Blizzard assures more growth to come for World of Warcraft

I agree with many comments here. All of the expansions for WoW took me back for a few weeks, but it's just more of the same.

WoW is a great game, it's well designed and plays beautifully, but it's just gotten old for me now.

I think people are forgetting the real reason behind WoW's (possible) decline -- the Daedelus Project [http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/] has shut down.

The experiment is over, and it was a roaring success!

If blizzard keeps moving in the same direction as they have been since BC the game will *eventually* wither and die. To think whatever they are doing right now with cataclysm is "innovation" is like thinking adding a different shade to your picket fence is innovating.

@TonyMCS: Those reasons may be why WoW *was* successful but you are a shining example of the kind of person who is blind to everything but what is put in front of them. Look around, WoW isn't innovating anything these days and to firmly believe that it is is a clear sign of your lack of peripheral vision.

Why is everytime there is wow news, all the cool kids on this site just spout hate over and over again?

Get over it. You don't like wow, go play your game and be happy you have something you enjoy.

And frankly, I think we will see a huge resurgence of wow very soon. The more and more blizzard caters to the casual crowd, and more and more ignores what I like to call the "no lifers", the better off they are in the long run.

And just because I want to be cool too, I know of around 5 to 10 large guilds on hiatus now that are coming back for cata. So Ha I beat your "my whole guild quit cause we are butt hurt over having the best loot".

It seems to me that Blizzard made a decision years ago to make as much money as they could off of WoW and to make that their primary goal. They're not concerned about the players who leave, they don't care about enforcing their own rules (i.e. the EUA) except when it comes to selling gold (which happens anyways). They're not going to make any fundamental changes to the game because it's still making them money, and that's what they are there for. I imagine they will continue to dumb the game down more and more as they have been doing already. Oh, they'll still have some "hard" challenges that will require you to have better gear...but that's it. It won't require you to be a better player, you can be sure of that. (On that subject I find it humorous in it's own way that to defeat most of the bosses in "hard" mode just means that you're fighting them like a retard i.e. not taking out their supporting adds or fighting them in an intelligent fashion.)
And so eventually WoW will start losing even more players and it will start to receive even less support than it already is (good luck getting a GM to respond to a ticket in less than 5 hours already) and will end up like Diablo 2 is right now... an occasional patch and minimal support. I'm already amazed at their laziness in producing "new content". Seems like half of Cataclysm is just going to be 'plagarized'. Like dusting off Onyxia and SFK they'll just start openly regurgitating their own product. But it'll still make them moeny and that's their goal and they're good at it. They're just not producing a game I care to play anymore. I plan to buy Cataclysm, level to 85, and sell my account to some poor bastard too lazy to level.

Out of the hundreds of people I know, only 3 of them play WoW.
11.5 million..im sure thats not all active. WoW needs to start a counter from the 1st of a month to the last day on houw many people logged in on different account to get a firm number.. 11.5million my ass

As some one with multiple WoW accounts who has subscribed since day 1, the game is definitely in the decline phase. They'll still have millions of players for a number of years, but what's going to happen with the release of Wrath in China and the release of Cata elsewhere is that they'll sell a bunch of boxes and get a jump in sub numbers for a few months, then a bunch of cancelled accounts.

By now, people know if they want to play WoW or not. There aren't a lot of people left to recruit, at least not compared to the number of people who simply move on to other pursuits.

5 years is a long time to be the top dog in the industry, and WoW is finally starting to show its age in a lot of areas. I have faith in the people who are working on it, but it's not a matter of faith in people. It's just a fact that the game is getting long in the tooth, and they can't count on a permanent lack of real competition. The Old Republic, Guild Wars 2, etc are all on the horizon, and while they aren't necessarily "WoW killers" they're great alternatives for the people who have played the game for years.

I'm reading a lot of ppl saying 'I know all these ppl that quit, therefore wow is in decline, QED'.

I have also known ppl who quit, but since the new LFG tool, the number of new-to-wow players I have met up with is astonishing. I often say to myself 'how can it be that these people don't know this instance after WoW has been out for five years?' People might be leaving, but I can tell you from experience that a boatload of new people are starting wow all the time.

People need to be aware when they are overgeneralising from narrow personal experience. All any of us can say based on the people we know/ have met, is that some people leave and some new people come.

Good on them.

Been a WoW player almost since the original was released. I've also quit the game numerous times. About half a year ago, I thought I had quit for good. I was damn tired of the game, and I was suffering the same WoW fatigue so many others suffer.

I didn't think I was going to come back this time, and up until a couple months ago, I hadn't even thought of WoW. Then one of my friends messaged me one day, and told me he was coming back as well, and that there had been quite a few changes. "Come back man, you can gear up through heroics and be ready for raiding in no time! There's even a cross server LFG now!"

So, me and a all of his friends join him, and I got my first taste of real raiding. And it was fun. As hell...

...for about a month and a half. And now i'm back at the same point I was at before. Bored as hell. No new classes to play, nothing new at all. I pretty much only log in for raids, which is the only entertainment I get out of the game anymore.

WoW's biggest problem is that Blizzard tends to think that recoloring items and making copies of raid/dungeon bosses means innovation and "NEW STUFFS". It does not. They started out copying some of the best features from other games, and doing it well. Now, when they try to copy something (Wintergrasp as a blatant copyoff of games like WAR comes to mind.), they either dumb it down so much that's it's a shadow of what it could have been, or that it's just not well done.

But at the same time, it's really hard to "innovate" a game that's more or less exhausted all of it's potential. They pretty much did everything they could do with the game when Wrath came out, with the vehicle combat gimmick and things like that. But there really isn't much more you can do, sadly. That doesn't mean that Cataclysm will be all bad. Redesigning the 1-60 content is something they should have done back in BC, and I personally think they lost a lot of players since they've held that off for so long.

However, Cataclysm still won't achieve any kind of innovation. It just can't. Redesigning the zones isn't innovation. It's just a fresh look at the same mechanics and gameplay we've known for years.

I will go ahead and agree with a lot of the other people on here. WoW hit it's peak, and I don't think it will ever get back there again. It'll be around for at least another four or five years, for sure, but it certainly isn't going to be top dog forever. Too many people are getting tired of the game, and for a lot of the people coming back, they'll most likely end up leaving again after a couple months. That's generally how it goes with WoW these days.