The Free Week

Much has been made about the announcement a few months ago that World of Warcraft lost quite a number of subscriptions.  It was surprising to many especially since the last expansion was only just released last holiday season.  The mmorpg fanbase exploded into various chatter that exulted in Blizzard's fall from grace and worry that the game was beginning to fail.  The Blizzard forums were overwhelmed by posts calling the expansion a very real Cataclysm and begging Blizzard to start merging empty servers.  It seems the schadenfreude talking heads won the day because recently Blizzard turned it's introductory areas to unlimited free to play.  A policy that was seen before in the less than popular Warhammer Online a few years ago.  This move caused even more chatter with greedy demands that the whole game be turned free to play.

I'm included in those lost subscriptions that caused this major change.  I left the game last year due to burnout over the dungeon treadmill.  I returned during the weeks leading up to the new expansion and only stayed about two months after it released.  During that time I barely played the game at all.  I did take a look at the new Goblin and Worgen areas.  And in my post a few months back I was alternately impressed and a little dismayed by them.  But I lost the energy to keep playing to see the end game areas on my top level characters.

This past week I received an email from Blizzard offering a free week to celebrate the latest update patch.  I decided to go back to take a look.

This time I concentrated on leveling my high level character.  I took this character through Hyjal and into Deepholm.  The quest design in the end game areas match the polish shown in the new Goblin and Worgen areas.  Everything is streamlined, intuitive and packed with good story tidbits.  There is minimal to no grind at all.  A player will never have to keep returning to the same areas to collect just one more object or kill one more baddie.  I really enjoyed the pace that the quests set and I never felt as if I was stagnating on a treadmill to prolong the leveling usefulness.  However the problems in the Goblin/Worgen areas are also present in the end game areas which include too much phasing, vehicle quests and cut scenes.  All of which took control of my character away from me and again left me feeling I was sitting in a Disney World ride.  I was also a bit dismayed to discover that the whole playstyle of this character (Paladin) was changed.  In WOTLK, the character had good utility and steady damage.  Granted there were areas that could be toned down and some toned up but the class was in a good place.  But this was thrown out and the class now plays like a slot machine.  Every move I make, I cross my fingers and hope to pull triple diamonds in order to do any damage at all.  In every fight I'm not sure if the character will destroy an NPC without blinking, do balanced damage or just keep hitting the NPC with no damage at all.  I don't understand this need developers have to throw out class design every few months or years.  That isn't something I have patience for anymore in any game.

All in all despite the few niggling problems I have with the new areas, I can't say that Blizzard went totally wrong with the new expansion.  In fact many of it's elements are better than WOTLK and BC.  Therefore my explanations for the surprising subscription loss are due to the ongoing economic Depression and an over saturation in the MMORPG market.  There are only so many games for which people can pay regular subscriptions.  That leads to careful picking on which games to play.  It turns out that the people prone to play MMORPGs are already playing and the audience is probably at it's peak.  This group for the most part cut it's baby teeth in World of Warcraft, they are a bit bored with the familiar game and now are spreading out to see other games in the market.  Some would rather pay a subscription to the new Rift now than go back to the same old WoW.  Another major change in the market are the rise of the asian based Free to Plays and western games that follow the same F2P model.  The F2P games are a very real threat to the old subscription model games and as the Depression gets worse their rise will gain more momentum.  Many of the asian F2P games rival the subscription style games in graphics and play style.  Many of the F2P games now are former A listed subscription games.

But does this mean WoW is failing?  I don't think that is case.  It will be chugging along for many years to come.  But it's heyday is most likely past.