The Elders guild here at JOB have experienced themselves some of the decline of WoW and several have quit playing due to the repetitiveness, lack of challenge, boring grind, and any other excuse we can come up with including myself. I’ve started playing again but am doing it at my pace and doing only what I feel like doing and not what I’m obligated to do for the sake of my guildmates, in-game friends, etc. Selfish? Maybe, but I’ve enjoyed the game for years and am looking for some kind of reason to stay around.

I found an article today at Gamasutra that outlines a lot of the decline that WoW has faced in the recent year or two and especially post-Cataclysm expansion. I found the article through a link in another article on WoWhead where the lead game designer Tom Chilton said “If you look at, if you look at the way the population breaks down, we’re at a point in our history where there are more people that played World of Warcraft but no longer play World of Warcraft than currently play World of Warcraft”. That’s a pretty loud statement and was somewhat tucked away in the interview between upcoming 4.3 content and the future of WoW.

The Gamasutra article states that in the months immediately following the last expansion that the game has lost almost 1 million players, dropping to 11.1 million subscribers from a peak of 12 million in 2010. Greg Street, lead systems designer at Blizzard, states in the interview that “The quests flow better, there’s not so much traveling all the way across the world, the rewards are just a little better.” While we agree with his statement, what’s causing this decline?

“One of the primary reasons I stopped playing was that I felt like so much of what made raiding interesting and fun was that elite end of the game where you have access to content that only a few people every get to see,” Doug Thomas, Associate Professor at USC and co-author of a book that studies changes in the 21st century, said. “Systematically, I felt what Blizzard has done is taken their high-end game content and made it increasingly accessible to larger group of players. Even if you couldn’t get the high-end Epics, you could get something that was pretty much equivalent through token systems. That kind of thing kind of eroded one of the core dynamics about what was fun about the game for me.” Agreed and agreed. It won’t be long before my level 71 priest I’m playing is 85 and is outfitted in gear that’s very close to that obtained by weeks of raiding. It’s not the same, but it’s certainly close.

Another WoW player and writer for Gamasutra says that “Raids are much harder than they were in Wrath of the Lich King, but the rewards aren’t significantly better than what you can acquire by queuing up for five-mans. On top of that, there’s no longer any mystery about exactly which patch all of your gear is going to be obsolete.” He also says “What this means is that you end up with a lot of people who are frustrated about wiping in raids, and there’s not a strong rewards-based incentive to keep trying. That’s precisely what happened with my own guild, and it drove us to stop raiding entirely, with a good chunk of people quitting or cutting back their play time significantly.”

So how many people does this translate into? 600,000 stopped playing World of Warcraft in the spring and another 300,000 have gone so far this summer. Thomas Debeauvais, of UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics conducted a survey

of 2865 World of Warcraft players from the U.S., Europe, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Almost all of the respondents had been playing WoW for at least one year and more than 70 percent had played for at least three years, itself a testament to the long-term commitment the game has inspired. Debeauvais found that 75 percent of his subjects had stopped playing WoW for at least a month during some period of their play, and 40 percent had stopped for six months or more.” He also found some interesting facts about subscriptions and says that “The funny thing with people who stopped playing [for more than six months] was that only half of them stopped paying for their account, even though they hadn’t played in six months or a year,” he noted. “I think there are many millions people fewer playing the game at any given time than the total number of current subscribers that you see talked about so much.”

While there has been a traditional drop in player numbers following each WoW expansion, the period of decline has lasted longer and been larger following Cataclysm. What’s your take on the decline? Do you think it’s just another traditional drop following an expansion? Do you think the door is opening for new MMO’s to take the throne? Read more of the Gamasutra article here.