With nothing to do at lvl 60 besides go through dungeons over and over for little to no chance of getting something like Steve said in his review, that would get boring. There's also no pvp action in it like most people know.

I blame publishers on this. Companies need to get together or something(and i said something) and get these publishers to stop making deadlines for them to finish making the game. This leads to bugs and less content a whole lot of the time.

I keep telling people this, but people seem intent on saying that it won't happen. Face it - battlegrounds will not save this game. PvP is poor, tradeskills are pathetic, and the quests are boring. *yawn*

Not a huge online RPG fan, but I played City of Heros for about a month, and that game seemed totally barren of anything except constant combat and leveling. There wasn't even any loot, the stuff you could collect sucked. Yet they're still apparently doing ok. I don't Blizzard will have much of a problem. The massive player base they have now might not be sustainable, but they'll be able to retain enough of them to be the largest MMORPG out there. If need be, I'm sure they can have their legion of content guys cook up some new stuff.

You think that's bad? Try Matrix online.
Drab, boring, laggy, buggy, retard players very poorly trying to outcool one another, TERRIBLE crafting, and very blah combat.
I don't regret the purchase, but I certainly will never recommend the game to anyone.
As for WoW, I could see it taking a dip. There aren't enough features. Online games -NEED- to have gambling and minigames and sports and public arenas. Duelling sucks because nobody cares.
I'd like to place bets and stuff. That'd keep my attention.
Because I sure as hell don't want to make the same items everyone else is making, sell loot everyone already has, adventure in areas everyone has already been, and then spend the rest of my time fighting and levelling.
Fighting and levelling is boring. It's fact.
I need amusement and in-game entertainment. And no, a dancing profession does not count.

Bleh.

Arguably I should've read the article, which largely compares WoW to City of Heroes.

Still, I'm not entirely convinced that it's as simple to say that creating a more hardcore game, essentially what this is advocating, is the path to more sucess for the developer. How much are you sacrificing upfront to get a larger rate of retention? Is the drop predictable? Obviously there's a limited number of cases to go off of here, but let's assume these trends are correct and what we'll see in the future.

The problem I have with this line of thinking is that the relative casualness of the game is though to be highly responsible to how many people you keep, but doesn't really examine how much more it can bring in at the begining(many of whom can be retained simply through inertia). Compare World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2. Both of these games have very high production values, took years to develop, had developers of great repute behind them and were using highly bankable properties. EQ2 is the highly traditional, slow-paced online CRPG, WoW is the glorified hack & slash. Both were launched at the same time. WoW has about 5 times the subscribers right now. They'll still be ahead of the game vis a vis EQ2 if it increases it's numbers by 100% and Wow falls 50%, both unlikely cases(even UO hasn't fallen that far to this day). FFIX, again, huge franchise, great developer, great production values and it's well below what WoW is likely to fall to. The same story with SWG(though the author catagorizes it differently).

Certainly some will say that there's a Blizzard effect playing into it's massive early numbers, but then certainly there's an NCSoft effect when looking at City of Heroes. Completely unknown property, very little awareness of the developer, yet they've had at least 120k paying customers a month for almost a year. Had they made a slow paced, traditional CRPG, would they have ever attained the initial base they needed? I certainly wouldn't have given it a shot if it were billed as EverQuest in Gotham City.

These aren't controlled experiments, so we have no way of setting up some definitive test to determine which style is better for developers when the dust settles. There's no going back and seeing how CoH would've done with slow paced combat or a huge virtual world component. But I don't think it's cut-and-dried that making more 'casual' online RPGs is substantially inferior to traditional, even if the distribution of subscribers over time are pattered differently.

Also, goona say that Planetside isn't really a fair comparison. I don't think anyone expected an online shooter to have the same legs as an RPG, even a simplistic one, and appropriately it isn't even tracked in this graphs along with other RPGs.

But then, I don't know anything about the genre. Yet I couldn't resist goint way too long with this comment. Just goes to show the incredible timesink effect of online RPGs; even those who don't play them somehow get entrapped.

(my apologies to Gaming Steve for piling on in this thread, as I believe he still checks all these individually. Actually, this one could conceivably be considering spam)

And before anyone mentions it(as if anyone actually cares), I know NCSoft has a fairly sizable stable of online RPGs, and one could argue they're the leader in the field. But for CoH, which was aimed at a western audience, they were relatively unknown when compared to Blizzard, SOE, et al.

hmm, I am still thinking about buying WoW tomarrow, but this has made me seriously think real hard about my purchase, maybe I should just save my money and keep playing Ragnarok Online.

Technically this is true, all MMORPGs are doomed. One day, they will lose there "newness" and dedicated players who love the game for what it is, will stay. Eventually another new MMORPG will come along, with graphics that make your game look like Pac-man, and more people are tempted and leave.

It will be interesting to see how things happen over a 5-10 year basis with these games. Its just like running a bussiness, infact it is lol, they will just downgrade server speed, lower staff, to adapt to the lack of players. Eventually there company behind the game goes under, or you get down to such a sad ammount of players, the profit margin disapears.

I think several things:

1) His article is based on insane amounts of speculation and twisting the facts to fit his theory (not the opposite). I'm not entirely sure why I should think of his opinion any better than that of the next player.

2) It seems that his biggest issue with the game is that it doesn't force you to team up. I'd actually like to hear Steve's opinion on that, since it seems that being forced to group after level 40 is one thing that bothered him. I'd also like to know if he actually played through the entire game without doing instances: I have several casual gaming friends and all of them have instanced.

3) "I predict that World of Warcraft's upcoming battlegrounds won't change the situation. Battlegrounds are encapsulated away from the game world too much to add any of the missing “epic” feeling World of Warcraft needs."

Unless he's a beta tester for Battlegrounds, I can't see how his prediction is based on any solid evidence. I think Battlegrounds looks awesome, and pretty much everything one could conceivably ask of PvP. Saying they are encapsulated out of the game without even trying them and seeing how they mesh with it is... the kind of baseless assumptions that are rampant through the rest of the article.

4) Like the vast majority of WoW doomsayers, he refuses to actually understand how casual gamers (the core base of WoW) think and play. WoW, while much quicker than most MMORPGs, will still last a casual gamer (you know, the kind of which may play 5-10 hours a week, you might have heard of them or seen them on the news) several years. Aside from they obviously playing less, they're not likely to grind or optimize leveling.

There's actually more but I'm not sure I want to dignify that piece of speculative fiction any more.

Battlegrounds will be cool, yes, but do you seriously want to PvP just in these pre-defined scenarios? Sure, you have epic battles and win "phat loot omgz0rs", but what about actually doing damage to your enemy? You cannot attack each other in opponent's territory without consent, you can not invade cities and capture them. What is the point? That isn't war, that's just silly.

I hate the term carebear... but i'm going to use it anyway - World of Warcraft pvp will always be carebear unless they actually allow you to make an impact on the world, and not just in their little(or big) battleground scenarios.

Lord Janos wrote: "Battlegrounds will be cool, yes, but do you seriously want to PvP just in these pre-defined scenarios? Sure, you have epic battles and win "phat loot omgz0rs", but what about actually doing damage to your enemy? You cannot attack each other in opponent's territory without consent, you can not invade cities and capture them. What is the point? That isn't war, that's just silly."

What's the point of Street Fighter? Of Tekken? Of Starcraft? Warcraft 3? Saying that PvP for the heck of it is pointless unless it has some impact on the game tells me right there that you don't enjoy PvP itself, and makes me wonder why would that change if it did affect the world. It's like people back then saying they enjoyed fishing a lot and that for them it was ruined when it started being a major source of income: well, if they loved it in the first place, why would rewards mean anything?

Lord Janos wrote: "I hate the term carebear... but i'm going to use it anyway - World of Warcraft pvp will always be carebear unless they actually allow you to make an impact on the world, and not just in their little(or big) battleground scenarios."

OK then, I'm a carebear. Guess what? Virtually all casual gamers are. Guess what again? That IS the core base of WoW.
And we're discussing precisely that, so there goes PvP as an argument for WoW's downfall.

Wait, you are a heroic character of the World of Warcraft, and yet you can do nothing at all that changes the world. You cannot go to war, you cannot put any pressure on the enemy, you cannot actually DO anything.

Sure, battlegrounds will be fun, BUT what fun is pvp when you can't act in the world? If i wanted to just do mindless pvp i will continue playing Counter Strike or Warcraft 3. If i want to be a heroic character in a fantasy world i want to be able to do things that effect it - like go to war, and be able to DO something to them instead of just standing at either end of a DOTA level in 1st person attacking people. That doesn't achieve anything. But whatever, i don't play it anymore, and if you have fun playing it then it's cool - hopefully we won't have that lot as the core gaming community in future games.

Lord Janos wrote: "Wait, you are a heroic character of the World of Warcraft, and yet you can do nothing at all that changes the world. You cannot go to war, you cannot put any pressure on the enemy, you cannot actually DO anything."

You can do a whole LOT of things that you happen to ignore in favor of the lack of one single thing. But you already posed in your first comment that you simply think the rest of the game is boring, so I'm not sure why we're discussing matters any further. Just don't be surprised with the VAST majority of players, which actually like the "pointless" parts (AKA the game), don't agree with you.

It's like me playing the best soccer game ever crafter (I hate sports games with a passion), and saying it's boring, but worse of all, it lacks the essential component of realisticly bending grass on the playing field. Is the lack of this one feature the actual problem, or my loathe of the entire rest of the game?

Lord Janos wrote: "Sure, battlegrounds will be fun, BUT what fun is pvp when you can't act in the world? If i wanted to just do mindless pvp i will continue playing Counter Strike or Warcraft 3."

Then by all means, please do. If I wanted to beat my opponents with martial arts moves, I'd play Tekken, not a soccer game. Not much else to discuss here neither.

Lord Janos wrote: "If i want to be a heroic character in a fantasy world i want to be able to do things that effect it - like go to war, and be able to DO something to them instead of just standing at either end of a DOTA level in 1st person attacking people. That doesn't achieve anything. But whatever, i don't play it anymore, and if you have fun playing it then it's cool - hopefully we won't have that lot as the core gaming community in future games."

How about some respect from others' tastes, instead of wishing that every single game was developed with your own standards in mind, assuming they're the ultimate truth? You know, the old "live and let live"? Should I campaign against sports games, or for them to include machineguns and giant mecha?

Honestly, what's with people telling others what they should like? Why the heck are your tastes morally superior to mine? You're all starting to get on my nerves.

"Honestly, what's with people telling others what they should like? Why the heck are your tastes morally superior to mine? You're all starting to get on my nerves."

Don't read my comments then. Why are you here arguing about how awesome the game is and not playing it in that case? If it's so great, then the best thing you can do is ignore stubborn pr**** like myself by ignoring me and continuing to play.

so what you're saying is "WoW is fun, but it would've been great if my presence actually made a difference and changed the world"

lets say that you could change the world
there are many more alliance players than horde, the horde newbie areas get raided every day (this is based on my experience in the beta and on what my friends tell me, I don't play WoW (too expensive))
if changing the world was possible, a horde newbie would be killed as soon as he starts playing, and that's not fun
the alliance would dominate most of the world, so joining the horde won't be fun because you won't stand a chance, and joining the alliance won't be fun because it's too easy
the only way to balance this would be to reset the server, and you don't want a server reset when you're 2 monsters from lvl 40 and a mount (if just the world would reset and not the characters, the alliance could take over the world again in a few days)
the battlegrounds will give you the world changing experience on a smaller scale, each battleground has a player cap, so there won't be more alliance players than horde players

The NUMBER ONE PROBLEM with almost all of these articles and comments is that if you are a big WoW fan person there are things that will be put in very soon about the same time as battle grounds that will be put in is capturable towns. This will allow the players to form a army and raid and if there are well put together they will be able to in a sense conquer the world or at least what blizz has deemed capturable. Secondly i have yet to even hear about a guild or raid group beating Molten core which is a very long and hard to get through instance once you beat it you WILL have a impact on the story if you have read all of the little bits of hidden info throughout the game. The second thing is that although people complain about the allience outnumbering the horde the other thing you forget is that the Horde has much better players on average so your going for quality and quantity with allience. The other thing is that what if a big player did do something soo epic it would shock the world, well then no one else would ever be able to do that event again this would mena the developers spent days making something that only one person can do now i might ask does this seem reasonable. But if you could have a big event that only the mnost skilled people could do then this seems much better, I bring this up to tell the fact that Artifacts/Legendary items which wil be put into the game are something that is a very unique thing to do as the fact that only one person could have these items at a time. Plus the new content updates probably contain much more in them then alot of the EQ expansions.

Wow content updates are no where near as big as eq expansions. I like the game and think it will continue to do well. MC has been complete defeated a couple months ago now and on just about ever server.

Weltall Zero said "Like the vast majority of WoW doomsayers, he refuses to actually understand how casual gamers (the core base of WoW) think and play. WoW, while much quicker than most MMORPGs, will still last a casual gamer (you know, the kind of which may play 5-10 hours a week, you might have heard of them or seen them on the news) several years. Aside from they obviously playing less, they're not likely to grind or optimize leveling."

A lot of casual gamers are hitting level 60, since WoW has been out 6 months by now.

More and more people are complaining about lack of things to do at 60, because they can't find the time to do the instances (and that's all there is to do at endgame.) The very thing that brings in the casual gamers - ability to play for a few hours here and there is stripped from them at level 60.

Perhaps it won't cause a mass exodus. But if the only content added caters to hardcore players - why would casual gamers pay to stick around?