Why casual players don't 'just leave'

[Teno]

Stopped at "MMORPG IS DEAD". Starts off with complete BS and bold caps, as if you were coming off with some gospel. People can't take you seriously, and if they do that was a nice bait. The mmo genre is more popular than ever, it's just not 2005 wow is all....

[Sigma5]

It is, the moment the gen x playerbase who tolerate the old ways die, the mmo dies, and the genre dies if it doesn't evolve. time waits for no one.

[BelegErkhten]

ESO just announced they are no longer doing expansions. Before this announcement they cut new content nearly in half. In 2024 they moved a feature that used to come with expansions to the cash shop instead.

They are no longer to committing to new content at all - they announced nebulous seasons with no commitment to any volume of content or time frames. Their cash shop which puts most new items into RNG loot boxes is one of the worst on the market if you care about cosmetics and housing. They even listed cash shop items in their latest letter as upcoming content. Some people have spent $700 for a mount due to RNG.

This is so sad. Alexa, play Despacito.

[hydralus]

Which MMOs have gone off the market lately? Feels like most of them are still hanging on. Last I recall was Blue Protocol.

[Akamadoshi]

Hello. It is hard to say who are "casual", "midcore","hardcore".
If by "committing ID by play hours", then I am hardcore.
If by "doing savage/EX/high end ID", then I am midcore.
If by "high skilled / maximized player", then I am casual.

I consider myself a casual player who tries out every content.
Whether it is EX/Savage/Chaotic/Island farming/etc, I want to at least see if I am "having fun" in the first place.
Because the term "casual" is depending person by person what it entails, I cannot judge it easily. However......

I wish the release of "Island gathering" or "Deep Dungeon" release sooner, and I really wish we also get 2 deep dungeons instead of 1.
Since Ultimate is able to get 2 of each expansion while Deep Dungeon is left with 1, I feel perhaps this is a "special content for 2 kind of players".
Of course, as a Necromancer, I will say the difficulty of Deep Dungeon is as difficult as one make for themselves.

While I understand the topic of the discussion, I wish it was more constructive in what people wish to see sooner/more often.
Instead, I am reading a lot of "MMO has been dying down", and "This game does it better than xxx game" and I wish forum stop making nonsense "own opinion arguments how a game design should be", if you know better, become a developer? On contrary in other parts of country in the game the raiding has become "too easy", and so we cannot please everyone.
The point is, this is not a constructive forum post and I wish to hear more opinions about what people want instead of starting threads to "argue about MMO genre" and "why is it not THE perfect MMO". So I do not understand it, but I will take the forum post as a "what can we do about it". My own desire to balance the casual/hardcore/midcore, it is:


I would like them to adjust certain limitations such "Savage weekly restriction"
now that we have alliance Savage added, it makes sense to make the limit timer shorter.
(I am worried as a Savage enjoyer, the content ended)
I would like them to consider "Island Sanctuary Quest" sooner.

My main wish I hope one day comes true is more than 1 release of Deep Dungeon,
but I believe the budget is not allowing it at the moment, so I am happy already we get 1 every expansion.
I will wait patiently for the release while working on FRU! ♡

[NegativeS]

Stopped at "MMORPG IS DEAD". Starts off with complete BS and bold caps, as if you were coming off with some gospel. People can't take you seriously, and if they do that was a nice bait. The mmo genre is more popular than ever, it's just not 2005 wow is all....

The only stable MMORPG games are over 10 years old. Every other game in the genre has either entered maintenance mode or is close to it (SWTOR, ESO, GW2), has died unceremoniously (RIP WildStar), is a P2W whale breeding ground (EVE, anything gacha pretending its an MMO), is extremely low quality or low on content (BDO, Mabinogi, New World, modern Runescape), is made for literal children (Wizard 101, etc), or is something from another genre that occupies space in MMORPG discourse because it has one or two elements common in MMORPG games (Destiny, Lost Ark, PoE).

What stable MMORPGs there are are either running on fumes (WoW), are being cannibalized by their publisher (FFXIV), or simply exist for oldheads to be nostalgic over (WoW Classic, OSRS).

The genre is dead. Two or three games having a handful of millions of players does not change this--it only reinforces the point, as one or two games does not a healthy genre make.

[Daralii]

Which MMOs have gone off the market lately? Feels like most of them are still hanging on. Last I recall was Blue Protocol.

Plenty are still available, but they're generally barebones enough that they don't require much dev time or money, old enough that they'd be in high school or college, and filled with microtransactions. With ESO apparently going fully into maintenance mode, it's mainly WoW, XIV, maybe LotRO, an ocean of KMMOs, and MMO-lite games like Warframe.

[NamiRocket]

You can't judge older content by playing it with the newer battle system added to crazy powercreep. Old stuff is just broken and insipid now. Old stuff wasn't designed to challenge and engage with what the current game does.

There is a question of tastes, and there is a question of the actual void left in the trail of everything that's been blown to pieces by the devs over expansions. If you're fine with the sorry state of the current battle system, the current job homogenization and lack of identity, the constant samey bosses in a circle square arena regurgitating the same stack markers or donut telegraphs, then yes, you'll not see what the game used to be, because all of those issues didn't really exist yet and started being a thing at various points in the game's history.

You're making an awful lot of assumptions about when and where I started playing.

But it's all still ultimately a question of taste. And there's no accounting for it.

[TemporalFruitsAndVeggies]

It's just sunk-cost fallacy. You put 1,000+ hours and a potentially non-trivial amount of money into something, you feel compelled to keep playing it, even if it's no longer fun and it's clearly not going in the direction you'd like it to. Happens with every game as a service. Game addiction plays a role, as well, but we've somehow normalized sitting around playing ten hours of video games a day, so that doesn't feel worth going into.

Also huge lol at the person claiming GW2 is in maintenance mode, despite it having just received a ton of highly reviewed new content.

[shigaisen]

MMORPGs are dead. MMORPGs remain dead. And we have killed them. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was most social and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our mice and keyboards: who will wipe this blood off us?