World of Warcraft died because the developers only catered to casuals and world prog

[Vahlnir]

All WoW devs care about is their Twitter following and likes.

With some of the things I've seen them say on Twitter I would argue that they don't care about that either. lol

[Avidria]

The irony in OP’s post is that WoW is actually dying because it doesn’t cater enough to its casual players. Harder normal raids, too many grindy systems every new patch, not alt friendly… the list goes on.

Yeah wow was built and thrived on its casual player base. It has never for one second been anything resembling a hardcore game. I do think it has more midcore content than ff, at least when I still played it in anything close to a serious way anyway. The endless m+ grinding for RNG gear stats and the changes that had basically no good rewards from casual (non rated) PvP were a big part of what made me lose interest in playing the game seriously (this was back before shadow lands mind... haven't played that at all). The godawful story, bizarre anti-flight crusade and a slew of other little changes all piled up to put the nail in the coffin for me.

[MisterNublet]

The endless m+ grinding for RNG gear stats...

At least it is something repeatable with something to work towards. There is hardly any repeatable content in FFXIV and gear is practically meaningless outside of Ultimate patches.

[Vahlnir]

At least it is something repeatable with something to work towards. There is hardly any repeatable content in FFXIV and gear is practically meaningless outside of Ultimate patches.

If Ultimate is your main or only concern, sure. There is also plenty of repeatable content in FF XIV. Could it use more? Yeah, probably. But it's still there.

[MisterNublet]

If Ultimate is your main or only concern, sure.

You can complete savage with crafted gear. Gear progression only exists during Savage > Ultimate.

There is also plenty of repeatable content in FF XIV. Could it use more? Yeah, probably. But it's still there.

I thought it was clear since m+ part of endgame content. To make it clear, there is hardly any endgame repeatable content.

[Avidria]

At least it is something repeatable with something to work towards. There is hardly any repeatable content in FFXIV and gear is practically meaningless outside of Ultimate patches.

I'd literally rather fly around collecting sightseeing logs than spam m+ until I'm ready to bodily throw Helya into the Maelstrom

[DanielNegreanu_Adamantoise]

Wow still the most successful western mmo
When did it die?

[Wolf_Heartnet]

I think the biggest problem is that there is a perception of hard/grindy = fun and I don't believe that is true at all.

I think games that are accesible to everyone and bring in enjoyable features are fun and engaging. You start putting things that are too hard and too much of it and people will just not find it fun and leave. An example are mmos with open world PvP. Devs have come out and said that they don't want open world PvP in their game and that if they do, they would prefer to make completely seperate servers for it or bring in a flagging system because there are too many people that quit playing when they find out they arent as great as they think and/or get griefed and that player active count or sub count drops compared to non open-world pvp servers.

A game can have hard content but that should never be the main attraction. The fact that WoW got as succesful as they did was because of catering to casual.
WoW's downfall was the result of many bad practices and corporate greed. I also believe that Ion is contributing to its downfall aswell with his own bad decisions.
They fired many of their employees so CEO can claim record profits and get bonuses
Activision started pushing them to milk players for money with mobile games and other greedy features such as charging players to clone their characters from Vanilla wow to Burning Crusade
Catering to China despite all their human rights abuses and changing things in the game when all they really had to do was just edit the chinese version of the game instead of making those changes to all versions of the game.
Being unprofessional and bringing politics to the workplace and letting those devs unprofessionally attack those players like what they did with asmongold.

[HisShadowX]

Yeah wow was built and thrived on its casual player base. It has never for one second been anything resembling a hardcore game. I do think it has more midcore content than ff, at least when I still played it in anything close to a serious way anyway. The endless m+ grinding for RNG gear stats and the changes that had basically no good rewards from casual (non rated) PvP were a big part of what made me lose interest in playing the game seriously (this was back before shadow lands mind... haven't played that at all). The godawful story, bizarre anti-flight crusade and a slew of other little changes all piled up to put the nail in the coffin for me.

People have a short memory. World of Warcraft became insanely popular due to the fact it was geared towards more casuals. Pretty much hardcore players for years would sit in dying MMORPGS that would soon die or become free2play think Everquest, SWG, City of Heros and even FFXI (Which didn't die but due to the fact the Square allowed Tanka to have FFXIV to be built like FF11 this caused the game to fail and be shut down and remade).

Ghsotcrawler was very vocal during Wrath he did not like the fact it was becoming too easy and tried to make features to make the game harder like dual speccing but he was overruled but his design in CATA caused people to flee. It got to the point where during this time Hardcore Players starting, joining WoW during TBC and Wrath and those hardcore guilds had to announce like a scarlet letter they were a DKP Guild otherwise the server would black list them.

Really during CATA and finally the Panda expansion most of the casuals left and the developers started making the game more grindy and harder which now the game is a ghost town.

Also MMORPGs that implements the removal of the leveling system making sure all enemies are your level, making the game harder like Elder Scrolls, which also remade their game lost a good majority of their fanbase when they tried to make everything hard again.

Don't get me started on SWTOR that advertised itself as the WoW killer promising to be the most casual, friendly game, but during the launch they decided to shift towards the hardcore minority. It was a weird time because SWG players pretty much lived in a bubble and didn't understand the modern MMORPG etiquette like if your a DKP Guild you must announce yourself as such otherwise the guild will be mocked and shamed. The developers even paid to have Guild members of hardcore guilds flown to Bioware to hold a Guild Summit in which the developers pledged to these DKP Guilds to make the game even HARDER and never to release casual features like a party or raid finder and make it a TOS violation to go after members who complain about DKP Guilds.

[HisShadowX]

Needless to say this caused the majority of staff at Bioware Austin including the Director to be fired after 2 million people instantly left and they implemented many casual features which they were slow to add to the point where you can be carried solo through any dungeon. Sadly the reputation of SWOTR never recovered.

Same thing happened with FFXIV which you can see the Documentary that Yoshi and many of the Square staff are in as they talk about how Tanka the Vile rebuffed everyone who wanted an easy game and the Hawaii shirt man (Former Director) also known as Nobuaki the insane made features the hardcore minority who prefers BDSM type of content where they must experience extreme pain and hardship and it punished anyone who played FFXIV 1.0 more then 5 hours a week and they could not progress any further but you could still delevel which pleased Tanka the Vile.

FINAL FANTASY XIV Documentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0yQKI7Yw4 (Part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoOI5R-6u8k (Part 2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONT6fxiu9cw (Part 3)

Seriously, never make a game for the Hardcore Minority unless you do not mind it failing or not making any money.