This is a “I quit” post, the answer is yes you can have my stuff - as long as I have the game time left to give it to you. I’m on lone wolf
With that out the way, I want to give some candid feedback to Blizzard. I am one of those returning players who came back for classic 19 and hasn’t played retail in years. I came left again when classic ended and wrath launched and came back to try hardcore and play a bit of ERA, like many did.
You have truly messed up SoD. This is not the casual dad friendly experience that you made it out to be. This caters to hardcore retail players who (no offence) tend to have no life outside gaming as a lifestyle. This might sustain retail, but now that classic is over you will lose this other, more casual and imo, probably larger subscriber base if you don’t create content for them.
Pretty much everything you have done caters to the hardcore nolife playerbase. Ashenvale PvP event is PvE, best do this to farm rep? How is it a PvP event? Oh people can’t take part in the PvE bosses because your servers can’t handle this terrible event ? Take the event offline and rework it? Nah, just add a dozen more layers and make the world completely dead outside of ashenvale even at prime time - anecdotally, most players from ERA I know left at this point and so did I. This retail playerbase doesn’t care about this though, and you knew that, they just want to min/max as efficiently as possible.
Unlike most, I came back for P2 to a dead guild, an experience I’m sure many classic players share. P2 had even less content, one raid that was being used for parsing by retail raid loggers and was gatekept to hell by the frankly, terrible community this game mode has fostered. Another PvP event which was scuffed, all you had to do was make it a free for all in STV where kills reward coins with an option to opt out. But again, this silly retail design comes in and kills your servers. Solution? More layers, more dead world.
The runes are crap, unbalanced I can forgive given no PTR but they’re 95% copy pasted from later expansions. Outside of P1 the “quests” to obtain them feel thrown together last minute for the most part. Again, because your experience developing retail shows that retail players don’t really care about this either. That’s fine, but for classic players thats pretty lame.
P3 I don’t even know where to start. Incursions? The most boring content I’ve ever seen, fully mask off at this point catering 100% to retail players as a skip to the next max level bracket. Sunken temple being overtuned ? Again, you know your retail audience, you want a bit of buzz and a bit of hype nerf it a bit and let them raid log and parse it out.
Your game is infested with bots and RMT, because you’ve created a community of retail gamers who are used to swiping to obtain everything. In the absence of wow token, they obviously will use these services and as they treat the game like a job, spending irl currency to obtain money for boosts, portals, pre-BIS consumables, whatever, is not an issue. They do it in retail anyway. Whilst this was an issue in ERA too, never seen anything like what I see in SoD. Every second character is a bot out in the world.
This community you cater too is antisocial (in a mmo lol), unfriendly, toxic and no fun to be a part of. Why would any casual player bother with SoD when you create content knowing the community will gate keep it ? Never in my 20 years of wow have I seen people ask for raid logs to get into a pug. Never before in game have I have been told to “know the route” for content that has been out for less than 48 hours and literally involves running in a circle and never before have I been refused access to even join a GUILD because the class or spec you played is not “meta”.
It is highly unlikely anyone from blizzard reads this, but if you do. All you had to do to retain a more casual playerbase was add some actual content, new quest zones, new battlegrounds, fun events that don’t cater to sweats, perhaps a dungeon or two. You could have had normal raids and mythic, if you really wanted to cater to both parties. You have spent minimal effort on SoD because you know at the end of the day, all the retail playerbase really cares about are the raids.
That is fine, this game has survived on your dysfunctional relationship with that playerbase for years now and I’m sure it will for years to come. But the only real market you have for growth is the market of existing players, this game is two decades old. As your own graphs show, your subs trend down except when you cater to casual, classic players. Give the retail players what they want by all means, if they enjoy it and it’s profitable why wouldn’t you? But you will lose the classic playerbase if you continue to take this direction.
I intended to pick up the war within as my first retail expansion in years, if SoD kept my subbed that long. I certainly won’t now, and I won’t be back for P4. Do what you want, but this late in the game if you don’t cater to the playerbase you were lucky enough to get back with classic you WILL lose them.
Inb4 "get gud’ “classic Andy” “tldr” and “cry about it”
retail players are mostly chill