The elephant in the room

Wow was built by a hardcore player base that kept the game alive for quite a long time. Wow didn't become the facerolling easy-fest that it is today for several years. It is catering to the EXTREME casuals, which is why even wow's subs are in decline, the game is basically on cruise control at this point while they push Titan out of the factory.

I'm not talking about hardcore *raiders* by the way, I'm talking about hardcore players. You're not a hardcore raider unless you're clearing the absolute most difficult content, which most of us aren't. But you really can't be defined as a casual player if you play for 15-20 hours per week. I'm sorry, but we're talking part time job hours here, thats not casual, whether you raid or not.

Thats the kind of player I'm talking about, you seem confused as to the context of my message. I wasn't saying that the top 1% of raiders keep the game alive, I was saying that people that actually play the game are what keep it alive. And the fact that this game is so mind numbingly boring at end game and everything is streamlined down to the most easily understandable and achievable state that it possibly could be is what is pushing those potentially dedicated players away from the game.

You can't please everyone, but you're certainly not going to keep dedicated players by pushing out a game with basically no complexity to speak of. It's just too damn easy, and thats one of the biggest problems hampering it's success. Btw. Wow does *nothing* for me, not everything, and it's because they have geared the game towards people that can't find the time to get good at the game so they require it to have a system in place to hand out epics to you the moment you get to ding 85. Much like this game does. It is those extreme casuals that I speak of that have caused the clouds in wow to literally rain epics.

They lost 400k subs after giving every account with a level 50 30 days free. So, 400k people quit before they even hit 50. With 90 servers at less than 100 people online EVER...... perhaps you are need of some math tutoring.

WoW went from 12 million subs in WoTLK to 10.3 million that is not 25% of their subscription base; not to mention this is in a game that is 7 years old. http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/02/09/wo...riber-numbers/
To the first bolded statement; while MMO's do lose some of their subscriber base, a 25% loss is not good. This graph was done before the 1.3 million was announced and shows that those MMO's (having a peak active subscriber number greater than 1 million) don't lose such a huge percentage of their customers right after launch. http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png As to your second statement, who says this? Do you have an actual source for this information?
EDIT: also TOR pads it's numbers just like WoW it's called business that is what they do. They gave everyone a free month which will extend the 6 month subs to pad the next quarterly report as well.

Your right its not closing anytime soon but games are veiwed as dead and gone long before they forced to close up shop.

1.3 mil includes the free month given out. We really have no clue how many people are actually playing.

By this standard every MMO running today is dead.

Wow was built by a hardcore player base that kept the game alive for quite a long time. Wow didn't become the facerolling easy-fest that it is today for several years. It is catering to the EXTREME casuals, which is why even wow's subs are in decline, the game is basically on cruise control at this point while they push Titan out of the factory..