Is World of Warcraft dying?

One of the legendary MMORPGs is losing its audience. There are a lot of factors that brought World of Warcraft to where it stands now in the row of most played MMO franchises. So, is World of Warcraft dying, and what are the reasons behind the loss of interest among gamers?

World of Warcraft was released in 2004 Fall, by Blizzard Entertainment. In the last 15 years, it has managed to attract hundreds of million players, including some of the well-known streamers and even non-gaming celebrities. The game is basically a huge world where you create and develop your own character, going through various quests, joining guilds, participating in raids, doing PVP fights. All of this with the supported lore and expansions. But at some point, the game developers took another path — the one which eventually ruined all the hype and admiration created around this title. It eventually made a lot of users ask themselves — is WoW dying?

The lack of quality updates

One of the core issues of the game is that it has become sort of a daily chore. You just have to keep up with completing your quests, which grant you so little for so much time investment. The approach has frustrated the gaming community. What is more, they were complaining since the times when Blizzard added a “pay to win” mechanic to the game. This simply demotivates those who do not have enough funds to deposit on their account and boost their characters, thus getting access to some exclusive in-game stuff, such as weapons, armor, etc.

Expansions, the next most important aspect, are the driving stimulus for attracting more and more users into the game. But here the exact opposite takes place. The player base is not so active any more, and is even less after the Shadowlands expansion was added to the title.

Lore, gameplay and events

The issue with expansions also means that the game lacks content fans expect to spectate. The story has become somehow vague, losing the chain of events, the chronology and priority order. The fact is, even though a new update for the year 2022 was announced, it still does not save World of Warcraft from dying. We have yet to see what are the changes to the endgame, but the soon-to-release part, according to rumors, will be called Eternity’s End. Players will once again go through the various obstacles and stand as one within the squad of warriors. There are multiple opinions on this case, as part of the community believes that Blizzard is able to save the situation with the upcoming content, while the others have lost hope and are quitting the title in favor of games like Final Fantasy or New World.

Additional limit of playing time

2 years ago, in 2020, Blizzard decided to put a limit of time in WoW Classic with 30 instances/day. Previously the limit was 5 instances an hour: here is the original post:

You may now enter a maximum of 30 unique instances (dungeon and raid) per day, per realm.

This restriction complements the current limit of 5 instances per hour. Now, when a player enters a dungeon or a raid, the game checks to see if they have entered 5 instances in the last hour or 30 instances in the last 24 hours, and if they have, they cannot enter the instance until enough time has elapsed. This check is across all of your characters in your realm. These limits only apply to dungeon and raid instances, and do not apply to PvP battlegrounds.

Actually, the limit was removed with the 2021 pre-patch in The Burning Crusade, but that was not enough for players. Coming back to 2022, there are now 10 individual instanced zones an hour. So even though you change your character, but using the same account, you could still be affected.

Outdated design, aesthetics

The game had its core design maintained since the early days. Big dungeons, massive halls, colorful environments, long roads to travel… these and many more nuances made WoW a game that players are simply used to. The buildings, mounts, the characters, effects of rain, smoke, wind, lightning were made to please the eyes of users from different age groups. But in the era, where ray-traced games and game engines like UE5 are the trend, WoW design shares sort of a nostalgic feeling with it's out-of-date visuals. But it will be unfair not to give credit to all the artistic teams working closely with the developers for years and years, trying to create more detailed depictions along with staying loyal to the overall atmosphere of the game. Is WoW dying because of this? Most probably this issue has the least effect on the player count decrease.

Political issues with Blizzard

With all the unpleasant discoveries about the poor work ethics at Blizzard and under the strikes of its workers and surrounding lawsuits, it is hard to expect the publisher to deliver something extraordinarily good, which will gain the trust of WoW fans back. As a result, not only Blizzard, but its smaller studios suffer from all the investigations including the name of the company. Many ex-workers spoke up on how horrible the conditions are inside of the richest game publisher’s facility walls. The misconducts and gender-based discriminations have thrown enough dirt on Blizzard’s name: something hard to recover from. As a conclusion, not only WoW, but other titles may also lose a significant amount of users, if the management does not bring positive changes into each and every aspect they entered.

Trying to answer the query “is World of Warcraft dying?”, one has to look at all the above mentioned factors, but still, not lose the hope for brighter days of the franchise.