When Warlords of Draenor launched, subscriptions shot all the way up to 10 million - not quite the 12 mil watermark that we hit at the end of Wrath and beginning of Cataclysm, but far higher than I think anyone expected after the steady decline during Cataclysm and Mists. Well, it seems that that bump was too good to last, and things have almost returned to the levels they were at pre-Warlords.
So what gives? Why was the expansion such a huge success when it launched but then sank back down to... well, still the most successful subscription-based MMO out there, but much less popular than it had been?
The obvious answer is the one Blizzard doesn't want to hear, which is that the game's old. We've been around the merry-go-round several times already, and we know their tricks. Fundamentally, it's getting hard to rearrange the elements of the game in such a way that feels new and exciting. Facing new enemies and delving into new dungeons feels less urgent. During Wrath, we faced down the Lich King, and the whole thing felt like a pretty epic struggle to face down this enormous threat to Azeroth. But since then, we've faced down tons of other threats that have, at least theoretically, just as much of a chance to kill us all. And from a gameplay perspective, it may have felt really important that you get that tier five set bonus so that you'd be able to push further into Black Temple, but nowadays, you always know that the next expansion is coming around the bend before too long, and you'll be able to see all that cool stuff once you've outleveled it. These are problems that Blizzard can't solve because they're directly linked to the passage of time.
The other problems I'll talk about are TOTALLY PERSONAL, SUBJECTIVE, AND NOT MEANT TO INVALIDATE CONTRASTING OPINIONS. Just to be clear.
The first is probably the most painful one for me to bring up, because it goes against my overall philosophy of making the game easy enough for casual players to enjoy (the very word casual is incredibly subjective. Casual to some is "I log in once every two weeks" and to others it's "I'm only 9/10 on BRF Heroic.") So here's my dreadful confession: I think LFR has been bad for the game. It's not that I don't think raids should be accessible - I do. I think Wrath of the Lich King had the difficulty pretty much right. But LFR has done something to the design/development team, which is that with LFR, the expectation is that all players will raid. And if all players are raiding, the team is disincentivized from making alternative content. BC brought us heroic dungeons, which, at the time, were not considered a stepping stone to raiding, but an alternative path to raiding. Badges of Justice, the original incarnation of Justice Points, didn't even drop in raids at first, because they were there to allow non-raiders to gradually gear up. Wrath added new dungeons with the later raid tiers, and Cataclysm did as well (kind of. The Zul'agains were originally meant to come out with Firelands.) While these varied in popularity, there was still a sense that players in smaller groups with less fancy gear could do something heroic and become more powerful.
It also gave raids a certain mystique. When we were working on Icecrown Citadel, I was excited to just see the Lich King fight. The raids were places that we would explore.
But the thing that was fantastic about the Frozen Halls dungeons is that even players who were not getting far into the raid had their chance to at least confront the Lich King. The last "boss" of the Halls of Reflection allowed us to beat Arthas, albeit just barely, and yet still get a great sense of how much of a threat he was. But with LFR, you find yourself having the final confrontation with the big bad pretty quickly, and it makes working through the harder difficulties - i. e. traditional raiding - less about having that role-playing experience of finally confronting the villain, and more about getting cooler, better-looking gear.
The game has narrowed in on raiding as the be-all end-all of PvE content. Now, I'm fine with it being the end-all. It's been that way since the beginning. But more and more, we've had other types of content swept away. Mists made dungeons totally irrelevant after stepping into MSV LFR, and Warlords saw daily quests eliminated without even giving us a timeless isle-like area to replace it. We've been getting fewer dungeons with each expansion, and with all of them coming at the beginning, the gear there becomes irrelevant (Timewalking and Mythic Dungeons are both things I look forward to, but they're not a satisfactory replacement for all new dungeons.) What this has done, among other things, is make WoW into a weekly, not a daily game. Once you've run your raid for the week, there's little else for you to do in a player-progression sort of way. And sure, I don't think any player should have to log in every day and run a dungeon or something, but if you want to figure out why players are complaining about a "lack of content" despite the 10-boss raid that dropped relatively recently (well, I guess it has been a couple months now,) I think that's where you should look.
The final thing I'll throw in is a big difference in opinion I have with Blizzard when it comes to loot. Blizzard has gotten rid of PvE gear currencies, and I think that was a terrible mistake. In order to get gear, one has basically no recourse but to pray to the random number generator gods. There is so much randomness in gearing up that it can really deflate one's ambition to actually work on it. The loot-table/dice roll thing is fine, but I think it should be the exception rather than the rule. Crafting in Warlords - a controversial subject to be sure - might have been the way to create a "work long and hard enough and you'll get it eventually" option for gear, but the three-piece limit prevents it. I'd much rather have the loot dropped from bosses feel like a cool bonus, but allow the real meat of progress be something that gives players a bit more agency.
So, is this good business advice or merely the rantings of pathological complainer? I don't know. But searching for the things that made me enjoy the game so much in the past, these are the bits that I can put forward. And I'm sure there is some player, equally passionate about the game as I am, who hold the exact opposite opinion on all of these issues than mine. Still, even if WoW is simply going into its white dwarf stage after the red giant Cataclysm, they might be able to keep it glowing for a good while yet.
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