So first of all. No this isn’t a " WoW is dying " “WoW is dead” thread. Nor do i want to see it go that way. However i would like to explore the topic of how WoW didn’t die.
I’ve been watching a series on Youtube called Death of a game. Focusing on Successful mmo’s and online only games.
All these games had large player bases and fans but died slowly and gradually. Saw new life for a while going free to play before ultimately dying.
Now how did WoW manage to stave off a natural decline. I have followed online gaming trends , the hype train , the pre-order , launch days , 6 months playing every week then the game just disappears or seen as old and we move onto " The next big thing"
Wow has had big pop drops , i especially felt it during WoD and Bfa and yet somehow , 4 years of " bad " expansion content hasn’t killed WoW. Players seems to be forgetful or more forgivable.
So why do you think we haven’t seen an episode of death of a game : World of Warcraft ? What makes you quit one expansion and buy the next one ?
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because we’re stubborn AF Refuse to leave and prefer to screech at blizzard about our problems 
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Wow was my childhood game and to this day still a game I play and love it there is another one like this and thats the ES oblivion. But in my opinion if wow would die maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as we think, there are millions of talented hobby devs who would gladly make a great pserver but they can’t because blizz just don’t give them any air.
The death of the game(ironic) or an entire dev/publiser purge is the only thing that could save this game.
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Generally speaking, WoW is a much better game than we tend to give it credit when we complain about each of our pet peeves. It is addressed to a very diverse audience, appealing both to the casual who occasionally logs on to level from level 44 to 46 and then takes a 1 week break, and to the hardcore player that wants to kill the most epic and difficult pve encounter, and to the midcore pvp player that wants a ladder to compete on and some gameplay that is always both complex enough to give satisfaction and simple enough to seem that it’s easy to get into, and to the person who would rather play a dungeon crawler with a few friends, and to the RPer writing a wall of text of background for their tauren shaman and then enjoying it with other like-minded folk, and many, many others.
I would say that one of the keys to WoW’s success has always been the fact that it’s always been accessible enough for the average person, while never being completely demystified at the highest level, fostering an elite, competitive scene at the same time, in both pve and pvp.
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Long, long term players.
Only had this monk since WoD, but I’ve had my druid alt since TBC, and the psychological investment is huge. After 15 years, it’s really hard to abandon something permanently.
That, and I tend to go where the people are. If you’re into the social side, if you like hanging out with your guild, if they’re regularly online and willing to do group content, even if the game itself is a bit rough; you end up logging in just to hang out.
That is because so many of us love the game, it is easy to leave when you don’t care. WoW has so many people that do and it feels sad when something is wrong.
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I’ve played WoW since 2006. In that time I’ve also tried Age of Conan (ok for 8 months, but ultimately too linear (I like open world), and LoTR, which while free to play got too grindy to unlock the zones, and again felt constrained, though this time to an overfamiliar story. Prior to WoW I played Unreal sniper and loved it, but that was dying by 2005. When not in WoW I’m doing elder scrolls (not tried online), Witcher and Fallout.
With WoW I played too much the first couple of years, damagingly so, gave it a break after Cata, came back in 2010, then dipped in and out since then. This time I’ve been playing for about 7 months. Why do I keep coming back? Probably because it evolves, possibly because I’ve never got good enough at it to get totally bored by it. How does it survive? Maybe 7million players like me, dipping in and out to something that is familiar but different, to a graphics and gameplay style that is good enough, to a game created by people who understand endorphin/dopamine generation, and because it only needs a seventh of its player base active at any one time to be viable?
Blizzard managed to keep the game afloat by constant marketing, developing new content and by being extremely succesfull with the game in the first place. It became dominant game on MMO market very quickly after its release in 2004. If that didn’t happened then WoW would be dead long ago, possibly after first patch of WOTLK if not earlier.
In markets where Blizzard does not hold the dominant game it’s not that colorful. HOTS died already, Diablo 3 is doing poorly (even though it was dominant hack and slash franchise for a long time). Overwatch is meh at best, lots of class based shooters do it better. Same for Hack and Slash games - POE and Grim Dawn do it much better. Heck modded Diablo II does it better (Path of Diablo, Project Diablo II, Median XL)
We lived through a number of bad patches and even bad expansions. But we know that eventually a good patch or expansion comes. Sometimes there is bad launch but later patches shape the expansion into a good one (MOP for example - 5.0 was a rough ride through a million annoying dailies with a mediocre raiding tier but then 5.2 happened, possibly the best WoW patch ever made!)
We simply need a better MMO to be released in order for WoW to truly die out (like HOTS did). This hasn’t happened yet but it is not impossible.
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the forums in a nutshell xD
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No king shall rule forever but it seems wow is going to rule forever. I mean, the game demographics shifted towards an audience that plays 1 to 2 months whenever a patch or expansion releases. Not to mention the fact that many people take break for a couple of expansions only to then come back once more.
Even if it seems there is a drop in active players, the game will always keep a healthy playerbase, since there are a lot of cycles of going back and quit, so on and forth.
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It is the father of MMOs and I have been playing it for 15 years. Far too much has been invested to really ever quit. And no game seems to shape up to WoW.
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There are no alternatives or at least all are inferior from the PoV of a player that keeps returning to WoW.
For me personally, in ESO I can’t stand the atrocious performance, the complete lack of vertical progression and the combat system. GW2 the same thing except the combat is nice there, but the other issues are even more pronounced. Also both games lock a LOT of cosmetics behind multiple paywalls.
FF14 I hate the art style, the combat, the way the whole game is designed around 100s of hours of story that I tried to get through but failed due to fatal boredom. In all 3 of them, I also hate the fragmented world design divided by loading screens that kill immersion (kinda like Shadowlands).
SWTOR is probably the closest one but I don’t feel it’s worth subscribing to that game, feels like it’s been dying ever since it came out, and playing as a free user is terrible. So basically WoW has no competition in terms of scope and the endgame IMO.
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Imho, it is because of over constantly over talking to high heavens of things that iwll improve, And only improve it after what feels like 6+ months.
Short story basically summed up in this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ibem-dNpHA (TL3 Poster will correct so you can see it)
Pretty sure you only need TL2 for youtube links (it’s a trusted site).
Trusted sites basically include Blizzard sites, wowhead, youtube, twitch, twitter and the like. If you only have TL2 you can always try to post a link and see if it’s trusted or not.
Its not dead!
Just smells funny
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Nope. I’ve tried posting Links several times before i had TL3, i still couldn’t post any it just keeps saying ‘‘Sorry you can’t post links’’…
Well I have no TL3 and it seems to work for me.
Weird. Guess i’ll try and post a link again to see if they have fixed it for me then to.
Again not any link just trusted sites.
