[cnkeller]

The numbers are getting lower because many people are leaving due to Blizzards repeated failure at basic concepts: trying to balance the game for both PvE and PvP, trying to make the content challenging enough for hardcore players, but accessible and rewarding enough for casual players. The first expansion was pretty good, but I think the number of guilds that finished Sunwell were something like 1-2%. I know a lot of "hardcore raiders" quit after the second expansion (myself included) simply because of the design changes. Even among friends that still play, I don't know anyone really looking forward to the upcoming expansion, it's not that people are sick of WoW in as much as they are sick of what Blizzard is doing with it.

[Lavery]

While calling these "basic concepts" is technically correct, I suppose, they're also among some of the most difficult aspects of game design. In a community as large and diverse (in terms of both ability level and time commitment) as WoW's, it's hardly surprising that Blizzard would err on the side of populism.

10.2 million may be a step down from the peak of popularity, but WoW is still wildly profitable and maintains a userbase larger than most of its competitors combined.

[cnkeller]

Just because I don't agree with their choices, doesn't mean I don't understand them. Even though Sunwell was an unplanned response to Black Temple being "tuned too well", the next expansion not being ready, the top guilds crushing existing dungeons, it doesn't make sense to release content that 5% of your player base ever has a hope of seeing, much less finishing. I mean I get it for sure. From a monetary/subscriber point of view, they absolutely did the right thing, the hardcore crowd for sure was the minority (the vocal minority), but minority nonetheless. I think we're seeing that in the subscriber numbers, 10% of so people got fed up and left, and the remainder are [happily?] plugging along. But playing through the various expansions, you can definitely feel that the top designers, etc have been pulled off onto Project Titan. The game has lost some of it's epic feel (which could also be due to it's age as well).

[anonymoushn]

The way they approached the problems with Sunwell in 3.0 and 3.1 seemed really good. All of the content was easy to finish, but fights like OS3D, firefighter, yogg+1, and algalon were engaging for a long time. After that the hard modes stopped being significantly different from the normal versions of the encounters, which makes them a great deal less exciting. The lack of excitement in high-end raid content should only impact high-end raiders, though, so this probably has very little to do with the people who are leaving the game.

[anonymoushn]

I just started playing 4.3 after leaving in 3.3 and the blatant brokenness of the game amazes me. I expected the human racial to no longer be unreasonably powerful, but 2x PVE trinkets is now an even larger advantage than it was in WotLK. I expected at least some effort at QA for the content patches, but instead we have blood DKs in blood presence being critically hit by bosses, carrying winds letting players fall to their deaths, and Deathwing occasionally deciding he would rather remain impossible to attack until his hard enrage than participate in the last phase of the encounter.

Blizzard has said they want to fix the PvE vs PvP issues at least with respect to gear, so that wearing PvP gear in PvE is bad but not terrible and wearing PvE gear in PvP (even trinkets!) is bad but not terrible. It seems odd that they did not think this was an issue from TBC until now.