World of Warcraft experiences a small drop in subscribers post-Cataclysm

Have people broken the leash?

Count me and my friends among that 5%. We've done everything there is to do in Cataclysm short of putting ourselves on a raiding schedule (which we promised ourselves we wouldn't do during this expansion) so we're done now.

I know quite a few friends who switched to Rift. Saying a lot of the new things they implemented in WoW wasn't good. I dunno what made them unsub, but something did.

I think it has to be more than that. It has been empty in zones that i have been in, when i log in.

My brother and I were recently about to WoW it up...but we just couldn't. There was no way. The WoW culture is so overwhelmingly complex at this point, so the question we had was "Where's the starting point". And how can we even reach the level of other players? It needs to be more accessible.

What I'm interested in are the number of folks like me, who haven't cancelled yet out of sheer laziness/apathy, but only log on a couple of times a month.

They could lose 1 million players tomorrow, and still have 10 million.




I think they're doing fine.

Recycled post from Wowinsider breakfast topic on changing cataclysm:

1. Unlink the 10-man and 25-man lockouts. Merging these was the worst idea ever as it effectively killed pug and casual raiding.

2. Get rid of guild leveling and rep. It kills off smaller guilds, and makes it much more difficult to recruit and/or change guilds if you don't like the one you joined.

3. Put portals to the 85 zones and dailies in all the cities, not just Org/Stormwind.

4. Change the faction dungeon rep grind. Wrath did it so much better. There were daily heroics that gave extra rep, and eventually there were weekly raids too. Of course, merging lockouts killed this off and they will never return because pug raiding is dead.

5. Do something about Tol Barad. Both the pvp and the dailies.

6. Figure out what you want disc priests to be and STICK WITH IT.

7. How about some new heroics that aren't recycled content?

8. Interacting with an auctioneer or other city NPC automatically kicks you off your mount.

9. The events of "The Shattering" should have been in the game. Having to read about the world changes in another medium was complete and utter laziness and fail.

Wouldn't a quest involving Cairne and having to track down the Grimtotem been awesome?

Solving the mystery of the murdered druids?

What about an event defending Ironforge?

Both could have included epic Wrathgate-like cinematics.

10. The cinematics and oh-so-slow cutscenes in Uldum were TERRIBLE. Plus, there were way way way too many of them. And being the "sidekick" instead of the hero wasn't that much fun.

11. Too much phasing

12. No interconnectedness of the 80-85 zones. In BC, we had all of outland. In Wrath, all of northrend. But in Cata, all the zones were separate from each other. So there was no sense of scale, or making progress towards the "big bad" by getting physically closer and closer to it.

Where does Deathwing live? Hell if I know.

13. By making the original capitol cities accessible via ports, there was no reason to ever stay in any of the new zones. I kept my hearth in Org the entire time. I couldn't even tell you where a single inn in any of the new zones is.

And it killed the "realism" of the experience by being able to do this. Oh my god, our ship has sunk and we're trapped underwater! What shall we do?

Screw the rest of you guys, I'm hearthing back to Org. Be back later, lololol.

14. Cataclysm was unforgivably a complete failure of potential.

a. The production of it was probably rushed. There were lots of spelling errors and grammar mistakes in quest text. I never saw these in original or any of the other expansions, and I played wrath at launch day.

b. As other posters have noted, there's a lot of quests that just feel unfinished and just ... end...

c. There was no real progression towards any goal. Not like in Wrath where we were getting closer and closer to Arthas.

d. The bosses in the heroics lack personality, which Wrath had in spades.


15. There is a hint of contempt towards players by Blizzard in the design of cataclysm:

a. The "Welcome to the machine" quest line making fun of different types of players.

b. The NPCs QQing over shaman healing and abilities when you're trying to escape from the stomach of the old god in the Twilight Highlands.

It's funny in a way, but infuriating and sad as well.

16. The rejigging of health to give everyone more than 100K of health didn't accomplish anything. Bosses just hit proportionally harder, and healing was nerfed. What was the point of this?

17. Forcing players to do endless heroics before getting geared up for raids. In Wrath, there was an "entry" level raid (Naxx) that had essentially the same level gear as heroics. So you could pretty much start Naxx as soon as you had a full set of 183 level gear. And so to get a full set of 200 gear, you could do both Naxx and heroics.

18. Thrall is out doing ... something. We see him in a "dream" but that's about it. How about a quest line or something to help him? What the heck is he doing? Can't I help? [EDIT: apparently this is coming in 4.2]

19. The only zone in Wrath that felt like a bunch of "side quests" was Sholazar Basin. Everything else was directed towards fighting of Arthas's forces and getting closer and closer to the main goal of killing him.

20. Why isn't there a single breadcrumb quest to any of the raids? If I didn't read this site, wowhead, the forums, etc., I wouldn't even know that any of these raids exist.

And that's 20 reasons why I let my subscription expire in February. Boy, was Cataclysm a disappointment.

I just quit after 4.2 (the last major patch). I enjoyed WoW pvp since the beginning but you can only get punished by someone you're giving $15/mo to so many times before you smarten up.

When the bombs hit, the only thing that will be left, besides the cockroaches, is World of Warcraft.

"Yahtzee" put it best. World of Warcraft is all about numbers. You get high numbers to get items to give you higher numbers. What do you do with those high numbers? Fight other things with high numbers. Then brag to other players about how much higher your numbers are than their numbers.