[minimaxir]

Nowadays (EDIT: anecdotally, sourced from myself, friends, and forums/Reddit), there's been a player exodus in WoW, as the latest expansion (Battle for Azeroth) has an unrewarding and mandantory grindy endgame, in addition to other player-unfriendly changes which the playerbase suspects is to pad out time-played metrics.

[vbezhenar]

I'm not sure if this is a proper place to discuss WoW, but as a long standing player I can say that BfA is much better in terms of grinding than previous expansion Legion. You don't really need to grind anything, exactly because that grind is unrewarding and you was obliged to grind in Legion exactly because that grind was giving too much power. Again, according to my experience I'm not seeing big player exodus, most of those who started playing in my guild are continue to play, but that's only a personal anecdote, of course. Legion was much better in terms of perceived development cost: new gameplay systems, loads of new art and content, while BfA feels like cheap addon to build upon Legion investment, but that doesn't really makes it bad, it's just feels that they could do better.

[minimaxir]

> You don't really need to grind anything, exactly because that grind is unrewarding and you was obliged to grind in Legion exactly because that grind was giving too much power.

Interesting perspective. I've always wondered if rewarding grinds or unrewarding nongrinds are better for both player enjoyment and monetization. (I think the former does better; it's how addiction works)

[vbezhenar]

There are different players with different needs which are often contradictory. I don't like to spend many time in-game. Ideal WoW for me is 3 hours/3 days a week, when I log in, enter raid with my friends, spend some time inside trying to kill some bosses, log out. But there are many people who want to play 8-12 hours every day and they love when they can spend that time improving their character. So developers are trying to balance game for both types of players. Basically they are doing rewards which diminish in geometric progression. You can spend hour to get 1% power increased. Next hour will get you 0.5% power increase and so on, so you can spend hours and get that increase, but there's some limit and different players can draw it for themselves. Those who spend more time will be more powerful and those who don't want to spend too much time won't be too that much behind. But still some players think that they are obliged to spend those hours to farm those few % of power even if they hate the process, they just want the rewards. It's unhealthy behavior and only self-control might help there, I guess, otherwise player will burn out and unsubscribe from the game. Probably a hard balance from game developer perspective.

[jsgo]

It is basically a race to ilvl 320 and then run warfronts for gear and then go raid/heroics if inclined. Personally, I wish they'd open warfronts up earlier and the gear you get have ilvl similar to how world quest rewards "scale" as your ilvl increases.

I play solo which is an anomaly in the genre I know, but I'm starting to feel burnout: need to run the wheel multiple times so I can do various tradeskills (the 2 tradeskill, including gathering skills, max per character thing) to be self sufficient. Need to do content on characters I'm not interested in doing the content on because, oh, my mage is my tailor and I want to craft bags for my characters which requires non-100% drop BoP tradeskill drops among other things. Reputations supposedly are going to be more forgiving in 8.1, but I'm not sure if it is just Champions of Azeroth that is shared by characters (probably for the neck upgrade) or if all of the BfA reps will be shared across characters (hoping so, for tradeskill rank upgrades).

[nemo846]

> I play solo which is an anomaly in the genre I know

Not as uncommon as you think, https://youtu.be/b2l2ZxNhCSg

[vlunkr]

Even if that's true, the game has had incredible longevity. That expansion came out 14 years(!) after the original release of the game. I'm sure the player base isn't what it used to be, but that has to be some kind of record.

[SketchySeaBeast]

There are longer running MMO's, and the playerbase has faded a bit, but you're absolutely right - it's still a monolith, and to which all other MMO's are compared. Regardless of the BFA problems, it still wields a huge amount of power.

[ergothus]

> the game has had incredible longevity

I'm not a WOW player (or really any MMO), but it's always impressed me how willing Blizzard is to throw out all the investment people have made in learning the game system details. Talent trees (or whatever they are called) are rewritten practically each expansion to follow very different rules.

I suppose it has to do with knowing that NOT changing is a guaranteed loss over time, but still, it feels like an unusual attitude.

[HeadsUpHigh]

It's a trend-setting attitude. Relearning skill builds is easy and relatively fun because you already have the skill points/levels and all you do is just allocate them again( provided the new ones are balanced and fun). What blizzard is doing is basically reseting the entire progress of every player in the game every expansion. You might spend 2 years building up your end-game gear and then an expansion comes and the common drops from one level higher are more powerful than the highest drops from the previous one.

[JCharante]

Eve Online is still kicking with its frequent updates (they shifted from an expansion every 6 months to a release every 6 weeks about 2 years ago)

[bspammer]

That's gotta be some sort of record. I can't think of any other game which is still releasing full expansions 14 years later.

[minimaxir]

It's a big downgrade from the previous expansion (Legion), which had a playerbase close to WoW's peak.

[basic1]

That information came from a blog post which was later refuted by Blizzard.

[tzs]

EverQuest is 5 years older than WoW, and still chugging along. They aren't doing two expansions a year anymore like they did from 2003-2007, but they have done one a year from 2008 onward (the 2018 expansion is coming out next month).

There was some worry earlier this year that it would abruptly die because of US sanctions on Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg who owns the investment group Columbus Nova. The sanctions were freezing assets and blocking payment processing.

There had been earlier reports that Daybreak Games, the company that acquired EverQuest years ago from Sony, had been bought by Columbus Nova. Daybreak later clarified that the person who bought them had been a partner at Columbus Nova, but he bought them personally, not for Columbus Nova, and he was not under sanction.

That was 10 months ago, and they still have their assets and can still accept payments, so apparently they were indeed not part of Columbus Nova. (Although at the time they were bought, a lot of Daybreak people did mention that name, rather than the name of the partner who now they say is the owner, so it is all still confusing).

Anyway, EverQuest today is worth a look if (1) you used to play and want some nostalgia, or (2) you never played but would like to see what one of the classic MMORPGs was about, or (3) if you would like an interesting game, good for grouping or solo play, that has a massive amount of content even if you are playing free.

There were three big changes on the "live" servers (which are distinct from the "progression" servers, which I'll describe later) that made the game a lot more friendly for casual and solo play.

First, a few years ago they added in-game NPC mercenaries that you could hire (one mercenary at a time per character). You can hire a tank, healer, melee damage dealer, or ranged damage dealer, and the AI for the mercenaries is pretty good. They "understand" group play.

With mercenaries, a whole lot of formerly full group only content can be taken reasonably by a couple players each with a mercenary, and even a lot of it can be done with one player with a mercenary, at least up to level 60ish if you are playing free, and up to at least mid 90s if you are paying [1].

Second, they introduced a new line of armor and weapons, Defiant Armor and Defiant Weapons. These things drop from a lot of normal encounters, but the stats on this stuff is comparable to top raid gear from a few expansions earlier. With Defiant, you don't have to dedicate your life to equipping your character to be able to handle the top content from an older expansion. It's only the people who are chasing the leading edge that have to make EverQuest a second career, unlike the old days.

Third, on the role playing server, Firiona Vie, there is a big experience bonus and very very items are marked NO DROP. So if you do need gear better than Defiant gear, you can trade for it or buy it from other players. Mana and healing rates are also higher than older players will remember.

Fourth, there are some new great quests. You start out with a book called the Tomb of the Heroes Journey in your inventory. When you open it, it tells you several zones that would be good at your level. If you open when you are in one of those zones, it suggest several NPCs who have task, quests, and problems you might help with. Just following the Heroes Journey will give you plenty of fun stuff to do, and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

With a mercenary and a free account on FV, you've got an excellent solo game for a long time. Even better for a group of friends.

For those who played before, and are nostalgic for the old days, they have "progression" servers. There are several, but the overall theme is the same. A progression server starts with some old version of EQ, and then progresses through the expansions. Progression servers do not have mercenaries, or Defiant armor. Heck, they are even missing later UI features when they start, such as the wonderful multiple target tracking system that the live servers have.

Progression servers have others rules, varying depending on server, to try to recreate the classic EQ experience that server's players want. For example, one of them is a "true box" server. That means you can only play one account per computer at a time. If you are one of those people who wants to play N characters at once on the same server, you have to have N physical computers if you are on a true box server.

They also differ in when when expansions become available. Some do it on a fixed time schedule. Some do it when the endgame content of the previous expansion is defeated. Some do it by vote. They also differ in how far they go. For example, Agnarr unlocks expansions on a schedule, but will stop at Planes of Power plus the two smaller expansions that followed that. Many consider that the best era of EQ, and Agnarr will be frozen in that era.

Progression servers are not available to free players.

So for those who want a shot of nostalgia, or who never played and want to check out the classic game, the best thing to do is watch for the next progression server launch, and subscribe. A new progression server is always a high population server, with population density comparable to the old days.

[1] The difference is mercenaries. There are apprentice mercenaries, with 5 skill levels (tier I to tier V) and journeymen mercenaries (tier I to V). Free players can only hire apprentices. Around mid 50s a tier V apprentice starts to struggle.

[Bizarro]

Nostalgia and then reality results in disappointment.

I played EQ 1 for a few years starting in 1999. It was a blast. People were always ad-hoc grouping together, talking to each other after a camp fight.

I remember just starting and my home base being in Queynos and a bunch of us level 5s went with a lvl 12 on an adventure to Freeport. Most of us died and we helped each other with corpse runs. Trains coming out of Black Burrow were a blast, everybody would zone out to that little corridor into West Queynos.

Those days are over though. I did download Project '99 years ago, went through a bunch of hoops to get it running, and 15 minutes later after logging in, just deleted it. Nostalgia meets reality.

[EpicEng]

Loud critics make up a tiny percentage of the player base. You have no idea what the numbers are and won't until blizz releases them.

[ArchTypical]

Blizz stopped releasing numbers. Now they make PR statements that are intentionally misleading. Given the popularity of addons, some addon makers have a good amount of data that reaches beyond "no idea".

[EpicEng]

Wow I didn't realize they stopped publishing sub numbers so long ago. I'm not convinced that add-ons give us great insight beyond a certain level of player who tends to use specific add-ons (e.g. DBM), but yeah it's better than nothing.

Still, historically we know that bid drama does not correlate to mass drop in sub numbers. Hell, GC just posted something about that a week or two ago[1].

>Dropping a game because of a specific design change (despite what you might read on forums / Reddit) is actually pretty rare. I know it happens, but if you’re stack ranking the reasons why people quit, those specific responses end up being so far down the list that it is hard for a development team to take actionable feedback.

WoW remains massively successful as far as I'm aware.

[1]: https://askghostcrawler.tumblr.com/post/157080214673/unsubbi...

[Drdrdrq]

Curious - have they made any of the numbers public?

[deong]

They used to as part of their quarterly earnings reports, if I remember correctly. They stopped during the latter part of WoD when by all accounts the subscriber numbers were very low (by WoW standards).

[xenostar]

As far as I’m aware not since wrath of the litch king expansion.

[IMcD23]

Source? Even though Battle for Azeroth had a rocky start, WoW still has a massive player base.

[minimaxir]

Fair: added an edit.