pabswikk

@Janitor
I hear it involves a series of tubes.

@The Ogre Essentially. Correlation does not equal causation. In fact, in terms of how humans think, it is quite reasonable to assume that people didn't necessarily leave because Cataclysm was bad, but because Cataclysm is an expansion, a convenient point at which to stop playing the game due to it being a large update. It's perfectly reasonable that a player who is fatigued from playing WoW for seven years would see an expansion as large as Cata as off-putting, as it require time and effort they are no longer willing to put into the game.

@Irem The people I'm complaining about are the people who argue that WoW is a terrible, linear, themepark catastrophe but don't actually like the core concepts behind the game. Sure, if you've been a longtime WoW fan and then Cataclysm in your opinion ruined the game, then that's entirely different. Your opinion then represents at least part of the playerbase that Blizzard is trying to keep. However, I personally don't think WoW is losing subs because Cataclysm made poor game design choice, I think it's losing subs because it''s an ageing game. Some people have simply grown tired of Azeroth and are moving onto newer pastures, or away from MMOs completely.
Furthermore, I'd argue this change isn't recent. WoW has been making the progression to it's current state since TBC, and Cataclysm was the next logical step in that progression. The writing was, as they say, on the wall.

Going to go ahead and play devils advocate here. I think Cataclysm was possibly the best expansion for WoW to date, possibly for any MMO for that matter. Ambitious, huge, and world changing. Sure it had it's flaws, but I think the whole package was great overall. Plus the quest design, while some called it too linear, was in my opinion just perfect. It gave you choice in which zones to go to, and then when you went to those zones gave you a story to lead you through the zone at a steady pace. Levelling was a bit too quick at points, with you too easily out levelling the quests you were doing, but fixing that is a simple matter of changing the rate at which you gain XP.

As for phasing, I'm sorry, but anyone who claims it ruins or ruined WoW is simply wrong. The phased areas are, firstly, excluded to areas of the game where specific story-driven sections occur, so the apparent problem some people have (that they never see other players) is just a lie. Important cities, quest hubs, and the vast majority of the game are not phased. Also, by the time you get to endgame phasing is a non-issue as you've completed the same content as other players. Phasing is the solution to a problem people have had in MMOs for years, that you could never see the effect your quests had on the world.

The complaint that WoW is too linear ignores the core design of the game. This isn't a sandbox game where they've created a world and simply let the players loose. This is a quest-driven game, where the overall world's story progresses regularly via patches. If that's not your cup of tea, then fine, but if Mists of Pandaria (and I'm not saying it will) suddenly changed the game into a sandbox., it would be a cheap imitation of what a Sandbox should be. Fundamentally liking WoW comes down to whether you:
a) Like this particular themepark design of MMOs (Essentially solo content with group-dungeons until endgame, where it becomes all group content)
b) Like the world of Azeroth.
If you don't like both of those things, you'll never like World of Warcraft. If you do, then lucky you. Hopefully Blizzard don't go ahead and ruin the story/ core game design.

Sorry for the rant, it's just that whenever I read the comments sections on this website it seems to be a group of negative thinkers who are determined to hate every piece of news that comes out of an industry of which they are supposedly fans.

Going to go ahead and say that I live in the UK and only very rarely buy my games from retail, and most people I know who play PC games do the same. Take this article with a pinch of salt as the PC games sections in most UK retailers have turned into little more than a shelf in the corner, turning people to digital retailers, which aren't included in the sales figures in MMOCRUNCH's article.