Why Am I Still Playing WoW?

As a WoW blogger, I am contractually obligated to talk about the drop in WoW subscription numbers. I guess it could be worse. Were I a sports blogger, I would be contractually obligated to talk about Tom Brady’s cheating balls, and really, nobody wants to hear that.

I’m sure you’ve heard by now that WoW is back down to 7 million or so subs and that basically everyone they gained at the start of Warlords has once again left. This used to be the kind of news that I took seriously and worried about. What was happening? What would Devs do about it? Would WoW even be around in a year or two? But after years of watching sub numbers ebb and flow, I’ve just reached the point where I don’t care anymore how many subs WoW has.

Why Am I still subbed

The biggest reason I’m still subbed is I look forward to playing and when I’m in game I’m enjoying it. It’s really that simple. I’m in a guild with good people and we are having fun clearing content and progressing. Even the nights we wipe and don't kill many bosses, I still enjoy it. What we do with our free time should fill us with energy and ignite our passions. If WoW doesn’t do that for you, then it makes total sense that you stop your sub and find something else that does.

Each time I’ve left WoW, it’s been to go to another MMO. First SWTOR swayed me away. I’m such a Star Wars nut and I totally bought the whole 4th Pillar thing. I thought that was going to be a huge thing and for a while it was. Then I left again for Wildstar. It was so fresh and I loved the Sci-fi setting, the humor and the action combat. I was sure it was going to be huge -- HUGE. If I was any great predictor of the great MMO success by what I liked, Wildstar and SWTOR would be juggernauts. Clearly, I’m a sample size of 1.

Each time left, I ended up coming back to WoW, my first MMO love. I don’t know what another game could really offer at this point that would make me want to give up WoW to try it although I would like to try GW2 at some point (their Engineer class looks like a lot of fun).

I think I was always going to be an MMO player. If you remember, MMOs started out as a niche genre. A few months before WoW was originally released it was predicted that the MMO market would never get bigger than about 500k players. That ended up being a little off. I tend to think that even if MMOs had stayed niche, I would have played them and enjoyed them, so it’s no great shock to me that I still enjoy them even as they start to become a niche thing again.

Tokens

As I mentioned before, the token has really changed my game time. Everything I do in game feels like it has a purpose and is contributing to my ultimate goal of buying another token to keep me from having to pay actual cash for my sub. I’ve been tracking my gold for about 3 weeks now and it looks like I’m making a token’s worth of gold every 18 to 20 days.

At this rate, I won’t have to pay money for my sub again for a long time. A financial decision on World of Warcraft will essentially never come.

I’m paying for the game by playing it. Why not stay subbed? 

I do worry a little because I’m essentially making this gold passively through my two Garrisons. The Salvage Yard, Barn, Gem Boutique and Treasure Hunters are my major source of income. I do wonder if Blizzard will have to adjust the passive gold generation because if I can make enough gold to fully fund my sub in about 45 minutes a night -- then just about everyone else should be able to as well. I guess Blizzard doesn’t care because somebody paid real money for that token. It just wasn’t me. So to all you guys buying my gold, just let me say thank you for paying for sub! I appreciate it!

Garrisons

I’ve read several blog posts that have pointed to Garrisons as one of the chief problems with Warlords. It’s predictable that whenever sub numbers drop, people will pick their pet peeve as THE be all end all reason why subs are down. But prior to Garrisons, the number one thread on the Official forums was always about how Blizzard had to add player housing to WoW. Blizzard experimented with the Farm in MoP and then went whole hog and gave us our house, and our fortress in Warlords. It’s another example of MMO players thinking we want one thing but after the Devs give it to us, we realize it really isn’t what we wanted. I made this mistake with Wildstar in regards to 40 man raids and grueling attunements. I thought both would be fantastic ideas and in the end neither really was. I love my Garrison because it’s essentially paying my sub right now but I totally get how its isolated players from the world. Warspear needed to be another Shattrah, another Dalaran, but it never happened.

Big Screen

Will there ever be another uptick in subs? The greater likelihood is there won’t but you never know. There is the little movie coming out next summer which will introduce WoW to millions of people who may have never played the game. Will this herald a new generation of players? I have no idea, but neither does anyone else.

The bottom line is I have no idea what the future holds for WoW. As long as the servers are on and I’m still having fun, I’m going to keep playing, regardless of what the sub numbers are doing.


So how about you? Are you still subbed to WoW? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments!