Is Warcraft Dying? Part Deux

I think the fact that this seems to be first comment on this particular blog speaks to the fact that at least some interest in the game is dying. I have several veteran friends who started when vanilla was introduced that have become burned out and bored with the game . Some have gone on to play Rift and other games while others have discovered that real life may also be of value. Playing 'til 2AM daily tends to wear on one's stamina for the next day, increase aggro from significant others and significantly reduce one's sex life provided the player is not at the extremes of the age spectrum.
A temporary respite from the tedium of original vanilla occurred with the introduction of Cataclysm but even now leveling has once again become mechanical and something to plow through as quickly as possible.
I have only been playing about 2 1/2 years and am far from experiencing all aspects of the game to satiation but I have a feeling of "sameness" to everything I do.
I somewhat shamefully admit that pvp seems the most stimulating....
We'll see what happens...

Is there any detail regarding the drop in subscription, specifically whether the players were tanks? Is there any relationship to the future of the game and the incredible stress on tanking and healing? Some of our Guild have stopped playing because they no longer want to tank and are bored with DPS. Your thoughts?

I don't think Blizzard could even tell you that. Given that one account can have several characters at level 85 it's too hard to say what rolls are seeing the most drop off. Though if I had to guess it's probably roughly in proportion to the general distribution of the WoW population.

Personally, I feel it might be a result of Blizzard catering to *gasp* casuals.

By this, I don't mean that they're making everything easier. Cataclysm Heroics (and the whining it spawned) should be ample proof of that. What I am saying, is that Blizzard have been taking away choices from players consistently for a while now. To do the new Firelands dailies, you need to have defeated Ragnaros in Hyjal. To finish Hyjal, you need to follow a specific quest chain or you're stuck. To unlock a second Talent tree, you need to put 31 points in the tree of your choice. As another, though slightly less accurate example: recently they revealed that to fill out your Conquest points, you need to play RBGs. Blizzard are dictating our play, rather than letting us decide things for ourselves.

By casuals in the first line, I meant people along the line of total newcomers to the MMO/RPG genre. For most of the people playing since Vanilla or even TBC, you're used to making your own choices. You're the one that decides how you spend your time and what you do with your resources. Get it wrong and you're not doing as well as you could. Nowadays it's pretty hard to actually -be- wrong as most of the chances to takes a wrong decision have been removed. Part of being challenged and thus improving oneself has been omitted to greater effect over time.

Game play has become more frustrating and less enjoyable. Heroic queue times and - at least on our server - an inability to recruit competent healers may provide important clues as to the cause.

Tanks insta-queue for heroics and healers queue pretty quickly, but a poor dpser can wait forever. While it might be a start, even adjusting content to allow 4 dps to run with each tank/healer wouldn't balance the queue times. Something has made tanking and healing too unattractive to play.

A 10-man raid group exacerbates the healer shortage. The composition is not 2xHeroic Groups . . . it's 2T+3H+5DPS. You can't get competent healers consistently and you usually rotate DPS. Even more frustrating.

Part of the problem can be eased by adjusting content and abilities to reflect the reality. Solely as an example, 12-man teams of 2T-2H-8DPS would help significantly. In addition, easing the burden/pressure on tanks and healers could encourage more people to play those needed classes.

But the game is certainly more frustrating and less fun when you need to spend half of your "play" time in a queue . . . when already limited "raid" time is further reduced because healers (or tanks) aren't available . . . when you can't progress to current heroic end-game content before the next dungeon/patch/expansion comes out and trivializes the it.

I'm not so sure the problem is demographics or saturation. I think its less fun and more frustration.

I doubt they're going to reduce subscription costs to fight the problem. Even if you count the revenue generated by server transfers and the like, a 5% loss of subscriptions is around 5% less revenue. Lowering the cost per month in any tangible amount (like to 10$) would make them lose much more money than 5% less subscriptions. Also, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I feel like 15$ a month is so little that lowering the cost would never make me play more if I didn't want to.

However, I could see them making the expansions cheaper or maybe even make vanilla free. I feel like a bigger barrier to someone who wants to start playing is that it costs around 150$ (not sure on the exact number) to buy all the expansions and the first month.

IIRC, the WoW Battlechest is $40, plus WotLK at $40, plus Cata at $40 is a total buy in of $120 for brand new players. It's a hard sell to convince someone to spend well over $100 for a game that is already fairly old and the vast majority of the early content is devoid of other players. Then you have the learning curve of end game PvP/raiding (presuming someone develops an interest in that).

Someone said to me the other day that WoW should be renamed "The Dungeon Lobby", and I completely agree.

Since the addition of the dungeon finder, heirlooms, battleground and arena queue tab, (patch 4.3!- auction house tab!) the game has become more of a single player game than a "massively-multiplayer" game.

There is no longer a realm community, which was the main selling point for many players including myself.

There are many points of issue here that are all contributing in some fashion to the shrinking playerbase. I could probably write a 20-page thesis on the subject, but here are what I think the three biggest obstacles in the PvE game that Blizzard needs to overcome if they want to stop the bleeding, all of which have already been brought up:

Cataclysm content pre-endgame takes a fraction of the time to complete compared to past iterations of the game. With all of the changes encompassed within patch 4.0 including the revised primary stat system, quest and dungeon gear itemization, ability scaling, revised talent trees and the mastery system, the average player is walking around with a lot more firepower than in any previous expansion, and a player that knows what they're doing is more deadly to the environment than John McClane, Shaft, Rambo and James Bond combined. Add in some combination of the additional nerfs to TBC and Wrath TNL values and a second batch of heirlooms, then stack on some rested experience or perhaps recruit-a-friend triple experience and the content blows by a bit too fast to keep the average player out of the endgame. Quest objectives are now plainly laid out in front of you, and if you didn't read the quest text you can always check your map for the exact location of whatever you need to do in most cases. Don't get me wrong, most of these are good gameplay elements for most players. The problem is, most of Cataclysm's content is based around redoing these fast-moving lower levels. And it's easy to miss entire chunks of that content if you spend too much time queueing for battlegrounds or dungeons. Even the XP from herbing, mining and archaeology is enough to inadvertently outlevel a zone before completion.

One of the big problems facing Blizzard right now is that there's not enough endgame content for the PvE player. TBC was probably the better of the three expansion launches in terms of content. 15 dungeons/heroics, 7 of which were tuned for level 70 on normal. 3 large and 2 small raids spanning two tiers were available at launch, with a third tier introduced six months later. Wrath featured 12 dungeons at launch, 4 of which were tuned for level 80 on normal. 3 small and 1 large raid were available from the start, followed six months later by a second raiding tier. Still a pretty sizable chunk of content. Cataclysm features 9 dungeons, of which only 3 are tuned for 85 on normal. 2 large and 1 small raid comprising a single raid tier were available at launch, with a second tier scheduled to launch roughly seven months later. Compared to TBC, Cataclysm only has a little more than half the endgame content. Compound this with five fewer levels than previous expansions and less high-level questing and you have a problem that not even re-introducing ZG/ZA as heroics is going to fix.

The sense of community on individual realms is dwindling. Back in brown box and TBC, making friends with your fellow realmmates was an essential part in making your way through endgame content. If you wanted to do the Daily Heroic in TBC or do a Baron run in classic, you asked your friends or general/trade chat to find others interested in going. In the latter case, you met someone new that was on your realm that you could play with again in the future. These groups tended to be fairly civil, as word would get out if you were a ninja, lootwhore, AFKer or someone otherwise unpleasant to group with, forcing you to reroll or transfer servers to shake your bad reputation among the community. On the other hand, everyone knew who the good players were on their realm through both their stellar reputation and the fact that you probably grouped with them once or twice for a daily.

Most of that is gone now. Login, queue in LFG, run dungeon with people you will never see again, logout. Need a guild for the benefits? Search LFGuild, find high level guild, request membership. Might as well be playing from a Halo-esque matchmaking screen. The problem with this is that players aren't forming the same kind of bonds as they used to, which are needed to keep an MMO strong. In many cases, people don't keep playing MMOs for an extended period because they're fun. They keep playing because they are emotionally invested in their character and the people they play with. A few years ago if you asked a longtime player what would happen if their guild collapsed, they'd probably say they'd join another guild that some of their friends are in. These days, the most common response from fellow members in good guilds is that they'll quit the game if the guild ever falls apart, because there's just no reason to stick around outside of the present company. And it's far harder to get emotionally vested in a character when it takes less than a month to level from 1 to 85 and gear a character out, so those interpersonal bonds become all the more important.

The worst part is that they are continuing to make design decisions that add to the problem. For example, the Call to Arms system encourages players to solo queue in LFG to reduce queue times in the system, incentivizing players to continue anti-social gameplay habits. The Guild Challenge system encourages players to only group with people already in their social circle, further retarding community growth. Outside of "Tank selling instant queue 200G," there is no real reason to get to know others on your realm anymore.

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Aside from these three points, the difficulty curve difference for tanks and healers vs. DPS at 85 deserves (dis)honorable mention. It's more of a "learn to play" problem than a social problem, but here's how I see it from the standpoint of someone who plays all three roles:

I played my Hunter exclusively in the beta due to the mechanic changes and leveled it as my first level 85. Played through the new content (for the fourth time), didn't see what the big deal was about difficulty. Moving out of fire is pretty trivial, tranqing is nothing new, I have to spec MM to help with platform interrupts on Nef. Pretty simple.

A month of raiding,
The character's fully geared,
Time to level a tank

OK, the Paladin is 85. Normals are pretty faceroll. Not seeing the big deal, time for heroics. If I face or misposition a boss the wrong way, it's probably a wipe. If I don't position myself correctly and get oneshot, it's probably a wipe. If I use HotR or Consecration in the wrong spot and break CC with all my cooldowns down and a bad healer, it's probably a wipe. If someone pulls threat and I don't taunt fast enough (or I use the wrong taunt to get it back), it's probably a wipe. OK, that's pretty standard for WoW, though the repercussions are a lot deadlier and more instant these days. If I miss an interrupt while making sure I don't screw up one of the above (Halfus, Maloriak, Omnotron, etc.), I've contributed greatly to a wipe. OK, just need DBM to remind me when to hit 1. I'd prefer not to be "that guy," the one that causes more than a fair share of wipes, and I can see how easily that can become the case. But I'm a good player and can make the cut. Now if only I didn't need to loot table scraps and farm 2-3x the VP to gear up both my Tank and DPS roles compared to a pure DPS. Maybe I should level my Bear...

So I leveled my Druid, which was Resto at the end of Wrath. Level 83, I'm having occasional mana problems, going to attribute that to having to heal bad players harder. Level 84, OK I'm starting to go OOM on a regular basis, hoping it's just the fact I'm coming up on 85 and the gear curve has made all of my "Darkbrand * of the Undertow" pieces obsolete. Level 85, already have 346 through rep rewards and Leatherworking/Archaeology/Inscription items, let's head into heroics! Oh god, what the hell, DPS stop being bad, I only have enough mana to heal the unavoidable stuff and not enough to heal your stupidity. Full 346+ in all slots, OK heroics aren't that bad now, time to get some upgrades from the Zandalari heroics. Oh god, I'm going OOM again. This is a lot of damage! DPS stop being bad. Tank, move out of Zanzil Fire faster! Don't you blame me for your failure to get out of the fire, that stuff hits for 30k/tick every half second. Gah, I wish I was on my Hunter right now.

Long story short, DPS has only a fraction of the responsibility and obligation of the other two roles in the PvE environment, but gets the same fulfillment out of each dungeon or raid compared to the other roles. In the process of giving tanks "more things to do" and making "mana matter" for healers, they've created a form of social entropy. Players prefer the role with the least responsibility, so a vast majority of the remaining population that plays the game for fun rather than a challenge moved over to the DPS role. The two basic ways to "fix" the problem are to A) make DPS harder in some fashion, possibly along the lines of more encounters that put the same level stress on individual DPS as say Herald Volazj phantoms, Lich King harvest souls or C'Thun stomach, or B) ease up/shift some of the difficulties away from tanks and healers - or compensate them more for their services, considering that raid design constantly demands that they have an offspec ready to go. Maybe a Satchel of Helpful Goods like the first 70 levels every time you queue as tank or healer containing something like a random prefix rare/epic or a current Darkmoon card at random.

World of Warcraft Subscriber Numbers Dip, Blizzard Plans For New Market - the[a]listdaily

They are down to 11.1 million now.

Rep grinding is what's killing Cataclysm for me ... I levelled a Paladin Tank/Healer first, and at first really enjoyed the quests and new areas. Then a priest healer/dps (which I levelled through Hyjal rather than Vashj'ir), then a warlock, rogue, warrior ... if I have to do the Thezerane quests 1 more time ... And now I find out I have to collect around 700 marks on each character to unlock all the Firelands vendor gear??

In Vanilla and TBC there were LOADS of things to do at max level that were both fun AND productive. Max level quests spread throughout the zones (not complete 1 zone and never go back there), and dungeon content tuned to align with increasing gear levels (BRD -> Scholo /LBRS -> Strat / UBRS -> etc in Vanilla) and all that was before you even got to raiding. These days for the not-quite-raider there are pretty much only 2 things to do on login: 1) Grind dailies, 2) Sit in LFG. Neither of which is particularly compelling when compared to all the sex ppmd01 pointed out we're probably missing!

While agree that these are all valid point I do think the reduction in active accounts may also have something to do with the economy. I wonder how many of those subscriptions were second accounts. Many of the features they have added have removed reasons to have second accounts.

I would disagree given that back in October 2008 WoW had a subscription base of 11 million. It peaked early this year at 12 and only since the release of the current expansion has there been a net loss of subscriptions. I'm sure that in many cases though gamers who maybe out of work are factoring the reoccurring cost of WoW into their finances and deciding the value is no longer there for them. Nonetheless, I still feel that the quick drop that we are seeing is due to other factors than personal finances.