What Went Wrong With WoW? A Blizzard Veteran’s Theory on World of Warcraft’s Fall From Its 12 Million Subscriber Height

Chart via u/Kamikaze4228 based on open source data

Ever wonder what became of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft? The groundbreaking MMORPG is still successful to be sure, but in recent years, it has fallen far from its 2010/2011 peak of over 12 million subscribers. 

Since then, its subscriber base has been on a sharp steady decline, dropping in 2019/2020 to below 4 million subscribers. In recent years, it’s wavered between that nadir and around 8 million, enjoying brief growth when a new expansion is released -- but never coming close to regaining its commanding heights. 

For the longest time I assumed this loss was simply typical attrition, as WoW players moved on to newer MMOs like Elder Scrolls Online, or metaverse platforms like Minecraft and Fortnite. 

But a veteran Blizzard developer just casually told me there were other key factors at work -- design changes I’ve seen little discussed before.

Irena Pereira joined Blizzard in 2006 (a little over a year after WoW’s 2004 debut) with an official role as a UI designer -- though that focus rapidly expanded. 

“[Blizzard] wanted a unicorn, somebody who could code, who could do art and design,” as she puts it to me now. (Disclosure: Irena and I are currently working on an unrelated MMO project, but more on that down the way.) In her three years at Blizzard, she worked on Patch 1.1,  as well as  the expansions Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, primarily as a UI designer. (“But again, full stack, I did everything, including designing with new features for the game.” She also managed WoW’s add-on community.) 

From that vantage, her post-mortem for World of Warcraft's declining user numbers (if I had to roughly summarize it) is this:

World of Warcraft lost its draw as a dynamic, living virtual world and even worse, lost its resilience as a virtual community.

“WoW as it was when it was first launched, is a very different game than WoW as it is now.” as she puts it. “Initially you’re dropping into a starting zone with an open world.”

The first-time new user experience now is tightly controlled:

“But now, when you log into WoW, there's dialog boxes and quest objectives, and NPCs talk to you, and scripted events -- all these things that kind of drive you from one moment to the next in a role. That includes making the game very easy at start:

“Currently with the starting zone for Dragonflight, I think it takes you about 10 minutes to get to level 10. Ten minutes. It's basically a couple of hours through the starting zone, I think you end up level 20.” (Reaching level 10 originally took something closer to week or more of play.)

The ease and speed of progression for players undermines motivations to talk with other players, and seek their help.

“The pace of leveling is the very first factor that I think has destroyed the early game and killed the community spaces where people would actually meet,” as Irena puts it. “The strategic shift to drive new users is very scripted on rails. The new user experience makes it so that players are paying more attention to the game than they are paying to each other.”

This also made WoW feel less like a world:

“This is a classic blunder that game studios make -- they feel they need only to throw more content at players, more storytelling and more narrative. I love storytelling, narrative, don't get me wrong. But the whole point of a great open world is for you to explore it at your own pace, not to be compelled to do things in an order.”

Now, there’s little reason to spend downtime in WoW talking with other players, let alone helping them out.  

Or as Irena puts it: “There's no white space in the experience.”

Which takes us to another problem: 

“Incentivizing multiplayer gameplay requests are gone. With increasing power levels, you really can solo most content. You don't need anybody, like with talent trees and whatnot. Classes can handle situations by themselves.” 

Now, high level players can just solo quests with a pet. There’s no need for other people, even to just take down a powerful NPC in the zone. 

“There's no risk,” Irena argues. “So you don't need help if there's no risk. These are all things that disincentivize finding other people to play with you.” 

I was surprised to hear all this. Back in its early years, WoW guilds required highly organized group planning and management, especially for complicated, high level raids.

In recent years, says Irena Pereira, that’s not so much the case:

“I mean, there's still raids, but a lot of the emphasis on group gameplay is just on the raids. Players want higher end game experiences. They want to take down big bosses. The smaller ten man dungeons like Karazhan, they don't do those anymore. A single five man dungeon like Gnomeregan is gone, like no nobody does that.

“The gray area, the juicy part of the experience kind of just slowly got whittled away, more and more and more player convenience features to bypass the annoying things. Suddenly you're not really running into people anymore. The player convenience features actually undermined the opportunities for social connection in various places in the game.” 

Irena pinpoints the problem to the launch of the WoW Cataclysm expansion in late 2010, with warning signs in the run up to the Lich King expansion of 2008, heard during a discussion with fellow WoW designers:.

“We were talking, I believe, about the Death Knight and planning an expansion for Lich King,” she recalls, “and we're discussing power leveling curves and multiplayer encounters, and [Blizzard VP] Jeff Kaplan said, ‘What about the solo player?’

“And then from that point on, there just seemed to be a lot of bias for supporting solo gameplay in this multiplayer world. But it was an overcorrection, like way overcorrected.” 

The result, Irena would argue, can be seen in the declining subscription numbers since 2010:

“They saw a precipitous population decline in a late stage, post-Cataclysm, the WoW population dropping, dropping, dropping. It got so low. But [Blizzard was] struggling with figuring out how they were going to improve revenue.” 

Above: Irena with fellow Blizzard veteran Brian Birmingham

A partial solution originated from her colleague Brian Birmingham, who lobbied for the re-release of the original version of WoW in 2019, dubbed World of Warcraft Classic, where play progression took more time investment, and more interactions with other players:

“When WoW Classic came out, it boomed. It became more profitable than retail because it brought back the original game and all the slower gameplay and all of those things that made WoW special came back. Players ate it up.”

You can see the subscriber numbers climbing back up after the advent of WoW Classic and successive Classic versions of previous expansions:

The release of Cataclysm: Classic earlier this year, however, is not an auspicious one by Irena’s lights:  

“Cataclysm was the expansion that killed a lot of those social features that killed the population in WoW. Now that they expanded WoW Classic into Cataclysm, it's having the same effect.” 

She says Blizzard often adds features that the hardcore player itself clamors for -- even if (in an ironic twist) they tend to hurt community cohesion.

“They added features that the community wanted but weren't necessarily good for the community,” as Irena puts it. “We started adding all these convenience features, right? The raid finding tool, random dungeon finder, that kind of thing. Features that also accelerate the lack of social stuff, [with players instead] going right into the dungeon. 

“They made dungeons transactional. You used to go up and find other people playing alongside you, where you'd be like, ‘Hey, let's do these quests together. Or are you gonna hit this dungeon?’ You want to join up.” 

But being able to have these random player-to-player conversations require time and space for such encounters:

“[N]ow nobody's actually physically walking to these locations, so that nobody's seeing each other,” she argues. “This is a chronic problem with abstracting things that should be immersive into UI elements. Suddenly people were part of a [online player] list and no longer actual people or characters.” 

A new WoW expansion, The War Within, arrives next week, and may attract a spurt of new subscribers, if temporarily. But if Blizzard asked Irena Pereira how to recover WoW’s former glory, it would be less about adding new content, but better encouraging players to play -- and socialize -- with each other.

Irena Pereira at Bungie's Game UX Summit '22 -- watch her talk here

“I would tell [Blizzard] to reduce the size of the land, funnel people into smaller groups. Take into consideration Dunbar’s number. In order to create more intimate connections, you need to facilitate the interaction of smaller and smaller groups. Build content for ten to fifteen people. When you stick 1000 people in Stormwind, nobody's ever gonna meet one another.” 

She harkens back to a memorable feature of EverQuest, where injured players would have to spend time restoring their health in a safe zone, where they’d inevitably begin chat with other recovering players:

“You have chill time where you're not being entertained, so that [players] entertain themselves by getting to know each other.”

Without those social moments central to WoW, she says, something crucial has been lost. 

“We seem to lose the thread on the multiplayer piece of MMOs by over-emphasizing the content and forgetting that the content needs to drive player interactions. 

“And when you lose the player interaction, you lose the population.” 

No doubt there are other factors to WoW’s population decline, but surely the decline of community is core among them. In any case, Irena’s insights are core to the thesis driving her new startup, Unleashed Games  -- which is developing MMOs, as VentureBeat puts it, that bring people together.

“[O]ur argument is, if we have a pro-social game where cooperation is the win condition, we can create more cooperative people and people who know how to collaborate, collaborating in-game, and incentivizing it in-game,” Irena Pereira tells me. “We always prioritize the social interaction and facilitate spaces where people can make up their own experiences by simply saying ‘Hi’ to each other.” 

And if the Proteus Effect is true (as she and I tend to believe), these players might then even end-up offering friendly greetings to strangers more in real life, too. Not coincidentally, they might also have more reason to stay and grow their virtual world too.

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Comments

[daralish]

for me WOW really blew it when they started the cross realms. before that you knew a ton of people in your realm and had the ability to join up with them for raids, instances and quests. when they opened up crossing realms to do instances and raiding they ruined the community. if you were new in your role you could not develop it with people you knew, everybody just wanted to slam through content. cross realm also made it so people could steal loot or just raid till they got what they wanted and then poof--there was no honor anymore. it stopped being fun. and now, even with new content, I have no reason to ever go back.

[cynicjr]

The reason why world of Warcraft has struggled since cataclysm is because whenever Blizzard would release a new expansion. They would do a number squish which meant that they also did a content squish and all the previous good content that people enjoy doing would no longer be in the game. In particular, the raids like carazhan or vortex Pinnacle or gruel's layer would no longer be relevant since blizzard would be focused on getting players to buy the latest expansion. They would feel like they had to eliminate the old content and make it irrelevant. So that meant the only time people would play The old content is if they wanted a transmog and in order to get that piece of gear they no longer needed a raid since they could solo it. Well, if you're just going to make all the content in the game soloable at some point, then that defeats the purpose of people actually caring to buy the latest content because they'll just wait until the expansion is cheap, 50% off and then they'll buy it and then they'll do all the old raids so that they can get the transmogs. What Blizzard could have done in order to keep the content relevant to rating Is forcing players to lock out tunes from leveling to latest content levels and for example, they would have to take a character and assign it to a specific expansion's content. So you would have two or three characters set aside for burning crusade content. You would have two or three characters set aside for wrath of the lich King content. You would have two or three character set aside for legion content and so on and the number squish would not affect those characters and the content would stay relevant at what and would not become so easy that the content could be soloed. I made this suggestion to blizzard a long time ago but apparently it fell on deaf ears.

[Yevgeniy khron]

I'll tell you exactly what happened and I devs would see this!
The way the bew raid and dungeon systm works is the issue.
Yes the new system can be fun for some players to have fun enjoying end game content raids easily.
Though it was the way the old raid and dungeon system worked that had so many wow subs.
The old system made it mandatory to be in a good guild and your only chance to raid especially end game content was to be on your best behavior with the guild leaders.
It would be the most juiciest moment of the week to go do a raid that nobody else can even clean a trash group with yet alone face any bosses.
This causeded more hardcore players to stay.
Now all raids are easily accessable and with a LFG team you can see the end game contents. This new system of raids and dungeons is what broke wow.

[Jess]

Maybe activison blizzards many crimes have something to do with jt

[Lola]

I stopped playing WoW before doing anything with the Shadowlands release. Seeing them take away the levels that I worked so hard for, along with busting my ass for gear and achievements, earning mounts among other things.. It just all became way too easy. I would never go back to WoW the way it is now.. Way too watered down.

[Doug]

I agree with much of this.
I'd add that splitting servers due to population was devastating. I got multiple communities onto one server on launch day, ensuring that there was a good balance of horde and alliance, and we had a server split forced on us. When the dust settled both sides were completely unbalanced. When Cataclysm came in, that was it. Almost everyone on the server switched to horde, and the server transitioned from an awesome collection of communities to the place you transfer to if you want to mindlessly slam out raids.

A other crime, was the end of the 40 man raid.
I am 100% guilty of advocating for smaller raids, and at the time I as server first guild leader believed it was the best thing as it would make scheduling and managing easier. I was right, but by god did that really screw up the game. In any given raid I would have about 10 to 15 people who, while they knew the strats, weren't doing anything much useful because their gear sucked their talents sucked (I refused to dictate talents to members and instead encouraged class officers to educate) or they hadn't prepared enough.

Remiving 40 mans removed that fat, and that "fat" was often a friend or partner or son or sister, mother, or grandfather. It crushed the community spirit. And for what? So I can have an easier time organising, and people's PC isn't overwhelmed by spelling effects?

We tried running multiple raids but that was even more of a hassle and bred resentment.

[CJ]

This begs the question of why a game like FFXIV is so popular, where the emphasis is precisely on those elements you claim are killing WOW, namely emphasis on the story and making it possible to play through the most of the story solo.

I played WOW on and off for about 15 years, but hated the elitism and the unkindness shown towards people who just wanted to experience the story instead of bothering with spreadsheets, macros, add-ons etc. Dungeons were mostly unbearable due to almost constant toxicity, but so much was gated behind them, even for crafting. I finally decided to take a break 18 months ago, because I could not cope with dragonflying at all, took months just to get through the basic tutorial and still was unable to do it properly after that , yet WOW in its elitist way had made its use pretty well mandatory for a bearable life in the land of the dragons.

I dipped into the FFXIV free trial instead and have never looked back, becoming a subscriber just a few months later because I wanted the full experience. Now I can live through a fabulous story and take my time doing so, because it all stays relevant. Gathering and crafting also remain relevant at all levels so are a pleasure to do. I can play all roles on a single character, so can chop and change my personality and experience different sub-stories at whim without needing to make alts. When I choose to interact with the community, it is usually a far, far more wholesome experience than I had in WOW. Right from the start, I have been far more incentivised to spend time in Eorzea than I ever was in Azeroth.

[Olle Ahlström]

This is a probably the best article I have read on the subject of went wrong with wow. The removal of "open world exploration"-style game to story-driven playstyle, the way the game has become way to easy and quick to level, and the raid finder/dungeon finder dynamic that took away play interactions.
I would like to add to that, that one of the reasons Blizzard added raid finder to the game and made the game easier was because "only 1% got to see naxx" which is non-argument in my opinion. Merely seeing the 3d-artwork without the challenge of the raid is pretty uninteresting. I say this from experience. In early 2004, some coders cracked the wow-alpha edition but with the caveat that there were no NPCs, monsters or quests in the game. You were basically walking around in an empty 3d-world. Eventhough I was 100% hyped about wow at the time, I got bored with the empty world in about 5-6 minutes. Raid finder is only used for gearing up and possibly for progressing Blizzards lame campaign-story.

[Fireblaze-Ravencrest]

Finally someone other than me acknowledging the causes of WoW decline. That's what I've been saying ever since the dungeon finder addition in late WotLK and through the rest of the expansions. They have rapidly "streamlined" the social aspects of the game out. And today I keep seeing the statements in my news feed about making the game "friendlier than ever to solo players" and that makes me chuckle to myself. It's unfortunate that struggling MMOs somehow keep arriving to a conclusion that solo-friendliness is the one thing that's going to reverse their decline, while in reality it's likely the main thing that's going to speed it up. Personally, I almost stopped playing MMORPG by now, because they all feel the same - soloable single player experiences with a chat feature. It's just not fun, and if I want a nice single player experience I will play a real single player game.