Burnout

WoW is dying. Again. Still. I have no idea. Whenever some of the more popular players or guilds announce that they're quitting the game with some big and meaningful blog post or forum thread, the whole thing inevitably attracts a whole bunch of people, who proclaim the end of the world. Of Warcraft.
And yes, they have lost more active subscribers than a whole lot of other MMOs out there ever had. But come on - WoW has how many million people playing it right now? Eleven? How many other online games have anywhere near as many players as that? That's right - none!

For some fucked up reason, whenever people quit the game they have devoted the biggest part of their spare time to for god knows how many years, they suddenly 'see the light', they have an epiphany of sorts and it all becomes clear: All the trolls and haters were right, all the criticizm is true, WoW actually sucks and it's gonna die! It's a bit like with those assholes who quit smoking.

And naturally, everyone has their own theory on why it's dying. The most popular one is about how everything gets nerfed and everything is supposedly too fucking easy. The other day, I have watched the Clairebear doing a 25man hard mode Lich King run with a whole bunch of well-geared level 85 folks. After 4-5 hours of failing, dying, replacing frustrated players and getting their asses kicked time and again, they gave up. One might argue that those guys are simply crap at clicking 4 hotkeys and moving out of shit on the ground and to some extent, that's probably true. But the fact of the matter is this: They're a bunch of average Joes, they're the kind of people, who make up the biggest part of the WoW community. People, who just play for the heck of it.

I wonder how many of those, who foresee the quick and painful end of WoW right now because of raid nerfs and awesome epic gear for everyone, have actually managed to finish all of the top tier raid content on hard mode. I wonder how quickly WoW would die, if all those people, who hate the raid nerfs so much, because the game actually, really becomes too easy for them to pose a challenge, would simply quit. Would that even be noticeable when looking at the subscription numbers?

If you're familiar with this blog, then you know I hate WoW's instant gratification, epix for every drooling moron and the speedy leveling curve with zero challenge as much as the next guy. But I'm not  an idiot. I know WoW isn't dying because of such stuff. In fact, this is exactly what keeps WoW going - it caters to folks, who don't want to spend god knows how many hours studying class guides, boss tactics and shit like proper enchanting and reforging. They just want to play.

Right now I'm part of a small guild, which contains these exact same kind of people. Most of them started playing sometime around Wrath and they don't give a fuck about how it took me a month to get to level 60 back then, how the boats used to vanish or how you couldn't just solo any monster ten levels above your own. None of this is of any meaning to those guys. And since we've guided and boosted them and held their hands all the way to the level cap, they're only beginning to actually learn how to do their jobs in a group and how to get the most out of their characters.

This is gonna make any top raid tier guild veteran cringe, but one of the coolest things you can do to make these guys happy is by doing a 5man run through Naxxramas. And I'm saying this without any sarcasm or disrespect. It's not difficult. It's not overly challenging. But they're having a great time. And they're paying the same subscription fees as anybody else, including elitist pricks like me, who dish out 50% more DPS than all of them combined, simply because I know my macros and keybinds.

And that's the whole point. So I've been there for nearly seven fucking years. I have been there, before the game made virtually everyone the target audience. And I miss some of those awesome battles, some of the really tough quests and challenges, standing out from all those maggots simply by owning some powerful gear, which wasn't freely available to everyone. But that doesn't make my opinion any more valid, it doesn't make my money any more valuable, it doesn't make my views on the balancing and changes any more important than that of any other paying player. And the game isn't fucking dying, just because it has gone a way I hate.

Of course WoW is gonna lose even more subscribers in the not so distant future. But that's not because of difficulty, nerfs, its community, which is supposedly getting more and more awful by the minute or yet another worst expansion, ever. It's because most of us have played it to death by now. Everyone knows WoW, we've all been there at some point, many of us are playing it right now and there comes a point, where you have simply played the crap out of it and all the new content in the world won't stop it from becoming stale.

And you can only keep a game fresh for so long. I'd kill to see Rift's cool multiclassing system in WoW. I'd love to roll a Tauren, betray the Horde and join the Alliance or vice versa with a Night Elf, much like on Everquest 2. I'd like to have a story, where I get to choose whether I make somebody my enemy or my ally, whether I want to be good or evil and where all my actions have consequences like on Star Wars: The old Republic. But we're talking about a game, where it took forever just to add visual customization for gear, aka transmogrifying. We're talking about a game, where skill trees get more and more streamlined, where the fabled 'Path of the Titans' had been canned for being too complex as a means of character development. They're not gonna make any groundbreaking changes.

Other MMOs out there aren't just catching up - they're getting better. They're adding exciting new features, which WoW will never have. And that's what will one day 'kill' WoW. That day will come. But that's not because Ragnaros has lost a couple HP. It's not because of Valor Point changes. It's not even because of that dumbass arms spec warrior and his fucking epic dagger. Though he sure as hell kills WoW for me quite a bit.

-Cat