1) plain boring raiding experience (4 lvl raid difficulty - lfr,normal,hc,mythic... why not leave one like in the old good days? make some stuff for casuals to do, but just separate raid experience and leave it for those who are dedicated)
2) problems with gathering people for 20 mythics - this has killed my guild for which I sacrificed my hearth before the expansion and during WoD as a RL and non-formal GM
3) garrisons - this is a nail to the coffin, I didn't even have time to left my garrison, coz of this profession gathering bullshit (main+3 alts), followers? won't even comment that. my bags and mail was all the time full of loot.
4) literally nothing to do besides raids (I don't consider garrisons as a "something to do" - game should bring fun, but not force you to work)
5) selfie........... blizzard knows how to kill lore and general fantasy immersion
6) broken pvp since MoP day 1, horrid balance decisions, wintrading, fail implementation of Ashan as a world pvp area (it's called lazy design - why not prepare some random generated events through the whole world in random places to lure out players? best herbs or mines to collect in dangerous areas close to enemy cities? this could work, but as we can remember, professions are almost useless atm and this is the 7th reason)
This is the reason I left almost 3 months ago, and for me this happens the first time after 9 years of constant play ... and I probably won't be back until this is fixed.
"The good news? A crap ton of content is well on the way."
No, there isn't. A new zone, a new garrison feature, and a new raid. That's not a lot of content. Everything else is rehashed content. Content updates have been abysmal in WoW ever since MoP's Timeless Isle patch.
Looks like the returning tourist (those who left, call a different MMO their home now, but buy expansions and return to level-up their characters to the new cap) population is growing... soon it will be more than half of the total population.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
I'm still playing, but I'm feeling distinctly 'meh' about Warlords of Draenor. For these reasons:
1) The Garrison is very isolating - it's possible to sit in it all day, issuing instructions to minions for them to go off and get trousers you don't even want. Multiple alts = multiple garrisons = boring. A cynic might say that Blizzard prefer us not congregating in cities because then we don't notice the population thinning out
2) I realise that I'm in a minority here, but I liked Pandaria - above all, it had a real sense of place. The artwork was brilliant - the cherry trees, the mountain villages, the architecture... WoD feels like a pretty boring looking place with lots of orcs in it, and that's about it.
3) New content has not been forthcoming
4) Flying still not included and it doesn't look like it's coming in 6.2 either (bear with me, I'll explain)
5) Dungeon drops lack originality; it's basically just a bunch of random stuff that drops whatever dungeon you're in, with ilevel adjusted as appropriate.
6) Professions are now pointless and pretty dull. And a lot of the gearing subtlety that was tied in to professions (enchanting, gemming) has gone.
Now you could argue that some of these (e.g. 1 and 6) were deliberate design choices by Blizzard to homogenize and simplify everything, and that the worst that can be said is maybe they made the wrong call. (I think in large part they did.)
But the rest... to me it feels like someone got lazy. They can't be bothered to design multiple models and come up with multiple names for dungeon drops. They haven't made much content. Everything looks pretty boring and by-the-numbers; there aren't any jaw-dropping vistas. And the reason I mention flying is not so much because I care about flying as such, more because it feels like another symptom of the creative laziness. Their major reason for not adding it seems to be that they want to slow down our consumption of content as much as possible, to conceal the fact that there really isn't much.
The next expansion needs to be better, and it needs to be soonish.
I think that many of the 3 million people that quit where mmo hoppers for quite some time, hopping from AoC, Warhammer, Aion, Rift, SWTOR, GW2, TESO and Wildstar. Every time a new game launches the servers burst until the boredom sets in.
With no new game on the horizon for quite some time, WoD was the game many returned too, but most of these gamers already played WoW to death, so once the newness was wearing off it was the same old game they left so many times out of boredom.
What it tells me is that there is still a big market of potentially millions of players out there looking for a really good new mmo.
6. No flying. I understand why flying should be restricted in new areas, but it's been almost six months. Running around aggroing everything gets old quickly. We've flown everywhere since TBC, but now there's hints that flying may not come back at all for WoD or subsequent expansions. Sorry, that's bullshit. At least give us a valid in-game reason for it, instead of "You just can't fly here because we said so!"
That wasn't arbitrary, Blizzard gave the reason at a convention last year.
They removed flying because the world they created for players to enjoy was, by and large, being skipped and ignored due to the fact that players just flew to the next waypoint on a mental autopilot. Despite their rather confounding efforts in other areas (Garrisons have been mentioned by most reviewers as taking away from the "world," which, admittedly, contradicts this philosophy), they wanted to bring back the feeling that you were inhabiting a world worth exploring, instead of just dungeon runs or going waypoint to waypoint. The other alternative, for them (to avoid wasting resources producing something the majority of players wouldn't even experience), would be to create a purely lobby-based expansion ala Vindictus, or make the new content areas so small as to be inconsequential (ala Destiny). And if they had went with that: see the hubbub about a "lack of content" in the new expansions. It would've been ten times worse an issue.
Now I'm not defending Blizzard for any part of the expansion. I couldn't care less the reviews WoD is getting, as I didn't resub to play it. But that wasn't an arbitrary decision, and they actually provided reasoning before the expansion hit. Take from that what you will.
I'm one of those that really felt subconsciously that if I wasn't doing my garrison stuff, somehow I wasn't progressing. I'm noramlly a guy that will keep several tank classes at max level and geared so I could just play whichever I felt like playing. But the garrison thing, I would log on and run through all the stuff with my tanks, then realize I had spent too much time doing garrison stuff, which I felt like I needed to do, and not just enjoying stuff outside the garrison.
I dont' even feel liek logging in now. If somehow all my toons could share a garrison, maybe that would work better? I dont' know, but while I loved the ideas of garrisons, they make me not want to log in, and of course I ultimately unsubbed about 2 months after WoD released. I've resubbed once, but then after a week of garrison stuff again, I just unsubbed.
So okay... whats the big deal.. 7 Million is still stars more than 99% of other mmos..not really a story here to me. WoW is still a titan. Im not trying to be punny.
"Beliefs don't change facts. Facts, if you're reasonable, should change your beliefs."
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
Not sure why both the developers and the stupid reviewers fail to understand these basic concepts. Oh ya now I remember they really don't actually play games anymore, they just dabble even less than the most casual of casual players.
Look it is simple stop with your psuedo smart guy theory crafting. All of these MMO's have been dumbed down so far that you get bored in short order. Not sure how many times you think people can run the same raid/dungeon over and over and over and over, especially when you already got the meager amount of loot and progression your character can make.
Wanna fix MMO's? Design an MMO with a rich character development system. Huge stats sheets, multiple equipment "profiles/pages" to accrue to provide set ups for many different types of fights, stop making the game so simple that I gear up grade that simply keeps raising my 2 primary attirbutes lol what a joke.
Finally design a system that allows you to CRANK out unique fun entertaining end game content. You want people to play these mmo's for years....then provide the appropriate content. The current development and release cycle for mmo content is a joke, i mean a real joke often taking full development teams over 3-6 months to drop one new short simple dungeon? Get your shit together mmo industry.
I think that many of the 3 million people that quit where mmo hoppers for quite some time, hopping from AoC, Warhammer, Aion, Rift, SWTOR, GW2, TESO and Wildstar. Every time a new game launches the servers burst until the boredom sets in.
With no new game on the horizon for quite some time, WoD was the game many returned too, but most of these gamers already played WoW to death, so once the newness was wearing off it was the same old game they left so many times out of boredom.
What it tells me is that there is still a big market of potentially millions of players out there looking for a really good new mmo.
Yes and no. We are talking about players who played Wow before and came back for the new content and left again when they felt they did enough of it, not the bungee players that buy every new MMO and plays it for 2-6 weeks.
There surely are a lot of players that would get into a new great MMO but this is more like we seen the last few expansions for Wow, they get a huge bunch of players for a couple of month (probably the same players every time) and lose them again.
To actually catch these specific players long term you need a sequel to Wow.
Where you people get your numbers is beyond me, WoW dropped 2.1mil subs in the past few months?? WoW at 7.1 Subs?? Sorry to burst your bubbles, but WoW still holds a solid 10mil+ Subs even to this day, all thanks to TESO, GW2, Wildstar, FF14 being crappy at best. Don't get me wrong, graphics on TESO, GW2, FF14 are amazing, but beyond that? GW2 you can't play 30 minutes without having a full inventory, FF14 you either rage quit at the RNG or go in to a deep depression when you're out of crystals to craft with, and TESO ... anyway, I understand 99% of you are tired of WoW and everybody else that is trying to copy the success of WoW but end up being thrown in the recycle bin after a month or 2 of game play, but don't start throwing numbers around that makes absolutely no sense. Am I a WoW fanboi? Not really, I'm more of a old school RPG fanboi, like FF6, Lufia 2, Secret of Mana, and so on. Just that when I read these kinds of threads, it brings my blood to a boil, but I'm alright now. And don't forget, most of WoW players that "quit", are most likely playing Destiny, so in the end, it's still a win / win for Blizzard and a major loss for every other Dev / Pub out there. Blizzard / Activision are the only saviors of the MMORPG world, and I cannot wait for their next gen MMO, might be another 5+ years, so I'll enjoy the upcoming titles coming out of Blizzard in the coming months / years which are Heroes of the Storm, HearthStone and OverWatch. I've lost all hope in every other Dev team out there to deliver something awesome. A little side note, instead of ya'll going crazy about WoW's numbers, I'd be more concerned of the fact that League of Legends has 25+ million users playing the game on a daily basis, compared to the 1.7mil combined of TESO, WildStar, GW2, FF14 ... just sayin'.
Hearthstone is a very good game. I have never been a big WoW fan but they have set the standard for so many years you would have to be foolish to question them. Games like Rift tried to copy them and have had some success but ultimately failed due to bad leadership within the organization. The recipe is there to be copied but a lot of these games just have bad generals running the show. There has not been a true successor as of today that has truly challenged their dominance. PVP and Dungeons have to be balanced and fun. When I see any game that favors pvp over dungeons or dungeons over pvp I see instant fail. Not sure what the answer is but I know even with the obvious WoW numbers dropping they still remain King.
Originally posted by klash2def So okay... whats the big deal.. 7 Million is still stars more than 99% of other mmos..not really a story here to me. WoW is still a titan. Im not trying to be punny.
Oh dear, you don't understand how the business works it seems. Blizzard has noted a big loss of bucks wagons coz of HUGE subs decline. WoD has been advertised as a expansion which would bring things to the roots, bring old players back, but obviously Blizzard makes the same mistakes all over again - they don't learn anything. Due to shallow thinking they have noted the unexpected playerbase drop - much, much deeper than previous years and ... it's only the beginning of expansion.
There was an argument, that competitors are weak (Wildstar, TESO etc.). Let's make things clear: there are other games than MMOs on the market too, so you need to have a little wider view in this case.
they were at 7 million before WoD hit, so it's basically the expansion hype train coming and leaving while the ones who are always subbed remain (and continue to bleed)
Originally posted by borghive49 I never understood why WoD had such great initial reviews? This was the worst expansion Blizzard put out for this game to date in my opinion.
I think the initial reviews were very understandable.
Look at the last two expansions. Cata is consistently rated as the worst expansion ever and MoP while much better done than Cata having the central focus of the expansion on "Kung Fu Pandas" gave it a childish feel so there was a general excitement for getting back to something more Warcraftish.
Also the fact that a lot of people had been waiting years for player housing and updated character models helped fuel the hype... and for a lot of people garrisons were very exciting at the start. It took several weeks if not several months for the magic of garrisons to wear off.
When garrisons started to look far less like player housing and far more like just another daily grind in a new skin the expansion was in trouble.
I can't log in a play because, as the OP states, the Garrison feels more like a job with my main and alts. It feels nothing like players housing at all more like a micro management game that takes me away from cities and any new content that I could play..if it was there... and why can't my farm be at my garrison, my wife hates that as well..just feels "messy" in a way.
Careful what you say on the WoW forums just got a 1 week ban for voicing my opinion about the sub losses. They are in full damage control at the moment.
Part of the problem with the new expansion is the way they did the garrison thing. It's not really player housing, because you can't really customize it enough for it to feel like YOUR creation. And, the tiny mini-games all feel like time sinks that you feel bad about not doing (because you're throwing away free stuff), but also don't really enjoy doing (because they're only interesting the first day you do them).
I enjoyed the quest lines leading up to getting your garrison, but the actual garrison itself doesn't feel like a base of operations. It feels like a theme park without any fun rides.
The other gripe I have is that it fragments the playerbase even more! One of the things that was fun about Wrath was Dalaran. Sure, the lag wasn't fun, but the fact that everyone was THERE was great. I keep hoping they'll make content that's actually focused in and around one of the main cities for a whole expansion, just to get people to interact a bit.
If *I* were Blizzard, I would start developing extended storylines for all the non-capital cities (Yes, even Silvermoon and the Exodar), and release those as an expansion pack, but phase them in over time, maybe one every other month. That way, people would cycle through the major cities and actually have reasons to visit them.
WoD is the first time I haven't re-subbed and purchased the expansion after a break and I still haven't gone back. I do miss WoW but I knew it'd be the same thing it is every expansion, as someone else mentioned, level, gear grind, rep grind, dailies, boredom. I figured I'd just stay gone this time till an expansion really grabs my attention and adds some new features to suck me back in.
Originally posted by LeGrosGamerV2 Where you people get your numbers is beyond me, WoW dropped 2.1mil subs in the past few months?? WoW at 7.1 Subs?? Sorry to burst your bubbles, but WoW still holds a solid 10mil+
Comments
1) plain boring raiding experience (4 lvl raid difficulty - lfr,normal,hc,mythic... why not leave one like in the old good days? make some stuff for casuals to do, but just separate raid experience and leave it for those who are dedicated)
2) problems with gathering people for 20 mythics - this has killed my guild for which I sacrificed my hearth before the expansion and during WoD as a RL and non-formal GM
3) garrisons - this is a nail to the coffin, I didn't even have time to left my garrison, coz of this profession gathering bullshit (main+3 alts), followers? won't even comment that. my bags and mail was all the time full of loot.
4) literally nothing to do besides raids (I don't consider garrisons as a "something to do" - game should bring fun, but not force you to work)
5) selfie........... blizzard knows how to kill lore and general fantasy immersion
6) broken pvp since MoP day 1, horrid balance decisions, wintrading, fail implementation of Ashan as a world pvp area (it's called lazy design - why not prepare some random generated events through the whole world in random places to lure out players? best herbs or mines to collect in dangerous areas close to enemy cities? this could work, but as we can remember, professions are almost useless atm and this is the 7th reason)
This is the reason I left almost 3 months ago, and for me this happens the first time after 9 years of constant play ... and I probably won't be back until this is fixed.
"The good news? A crap ton of content is well on the way."
No, there isn't. A new zone, a new garrison feature, and a new raid. That's not a lot of content. Everything else is rehashed content. Content updates have been abysmal in WoW ever since MoP's Timeless Isle patch.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
I'm still playing, but I'm feeling distinctly 'meh' about Warlords of Draenor. For these reasons:
1) The Garrison is very isolating - it's possible to sit in it all day, issuing instructions to minions for them to go off and get trousers you don't even want. Multiple alts = multiple garrisons = boring. A cynic might say that Blizzard prefer us not congregating in cities because then we don't notice the population thinning out
2) I realise that I'm in a minority here, but I liked Pandaria - above all, it had a real sense of place. The artwork was brilliant - the cherry trees, the mountain villages, the architecture... WoD feels like a pretty boring looking place with lots of orcs in it, and that's about it.
3) New content has not been forthcoming
4) Flying still not included and it doesn't look like it's coming in 6.2 either (bear with me, I'll explain)
5) Dungeon drops lack originality; it's basically just a bunch of random stuff that drops whatever dungeon you're in, with ilevel adjusted as appropriate.
6) Professions are now pointless and pretty dull. And a lot of the gearing subtlety that was tied in to professions (enchanting, gemming) has gone.
Now you could argue that some of these (e.g. 1 and 6) were deliberate design choices by Blizzard to homogenize and simplify everything, and that the worst that can be said is maybe they made the wrong call. (I think in large part they did.)
But the rest... to me it feels like someone got lazy. They can't be bothered to design multiple models and come up with multiple names for dungeon drops. They haven't made much content. Everything looks pretty boring and by-the-numbers; there aren't any jaw-dropping vistas. And the reason I mention flying is not so much because I care about flying as such, more because it feels like another symptom of the creative laziness. Their major reason for not adding it seems to be that they want to slow down our consumption of content as much as possible, to conceal the fact that there really isn't much.
The next expansion needs to be better, and it needs to be soonish.
I think that many of the 3 million people that quit where mmo hoppers for quite some time, hopping from AoC, Warhammer, Aion, Rift, SWTOR, GW2, TESO and Wildstar. Every time a new game launches the servers burst until the boredom sets in.
With no new game on the horizon for quite some time, WoD was the game many returned too, but most of these gamers already played WoW to death, so once the newness was wearing off it was the same old game they left so many times out of boredom.
What it tells me is that there is still a big market of potentially millions of players out there looking for a really good new mmo.
Panda's was bad but at least it was the last true 'expansion' with flight and all the zones at launch.
WoD is a WoW Facebook game. With a sub. Yeah I know about WoW Tokens, I wonder how long they will last before they are shut off like D3's RMAH.
That wasn't arbitrary, Blizzard gave the reason at a convention last year.
They removed flying because the world they created for players to enjoy was, by and large, being skipped and ignored due to the fact that players just flew to the next waypoint on a mental autopilot. Despite their rather confounding efforts in other areas (Garrisons have been mentioned by most reviewers as taking away from the "world," which, admittedly, contradicts this philosophy), they wanted to bring back the feeling that you were inhabiting a world worth exploring, instead of just dungeon runs or going waypoint to waypoint. The other alternative, for them (to avoid wasting resources producing something the majority of players wouldn't even experience), would be to create a purely lobby-based expansion ala Vindictus, or make the new content areas so small as to be inconsequential (ala Destiny). And if they had went with that: see the hubbub about a "lack of content" in the new expansions. It would've been ten times worse an issue.
Now I'm not defending Blizzard for any part of the expansion. I couldn't care less the reviews WoD is getting, as I didn't resub to play it. But that wasn't an arbitrary decision, and they actually provided reasoning before the expansion hit. Take from that what you will.
I'm one of those that really felt subconsciously that if I wasn't doing my garrison stuff, somehow I wasn't progressing. I'm noramlly a guy that will keep several tank classes at max level and geared so I could just play whichever I felt like playing. But the garrison thing, I would log on and run through all the stuff with my tanks, then realize I had spent too much time doing garrison stuff, which I felt like I needed to do, and not just enjoying stuff outside the garrison.
I dont' even feel liek logging in now. If somehow all my toons could share a garrison, maybe that would work better? I dont' know, but while I loved the ideas of garrisons, they make me not want to log in, and of course I ultimately unsubbed about 2 months after WoD released. I've resubbed once, but then after a week of garrison stuff again, I just unsubbed.
-Unconstitutional laws aren't laws.-
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
wasnt dota a mod for Warcraft? how did blizzard copy their own art?
Not sure why both the developers and the stupid reviewers fail to understand these basic concepts. Oh ya now I remember they really don't actually play games anymore, they just dabble even less than the most casual of casual players.
Look it is simple stop with your psuedo smart guy theory crafting. All of these MMO's have been dumbed down so far that you get bored in short order. Not sure how many times you think people can run the same raid/dungeon over and over and over and over, especially when you already got the meager amount of loot and progression your character can make.
Wanna fix MMO's? Design an MMO with a rich character development system. Huge stats sheets, multiple equipment "profiles/pages" to accrue to provide set ups for many different types of fights, stop making the game so simple that I gear up grade that simply keeps raising my 2 primary attirbutes lol what a joke.
Finally design a system that allows you to CRANK out unique fun entertaining end game content. You want people to play these mmo's for years....then provide the appropriate content. The current development and release cycle for mmo content is a joke, i mean a real joke often taking full development teams over 3-6 months to drop one new short simple dungeon? Get your shit together mmo industry.
https://twitter.com/BlizzardWatch/status/596056727574827008
For those wondering how tokens factor in to subscriber numbers, RT @Joefran92: @BlizzardWatch Tokens are Q2, its not counting yet.
EQ2 fan sites
Yes and no. We are talking about players who played Wow before and came back for the new content and left again when they felt they did enough of it, not the bungee players that buy every new MMO and plays it for 2-6 weeks.
There surely are a lot of players that would get into a new great MMO but this is more like we seen the last few expansions for Wow, they get a huge bunch of players for a couple of month (probably the same players every time) and lose them again.
To actually catch these specific players long term you need a sequel to Wow.
Oh dear, you don't understand how the business works it seems. Blizzard has noted a big loss of bucks wagons coz of HUGE subs decline. WoD has been advertised as a expansion which would bring things to the roots, bring old players back, but obviously Blizzard makes the same mistakes all over again - they don't learn anything. Due to shallow thinking they have noted the unexpected playerbase drop - much, much deeper than previous years and ... it's only the beginning of expansion.
There was an argument, that competitors are weak (Wildstar, TESO etc.). Let's make things clear: there are other games than MMOs on the market too, so you need to have a little wider view in this case.
It's not but it's pretty much click bait.
They know it's the usual peak and trough of gamers that leave after a few months every time, it's fun to talk about though.
I think the initial reviews were very understandable.
Look at the last two expansions. Cata is consistently rated as the worst expansion ever and MoP while much better done than Cata having the central focus of the expansion on "Kung Fu Pandas" gave it a childish feel so there was a general excitement for getting back to something more Warcraftish.
Also the fact that a lot of people had been waiting years for player housing and updated character models helped fuel the hype... and for a lot of people garrisons were very exciting at the start. It took several weeks if not several months for the magic of garrisons to wear off.
When garrisons started to look far less like player housing and far more like just another daily grind in a new skin the expansion was in trouble.
I can't log in a play because, as the OP states, the Garrison feels more like a job with my main and alts. It feels nothing like players housing at all more like a micro management game that takes me away from cities and any new content that I could play..if it was there... and why can't my farm be at my garrison, my wife hates that as well..just feels "messy" in a way.
I'm a casual player and I do miss Ghostcrawler...
Just my 2 cents.
Part of the problem with the new expansion is the way they did the garrison thing. It's not really player housing, because you can't really customize it enough for it to feel like YOUR creation. And, the tiny mini-games all feel like time sinks that you feel bad about not doing (because you're throwing away free stuff), but also don't really enjoy doing (because they're only interesting the first day you do them).
I enjoyed the quest lines leading up to getting your garrison, but the actual garrison itself doesn't feel like a base of operations. It feels like a theme park without any fun rides.
The other gripe I have is that it fragments the playerbase even more! One of the things that was fun about Wrath was Dalaran. Sure, the lag wasn't fun, but the fact that everyone was THERE was great. I keep hoping they'll make content that's actually focused in and around one of the main cities for a whole expansion, just to get people to interact a bit.
If *I* were Blizzard, I would start developing extended storylines for all the non-capital cities (Yes, even Silvermoon and the Exodar), and release those as an expansion pack, but phase them in over time, maybe one every other month. That way, people would cycle through the major cities and actually have reasons to visit them.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/4878-WoW-Down-to-7-1-Million-Subscribers
It's been widely announced over the last several days.