#1 - June 29, 2011, 7:23 p.m.
After the 1.5million+ players left that raid family ether switching to other games or other aspects of the Wow, raiding has basically died.Blizzard refused to balance out pvp its completely corrupt with mmr abusers gcd hackers etc...In my opinion Blizzard dosent care instead of trying to fix the problems all they do is release mounts and crap you can buy to try and stop the boat from sinking to fast.
Also the average wait time to open a ticket is 324 days thats just crazy.Blizzards World of war craft is in its final months once the new star wars mmo comes out its over.In the latest gamers poll %39 of wowers admited they are switching over from Wow when KOTR comes out.....If only Blizzard listened to its players.
1. The length of heroics - This hurt a lot of people, especially with the added difficulty. Thus making the LFD extremely problematic. It wasn't unusual to get in one that took more than 2 hours, not including queue time.
2. Raiding difficulty - Raiding population decline has been huge. The game has lost over 1.5 million people that raided in WotLK. Is it difficulty? Burnout? hard to say, but I think heroic length+difficulty has led to higher burnout. Thus leading to less people raid ready, and as such the difficulty gets larger with less population and refills
3. Caps on Valor and Justice - all it really does is hold people back. A kind of cheap way to make people play longer. I think it's had the opposite effect. Look at WotLK and people could run heroics all day long, get their points and get gear. Sure it took a while, but there was an incentive to run and run and run and run. In Cata, once you run 7, you're done. There's no point in going for more, thus artificially holding people back. Bad move, IMO, and bad design.
4. Overgrind - this is kind of inclusive with the others, but it just takes too long to do much of anything in the game. Too much time to farm for mats, too much time to grind for rep, too much time to do a heroic, especially with lfd and the queue times. Archeology is a just a pure time sink
5. Premium stuff - there has just been a large push lately towards premium type content, whether it be pets, mounts, or the realID stuff. I think this has turned people away feeling betrayed by Blizzard.
Here are some interesting links
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/52996/World-Of-Warcraft-70-Of-Trial-Players-Give-Up-Before-Level-Ten
http://www.gamesbrief.com/2009/07/world-of-warcraft-loses-6-million-users/
<a href="http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2721384528?page=1">http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2721384528?page=1</a>
http://www.mmowned.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/general/245539-world-of-warcraft-loses-6-million-users.html
http://www.freefrag.com/world-warcraft/14641-world-warcraft-lost-600k-subscribers-down-11-4m.html
