Perfect summation. Anything that spans a few years gets stale at some point. I logged into Everquest for the first time in 6 years the other day, and the game immediately showed its age, both in graphics and gameplay. If you dramatically change the WoW formula, it's no longer WoW. Keep it the same, and it tires. It's just the nature of gaming. We all knew it'd one day be dust on our hovering bookshelves in our space shuttle libraries =)
Only thing I have to say about this is Counter-Strike. That game is old, and hasn't changed a bit, but the player base is still thriving. Same goes for StarCraft. How did StarCraft survive so many years without being drastically changed. I know they are 2 different genres, but in my opinion, age doesn't kill a game. Ways to save WoW are simple, Blizzard actually needs to split up the communities rather than get them together. By this, I mean PvP, PvE, Hardcore and Casuals need to be split up. Heroic Modes are a good way of splitting this divide for Hardcore/Casuals, but PvP and PvE still need this divide to be made. If Blizzard took the abilities and made them act differently in PvE and PvP (similar to Guild Wars and similar to Bosses from Normal to HC modes), then the game would be easier to balance. Also, I feel that brining the class DOES matter. Cataclysm allows players to come as any class because nearly all have interrupts and buffs are cross-class. Bringing back class uniqueness will be better for PvP and PvE.Just my thoughts.Kieran
I think people are getting bored faster than they did in the past. I've heard people complaining about how they're sick of the 5 man content and were annoyed that 4.2 didn't include any new 5 mans, and I'm like, really? You do realize that there were no new 5 mans in between Dire Maul in March '05 and BC? Or between BC launch and 2.4? Or between LK launch and 3.3? Getting the trollrics so soon was really a pretty nice surprise.I'm honestly kind of curious how many people go from WoW to another MMO long-term as opposed to just dabbling. Do other MMOs really have unique features that would keep a player who's grown bored with WoW, or do they just feel like WoW in a different skin when the newness has worn off?Perspective on how old WoW is: I was pregnant for the first time when WoW launched. I went to first-grade back to school night for said child last night. FIRST. GRADE. WHAT.
No matter what people think about Cataclysm, or how nostalgic they get for previous expansions, no matter whether people are complaining about class balance or not, no matter how many more years World of Warcraft survies, it has been, and still is, a massive success of indisputable magnitude. Gamasutra's candour is to be appreciated, but at the same time it almost feels like an eulogy.
I can explain why I dislike Cataclysm and have, although many of the posts on the official forums that I participated in where often deleted.To sum it up, Blizzard didn't really try anything new. You can't just refine your formula over and over and expect it to be a success.
But if we are bored of the most successful mmorpg( if i might say) will there be another one who can satisfy our thirst for online gaming? It might end up that WoW actually is killing the mmo genre as we speak. New content comes rather frequently but we are given so much time in between that we grow bored of it in mere hours. Dunno if it's lack of complexity but i am taking a rest from wow during the summer cuz i had nothing to do ingame anymore. My guild cleared everything on normal and struggling with a few heroic modes but there was nothing new for me. And the firelands quests and raid didn't introduce much.... more quests(seen them before completed them a thousand times) and a raid(since valithria i havent seen a unique boss encounter worth mentioning). I really like the game don't get me wrong but i don't have motivation to play it anymore. After a few months of new things it will catch my eye again i hope :)>.
I hate Cata because it made all the guilds on my server EXTREMELY insular, which killed a lot of raiding and almost all roleplay on my server. It has nothing to do with the age of it.
Gamasutra reached, with far more research and collection of evidence, a thought that I'd voiced back in Wrath: The age of the game is the primary reason people leave. There are games that people go back to for nostalgia's sake, but gaming tends to be a progressive entertainment - play it for awhile, move on to the next big thing.What sort of makes WoW different is that so many people kept coming in, even though its core design wasn't really new. But that's a double-edged sword: Change that formula to try and refresh the game and you risk losing people and not replacing them. Regardless I think Blizzard is to the point where it's seen its top numbers for the game's player base, and the game's age is showing to the point where we'll see people start to drop away steadily.Someone mentioned Counterstrike and Starcraft. I've never played the former, played the heck out of the latter. But it's not necessarily a valid comparison. How many people are really playing Counterstrike? While there are numerous private servers, Steam indicates that their servers have an average audience of 50-55k. Starcraft seems to average anywhere from 20-25k players at a time.That's a far cry from keeping the interest of 9-11m players. I'm not disparaging those games in an way - it's just that the comparison won't be valid until WoW actually reaches the point where most of its subscribers have left for other games, and there's a small, core audience still signing on. Given the total number of subscribers in the game's history, I think that WoW on its "deathbed" will still have more regular players than many other MMOs out there.
Frankly, WoW's subscriber count could probably use a diet.Hopefully if it drops to 8 million, the 3 million that leave will be all the trolls and morons that are ruining it for those of us that are actually having fun.
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
WoW's development is an iterative process. They try new things from Tier to Tier, keep what works and improve on or dismiss the things that don't. I think one of the big "things that didn't work" for Cataclysm is the divorce of 10 and 25 man lockouts. It goes both ways; I know there are players in my 25 man guild who would -love- to get together in a 10 man environment and push some content that we don't have the time to do on our normal 25 man nights. There are also those 10 man guilds who would love to group up with other guilds and pugs and try and get some 25 man content down.Go ahead and keep the same loot drops, but allow people to do both again in the same week. I still love the game, but I'm down to raiding my 3 nights per week and... that's about it.
One day this game will die like everything must but I hope blizzard will make world of warcraft 2 some day and continue the lore because its such a massive universe and a lot of aspects you can really emerse your self in.Warcraft will I hope continue one day.
In my opinion one of the problems is class uniqueness. I personally don't like paladin's BoM stacking with Trueshot Aura, a deathknight's Abomination's Might, and a shaman's Unleashed Rage. There is plenty of more examples. In WotLK I liked having kings, might, priest buff, MoTW and others all on at the same time, now I can't have that. This class uniqueness being taken away is something that I really hated about cata.