In the fantasy MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW), 3 million paying players have been lost in just a few months. Lead designer Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas also admits to mistakes in the analysis.
In the interview with VentureBeat, chief designer Hazzikostas mainly talks about “cycles” that are responsible for the disappointing numbers from the first quarter of 2015. The number of paying players has dropped from 10 million to 7.1 million.
The 5-man instances: We found it silly in MoP, now we have overdone it
Internally, the “dungeons” have also been identified as a cause. This is probably the aspect of the expansion “Warlords of Draenor” that Blizzard is most dissatisfied with. “We created a handful of dungeons, but did not give players a reason to continue playing them after the first few weeks”, Hazzikostas said.
“In Mists of Pandaria, players repeatedly did the 5-man instances for valor points. Even after a year. We found it a bit silly to tackle the same content with increasingly stronger gear and receive the same rewards every time. So, we removed the valor points from the game. I think we overdid it there.”
With the mythic difficulty for the 5-man instances in 6.2 (the lead designer refers to them as “mini-raids”) and the Timewalker dungeons, Blizzard believes they can counteract this issue in the next patch.
The Garrison: The 5-minute WoW has no competition with the rest
While the garrison has been heavily criticized by fans, Hazzikostas doesn’t see it as negatively. These garrisons encouraged players to log in only briefly, in sprints. Instead of perhaps not playing WoW at all that day. It’s not uncommon to log into WoW for 5 minutes before work, complete the follower missions, restart and then log out.
He doesn’t believe this player experience comes at the expense of larger activities like raids.
Warlocks were formerly two-button characters, WoW has not been dumbed down
In raids, one can see more of a development where the “veterans” of WoW are still hardcore at their core, but now have jobs and families. The hours-long raiding from college or school days has been replaced by “45 minutes after the kids are in bed”.
Blizzard is trying to address this with higher accessibility. The interviewer notes that today some guilds only raid two evenings or 6 hours a week and still do so at the highest mythic difficulty.
This trend towards guilds with fewer raid days can be observed, and the lead designer agrees. He also contradicts the thesis that WoW was much more challenging in the past. The destruction warlock, for example, only needed two buttons during BC: one debuff kept up and then very quickly hit the shadow bolt button hard. Compared to back then, the game has certainly not been “dumbed down”; rather, they have merely focused on keeping WoW “clear and concentrated”. World of Warcraft has a high skill cap.
The reasons for the lost players: Players don’t want just one game in their life anymore
The main reason for the lost players, however, is seen by Hazzikostas elsewhere, not with the garrison or the 5-man instances: It would be cyclical behavior.
Today, World of Warcraft is no longer a “year-round lifestyle”, but something that players love, but something they come to, see what’s going on, play the patch, and then leave again, perhaps to play another great game that has since been released.
Part of this cycle is when at a certain point there is very high interest, there is also a strong drop-off of players afterwards.
Hazzikostas refers to the next patch 6.2., which should give players a reason to log in again. The introduction of the WoW token has not had a “dramatic” impact on player numbers, as he reveals.
