Out of Pod Experience

Played for 4 entire months
Leveled a uh er pfff derp dark daek? er (looks it up) night elf mohawk hunter somethingsomething.
Far from my first mmo, was underwhelming. The community purely reminded me of the hoards of Diablo players I fled from to the launch of UO. There was just 0 challenge there for me. After years of EQ1 pre-PoP crazy hard content, WoW was more like being on a marry-go-round with laughing clowns riding the horses up and down, up and down, with rainbow glitter puffs trailing behind each and every one of them. I honestly fell to sleep once while playing WoW, in the MIDDLE OF THE DAY!! Well I don't like clowns and I still have night sweats from the whole experience
Well, no I really don't but it did take a lot of bourbon to straighten me out once I uninstalled WoW.

You can go to blogs run by WoW players and see much of the same. In fact, most of the observations in my previous post were gleaned from blogs by veteran WoW players reacting to the no-more-flying decision, which I was interested in as a variant of EVE's jump drive nerf.

The simple fact is that it's OK if WoW is starting to fade. Nobody can possibly dispute that it had a good, long run at the very top of the genre, crushing even the most hyped and well-heeled competitors. Nobody can dispute that what they've been able to do with an aging engine is impressive. They will probably take the lessons learned from WoW and would-be successors like Wildstar and take another crack at designing the next hotness. The measures they're taking now seem to be aimed at catering to people who actually want to enjoy the content they've designed, which is understandable. If they're shedding relatively low-investment players who want to skip over or automate as much of their content as possible in the mean time, that's an acceptable, if painful, loss.

The big takeaway for me, courtesy of The Nosy Gamer, is that there are game design changes that uninvested and impatient players will clamor for which reduce players' overall investment in the game itself, which in the long term is bad for the game. EVE is insulated from that somewhat by the fact that there never was that much to the game itself. WoW is not.

You mean this?
"And some "World of Warcraft" players say they say they’ve run out of challenges. The game requires too many tedious tasks. Plus, the gamers themselves are aging too, and moving on."

He was interviewing a 14yo after all... lol. Where does a 14yo go after spending 10 years addicted to WoW? Retirement home?

The kid was just a sparkle in his dads eye when Blizzard had a huge army of players all into Diablo and Warcraft, many of which flocked to the WoW beta and got the whole popularity craze going in mmo's (or that mmo), causing a snowball effect with WoW. It's popular, so it must be good, right? So even more people start playing it, convinced it's good before they even start playing. And frankly, WoW is a hybrid mmo, things like instanced raiding is purely multi-player gaming such as from Diablo where many of those WoW players came from. So it's not even mmo mechanics that keep many of them around the game.

But "grind", that's totally a casual gamers response. One that really doesn't like any mmo, but plays due to that snowball effect, just expecting it to be the game for them due to it's popularity. What have I seen since WoW came around, armies of dedicated WoW players bored to tears swarming all the existing mmo's demanding WoW style gaming in those games, usually non-mmo type systems. The same type of stuff that in their own game made them bored to tears in the first place, at least until the next playable expansion. meh progression themepark hybrid mmo's.

i tried playing WOW a few years ago. I did not like at all so i gave it up within a few days
Eve is better

It doesn't surprise me to be honest. I played WoW for a good 9-10 years and all they keep doing is dumbing down the game completely. I mean you can even purchase a level 90 toon right off the bat if you have the money to throw at blizzard!

I could go on, but it really doesn't surprise me that WoW sub's are declining.

Jabba the Hutt and his brothers must have been hungry!

I was a part of a group that competed on a global level when it came to PVE. I played most hardcore during TBC and WOTLK and it was satisfying. I cant speak for PVP cause I stopped playing that seriously in TBC after a priest in a 2v2 arena got resurrected by a trinket that has 1% chance of doing just that to its user, I yanked out my keyboard and smashed the hell out of it, deciding after that it was too stressful for me to continue that part of the game and never did I return to it. But for PvE in TBC and Wotlk you had to grind as well, however very few people found it a hustle, and it was far more time consuming that it is now.

When it comes to dungeons and raids, you didn't have LFG in TBC, nor cross realm groups. You had to go into town and spam channels to find people, and that is not easy when you are in a low populated server. You had to be good and keep pushing yourself to be better to get the equipment you desired.

After Wotlk it started to go downstream, instances were dumbed down, you could run trough dungeons with no CC, I still remember Shattered Halls or Magister's Terrace, you got LFR to help you farm gear, bosses were pretty easy, AoE is virtually the only thing you use in dungeons, and the numbers, god, hundreds of thousands, millions even, WoW was becoming more and more a childish game and of course that attracted a childish audience which if they couldn't attain something cried about it and when they cried enough they got their nerfs, their gear, everything.

When the newest patch came I was excited cause it was supposed to bring back WoW to the early glory days, that didnt happen. I level up, found it was exactly the same as before, also if anyone else played the expansion you had the constant breakage of the garrison servers, which caused severe anger in my case at least, cause I needed to turn in and get quests to progress.

Dungeons were nothing innovative again, I didn't mind the new models, found them bit refreshing to be honest. But again, something was missing, all that LFG, LFR and cross realm group finding disconnected you from the people of your own server, there were no new friendships to be made while you were sitting in a group waiting for that one tank for 20-30 mins, no hardships to endure and that feeling after you finally got that boss down after countless upon countless wipes, dungeon boosting has become a thing and people just farm and then pay to someone else to clear the content for them and so on and so forth, lots of things weren't fixed.

Maybe I, we, just simply got older and WoWs basic mechanics aren't really that appealing to us anymore so we moved on to something else, or simply life made us quit it by giving us obligations and responsibilities that we must adhere to.

Woah, that wall of text. I just started writing and nostalgic came over me I guess.

Just my 2 cents

Best regards

Capt Seph