not true. I know a lot of young kids that are playing. The problem is they dislike retail. The only ones I know are in classic servers. I tired to get my nephew interes into wow in legion expansion. But couldn’t up until i started playing with him in 2019 classic wow. So i’m pretty sure the problem is the game, not the players. Retail is so dull to leveling in… no wonder we dont get many new players.
btw, DF sales were low because ppl lost faith in blizzard, expansion after expansion with shadowlands being the last drop. It got nothing to do with the age of wow players.
Age is not really a factor when it comes to games.
Young kids will absolutely play games aimed at older audiences, just as older people will absolutely play games aimed at younger audiences.
Look at GTA for example, although it’s aimed for older audiences, it’s filled to the brim with young kids playing it, even though I was a fan of the older GTA games, the new ones just weren’t appealing at all.
On the flipside, look at Minecraft/Gacha/TCG/TFT/Fortnite they are played by a lot of older people, and yes, I mentioned Fortnite because somehow every college professor I know plays that game.
Can you even consider Lost Ark an MMO? Lost Ark to me felt more like a .exe version of Raid: Shadow Legends™ and despite that it has done incredibly well.
MMOs as a whole haven’t really been appealing for probably 15 years, they’re all so focused on reinventing the wheel to not be a WoW clone that they for the most part completely miss what makes an MMO good and worth wasting your time on. You also need a gigantic budget to keep it afloat for long enough to get people invested these days which wasn’t really the case with 2004 WoW when it was amazing enough that you could chat to someone on the other side of the world.
I don’t think time investment plays as much of a factor as dev time does, people still play CSGO or League or Dota for thousands of hours but you need enough content or replayability to justify playing it for 1000s of hours and MMOs just don’t work like that.
I put 2k hours into Lost Ark and finished every collectible except for a handful of things with like 0.01% droprate, now all there is left to do is my daily chores and raiding once a week. There’s no longer enough stuff to do to bother logging in anymore.
also not to forget suvival games started to come, even if they when under the raidar for a long time, they have now started to burst out more and more, they are getting more people now, a lot more people to be exact.
some of them could be called mini MMOs, becuse even if the map is no where as big as in mmos like wow, they seem to have their audience now, what is growing.
though the audience is split up there, where probably Ark and Conan exiles are the biggest for the moment, others are comming also.
I think what attracts people to theese games is that you are so free to do what you want in them, and could say they have pretty much same things in them as wow, par the quests, though even that happens due to modders also.
MMO’s are still very popular, the market itself is just in a slump.
There really aren’t any amazing MMO’s right now. There are plenty of MMO’s with good elements and aspects that are fun, but all of them have some sort of ugly side, whether it’s p2w, bugs, bad servers/engine, forced activities players dislike, strange developer visions and so on.
Many MMO players right now are in the waiting room for a great MMO. The market has an open spot for it just waiting to be filled. Some of us play WoW because hey, it’s fun, it fills the time while we wait. Same reason players moved to FF14 when SL sucked. But right now there simply is no outstanding MMO without big downsides.
Ah but amazon new world is/was. So much promise, so terrible ;(
I will still stand by my opinion that the combat in Wildstar was more fun than WoW’s. The spell telegraphing was amazing for its time and - quite frankly - still surpasses WoW’s poor implementation. Their character and world design was also on par (at the time even better IMO) with WoW. They had super interesting and well implemented player housing. The minijobs (e.g. Explorer) were also kind of cool.
The one big mistake they’ve made was to design the game purely for the 1%. As soon as the majority of players hit max level they noticed that there is no content for people without a dedicated guild and a group on voice comms. Technical issues finished what the “hardcore” content didn’t. At the time they implemented more content, people didn’t return and the game finally died for good.
I would actually love to play a Wildstar with a more casual approach. I loved everything about the game besides the ultra-hardcore approach…
But you are correct with the “WoW killer” assessments. WoW was so successful that other studios even went so far as to abandon their original designs for an MMO in favour of a direct WoW clone. WAR was one of those. Instead of drawing from Mythic’s experience with MMOs they decided to just do a WoW copy job. They even admitted it.
But they weren’t the only one. Most MMOs went with a variation of WoW’s combat (which is another reason why I adored Wildstar btw) and tried to put their “unique spin” on it.
And because WoW was always the biggest and best among the sea of copycats Blizzard themselves never had to evolve the game. Why should they? It was good enough. And the further time progressed the less competition there was and the lazier Blizzard got.
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I don’t about fantasy MMO’s but some war themed MMO’s is having great and growing success.
Sorry mate this excuse doesnt hold any ground when you actualy start playing classic and realize that there is actualy lot of young players.
Remeber Nostalrious? Majority of Nost playerbase where around 20y so most of them have actualy never played vannila yet they prefered this version of the game over retail.
Modern WoW is bad game. It has nothing to do with its age that players are not interested.
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Bruh. I’ve started losing interest in MMOs these days too but there’s still plenty of them that are doing insanely well stop talking nonsense. WoW for a start, FFXIV, GW2, ESO, PSO2, OSRS, etc.
That’s true. I’m leveling on a classic era server for a few weeks and i met lots of young players. Just yesterday i met a 16 years old kid. That kind of stuff never happened in retail wow. Or maybe it seems this way because there is no player interaction in retail wow, haha.
I’m pretty sure young players are still very interested in mmorpg. The problem is we dont have very good mmorpg games at this moment. Retail wow is boring, classic wow is stationary, and other mmorpg are simple not good enough yet.
We will see what happens after ashen of creation/riot mmorpg launch. If they do it right, i’m pretty sure they will get massive amount of players. Wow needs to do something amazing until then tho. Wow 2, retail revamp, or at least a classic+ . This kind of “modern” direction mediocre expansions every 2 years are not going to work anymore if there will be trully good competition games people are already hyped about.
A few days ago, I decided to try FF while I wait for 10.1 to release, and I was amazed by how accessible it is to new players. The ‘hand holding’ doesn’t stop at level 10 - every single time you encounter something new, you get a pop up window explaining how it works. While WoW says ‘don’t stand in the fire’, FF provides dungeon ‘training’ (which offers decent gear as a reward to low levels, so an incentive to do it) that’s tailored to role. Just two examples.
I’m a huge fan of WoW and FF will never compete with M+ and WoW’s raid experience (once the new season starts, I will likely stop playing it and focus entirely on WoW again), but WoW really should learn from FF on how to help new players get into the game.
Time investment certainly is a thing. Just not the way you percive it. League dota and CS offer fast faced fast finished gaming sessions . MMORPGs require really long gaming hours before you see the "return ". That’s why they are unpopular.
People nowadays just dont have that kind of time of will to do any kind of hard stuff
its not just mmos but all video games as a whole genre thing let me explain…
MMOs : wow and ff14
Moba : league and dota
arena shooter : overwatch and valorant
shooter : COD and rainbow 6 siege
BR : fortnite and PUBG
and even back in the days for arena shooter was quake and unreal torment , while also before COD was medal of honor
that 2-3 games having monopoly over the genre isn’t new thing , people seems to favor quality over quantity , like with how insane big population of fortnite and PUBG people less likely to play entirely new game with less resources and content and quality compare to titans of the genre
hell even new mmos will fail so bad too duo to lack of content they will have and ofcourse pay 2 win garbage stuff
Hand holding is terrible way how to explore and learn new game. It completly ruins exploration part.
WoW doesnt have problem with explaning stuff. It has problem with pacing and fact that as new player you wont experience that mmo part of game until like M+ content.
If you comparw classic leveling to retail there is big difference in pacing. And becouse classic leveling takes way more time you actualy get to know your class skills way better before you get your next ability. Also zones are filled with players. You can hardly go 3 minutes without bumbing into other players.
Then you have retail leveling. I have literaly dinged lvl 10 in 1 hour. Thats including reading quest and be afk for RP and coffe.
At lvl 10 i had like 14 skills alredy on top of unlocked 3 specs and talent trees. And i havent seen single player around entire time.
Imagine new player being this overwhelmed on top having 0 multiplayer experience as there are no players around. Its instant quit. If you would realese such game back in 2004 it would instnaly die.
When will you stop posting your BS?
Its not BS and if you have nothing to add into discusion dont post. Reported and ignored bye.
This isn’t the experience I had when I tried classic. In fact, when I started playing WoW back in WoTLK, I found it so confusing and difficult to make any progress that I kept creating and deleting characters, stopping playing and starting again (because I was sure this game ‘should’ be good even though I wasn’t enjoying it) that it took me until Legion - yes, you read that right, LEGION - before I reached max level and engaged in endgame content.
The levelling experience in early WoW was horrible.
Maybe you misunderstood my use of the term ‘hand holding’ (which I put in quotes in the hope that people wouldn’t take it as literally as you did). A pop-up question mark in the middle of the screen when you encounter a new feature, which you can either click on to read an explanation, or dismiss, does not ‘ruin exploration’ any more than the phrase ‘shift-right click to socket’ does.
What it does do is provide the new player with a resource to help them understand the wealth of complex features that FF has developed as it’s evolved. It’s the kind of information that WoW players need to look on Wowhead to find (and bear in mind that new players to WoW aren’t going to know to look on Wowhead, or even know it exists), all provided right there in the game, as it’s needed.
If you have a problem with that kind of ‘hand holding’, then I’m truly astonished that you don’t love retail WoW.
I decided to level a rogue with questing only in MoP. Barely made it out of the first zone and already above lvl 40 with so much of the expansion left undone.
I do like that they squished the levels and allowed for us to choose a timeline, but I don’t like that I don’t see more of the expansion than before… I think it should take you 50-60 levels to quest through the timelines main story. I don’t mind if one is longer and one is shorter, let’s have the shorter ones and dungeons for speed levellers… Let’s have the long ones for those who want to relax and breathe in the story. That will not hurt anyone since we already have the option to choose.
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