Warcraft and lets just wait and see if they make mistakes or who takes them down.
Wow is not a game of skill, it is a game based on gear and level thats all, and no one really wants to play a game like this, lets just say that in wow Blizzard could have put seperate damages on Spells for PVP, and seperate for PVE, but instead they like just nerfed everything and killed out certain classes and peoples play styles going all the way back to Burning Crusade which is the point where Blizzard really screwed up.
I don't think it has "lost" the community, but it sure has frayed at the edges. While I understand why they made the level increase only 5 levels for Cata, in order to solve this speed issue they have with getting content out (doesn't seem to have worked, though), they really need to start thinking outside the box and start implementing endgame activities other than raiding and rep grinds. Things like guild housing, player housing, collections, mini games, and alternate advancement mechanics are what is needed to keep the community playing while they then take the time they need to do their content patches. They literally have dug themselves a hole by not persuing these things from day 1.
All you have to do is look at their competition to understand how those "other" games are still afloat. Like EQ2 and Lotro. They offer a more significant alternative to endgame raiding/rep grinding.
Now on the topic of charging players for things like chatting with friends or playing with friends via cross server, yes, that IS a divisive effect on the community, especially when a game like Rift just one upped Blizzard by stating they will have Free Character Transfers. The gauntlet has been thrown and it's time for Blizzard to make some changes and stop being greedy because they've been on the throne for 6 years.
Firstly wow you must have a bee-line to my brain. Many people are unhappy with cataclysm its not the expansion itself its how blizzard have treated players. They have constantly shifted goal posts, in the game of "its too easy its too hard" ping pong.
In WOTLK there was so much to do outside of raiding the offering we have now is just awful tol boring is nothing compared to old wintergrasp with massive machines of destruction! + a massive quest hub in a pvp zone give me a break when will devs get it PVP'Rs DON'T LIKE TO QUEST GRIND. Wintergrasp was alright for quests but this tol boring place is a massive loop grind of epic proportions its not fun its a rat maze with cheese and other rats hitting you with their weapons.
I have more moanings but Im not the only one that feels the way I do, meh screw it just give me the purple pill Ill go back to my happy days of community in dark age of camelot RvR logging on when I wanted not when Bob told me to do so or when the game did.
Nice post and I have to say I agree with alot of the points made. Cataclysm for me was a mass disappointment, and felt like a very large content patch rather then an expansion. I quit my account 6 weeks after Cataclysm came out as had done everything in Cataclysm except for the raiding, including maxing my char out in 346 heroic blues.
As for their premium services on top of a monthly fee, if people use their services and are willing to pay for them then Blizzard will keep doing it, the only way to stop is to vote with your wallet, but with 11.5 million subs that won't happen anytime soon...
As for the community, I agree with what another poster said, "They already lost their community a long time ago."
The only reason WoW has maintained the subscription numbers to date is they have no competition, yet. I am sure Rift has taken a few but if SWTOR or Tera Online live up to half there hype than that is when the mass exodus will begin.
They have always been greedy, they where the first to charge for upgrades and monthly, why are people surprised they charge for game features. As long as people pay they will do it.
Look for the Rose with the Thorn.
greeedy greedy Blizzard. You are only buck hungry. With such a revenue every month from ppl, you could take out new expansion every month! instead you are charging for everything possible imaginable. Discusting. I hope Blizzard will pay hard for their greediness
600,000 subscribers lost? I may not have a head for corporate thinking, but to me, that's a hit. It might be only about a 5% hit. But still, that's money lost as the article stated. Maybe it's wishful thinking. But I have to wonder if the bean counters there are starting to get a little concerned.
I may be dating myself a bit. But I remember a World of Warcraft where no one had any expectations. It was Warcraft. What else was there? Fighting for the Horde! Fighting for the Alliance! To me, it was magical. It was everything I hoped for. Now?
I left World of Warcraft a month after Cataclysm. I didn't feel that same magic I did through Vanilla, Burning Crusade. There was no community. It all became a money grab after that. It all became "Raid or Die". The game itself felt empty. It feels like Blizzard went the wrong way with Cataclysm. Maybe even before then with Wrath.
Will Rift become the new king of MMO's? The Old Republic? TERA? Or even Guild Wars 2? No, I doubt it. They will be good or great in their own rights. Warcraft was good, if not great in its own right years ago. But, it seems corporate greed is now starting to take over. And that profit is winning out over customer satisfaction.
This article has basically stated what I've been feeling has been wrong with Warcraft for a very long time. Thank you for that.
Good article, especially with all the unfounded griping here on the forums about how WoW's "community" is crap just because the players are typically younger and has a more casual player base. But I completely agree, their latest expansion was geared towards getting MORE players, to increase revenue (re-hashing 1-60 content, while leaving 60-80 content the same and adding a meer 5 levels on top), in addition to increasing revenue through purchasable pets, and now the realID grouping also charging money. 10+ million subs and they are still looking to increase revenue? It's about time people started voting with their wallets and writing the game off. Interesting facts about EQ's population decline as well.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
The first comment is right, and if you look at the etymology you don't have a "community" in WoW and Blizzard from today has nothing to do with Blizzard North from Diablo 1-2, Warcraft 1-3, and Starcraft BroodWars (besides a lot of devs have left to join other teams).
WoW BC was still decent then it went down the drain with greediness and broken promises (item shop, race-class transfer, pve to pvp transfers 3 days before Warhammer launched, to name a few). Basically what they are doing is divert the bulk of their devs to their other projects and let WoW thrive on the inertia of their hypnotized fanbase and charge everything they can in the process so Activision's shareholders can buy themselves new sportscars every month.
And yeah with the money they have they could have done so much better in terms of innovation, of content or new features. I really liked Diablo, no so much their RTS because Age of Kings and Cosacks was superior but now I strongly dislike Blizzard and their decisions, and the gaming environment is so vast and good I don't feel like trusting them anymore because how the company behind a game behaves does matter for me.
This could be the golden oppourtunity for TOR then. If WoWs base is increasingly frustrated with Blizzard over these issues they maybe more apt to try TOR. Given the IP I would bet the crossover between the two titles is huge (meaning there are probably plenty of SW fans amoungst WoW regulars). If TOR is enough like WoW but incrementaly better and contains large amounts of what WoW gamers want more of (Content) then it could be a huge windfall for TOR much the dismay of Blizzard.
Actaully, it's not unfounded griping. From start to end, I have seen the de-evolution of the World of Warcraft community. But it's not the main cause of the decline. But it doesn't help either. I hate to say it, Meltdown, but when the community are a bunch of bullies, insulting people asking questions and typing in a language that...frankly is just laziness, yes, the community is crap.
New Player: Can someone explain how mining works?
4 month player: LOL! STFU NOOB! L2P! UR MOM!
*shutters* I think my IQ just dropped 20 points typing that. But that is the general talk in chat in World of Warcraft.
Again, it's not the primary reason for decline. But it is a reason to a lesser extent. It's the money grab that's the bigger part of it and the other reasons explained in this article.
I have to agree and will take iws a step farther. The MMO community in general is broken. It seems to me everyone is waiting for a new game to break barriers and step up to the plate but the corperate gold diggers are just trying to make a buck. Its why we have to put up with 1/2 finished games on release, Whole online systems being taken out.
Until these companies get it through there heads that they might make a few dollars releasing crap if they want to make a truly great game they need to start taking the things the players say sirously.
Honor, Valor, Truth are in the heart of the true and the one.
- Gereth Deepdale
As a few others have already stated, Blizzard lost it's community a long time ago.
I think it even goes back to even before WoW, as Battle.net has never really been anything other than an example of how a community shuldn't be. But, it's undebateably gotten even worse through the years in WoW.
Blizzard isn't entirely responsible, it does come with something going mainstream. That said, Blizzard has consistently tried to inflate animosity and competition between players. Heck, ask almost anyone who plays WoW, almost undoubtedly they will have a blind hatred for the faction opposite of what they mainly play. Sure, part of the game is faction based PvP... but the majority of it isn't. Besides, since when did PvP require seething hatred for your opponents to be enjoyable?
Honestly though, I think Blizzard stopped caring a long time ago. They treat their customers like children (and most of them should be), while their own CM reps act no better. The times they use to have decent CM reps, the community drove them off with their nonsense.
They don't even reprimand misbehaving players appropriately or consistently. Swearing in a general chat channel can get you a three day ban, if you're unlucky... yet dozens of other players do it every day, get reported consistently, yet they're still there.
Annd then there's the times when hundreds of players roll level 1 alts on other servers to try to crash it while spamming every channel with garbage... yet the worst any of them get, if they even get reprimand, is a three hour ban. Seriously three hours? Most of these people are acting like a-holes specifically because their main server is down, so they can't even play anyways. A three day ban would do more to make them think twice before throwing another tantrum.
First of all we need to change the name of the column form guilds eye view to dragons weekly view of blizzard. Ther has already been multiple threads of player loss in wow this week, now we got this one.
Second I don't think the blizzards loosing to much. Lets wait and see what happens when SWTOR comes out.
The most significant fact is not that WoW lost subscribers: it's that it is no longer growing.
It wasn't too long ago that WoW was the growth enginge for the entire MMORPG genre, if not the PC gaming industry. That has clearly changed. With new subscribers plateauing (and other games like Rift having failed to attract significant new subscribers), it's clear that the MMORPG genre is stuck in a rut. This is not about problems specific to WoW; if it were, then other games would be absorbing the new growth, but they're not.
I was totally dismayed at the announcement of Wrath of the Lick King. I had already become very disenchanted with WoW's gameplay, even with the innovations of The Burning Crusade, and thought it was a huge mistake to keep trying to work the same broken model. Needless to say, I felt precisely the same at the announcement of Cataclysm. I effectively quit WoW early in the BC phase, and have only checked in on it for a month at a time here and there since, but have almost no desire to become actively involved again.
The difficult reality is that the genre needs a huge update. The same old level-and-gear grind isn't cutting it, even with flashier graphics and "community" features. Blizzard needs to get moving on Titan sooner rather than later, and it needs to be a next-generation MMO with real innovation, not a re-skinned WoW. Otherwise, this industry will fall into the same long-term slump that others before it (CCGs--remember them?) have due to the greed and short-sightedness of the industry leadership.
The worst thing they did, imo, was merging/changing the lockouts for 25 man and 10 man. It killed pug raiding for those of us who cant / dont want to operate around a gaming schedual.
To me Cataclysm is a failure. I don't care about 1-60 content because I've done it already. That's where they spent too much time. The 80-85 content is nothing but boring daily quests once you finish all the regular quests. For me it's really hard to pinpoint what I dislike about Cataclysm, but I had fun with Classic, BC, and WotLK all the way up until a few months before the next expansion. I'm already tired of Cataclysm and we probably have to wait a year and a half for the next expansion. And it seems until then, Blizzard are primarily focusing on optional garbage for people to spend money on. I'll pass.
If Blizzard would state 'hey, you know what, we saw all your reactions and it made us rethink the whole pay-for-cross-server grouping with friends: this option will now become available for free when you activate 3-month subscriptions or longer term', I bet they would alleviate a lot of all that anger and even generate a happy buzz around.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
That would be nice of them, Maverick. But sadly I don't see that happening.
Good~? Good research model for ANet, Bioware and Funcom.
Guild Wars 2's 50 minutes game play video:
http://n4g.com/news/592585/guild-wars-2-50-minutes-of-pure-gameplay
Everything We Know about GW2:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/page/1
OMG WoW losing their community! Please god/allah/buddha dont let them near the MMO's im playing.
The following statement is false
The previous statement is true
Same for me. Stopped playing @ february myself. I also have a hard time to exactly say why I'm not enjoying the game anymore. Probably Blizz just finally went too far on the simplifcation. I liked vanilla and TBC a lot, WotLK got a bit ridicilous towards the end, but was still ok for the most part. Cataclysm, though... can't imagine when I'd start playing again.
I expected much from Cataclysm, but it's by far the dullest expansion they've made so far. There's no longer true purpose to even leave a capital, you just sit there waiting for some queue to pop.
I actually miss farming stuff for res gear, Silithus raid boss summons, raiding Astranaar, timed Strat runs, etc. Of course a lot of that stuff was so cool, because it was first time doing things like that.
I guess I just miss the sense of new that no longer is there and now that the game is back to Azeroth, there's not even a new continent to use. There's a lot of vets who seem to be feeling the same way now.
Can't complain much though, if a game gives you around 5 years of good times and holds your interest, it obviously has paid its price back in full. I don't even want to imagine how much (more) money I would've spent in beer without WoW.
Slowly but surely, they are losing their playerbase. Finally, the giant is growing old.