A lack of fresh ideas, plummeting subscriber numbers and failing to enact desperately needed changes. This is a story of how Blizzard slowly, but surely, created a single player experience out of a massively multiplayer online game.

But let me start at the beginning. I was 11 and Starcraft was the computer game everyone was talking about. Most of my friends were crazy about it, but I never really enjoyed it. I loved commanding my own troops into battle and there wasn’t a better feeling than destroying the last building in your friends base only for them to rage quit and whine. But something was missing from the whole experience. I never really appreciated the futuristic setting and the game world never really entertained me into wanting to continue playing.

Along came Warcraft 3. It had everything – the gameplay was polished and fluid, the hero units added an extra layer of depth to the action, the campaign had a captivating story and the cutscenes were jaw-dropping. And it was in a fantasy setting, with medieval swords and magic in place of laser guns and space age technology.

What stood out most for me, was the humor that the developers put into the game. I just knew that the people who made it were having as much fun creating it, as I did playing. I fell in love with the world they built.

The Frozen Throne was just icing on the cake, it improved on just about everything and expanded the story, leaving the players wanting for more. After finishing the single player campaign for the 20th time, I started playing custom maps and even designing my own maps in Warcraft 3, trying to create a new story within the world.

And that’s when I heard of World of Warcraft being announced. Was Blizzard reading my mind? How amazing would it be to be a small part of that universe? I was sold.

Unfortunately, I was only 13 at the time and being sold meant paying for something, and I couldn’t quite convince my parents that they should be giving $12 a month for a subscription to a video game that would take up most of my time. God, what assholes. What was fortunate was that there was an arcade nearby.

I remember the excitement I felt when I created my first Orc Shaman, and the sadness I felt when it got deleted. And even in that tiny room, surrounded by tens of screaming, Counter Strike playing teenagers, I was completely immersed in the game. Eventually I saved up enough money in order to properly play and enjoy the game. And boy, was I hooked. It was everything I wanted, and more. I still remember those times with clarity and I remember how much fun I was having. I remember leveling with my friends as a human mage through Duskwood. I remember meeting new people and going through dungeons. I remember PvP-ing and getting destroyed by an Undead rogue 30 times my level. I remember traveling zone to zone and just soaking it all in. I remember my friend strutting around Ironforge in full epic gear and people following him around like groupies follow rock gods.I remember the challenge I faced and the practice I did with my guild while we were getting annihilated by the Lich King, and how much fun we had as a group.

The world was alive, it was a pixellated, but living universe. You could feel the epicness of the pure scale of it and how it never felt empty, because of the real life people inhabiting it. The humor from Wacraft 3 translated even better into WoW with its colorful, even at moments, silly graphics. The game was fun even during times of content drought, and the player base was climbing, and at moments even exploding. Mainstream media outlets were making reports of people all over the world getting in lines for a midnight release of a WoW expansion and even South Park devoted a whole episode to the game. WoW became a genuine cultural phenomenon.

It all started going downhill, slowly, but surely, somewhere with the death of Arthas in Wrath of the Lich King. We, as players, had a sense of closure as we wondered what was coming next. What could possibly top the death of the main antagonist of Wacraft 3? The story that spanned over 8 years and two different game felt like it finally ran its course and came to a satisfying end. And while the expansion had many flaws, it was a real gem, and it seemed as though WoW has reached its peak.

Cataclysm was a great and fresh redesign of old content, but left players feeling disappointed, as evidenced by the sharp decline in sub numbers. Mists of Pandaria had great raids, or so I’ve heard, because I wasn’t sticking around with WoW for another expansion, just to play Panda bears or fight unknown raid bosses that felt shoehorned into the story. Warlords of Draenor was fun for the first two months, but it became a real disaster soon after. And now we have Legion and a lot of people seem convinced that it will be fun and make players return, but even with the Burning Legion returning, I remain sceptical.

So what went wrong?

As it turns out, a couple of things. What became more and more prominent with years was the general lack of ideas and inspiration from the developing team. WoW started missing a unified vision of what the developers were trying to achieve, it was as though they forgot what initially attracted players to the game.

The death of Arthas really felt like a satisfying conclusion to a long story, and there was nothing to follow it up. The title of the Lich King was passed on to a relatively insignificant character from the story, who ended up acting as a placeholder for a possible future story. Deathwing and the threat of the whole world ending was maybe a good and ambitious idea on paper, but in reality Deathwing became just another dragon in a line of many we have already faced. Pandas were supposed to bring in some fresh air with Asian themes and scenery, but it all ended up being very underwhelming. Warlords of Draenor was just confusing – a weird mashup of random storylines and what-ifs, and I’m personally not sure if it’s even canon or not. Too much time travel and weird, outlandish (no pun intended) plot points with no real purpose, which only the biggest lore nerds and red-shirt guys could follow.

Apart from that, there were some key design and developer choices that slowly ruined the game, all of them coming from a complete lack of understanding of what people actually enjoyed in WoW. None of them had a sudden effect, but they accumulated and got worse over time, and the developers were too slow to respond to or even to realize the mistakes they were making.

The single, biggest mistake was adding flying mounts.

The size of WoW’s universe became completely distorted by adding flying mounts to the game. It’s simple mathematics, really. If you are suddenly flying a gryphon 200 meters above ground at 280 percent running speed, when you were used to ground level horseback riding at 100 percent running speed, your perception of the scale of your surrounding will be shattered, with everything feeling smaller and distances feeling shorter. WoW started to feel much smaller and players started seeing through the tricks developers used to make them think the world was larger than it really was. Gone were the days when you needed to really travel anywhere and gone was the sense of a journey. Now what you needed to do in order to navigate was to simply open the map, press a key on your keyboard and off you went in a general direction that you’re trying to reach, all the while being free to go AFK for a few minutes. While it might have worked for Outland, with its disconnected zones and flying rocks, it had no place in Vanilla zones, and I would even argue that allowing and designing around flying mounts in Northrend was a mistake.

You were now no longer seeing and experiencing the diverse zones, each having their own ambience and atmosphere complimented with unique scenery and music. You were literally flying over all of that, seeing it top-down, and hitting an artificial ceiling in the sky. Where is the beauty in that?

By adding flying mounts the mystery of the world was gone. When you know how a magic trick is done, you lose your interest in it. Sure, it might still be cool, but it’s not magical anymore, the sense of wonder is gone.

The world into which the artists and programmers poured their hearts and souls to make it feel truly alive was killed by adding flying mounts which made it feel empty and dead.

Adding flying mounts to the game might have sounded like a great idea at first, something that the players really wanted. But as we all found out, most players don’t really know what they want.

This is extremely apparent with a more recent example of adding Garrisons in Warlords of Draenor.

Player housing in an MMO? Sounds great, who wouldn’t want their own personal home to show off to their friends, with all the cool stuff and personal touch one can add. I remember player housing being “in the works” or planned for almost every expansion, or at least postponed as a great idea for the future.

But when players finally got what they have been wishing for years, they were disappointed. Player housing ended up feeling like a cheap Facebook game. Nothing speaks more of the complacency and the general absence of a vision from the developers than the disaster of Garrisons. Were they really lacking vision so critically that they turned to Facebook games for guidance? Garrison features felt poorly thought out, glued on and showed in, something the developers were hoping would addict players into coming back and playing each day, clicking on a screen in a mini-game inside the real game. I can’t imagine lots of WoW players wishing for an Azeroth version of Farmville, when you can just as well log on to your Facebook account and finally accepted one of those annoying invites. What were they honestly thinking? “Forget about the epic loot, the legendary bosses, the storyline, the questing zones filled with gorgeous scenery and beautiful music – let’s make the players click on pointless junk, that will keep them playing! Hey, if it worked for Zynga!”

Who in the developers team thought it would be a great idea to make it even harder for players to socialize? Really, a few cities for each faction became the only hubs in which the declining player base could move around and see other players on-screen? WoW never felt more like a ghost town , even the major cities were empty.

The developers should be doing everything they can to make players socialize. Instead, they crammed them in their own walled off homes in which they will never see a living person, except for the odd group invite to talk to a daily trader. If people wanted a single player experience with NPCs, they would have played Skyrim. Garrisons were also very unbalanced in what they provided, giving you free epic loot and making gold for you while you were idling. Players ended up having too much gold for doing next to nothing, which ended up making the flimsy economy of the game even, well, flimsier. Blizzard tried to patch this up by adding Tokens that you could buy in-game, allowing you to purchase game time with gold, which was anything but a real solution.

And of course, when it comes to tools that prevent socializing, nothing comes close to the dreaded Group Finder.

With group finder, the developers made it too easy for players to jump from group to group. No more was there a sense of adventure in leveling a character through the Barrens, searching for people to join your group and trying to navigate to the, impossible to find, entrance to Wailing Caverns. Which made you run back to find them, get lost, then finding your place again, all the while trying to help navigate someone who is obviously using a napkin instead of a map. Does that sound messy? Well, it’s because it is. But in all that confusion you could find friends. You shared an experience with people, you did something together and connected as a group.

With Group Finder all you now needed to do in order find a group to play with was to press a key and wait. That’s it. You ended up with complete strangers that have no desire talking with you or working with you to reach a certain goal or defeat a boss. And at the end of the 15 minutes you shared with them, they went back to their own server, never seeing you again. Truly a meaningful experience. There was now no purpose in even adding dungeon entrances to the world, because the world felt fake and instanced. You, as a player, were now missing out on tons of content that you should be experiencing in an organic way. But what’s even worse is that you were missing on countless of social interactions and friendships – something that would actually make you want to continue playing. Instead of making it easier and more natural for people to cooperate, Blizzard engineered obstacles by simplifying the game and turning it into an “instanced” experience. Entering WoW was now like entering a lobby and waiting for your turn to be ported to an instanced part of a game, like waiting for a new game in a MOBA.

Players are not willing to communicate with other players anymore because there is now almost no need for communication. Why bother with the drama of someone needing on an item that is barely an upgrade for them in a level 30 dungeon, when you know you can just as easily press a key and be on your way to find a new group? How ironic is it that you don’t need to socialize in a massively multiplayer online game anymore?

Now I am not saying that everyone is an outgoing, social type and enjoys being surrounded by people,which brings me to something else that helped ruin the game in a completely different way:

Heirlooms.

Heirlooms were a horrible design choise, at least in the way there were implemented. They destroyed the experience of leveling by providing a fast, artificial boost through the content which put more emphasis on reaching end level as quickly as possible. They completely ruined the journey and challenge of lower leveled content. And by making heirlooms into items that take up important gear slots, instead of a flat-out experience boost, you couldn’t even find happiness in getting new gear and replacing the old one, because Heirlooms are better than just about any item that you can get leveling. Gone was any satisfaction of questing, exploring or doing dungeons and enjoying a slow(er) experience, everything started to move at light speed. Which is a shame, because Blizzard really put in a lot of effort to try to make leveling fun, redesigning the whole experience in lower level zones. And it doesn’t even matter how fast leveling is, if you can barely push yourself to do it. Heirlooms made the whole concept of leveling joyless and in desperate need of change. Blizzard seemed to forget that once you type in “godmode” the fun tends to stop.

I remember clearly seeing how bad of an impact Heirlooms had on the game, when I decided to join “project 60”, organized by a popular WoW Twitch streamer. Project 60, as it was aptly named, was an attempt to bring back the Vanilla experience by making rules for players who were willing to join and play together on live (Blizzard) servers. The rules went along with Vanilla or TBC rules and balancing issues, so, for example, you were not allowed to use a mount until level 40, you couldn’t play a tauren paladin, heirlooms and group finder were banned etc. But by not using heirlooms in my leveling I had more fun playing WoW than I’ve had in years. I rolled an orc shaman and actually used the quest gear I got. Every little thing I received starting from level one was important, either as gear or gold. I saved for bags and mounts. I actually enjoyed my experience and even read some quests. The combat became more challenging and therefore more fun. Not using heirlooms made me want to complete a zone or questline and left me with a sense of achievement and a good memory. I didn’t care that I wouldn’t reach end level in 2 or 3 days, because I was actually enjoying myself while I was playing. I didn’t force my way through zones in order to reach max level as fast as I can, there was actually a journey involved. But the fun was short-lived, as most people had quit when they realized that raiding was too easy even with no gear equipped, due to balancing issues. Players soon realized that the fun came from completely arbitrary challenges and it was like squinting our eyes and trying to pretend that everything was the way it was back in the good old days. But it serves as proof that people actually want that experience back. One only needs to look at the Nostalrius fiasco that happened this year to see how much Blizzard is disconnected from understanding the needs and wants of players. Even the rapidly declining player base of WoD wasn’t enough to convince them to make some changes.

The expansion model is dead.

Blizzard has started relying too much on providing new content only with new expansions and not with meaningful patches. This system became stale back in Wrath of the Lich King. Waiting two or more years to get new content that would actually make the game enjoyable? Why would the players need to make challenges for themselves in order to keep the game interesting? That’s why movements like project 60 or project 70 started forming, and that’s why there are now huge petitions for Vanilla experience Blizzard servers. Most players continue playing out of pure nostalgia.

But here is the catch – I think Blizzard is right. They are right when they say players don’t want the old WoW back, with all its flaws. Nostalgia, as it tends to do, has distorted people’s memories, leaving them only with the good ones, while forgetting the bad. The pure chaos of 40 man raids,the horrible itemization, the imbalanced classes, the abominable PvP, just to name a few. They know players wouldn’t stand for all those thing returning. WoW is now more polished than ever before, with the mechanics being as fluid and perfected as they can be.

But what Blizzard fails to see is that, while the players might not want the old WoW back, they do want the old feeling that had while playing back. They want to be immersed into the world, they want to feel apart of it again. They want to socialize and they want to have an experience.

There is a huge world out there. I don’t mean the real world, screw that, with all its stupid birds and trees and real people with their real things happening in their real lives, forcing you to question what are you even doing with yours. No, I mean that there is a huge world in-game. Why not make it so that people would want to experience it? Why not force them out of their pixellated houses and into the pixellated world. People come to play WoW to have fun, to escape their lives for an hour or two. They want to be a strong Orc warrior or a tiny Gnome warlock called pwnuintheface. How can they do that when you forced them to be in a virtual house, when they are already in their brick and mortar house. They want to experience the world you created and forget themselves in it, the genre is called fantasy after all. If Bilbo Baggins had a level 3 garrison I bet you no one would have been able to convince him to leave it to come help slay a dragon, not even Gandalf. He would have just used the group finder instead.

All good things…

There are a lot more things that are wrong with WoW these days: the profession system has no meaning, the end game turns into WoW the Stock Market Game for months of content drought, outdated guild system, battle pets, the servers need a make over, battle pets.. it really is a long list. And there are, as I’ve mentioned, some golden nuggets in this whole mess, most of them being connected to the polish and shine Blizzard has achieved in more than 10 years of working on the game engine.

And sure, Legion and possible other expansions will make people come back, and they will stick around – for a month or two, and each time in smaller numbers. Because they will, inevitably, face another content vacuum, in which they will squint their eyes yet again and pretend they’re having fun in a sandbox game, making up their own rules to keep the experience amusing. Like when you were a child, and your parents gave you some sticks to play with and said: “just use your imagination”. Sticks don’t have a subscription fee, Blizzard.

It is time for a huge overhaul, it is time for change. A new expansion won’t cut it, and the player base will keep declining until it dips below a million, that’s when it won’t matter any more. We might end up seeing WoW going free to play and becoming another tombstone in the vast graveyard of MMOs that are long gone. The pure nostalgia of it all and some casual fun here and there might keep it going at that point, at least for a while. As the popular saying from another fantasy epic goes: Valar Morghulis – all men must die. The same is true for MMOs, I guess. And MMOs do end, all of them – but is it really WoWs time to join them? None of the other MMOs had the soul to compete with WoW, nothing to really draw players in. Some had better graphics, some had newer mechanics, some had amazing new raid systems or a popular franchise to back them up. But none of them had the feeling WoW gave us, none of them really felt like a complete package.

What we might get, and what both we and Blizzard deserve is a new WoW – WoW 2.0. MMOs might be unpopular now, and the market is over-saturated, but nobody could predict that WoW would explode into the entity it is now known for.

But if Blizzard has lost so much inspiration, maybe it’s better not to force it.

Maybe it’s time for new things, maybe it’s good that WoW will end, who knows?

I know that I won’t be playing Legion and that the thrill, for me, is gone. Maybe I will go back to playing Warcraft 3, going through those old maps and remembering how much fun I had when I was a kid. Because nothing will bring that feeling back, maybe only WoW 2 – the Sequel, with even a Warcraft 4 to come before it. To help us understand the story and where it’s all heading, to bring out new heroes and set everything straight.

I might be too hopeful, after all, I can’t get those times back. I might just be getting older, and the age brings out childhood nostalgia and memories, along with a few grey hairs here and there and the burden of more responsibilities. But the people who were there for WoWs glory days, the people who have experienced the magic of the original game, the sense of community and being a part of something great, being immersed into that world, they understand. They remember how it felt. I might just be getting older and thinking about past loves, and how it’s sad that now it’s over and I’ll never have it back.

Because I know that the feeling is now gone. That feeling of being a human mage in a living, breathing world. The World of Warcraft.