If you continue to dumb down the game, you will lose half your player base

[MisterNublet]

Plus the game is more popular than it's ever been. Claiming that half the playerbase is going to vanish just because they're fixing button bloat is just the worst kind of hyperbole. It won't have a negative effect at all.

WoW was at its height at the start of WotLK, but at the same time they started a new motto "Bring the player and not the class". They simplified classes, and homogenization across the board. They began trivializing non-raid content.

Blizzard stopped reporting subscriptions during WotLK, and the player base began to decline as the expansion grew older. Everything came to a head, and exploded in Blizzards face with the release of Cataclysm.

SE is just repeating history with Endwalker.

[Y2K21]

Blizzard stopped reporting subscriptions during WotLK, and the player base began to decline as the expansion grew older. Everything came to a head, and exploded in Blizzards face with the release of Cataclysm.

Blizz stopped reporting subs during WoD when the game lost 50% of its playerbase due to bad game management decisions.

[Vahlnir]

Blizz stopped reporting subs during WoD when the game lost 50% of its playerbase due to bad game management decisions.

And this was before the flying debacle. They lost way more than 50% before they stopped reporting. Rough estimates around that time were around 2 million players and still dropping fast. Down from 10 million at the start of that expansion.

[Moonsprite]

WoW was at its height at the start of WotLK, but at the same time they started a new motto "Bring the player and not the class". They simplified classes, and homogenization across the board. They began trivializing non-raid content.

Blizzard stopped reporting subscriptions during WotLK, and the player base began to decline as the expansion grew older. Everything came to a head, and exploded in Blizzards face with the release of Cataclysm.

SE is just repeating history with Endwalker.

Cataclysm people left because you could no longer aoe trash in dungeons. People didn’t want to slow down and sheep mobs and use sap again. Heroics were overturned for newly geared players. Loot was scarce too. People came back in MoP because they changed loot, reps, and the dungeons and added fun mechanics. Classes didn’t get gutted until Legion. Then in legion your complete class kit was locked behind a artifact grind and RNG legendary system. They took abilities classes/specs had before legion and made people earn them again. WoW has talents, specs, classes, borrowed power to balance too.

Ffxiv classes/jobs, even when you had to level other classes for viability like blm swiftcast, have never had the amount of balance issues or gutting WoW has every expansion. There also aren’t any unplayable jobs in ffxiv. WoW has specs that aren’t viable for endgame depending on the patch.