Out of Pod Experience

In the end the only game that will kill World of Warcraft is World of Warcraft 2 or whatever blizzard decides to name the next game in the same genre and theme.

When it comes to making user friendly games that appeal to a wide audience they know what they're doing.

This does not seem to be a problem for EVE.

I play a mmo game on mobile called Parallel Kingdom. It is a free to play, pay for secondary currency, food, with real life money. This game brings the best of both words together and does it well in my honest opinion. It is a land conquest game played on google maps. It has a dynamic player driven economy based on resource acquisition and player crafting with no quests 8-). It has dominated my game time for over a year and half now. I have played it for free and I have given some money to the developers in the form of buying food.

EDIT: Food is used to buy swag armor, weapons, and deco for your avatar and houses, but all item leveling, swag or regular, is done with gold earned in game via hunting.

I guess you are not getting the same offers as my unsubbed accounts get... CCP has gone as far as offering Power of 2 to accounts just subscribed. Plus all the "come back" offers, pus the "start a sidekick " campagin, plus the average Power of 2 (which Ishtanchuck was offered while her sub was still active but already unsubscribbed, and then again when I fired a PLEX for her).

If Permaband had to make a new tune, it would be this one, and the videoclip would feature a line of CCP ladies in miniskirts, CCP Guard juggling viking swords and Hilmar handstanding and eating fire.

Eve has a fair few things going for it that makes it worth P2P, though all points can be argued against (and likely will be for the sake of it).

Going F2P - such as the old republic recently, gets a sudden influx of people who want everything for nothing and other terrible players. Not to mention a loss of services and other things we take for granted.

According to my friend who plays WoW, here is the problem.

Lately, WoW has been making the game even more casual friendly than it already was, and by casual I mean like, everyone can be really good at it in 10 minutes. Something similar to the skill level required to play most smartphone games. Basically, the game has been getting dumbed down heavily. So why would this be driving away players?

Problem is, even if you are doing a lot to make the game casual friendly, most casual players aren't going to be willing to fork over 15 dollars a month just to play, let alone the hundreds of dollars for all of the expansioins.

Because of this, all Blizzard is doing is making the game less appealing to the dedicated gamers and hardcore gamers that like the challenges and not having everything handed to them (and most importantly, are willing to pay to play) while failing to gain more casual gamers.

Basically, Blizzard will either have to make the game free to play (with microtransactions) or stop dumbing the game down. Otherwise, WoW will crash and burn.

This is at best, severely grasping speculation.

"hardcore gamers" was a surprisingly small minority of Wow players. Even in classic many servers never even killed Kel Thuzad because naxxramas was just too hard. It was the hardest raid instance blizzard ever made and the result was that most people never experienced the content that they developed.


Looking back. Classic WoW was a nightmare.

Quests like escorting Marshal Windsor in BRD and the endless attunement chains were damaging to the game itself.

On top of that the classes were a complete mess. Warriors were near useless for pvp. Warlocks were practically indestructible. No functional pvp trinkets. No diminishing returns on crowd controls.

Warrior was the only tank class in the game until Wrath of the Lich King arrived. Yes Druids and Paladins could tank in theory but druids had no protection against crushing blows and the Paladins kept running out of mana.

Paladins, Priests and Warriors had no functional DPS spec until Wrath. Warriors could deal damage but had no aggro control until WOTLK brought passive aggro reduction to all non tanks.

Priest and Druid were the only healing Classes in classic but the druid had no proper resurrection spell so anyone who died had to run from the graveyard. Paladins only job was to cast blessings and off-heal. The game had 6 different Paladin blessings that lasted for 5 minutes each and had to be cast on each player individually. That means that in a raid of 40 people. About 240 blessings had to be handed out every 5 minutes and the Paladins had to coordinate it between themselves who blessed who with what.

The game has only been getting better and better with every expansion. Blizzard had not scared away players. The players have just moved on.

I have personally probably stopped playing a dozen MMOs and hundreds of games. Not because the games turned bad but because I got bored of them.

When people switch games they don't do it because the games "turned bad" they just get bored of the same thing.

Metroid on the nes was one of the most fun games I ever played in my life but the reason I haven't played it for about 20 years isn't because the game turned bad.

They could lose multi-millions more subs and still be fine .. and still lead the mmo subscription race.


Even if WoW did take a turn for the worst and die in a fire .. Titan isn't too far off and Blizz will take over the industry again.

they've been saying the same thing about WoW on their forums too for years.

The game will not die anytime soon as Blizzard will keep pushing out expansions for the game that brings back the sheep to the flock (even if it's only for a month or two). But of course, it's inevitable that a game that is soon 10 years old without adding something revolutionary will shrink in subscribers.