[Uteunayr]

Originally Posted by radditsu [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I had a ui during lich king that told me what buttons to press to maximize dps and tell me exactly where to go on every boss fight. How is that not the easiest thing that exists?

I guess to be fair to WoW, raid encounters are currently designed so such a mod is not possible, and most classes have been transitioned from a rotation based system to a priority based system (although a priority system still has addons to make it easier).

Originally Posted by Ahldagor [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

not in terms of dollars. blizz is doing everything they can to stop a sinking ship and trying to get that number back to 12million. i think swish said it earlier that the game has just run its course.

I do not think their issue is in the game simply having run its' course, it is something Blizzard has done. Okay, so here's my view on what happened with WoW.

WoW came about when MMOs were, by and large, difficult. It took a lot of time to do virtually anything, and it lacked direction. Now, WoW wasn't "easy" exactly, but it did offer a new type of MMO structure: the quest grind. This was incredibly directed. This made it easier to get into from the get-go. Additionally, WoW came around when the internet, and gaming, was by and large becoming more socially acceptable, or rather more common. Lastly, you have a lot of players who remember Blizzard for the Trinity.

So, when you combine these, you get something fascinating. You get a huge clustering of players that remember Blizzard's great games, and it is accessible. More accessible than previous MMOs. It is more socially desirable, so these fans are able to get their friends into the game more easily than was in the past, and those friends will stick because the game is more accessible.

Therefore, you have a huge bump in the game's population quickly. This creates the most extensive social network that existed at the time in video games.

Now, a truth about social networks is that the more complex they are, the more forces are acting on any actor within that system at one time. In other words, the community perpetuates itself. The large community ensures a continuation of the large community.

You see this as a recruiter in WoW, in which a portion of the population will quit the game. But when they quit, they will go on for a while, but they lose access to the social network, their friends. So after a while, they want to be back in that network, so they want to play a MMO with their friends. But to get back into that network, they must go back into WoW, as that is the only network that has a centralization of all their friends. So, they return to WoW.

As this player returns to WoW, another player is quitting, and will do the same thing. And so on. The cycle is one in which the community persists because the community is so centralized, so tight, that it is the only place many people can agree on to go to, because most people are already there.

So that is why, from the perception of a former guild leader, raid leader, main recruiter, of a top guild in the top 50 of WoW servers, that is why WoW has such a huge player base, and lasted for so long.

However, in more recent times, as I have played through the game's history, and I played most actively during the recent decline (LK->Now). Blizzard has acted as if WoW's success is based on their own design decisions, and that it is the quality of the game, rather than the strength of the community, which perpetuates the game.

In this, Blizzard started to do stuff that obliterates community, because they don't realize the community is what matters, but access to their content. So if they increase access to content, they contend, then more people will join. So you get the LFD system, and the LFR system, which abolishes any sense of community, or reputation in the game. This begins to make the game's community one that is nasty, and this is when the game started to decline (LK/Cata).

Further, Blizzard, still believing it is all about their content, rather than their community, they do things like the class changes. You see Blizzard not just nerfing classes, but entirely changing around their play style. You get Blizzard making it so Protection Warrior's rage system is now just energy, and instead of being a unique toolbox, for the sake of "active mitigation" they make all tanks except Death Knights work as: Use one of three abilities to generate resource. Spend resource on one of two short term CDs. They do this because they say it is "More Fun", without *any* support for this.

That isn't just a nerf, that's an entire change to the play style of the game, and they do it in their arrogance that it is "more fun", but it ultimately pushed away virtually every Protection Warrior, Bear Druid veteran. I saw major losses in my guild in terms of Warlocks, many of whom were disgusted by the entire class overhaul they did.

This is what will make WoW die. Blizzard's arrogance that WoW persists because of their game design, rather than because of the strength of community. Their design will only push away people from the game. Very few people saw their class changes and went "Wow, finally my class has been simplified to the point that I want to play it for the content!", instead, their veteran players (hardcore OR casual) were faced with drastic changes, and wanted to quit instead of keeping playing. Not even the strength of the social network was enough to keep people in, that's how bad their content is.

Hopefully when it does die, we'll see a resurgence of interesting and unique MMOs, as we have had way too much repetitiveness and lack of innovation in the MMO market for the past decade.