Chart via u/Kamikaze4228 based on open source data
Ever wonder what became of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft? The groundbreaking MMORPG is still successful to be sure, but in recent years, it has fallen far from its 2010/2011 peak of over 12 million subscribers.
Since then, its subscriber base has been on a sharp steady decline, dropping in 2019/2020 to below 4 million subscribers. In recent years, it’s wavered between that nadir and around 8 million, enjoying brief growth when a new expansion is released — but never coming close to regaining its commanding heights.
For the longest time I assumed this loss was simply typical attrition, as WoW players moved on to newer MMOs like Elder Scrolls Online, or metaverse platforms like Minecraft and Fortnite.
But a veteran Blizzard developer just casually told me there were other key factors at work — design changes I’ve seen little discussed before.
Irena Pereira joined Blizzard in 2006 (a little over a year after WoW’s 2004 debut) with an official role as a UI designer — though that focus rapidly expanded.
“[Blizzard] wanted a unicorn, somebody who could code, who could do art and design,” as she puts it to me now. (Disclosure: Irena and I are currently working on an unrelated MMO project, but more on that down the way.) In her three years at Blizzard, she worked on Patch 1.1, as well as the expansions Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, primarily as a UI designer. (“But again, full stack, I did everything, including designing with new features for the game.” She also managed WoW’s add-on community.)
From that vantage, her post-mortem for World of Warcraft's declining user numbers (if I had to roughly summarize it) is this:
World of Warcraft lost its draw as a dynamic, living virtual world and even worse, lost its resilience as a virtual community.
“WoW as it was when it was first launched, is a very different game than WoW as it is now.” as she puts it. “Initially you’re dropping into a starting zone with an open world.”
The first-time new user experience now is tightly controlled:
“But now, when you log into WoW, there's dialog boxes and quest objectives, and NPCs talk to you, and scripted events — all these things that kind of drive you from one moment to the next in a role. That includes making the game very easy at start:
“Currently with the starting zone for Dragonflight, I think it takes you about 10 minutes to get to level 10. Ten minutes. It's basically a couple of hours through the starting zone, I think you end up level 20.” (Reaching level 10 originally took something closer to week or more of play.)
The ease and speed of progression for players undermines motivations to talk with other players, and seek their help.
“The pace of leveling is the very first factor that I think has destroyed the early game and killed the community spaces where people would actually meet,” as Irena puts it. “The strategic shift to drive new users is very scripted on rails. The new user experience makes it so that players are paying more attention to the game than they are paying to each other.”
This also made WoW feel less like a world:
“This is a classic blunder that game studios make — they feel they need only to throw more content at players, more storytelling and more narrative. I love storytelling, narrative, don't get me wrong. But the whole point of a great open world is for you to explore it at your own pace, not to be compelled to do things in an order.”
Now, there’s little reason to spend downtime in WoW talking with other players, let alone helping them out.
Or as Irena puts it: “There's no white space in the experience.”
Which takes us to another problem:
“Incentivizing multiplayer gameplay requests are gone. With increasing power levels, you really can solo most content. You don't need anybody, like with talent trees and whatnot. Classes can handle situations by themselves.”
Now, high level players can just solo quests with a pet. There’s no need for other people, even to just take down a powerful NPC in the zone.
“There's no risk,” Irena argues. “So you don't need help if there's no risk. These are all things that disincentivize finding other people to play with you.”
I was surprised to hear all this. Back in its early years, WoW guilds required highly organized group planning and management, especially for complicated, high level raids.
In recent years, says Irena Pereira, that’s not so much the case:
“I mean, there's still raids, but a lot of the emphasis on group gameplay is just on the raids. Players want higher end game experiences. They want to take down big bosses. The smaller ten man dungeons like Karazhan, they don't do those anymore. A single five man dungeon like Gnomeregan is gone, like no nobody does that.
“The gray area, the juicy part of the experience kind of just slowly got whittled away, more and more and more player convenience features to bypass the annoying things. Suddenly you're not really running into people anymore. The player convenience features actually undermined the opportunities for social connection in various places in the game.”
Irena pinpoints the problem to the launch of the WoW Cataclysm expansion in late 2010, with warning signs in the run up to the Lich King expansion of 2008, heard during a discussion with fellow WoW designers:.
“We were talking, I believe, about the Death Knight and planning an expansion for Lich King,” she recalls, “and we're discussing power leveling curves and multiplayer encounters, and [Blizzard VP] Jeff Kaplan said, ‘What about the solo player?’
“And then from that point on, there just seemed to be a lot of bias for supporting solo gameplay in this multiplayer world. But it was an overcorrection, like way overcorrected.”
The result, Irena would argue, can be seen in the declining subscription numbers since 2010:
“They saw a precipitous population decline in a late stage, post-Cataclysm, the WoW population dropping, dropping, dropping. It got so low. But [Blizzard was] struggling with figuring out how they were going to improve revenue.”
Above: Irena with fellow Blizzard veteran Brian Birmingham
A partial solution originated from her colleague Brian Birmingham, who lobbied for the re-release of the original version of WoW in 2019, dubbed World of Warcraft Classic, where play progression took more time investment, and more interactions with other players:
“When WoW Classic came out, it boomed. It became more profitable than retail because it brought back the original game and all the slower gameplay and all of those things that made WoW special came back. Players ate it up.”
You can see the subscriber numbers climbing back up after the advent of WoW Classic and successive Classic versions of previous expansions:
The release of Cataclysm: Classic earlier this year, however, is not an auspicious one by Irena’s lights:
“Cataclysm was the expansion that killed a lot of those social features that killed the population in WoW. Now that they expanded WoW Classic into Cataclysm, it's having the same effect.”
She says Blizzard often adds features that the hardcore player itself clamors for — even if (in an ironic twist) they tend to hurt community cohesion.
“They added features that the community wanted but weren't necessarily good for the community,” as Irena puts it. “We started adding all these convenience features, right? The raid finding tool, random dungeon finder, that kind of thing. Features that also accelerate the lack of social stuff, [with players instead] going right into the dungeon.
“They made dungeons transactional. You used to go up and find other people playing alongside you, where you'd be like, ‘Hey, let's do these quests together. Or are you gonna hit this dungeon?’ You want to join up.”
But being able to have these random player-to-player conversations require time and space for such encounters:
“[N]ow nobody's actually physically walking to these locations, so that nobody's seeing each other,” she argues. “This is a chronic problem with abstracting things that should be immersive into UI elements. Suddenly people were part of a [online player] list and no longer actual people or characters.”
A new WoW expansion, The War Within, arrives next week, and may attract a spurt of new subscribers, if temporarily. But if Blizzard asked Irena Pereira how to recover WoW’s former glory, it would be less about adding new content, but better encouraging players to play — and socialize — with each other.
Irena Pereira at Bungie's Game UX Summit '22 — watch her talk here
“I would tell [Blizzard] to reduce the size of the land, funnel people into smaller groups. Take into consideration Dunbar’s number. In order to create more intimate connections, you need to facilitate the interaction of smaller and smaller groups. Build content for ten to fifteen people. When you stick 1000 people in Stormwind, nobody's ever gonna meet one another.”
She harkens back to a memorable feature of EverQuest, where injured players would have to spend time restoring their health in a safe zone, where they’d inevitably begin chat with other recovering players:
“You have chill time where you're not being entertained, so that [players] entertain themselves by getting to know each other.”
Without those social moments central to WoW, she says, something crucial has been lost.
“We seem to lose the thread on the multiplayer piece of MMOs by over-emphasizing the content and forgetting that the content needs to drive player interactions.
“And when you lose the player interaction, you lose the population.”
No doubt there are other factors to WoW’s population decline, but surely the decline of community is core among them. In any case, Irena’s insights are core to the thesis driving her new startup, Unleashed Games — which is developing MMOs, as VentureBeat puts it, that bring people together.
“[O]ur argument is, if we have a pro-social game where cooperation is the win condition, we can create more cooperative people and people who know how to collaborate, collaborating in-game, and incentivizing it in-game,” Irena Pereira tells me. “We always prioritize the social interaction and facilitate spaces where people can make up their own experiences by simply saying ‘Hi’ to each other.”
And if the Proteus Effect is true (as she and I tend to believe), these players might then even end-up offering friendly greetings to strangers more in real life, too. Not coincidentally, they might also have more reason to stay and grow their virtual world too.
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Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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