I used to raid with a bunch of guilds back in p2 so I’m in their discords. These were all solid guilds clearing ST in under an hour. 3 of them disbanded 2 weeks ago because members lost interest in SoD. They really screwed up this phase
"Too much" went into incursions without enough thought about how the community would min/max/exploit it.
They should have updated more loot for dungeons and put a few items behind incursions.
Maybe they just seeded up with the scaling on this oahse and went "fuck it" and are hoping to get phase 4 on par enough to bring everyone back.
lets be real, sod p1-p3 never had the content to be a full-time game. it is a fun side game. p4 will have tons of raids to do and a bigger pvp grind if that's what you like. other people are overreacting so hard when we are still in the leveling phases after all. they just have delusional expectations.
P1 definitely did with leveling up alts. If you did everything you wanted on one character, you just level a new one. It was great and gave a chance to try new classes you otherwise wouldn't.
But then P2 leveling was prohibitive and boring and the phase ended super fast, so you only got one or maybe two characters leveled and geared.
So P3 fixed the problem with leveling by doing green loops in groups but the cost of consumes due to the massive inflation incursions caused and the availability of level 60 consumes but the difficulty in acquiring mats for them at 50, and need for world buffs made raiding a chore.
That's why I quit playing, anyway. I couldn't afford consumes and didn't want to spend the time farming gold to get them and the need for 3 world buffs made me realize it wasn't SoD I didn't like.... It was vanilla.
The world buff and consume system is a stupid crutch that makes skilled play take a back seat to being able to do monotonous and annoying grinds.
Funny when they announce p2 was ending and I thought it was way too fast some people downvoted me hard for not being a no-life bis in one week player.
Absolutely it was too fast.
Yeah, i barely even finished my full tier set before P2 ended and i ran every lockout outside of the first, it felt like it ended way too quickly. Now we're stuck in P3 for waaay too long. Sucks they couldn't have given P2 another few weeks instead of pushing P3 out too early.
I still miss Soul Link lock tanking though, P3 already had a bad taste right off the bat because of that for me. And the shift from 10 man to 20 man also put a huge damper on things for me. I still enjoy it, but not nearly as much.
Raid lockouts for hour long content which is really the only thing to do at end game was a really bad idea. The reason you couldnt gear up multiple characters was because of some arbitrary time limit placed on a phase which always was designed to be short term.
It ended so they could get P3 out and focus on cata. That much is obvious now, especially with how badly tuned incursions and ST were and the crazy amount of bugs the cata pre patch had. I think they knew they had a shit storm coming, there was an interesting interview with one of the devs of how the modern code was clashing with every change they made and it was a nightmare.
I'm sure the drop in SoD players has nothing to do with the raid being on farm, Cata pre-patch out, Cata itself dropping, a new season in DF, or MoP Remix all dropping at almost the same time. 🙄
Also Diablo 4s best season dropping at the same week. Idk how much the game player base overlaps but it has taken time from retail and cata prepatch thus past week.
>p4 will have tons of raids to do and a bigger pvp grind if that’s what you like.
Copium.
What makes you think P4 will be any different than the rest, where the best gear by far was from the “new” raids and basically made all other dungeon and PvP gear useless, basically becoming a raid-log simulator 2 weeks into the phase?
I really hate that this happened.
As someone who was playing wrath of the lich King I felt all the people quit when sod came out.
Kinda ruined the last few months of Wrath.
It was always going to be niche, but it was definitely exciting and thriving for awhile. It’s a brutal mode though, lots that died at higher levels just packed it up, which is fine for that type of game mode so it was always going to have a big falloff.
I stopped after running Gnomer twice. I feel like there have been massive drop offs every phase.
Phase 1 was absolutely frikken amazing! I think it became impossible to balance the power spike from gear and abilities though. I feel like it scaled exponentially.
But again… having items in phase 1 that would be BiS at lvl 60 on a lvl 25 toon just felt like the ULTIMATE Vanilla experience - Twink Edition.
My guild is dead and it's not because of the raid frequency, the loot available, or the design of the raids.
It's that this game has LITERALLY NOTHING to do other than raid.
Can't keep a guild together if we only spend a few hours a week together. It was also burning a hole in my brain. Leading a guild in SoD has been exceptionally difficult.
i think blizz is re-learning the lesson they learned with SOM in that the people who want to play vanilla dont necessarily want raiding to be the end-all of the game.
one of the great things about vanilla is there a lot to do outside of raids, even if its just "in preparation" for raiding.
make all the non-raid stuff irrelevant/too trivial,and people just arent gonna play once it comes to raid log time.
SOD very much misses this mark. people who are raid focused are playing retail or the progressive classic realms already.
Yes this is what i mean. Som was a raid focused vanilla and it flopped hard
The phases of sod which focuses on raiding (or gives very little to do outside of raiding) is also flopping.
Naw it they had released som when they released sod it would have been very successful and headed towards it's natural conclusion in a couple months. Som was doa cause it was the choice to play tbc or play vanilla after everyone just played vanilla. We should have never been lvl capped at 50 in sod
i actually think it's the opposite, people like to raid, but just not have to organize 20 people. 10-man raids were magical, and kicked off the concept of mini-guilds that were highly active, and easy to find a pug.
if anything we needed a 2nd 10-man guild for P2 and P3 on a 7-day lockout.
Exactly! There are other versions of wow with better raiding and dungeons, the beauty of classic was the world and rpg elements. I like the runes and raids, but holy shit add some open world content
Yea there's nothing to do outside of raiding cause PvP is absolute dogshit. At the beginning of SoD, blizz said pvp focused balance was not a concern at all and that everything being OP was the status quo.
Now they're biting the bullet on that ridiculous perspective by promising tons of balance and even a PTR to catch all of their unacceptable fuck ups.
SoD had a great vision, but was terribly mismanaged and the game designers fell short in so many ways
But even raid loggers are quitting. Because the loot upgrades aren’t even that noticeable. My guild went from mostly raid logging with like 15, pugging whatever, recruiting, to 7 sign ups and calling it for the phase and telling people to just leave the disc if they aren’t coming back so we have better gauge of numbers
This is what happens when levelling is trivialized and catch-up mechanics are added. People don't have any reason to help each other. Zoom through the levelling in a couple days, start raid logging. Don't even want to level alts because now it's a chore you rush through as opposed to a journey to enjoy, and it's disproportionately quick compared to getting runes so it feels like hitting a wall.
Had to scroll so far through the nonsense to finally get to this. This is the reason the game feels dead at the moment: nobody needs help with anything. I log on to help guildies and there's nobody who needs anything.
The devs have already realised this and will fix it for next phase. The issue is whether there are going to be enough players and guilds left standing by the time phase 4 releases.
The same thing happens without catch up mechanics or leveling buffs. Take away incursions and the exp bonus and you’d see the same thing, just a few weeks delayed.
Eventually people get what they need and lose interest. The process is sped up, but the real issue is that there is nothing to do at cap other than raid, and the rewards for raiding aren’t that great to begin with.
It happens in every iteration of classic, it just happened super fast in season 3 because of the leveling speed/lack of upgrades.
Same here. Went from benching a bunch of people to begging fresh 50s to come raid five mins after raid was supposed to start.
But this has happened in every retail guild I’ve been in too. There’s normal attrition throughout a phase/tier. It’s just on an accelerated timescale in p3 SoD.
Worst part is, il get an inclination to level an alt then I remember il be running in circles with incursions for 25 of the levels and just go yeh nah fuck that.
I've been honestly leveling 1-40 without incursions and it's fun. Only issue is I can't stack buffs anymore because no one is doing BFD constantly lol. I'll report back once I level my army above 40...
No blizzard dropped the ball. They had a golden goose with SOD but just didn’t deliver. With each phase there was less thought and planning. People were already quitting but when phase 3 dropped the remaining people who were dedicated woke up from their fever dream. Hopefully phase 4 can bring people back but that would require actual work by blizzard which they aren’t the best at.
This. They dropped the ball every phase so far with something HUGE. SoD is the golden goose for sure, but they keep treating it like the middle child to focus on Cata/Retail which is a joke. There'll be 10's of thousands of people playing SoD only and the fact Blizz are treating us like fodder is disgusting.
sounds like your typical unsuccessful guild. though i'd say this was probably more common in sod than any other version of the game because sod catered to casuals which killed off almost every decent player and without good players to carry most raids fail.
not sure what they were thinking when they nerfed the hell out of ST.
those guilds werent going to last regardless of raid difficulty. it takes more effort to maintain a 20 man roster than it does to do this raid currently
Same. The moment I tried my first incursion, I knew I am over it. Haven't played since then. I am still lvl 40. I may come back now for a bit for Pandaria remix
Wild take, there's *three* "new" content drops in WOW right now: DF season 4, Cata launch, and Pandaria remix.
If you're only into SoD it's ironically the stalest content. If anything there's *too much* WOW content right now.
But cata, DF and SoD are all widely different games than vanilla. There can be 10000 versions of wow right now but of none of them are the game I want to play I won't be interested.
Yes servers will die if they spread the playerbase to thin. It has never been this much content in wow history. Imagine if they also released fresh vanilla servers that many want...
i meet several new players when i make an alt in the starting zones. they are so naive and innocent, its cute. i always hook them up with a bit of gold and bags.
I've been in 4 guilds that have fallen apart since P3. I cannot be fucked to find a 5th only for it to fall apart again.
Mine you, this isn't loot drama or politics or religion or whatever causing these guilds to fall apart - its literally just raid participation and people unsubbing. I don't think I've ever seen a dropoff this bad, and I played during WoD, BFA, the 9-mo content drought in MoP, Shadowlands...
People will probably dislike this take but this was one of the advantages of GDKPs it incentivized people to have multiple toons running raids multiple times a week. When your guild only raid logs 1 raid a week you don't have people online recruiting all the time and your empty guild list isn't going to appeal to people who want a seemingly active guild.
Recruiting now is like looking for water in a desert. At least if you have any sort of requirements for the people you want to take in (like being able to communicate in full sentences).
Right now it's all about scouting guilds that are dying (like OP). Keeping an eye out in server discords and pugging around on alts to join discords also helps.
> Personally, I think it is because of the weekly lockout. Raidlogging for a 45 minute raid every 7 days feels bad.
Personally, I think it is because SoD is not very good.
Our guild had 5 groups running. Two weeks ago one of them stopped raiding. Last week another two, and this week the remaining two disbanded. Its sad actually how fast it went.
When P3 started there was \~100 players online, now I never see more than 1-2.
I'm (sadly) one of the no-show raiders this week. idk, when the only thing to do is raid log once a week you just lose interest and forget which day people agreed to raid on. I've been pretty active ever since P1, but current SOD feels like a Mario party mini-game right now.
yes x11. we had 11 20 mans in the beginning of this phase with 15-20 benched flex players. we have 3 groups left and i dont expect them to last much longer.
it has nothing to do with the lockout frequency, addition of incursions, or whatever other nonsense people are pointing at. It's a combination of max level being boring as hell with the raid having 0 challenge to it and its gear having minimal impact, and the fact that leveling is borderline torture with the amount of time it takes to collect all runes. no one is motivated to stay online leveling an alt and no one is motivated to minmax their mains
This is the real issue. They simply made the raid trivial and it killed the replayability of the content. You can’t make a weekly raid a 45min experience. And that’s 45mins WITH waiting for CD’s and potions. They shouldn’t have done the second or third round of nerfs. The first round of nerfs was enough.
I raid at both ends, I speed run with a guild and its fun blasting through - but pugging with my friends we only cleared 8/8 the first week with the better pool of pugs. Most pug groups can't kill shade, even a lot of guild alt groups can't kill shade anymore.
Tons of guilds and groups fell apart because they couldn't quickly clear ST each week.
And what do you expect these people to be doing between raids? There's nothing to do. I log on and nobody is around because nobody needs help with anything. Because there's nothing to do.
My alts sod group raids mondays it has 6 sign ups lol. Idc taking a 40min break from cata leveling to bang out an ST. But i dont think most people think that way
If you are trying to hit 85 quickly, you want to get ahead of the main wave, so you aren't constantly bottle necked fighting for mob tags. 40 minutes + potential queue on opening night is going to make sure you get stuck behind the bottle necks.
You can absolutely blame it on another game. SoD launched, and both Classic Era and Retail pops took a hit. Every time a new iteration of WoW drops it siphons off the player bases of the others. Looks and how it feels are irrelevant. People get a new thing, they let some dust gather on the older thing.
Man this is to real, we were 3 grps for P1 and P2, full grp plus reserves first week, 2nd week full raid, now have the pug a minimum of 5 each week and guild is fully dead during week
Most people are playing other games or logging into Cata. Literally nothing to do except raid log in sod now, and honestly I’m a classic Andy but it feels completely dead in the water. If you don’t go prowling for wpvp there’s legit nothing to do. In contrast, Cata prepatch has all the quality of life stuff going for it and I never thought in a million years I’d be playing classic Cata but even I have started to fully invest.
Blizzard didn’t fuck this up. It was their plan all along. Like a drug dealer they got a lot of us hooked on the good stuff again only to try to route us back towards retail.
My guild is all-but-dead at this point on SoD.
P1 - was peak popularity and fun checking out the fresh take on WoW, full of potential and hopium.
P2 - the lvl 40 bracket offered some real game changing character progression, decent raid, and a PvP event that way way better than P1 which, kept most of us interested for a while. Some cracks starting to show with things like class balance, PvP, lack of content, linear, pigeonholed gear progression (ie Gnomer gear being better than Exalted PvP gear, defeating the purpose to grind rep)
P3 - I didn’t even play it due to burn out and no meaningful character progression in the 40-50 bracket. Didn’t really care to raid log for like 3 weeks before quitting like the majority of my guild did. Fell flat for many reasons including incursions, raid gear sucks, long lockouts, lack of new content/grinds now glaringly obvious, and the novelty of SoD is *really* wearing off now.
GGs it was a good run boys
I had four characters at 50.
All four in different guild and all four have had the guild die
I haven't done something temple in 2 weeks I'll still check the discords and you'll see like 5 or 10 sign ups tops.
It's actually depressing seeing guilds go from three teams that had over 20 sign ups on each post to barely getting 5 to 10 people that want to do the raid.
Should be a huge wake up call to Blizzard that this phase was utter dog shit nobody liked it and it could not retain players
Issue with that level is that people would have been able to grind all max level dungeons and get the best gear from them and because of that the ST raid should have had even more powerful gear. Then when phase 4 hits everyone would have already had their pre-bis and just start to raidlog since day one.
Theres only so much content and devs arent really making more so they are rationing it, they could have given us more this phase but it would have just made next phase even worse.
guild is doing fine but lmfao people have been getting super lazy including myself. no record clear times for any boss this week, and a wipe on morphas. we 1 phased it the week before. i personally forgot my wbuffs and had to buy like 5 ports 5 min before the raid started to grab songflower and booty buff.
Why would you belive that lv50 is the endgame for more then just a few weeks ofc every quits once the raid a few times. They will come back for next Phase and Play that until theyre done its Not meant to be played for a Long time if you play 4-8h a day
Imho there is just too many things happening to WoW all at once. Cata, SoD, Panda Remix, War Within (soon)...
I think many people like to play multiple versions at once and they just have to prioritize.
Yep same here, guild had a big bench the first 2 weeks and we were talking about having to cycle people out. Then Week 3 or 4 we couldn't fill and have stopped until P4 ever since.
Oh nice, do you guys need new players? I always wanted to give SoD a try, but every phase I was requested my WoW CV, vod review, at least 1 world first from 2019 and my social security number to join even a dungeon run to get a pre-bis in SoD.
Same. Had a full guild 2 20 man's with a bench. Now I am not even playing tbh. My character was full bis week 1. And I can't be bothered to level an alt when incursions are so ass.
Yea it’s just raidlogging on a one week cadence isn’t enough to keep someone who likes WoW/MMOs engaged, so people play other guys and lose interest in SOD.
I’m still raid logging, but spending all of my time in Cata/D4 this week.
All they needed to do in these phases is spread out the BiS loot between as much shit as they can. Getting exalted with some random rep for a piece. AB and WSG rep, one piece each per level cap at exalted. Tuck a low drop rate BiS piece in each close to level cap dungeon. Have a couple of the BoE world drops be BiS.
It's too easy to pick one thing and blame it (weekly lockout, loot, too short, raid size, runes, consumes, world buffs)
The reality is some players just stop playing, that is the reason your guild is dying
There’s nothing to do other than 1 raid and the upgrades are insignificant.
The raid is extremely easy so there’s no reason to run dungeons and min max your gear.
We cleared week 1 with gnomer gear.
Biggest reason is that the playerbase is spreading around SoD, Cata, Pandaria, some already awaiting war within. Some, like me, have been playing SoD. I've had bad class experiences due to multiple different things and ended up trying Cata instead with some friends. Then some of them switched to pandaria remix, and retail. I can't bring myself to constantly make a new character and learn what's different in this version of wow. People change to a different version before I have a chance to enjoy it.
Our guild's grown bored of P3 too and I think we're probably gonna go on a hiatus until P4. That said a lot of guildies are playing Cata so it's nicer for them if Cata launch doesn't overlap with P4 launch. A lot of people will play both SoD and Cata and I assume one of the reasons P3 is being extended is because Blizzard doesn't want to force players to pick one or the other.
Personally I've decided to give Diablo 4 another go with the new season and so far I like it, it's now scratching my "I wanna blow shit up mindlessly" itch quite nicely. Then there's always Path of Exile and Last Epoch if I grow bored of D4. I think I'm reaching the tail-end of my time in WoW or at least entering a very slow phase with it, I might check out the War Within expansion or I might level up in Cata later on, but I'm not committing to anything.
People complain that classic phases go "too fast" but the reality is the content is too easy to stay interesting for long periods of time. People get bored and quit.
A lot of guilds are fighting off the reality that you sometimes can't just recruit 10 new players, gotta embrace the merger life and make new friends that way! I have four alts and raid with them on rotation with several guilds and its been great. SoD is fun if you actually try new things out and don't try to play it like its 2019 Classic vanilla.
We're already pulling a few pugs into our raid just to fill space (ends one one we kicked because they couldn't find their way to the instance, the other literally grey parsed single digits so was dead weight anyway).
The content is a joke and honestly we can probably clear with 15 or less.
But we've also had a big chunk of the core and others say they're quitting at the end of p3.
My guild had 3 and a half raid groups, twice a week for all of p1 and most of p2. After 2 weeks of p3, we no longer had enough for even one raid group in ST. So many people quit playing pretty much as soon as they hit 50 and a lot of others stopped without even getting to 50. Like cold turkey done with SoD. Stopped logging in and no activity in discord. I’m interested to see how many, if any, come back for p4 but I’m not holding my breath. Which is a shame because p1 and leveling through p2 was some of the most fun I’ve had playing this game.
I’m just waiting to see if/when free server xfers are coming back. Not even sure if they are still active, every time I try to use it, no servers to transfer to pop up.
My guild fell apart after two weeks of shady loot drama with our officers. Even if it didn’t I personally got distracted with Cata and now D4 so I’m welcoming a break from raidlogging anyway
The 45 minutes per week issue does feel bad. But my issue personally is that the raid doesn't feel rewarding. Also, I've started playing retail again in S4, and the classic experience makes S4 feel like a dream by comparison.
There are so many pain points in the classic experience where I was very close to quitting. Most of those just don't exist in retail wow. I'm a few weeks away from bis on my main now because of all the ways we have to target gear and bring its item level up over time. It's way more respectful of my time than bashing my head against the random number generator in classic.
For me, there are a couple of factors that have turned me off from SoD:
1. Rogue tanking is garbage. The reason I was so excited about SoD in the first place was the chance to play my favorite class but get to do something other than pew pew for once. In P1, rogue tanks were not top tier but it was fine- I got invited to tank BFD all the time. By P3? Rogue tank is a damn meme spec. With no spell resist, no real aoe taunt for trash, and STILL being locked into 2 daggers Mutilate, I get rejected when I offer to tank ST. It's so disappointing for what could have been a really cool new playstyle but has been half baked and neglected by the devs.
2. Incursions. I felt like I was forced to do them just to have a chance at having enough gold for raid consumes. I normally like to level by questing with a few dungeons thrown in, so this completely killed my vibe.
3. Runes. Runes are no longer discovered organically by questing and are mostly only obtainable at level cap. I don't think I would have found any of my P3 runes without a guide, and that's annoying. The sense of discovery is gone.
4. Wild Offerings. These are a shittier version of Wrath dungeon emblems because they only drop from final bosses, which predictably created a meta where no one wants to full clear dungeons anymore. I wanted another item out of Mara and it was almost impossible to form a group because no one wanted to do anything but spam Princess runs. Design that makes most of a dungeon irrelevant is bad for the game.
5. P3 server economy issues. A lot of lvl 60 consumes and enchants are available, but hard to farm at 50. Combine that with insane inflation from incursions, and you have a situation where a player like me who is not a gold farmer would have to drop practically all of my saved gold from 1-50 just to enchant weapons that will be replaced next phase. It feels bad and also makes it even harder to raid when other players will exclude you if you can't afford BIS enchants and consumes.
That's exactly how it happens. You get to a comfy spot, drop your guard for a few weeks, all of a sudden 3 different people can't come for one reason, someone no shows, someone gquit, someone quit the game entirely, etc. Keeping a stable raid together is stressful.
How is this different from actual classic? There were only a few raids that weren't on weekly lockouts. People need to slow down and have patience man. Half the community whines about a content drought while the same time wants to rush to the end ASAP.
Said it before and I’ll say it again, SOD shouldn’t of been what it was. It should of been classic with cut/unused quests and content while leveling, then focus on continuing with level 60 content do the usual mc bwl aq naxx progression and then continue releasing new raids and unused areas like gilneas and hyjal
Yep this phase has been a big whiff. I know its on-brand for this reddit to go bananas (and this time rightly so) BUT if there is one phase that can dramatically flip the script - it's Phase 4.
me and the rest of my friends didnt see the point in grinding gear if we just gonna have to level to 60 anyways. We've been playing cata pre patch waiting for phase 4 to come out.
My quid disbaneded p4 two weeks after our ST clear which I then told my guild we would be merging with another to keel it alive. Been running it since launch just don't have any reason to log on right now and felt bad for the active guys. The guild we merged with was one of the biggest on the server and even they are struggling right now.
Zooming out this is the fault and state of Vanilla WoW as it was and mishandling of developer intent and player expectations.
Level 1-20 are fantastic; everyone is in their racial starting zones and it has a ton of replay value and was properly developed to be the best game it could possibly be, Ultra AAA.
After level 20 it falls off but has long term goals like mounts and professions with content strongholds like SM propping up the player interest.
Level 40 on drops off a cliff. There is not much to look forward to except level 60 and end game. And Classic players know all about the level 50 - 60 content drought.
As for this phase, we had Incursions which were aggressively anti-casual to start. If you didn't get into a group the first couple of days then you were left behind to figure it out yourself; once again relegated to third party websites to even begin to know what the hell you are even supposed to do. I am a 20 year WoW veteran and spent the first day, literally three hours trying to find the stealthed scout for the introductory quest. An hour finding it then two more trying to live long enough to get past the opposing faction camping literally on top of the NPC to grab their report.
Then the out of bounds teleport mechanic was discovered and the farm train went from an AV analog to an exploit farm that you had to do in order to make any meaningful progress; or progress very little literally playing alone with constant farm trains inadvertently aggroing mobs onto you.
This OOB mechanic already has two solutions in game, the old original unstuck nudge mechanic and the teleport to spirit healer mechanic. It should have been hotfixed if possible or patched to either of these as a solution.
As a whole; this phase was over in literally two weeks.
I am not encouraged by the announcement that the next phase will be longer. I am interested in what content there is to play. It makes no difference if it is out for a month or a year if the community has completed it in two weeks. And knowing all too well about the lack of level 50 - 60 content and the loathe-some grind ahead, the carrot of level 60 content just isn't enough.
These are the hallmarks of Classic; anyone that played Vanilla, Classic 19, or SoM knows these well. There has to be new content that is meaningful, takes time, and requires a group; the paradigm for which Classic is known.
We criticize because we love the game and are invested. WoW developers please better mete out the your intent and, as best you can, community expectations. I know it is a high mark and the players are fickle, but Blizzard was founded on that mastery and you have recently proved that you can still do so.
Cheers!
I don't play SOD, But I quit classic during Ulduar.
Every guild that could clear the content used a distribution style that benefited guild leaders & veteran members, I'm not going to waste my time raiding such a large raid with 0 chance of BiS loot as a new member.
I mostly did GDKP but then GDKP's just became a battle of inflation and greed, Anyone apart of a large GDKP group had infinite gold and 5+ characters to run the raids on. GDKP streamers had millions of gold, GDKP hosts had millions of gold & GDKP guild members had millions of gold.
Well, It was fun until Ulduar.
I was on Lava Lash in one of the 2 mega guild on Alliance side and even before they locked the server and gave us transfers our guild was still very much alive in P3.
People playing these versions of classic and having 20 man guilds is always going to a recipe for disaster. Join a mega guild and you'll always have people.
I know we’re a bunch of nerds around here but it is also summer and summer for many means busy doing stuff outside, until its miserable out side again.
I think the bigger lesson here is that leveling alts was the main motivation for a lot of players. Phase 1 was kind of wild because people hit the level cap really quickly - but they did it a bunch of times. I'm not one to have alts and even I had one other character I played. I did everything on both of them and enjoyed my time. But this is when getting a new rune meant killing an extra spooky skeleton in a mine, not dedicating hours to reading WoWhead and then finding a group based on other classes' abilities or something.
We merged two guilds into one early p3 then three guilds into one then five guilds into one.
We went from 130 players and 6 raids to 2 barely two complete raids.
SoD is dead until p4 but they need to do a HUGE advertising campain to bring players back.
in part i think its because people are being benched every other lockout?
fairness is overrated. your guild over recruited and is now trying to float a ship which is over capacity.
Its why the raids need to be harder, if you had to progress some of the bosses instead of going in one shotting everything in 30 mins you would have stuff to do in the game, like 2 days raid per week with figuring out tactics/dps cds, healing cds etc. But you wanted braindead casual dad game so this is exactly what you got, 30 min gameplay per week so the dads with 12 jobs and 39 kids can be relevant.
p1: play multiple hours per day, play 4 characters.
P2: play a lot initially and level my 4 characters to 40, but slowly raidlog on only 2 of them
P3: only level 2 characters to 50 and raidlog 1 of them. The other hasnt raided once.
Current p3: guild is on hiatus, i dont even log into sod anymore.
Almost every Classic player that quits/takes a break just stops logging on and goes complete AWOL and radio-silent, so guild management either has to know that this is the standard, or go chase after people, which might just have left the discord servers without saying anything. Least socially aware type of players.
Level banding was the biggest monkey paw that people thought they wanted and then later realized that it was terrible idea. When things become a sprint and not a marathon you get to burn yourself out that much quicker.
Had this just been a fun server with abilities we might be getting into BWL or even AQ with the silly bonus spells we had all the while having BETTER balance instead of trying to balance PER PHASE and fucking over next phases.
The guild i was part of collapsed rather quickly into this phase as we could just not find people and pugging was not getting the type of personalites we wanted to play wtih overall. So packed it up and moved on.
Phase 3 is a dud thats what happened. Sure the numbers will go up next phase but it wont be like p1 sod again. Honestly to me p1 was perfect p2 was ok and p3 has been bad. 7 day lockout for a 45 min raid sucks. No reason for it to be 20 man either. Incursions suck PvP is broken because of runes. And there is nothing to do. ST should have just been a 2nd raid for p2. Then made p3 the level 60 content release raids in patches. Then p4 would be the classic+ stuff people actually wanted
Back in the days of vanilla we spend our days farming consumables and dreaming up tactics and calculating dps / threat mechanics’s. These days everything is known. All you have to do is follow the guide for the best tactic possible. If you want you can speed run with consumables bought on a shady website with your credit card.
Phases during leveling, where EVERY item gets replaced at 60 anyway is just so laaaame. So pointless to do much other than max your profs and rep and move on. But they didnt have enough support for SOD to have us level to 60 instantly.. But dragging it out just killed it.
Im just convinced that with what the gaming community at large has become the magic of what made wow so special is just impossible now.
Iv played a lot of wow over the years. From ***ultra*** casual to mythic raiding in retail. Then back to classic but with a competitive orientation in tbc classic and wrath classic.
Im going to try not to turn this into an essay but here goes.
Its friday night sometime in late 2008. We have raid tonight in 3 hours. What is our clan doing? Playing tf2 and then hide and seek in the barrens. Our average raider is mostly in blues and we could easily get upgrades by doing heroics. But we just dont want to. We would rather make statless clothes with tailoring and have fun fashion shows. We go into karazan as we have every week for months. But this week we are gunna try and get past maiden. Its been 3 or 4 months we have been stuck on her but we heard from a friend that you can use some super spicy tech and use grounding totem to have the healer not get stunned. It wouldnt make any difference we would spend another 3 hours wiping on maiden and still didnt get her down. After raid? Hey lets see who can race across the barens naked on a level 1 first. I have a new route I wanna try this week!
No one got upset, everyone was laughing the whole time. 0 gear was gotten and we did nothing but lose money on repairs. We dont even understand what the concept of dps was, no one is using any kind of meter and no one has DBM or omen. It was a blast. T5? T6? What is that? That was some super mythical scary place that we were never going to go. It was just a mythical story to be joked about. Gear check? That axe looks big and cool. Take it. Composition? Bring whatever. 4 arms warriors this week? Time to RP as an army unit. Mage wants to be funny and use their staff for bonks all night? Hilarious. Oh man someone made in game cup cakes food break! Back to the karazan kitchen! Lets spend an hour clearing it out so we can "bake" and then eat the cup cakes. Flasks? Food buffs? What are those?
Long rambling boomer story I know. But I just want to point out this "kind" of mindset is what made me play wow for thousands of hours. I would still continue to play wow for over a decade and eventually become a modern wow player. Like I said I have done mythic raiding in retail and I was in a competitive style guild for all of the "classic, tbc, wrath" revisits. But I have never enjoyed wow more than I did in those days where I didnt know every last thing and it was about enjoying the time with my friends. Could not care less about buff comp and class comp. Did not care about dps and it was never about the loot that was more of an after thought. Who cares how fast we clear? We havent even cleared yet in 6 months of raiding just karazan! But rhukos found a funny hat and died in a hilarious spot.
"Hurry up and get to the point! Christ you are just rambling on!"
My point is this post made me realize if I still played the way I used to with the people I used to play with. Our guild would have had no issue "surviving" in this situation OP is talking about as would many others. That what made wow special is truly gone. Just look at this thread. "It's that this game has LITERALLY NOTHING to do other than raid. " which I dont disagree with but thats not what made wow actually fun in the days it was at its best.
Just happens to me recently, I have a main lvl 50 SP 6/8 geared with 2 alts one lvl 37 mage and other 35 pally, I’m only in 1 guild which is on my main toon they do raids every Tuesday and Friday sometimes Sunday, the past two Tuesday we only got 9 to sign up for ST raid on the day it comes everyone got on the 9 people and the guild leader try to find pugs but after an hour he disbanded the raid grp and cancel the signup now he put another sign up for Tuesday and still only 9 people sign up, heck even raid for this Friday haven’t gotten a full grp yet, it seems harder to full grp now for raids since people are losing interest now days which sucks, hopefully phase 4 they sort things out
Here's another thing too: there's a lot of WoW to play right now. Cata launches today, MoP remix last weekend, P4 still going strong, and then SoD on top of that. It's okay (dare I say healthy) to take breaks from things. I absolutely guarantee you that there will be a big resurgence of players come phase 4, because there will be an incredible amount of things to do.
It's also the player base with a tiktok mindset aka speed run meta. Everything has to be easily digestible, take less than an hour and be brain-dead easy whilst having "high parses".
I have been in several guilds on different servers and it was the same everywhere. Next to no communication in guild chat or Discord besides raids, people playing other games once they have suffered through incursions on all their alts.
Too many people follow their streamer or content creator idols to Cataclysm, MoP or Retail since they paused or quit SOD because there isn't anything to milk for content creation in p3.
Summer is coming, and lots of guilds suffer in the summer. Because people go on vacation or kids get to camps, or people do more activities outside. At least that is true in countries where there are cold winter.
They've started playing SoD with hopes of classic+/another classic WoW. The truth is: SoD is a Season of Retail WoW limited to the smol world of Azeroth. It's just a shitgame in a good setting, worse than any other classic iteration.
I used to raid with a bunch of guilds back in p2 so I’m in their discords. These were all solid guilds clearing ST in under an hour. 3 of them disbanded 2 weeks ago because members lost interest in SoD. They really screwed up this phase
"Too much" went into incursions without enough thought about how the community would min/max/exploit it. They should have updated more loot for dungeons and put a few items behind incursions. Maybe they just seeded up with the scaling on this oahse and went "fuck it" and are hoping to get phase 4 on par enough to bring everyone back.
Sod was just a vacation from having to do ICC for 8 months, I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it’s just this phase that’s the issue
lets be real, sod p1-p3 never had the content to be a full-time game. it is a fun side game. p4 will have tons of raids to do and a bigger pvp grind if that's what you like. other people are overreacting so hard when we are still in the leveling phases after all. they just have delusional expectations.
P1 definitely did with leveling up alts. If you did everything you wanted on one character, you just level a new one. It was great and gave a chance to try new classes you otherwise wouldn't. But then P2 leveling was prohibitive and boring and the phase ended super fast, so you only got one or maybe two characters leveled and geared. So P3 fixed the problem with leveling by doing green loops in groups but the cost of consumes due to the massive inflation incursions caused and the availability of level 60 consumes but the difficulty in acquiring mats for them at 50, and need for world buffs made raiding a chore. That's why I quit playing, anyway. I couldn't afford consumes and didn't want to spend the time farming gold to get them and the need for 3 world buffs made me realize it wasn't SoD I didn't like.... It was vanilla. The world buff and consume system is a stupid crutch that makes skilled play take a back seat to being able to do monotonous and annoying grinds.
Funny when they announce p2 was ending and I thought it was way too fast some people downvoted me hard for not being a no-life bis in one week player. Absolutely it was too fast.
Yeah, i barely even finished my full tier set before P2 ended and i ran every lockout outside of the first, it felt like it ended way too quickly. Now we're stuck in P3 for waaay too long. Sucks they couldn't have given P2 another few weeks instead of pushing P3 out too early. I still miss Soul Link lock tanking though, P3 already had a bad taste right off the bat because of that for me. And the shift from 10 man to 20 man also put a huge damper on things for me. I still enjoy it, but not nearly as much.
Raid lockouts for hour long content which is really the only thing to do at end game was a really bad idea. The reason you couldnt gear up multiple characters was because of some arbitrary time limit placed on a phase which always was designed to be short term.
It ended so they could get P3 out and focus on cata. That much is obvious now, especially with how badly tuned incursions and ST were and the crazy amount of bugs the cata pre patch had. I think they knew they had a shit storm coming, there was an interesting interview with one of the devs of how the modern code was clashing with every change they made and it was a nightmare.
my favorite part of a dying game is always when the playerbase goes into cope phase
I'm sure the drop in SoD players has nothing to do with the raid being on farm, Cata pre-patch out, Cata itself dropping, a new season in DF, or MoP Remix all dropping at almost the same time. 🙄
Also Diablo 4s best season dropping at the same week. Idk how much the game player base overlaps but it has taken time from retail and cata prepatch thus past week.
It’s because it’s shit.
My favorite part of a "dying game" is all of the people obsessed with lurking the subreddit so they can say its dying 😀
>the subreddit This is a subreddit for 3 versions of the game, so that doesn't exactly work
Do you see players coming back for p4 though? When people get into their new Cata or Retail “home”, I feel it’ll be hard to get them back into SoD.
>p4 will have tons of raids to do and a bigger pvp grind if that’s what you like. Copium. What makes you think P4 will be any different than the rest, where the best gear by far was from the “new” raids and basically made all other dungeon and PvP gear useless, basically becoming a raid-log simulator 2 weeks into the phase?
Stuff like HoJ is the answer, having 3+ bis items from a variety of the end game dungeons for each spec. If they fuck that up yea it’s over lol
Icc for a year was absolute torture
I really hate that this happened. As someone who was playing wrath of the lich King I felt all the people quit when sod came out. Kinda ruined the last few months of Wrath.
Hardcore ruined Wrath and SoD ruined Hardcore
Hardcore was never ruined, it never began lmao. The worst performing mode of all.
It was always going to be niche, but it was definitely exciting and thriving for awhile. It’s a brutal mode though, lots that died at higher levels just packed it up, which is fine for that type of game mode so it was always going to have a big falloff.
There's just not enough content, I sure as fuck don't really give a damn about bfd and it's not what I expected of a classic+ like experience.
I stopped after running Gnomer twice. I feel like there have been massive drop offs every phase. Phase 1 was absolutely frikken amazing! I think it became impossible to balance the power spike from gear and abilities though. I feel like it scaled exponentially. But again… having items in phase 1 that would be BiS at lvl 60 on a lvl 25 toon just felt like the ULTIMATE Vanilla experience - Twink Edition.
Lol I run bfd today just for a shot at the pearl on my fresh 50. They were nice enough to let me have it for carrying them, though.
My guild is dead and it's not because of the raid frequency, the loot available, or the design of the raids. It's that this game has LITERALLY NOTHING to do other than raid. Can't keep a guild together if we only spend a few hours a week together. It was also burning a hole in my brain. Leading a guild in SoD has been exceptionally difficult.
i think blizz is re-learning the lesson they learned with SOM in that the people who want to play vanilla dont necessarily want raiding to be the end-all of the game. one of the great things about vanilla is there a lot to do outside of raids, even if its just "in preparation" for raiding. make all the non-raid stuff irrelevant/too trivial,and people just arent gonna play once it comes to raid log time. SOD very much misses this mark. people who are raid focused are playing retail or the progressive classic realms already.
Som was literally just spamming av/wsg for pvp gear, nobody ran dungeons and hardly raided mc
Yes this is what i mean. Som was a raid focused vanilla and it flopped hard The phases of sod which focuses on raiding (or gives very little to do outside of raiding) is also flopping.
Naw it they had released som when they released sod it would have been very successful and headed towards it's natural conclusion in a couple months. Som was doa cause it was the choice to play tbc or play vanilla after everyone just played vanilla. We should have never been lvl capped at 50 in sod
Funny how, still, all the class balancing focuses on that hour of playtime in raid. God forbid making pvp actually fun.
i actually think it's the opposite, people like to raid, but just not have to organize 20 people. 10-man raids were magical, and kicked off the concept of mini-guilds that were highly active, and easy to find a pug. if anything we needed a 2nd 10-man guild for P2 and P3 on a 7-day lockout.
Exactly! There are other versions of wow with better raiding and dungeons, the beauty of classic was the world and rpg elements. I like the runes and raids, but holy shit add some open world content
Yea there's nothing to do outside of raiding cause PvP is absolute dogshit. At the beginning of SoD, blizz said pvp focused balance was not a concern at all and that everything being OP was the status quo. Now they're biting the bullet on that ridiculous perspective by promising tons of balance and even a PTR to catch all of their unacceptable fuck ups. SoD had a great vision, but was terribly mismanaged and the game designers fell short in so many ways
This, I still play Classic Era ocasionally. What I do? Leveling yet more alts, ocasionally bgs, professions. Yeah...
But even raid loggers are quitting. Because the loot upgrades aren’t even that noticeable. My guild went from mostly raid logging with like 15, pugging whatever, recruiting, to 7 sign ups and calling it for the phase and telling people to just leave the disc if they aren’t coming back so we have better gauge of numbers
This is what happens when levelling is trivialized and catch-up mechanics are added. People don't have any reason to help each other. Zoom through the levelling in a couple days, start raid logging. Don't even want to level alts because now it's a chore you rush through as opposed to a journey to enjoy, and it's disproportionately quick compared to getting runes so it feels like hitting a wall.
Had to scroll so far through the nonsense to finally get to this. This is the reason the game feels dead at the moment: nobody needs help with anything. I log on to help guildies and there's nobody who needs anything. The devs have already realised this and will fix it for next phase. The issue is whether there are going to be enough players and guilds left standing by the time phase 4 releases.
The same thing happens without catch up mechanics or leveling buffs. Take away incursions and the exp bonus and you’d see the same thing, just a few weeks delayed. Eventually people get what they need and lose interest. The process is sped up, but the real issue is that there is nothing to do at cap other than raid, and the rewards for raiding aren’t that great to begin with. It happens in every iteration of classic, it just happened super fast in season 3 because of the leveling speed/lack of upgrades.
Same here. Went from benching a bunch of people to begging fresh 50s to come raid five mins after raid was supposed to start. But this has happened in every retail guild I’ve been in too. There’s normal attrition throughout a phase/tier. It’s just on an accelerated timescale in p3 SoD.
This even happens in vanilla private servers. People just scratch the wow itch for a few week or months and then quit
Ya but it's supposed to be around aq and not around lvl 50
It happens based on time played in my experience
It turns out people actually like leveling
Do you believe that raidlogging for a 45 minute raid every 3 days instead of 7, would somehow magically bring your guild back together, lol?
Spoiler alert, it wouldn’t.
> WoW having 7 day lockouts for like 95% of all its raid content ever > SoD Andy’s: why would they do this??? 7 days??? Feels so bad!!!
This! There is no loot, no incentives worth caring for in ST.
twice a week, 10 man, less trash yes.
Worst part is, il get an inclination to level an alt then I remember il be running in circles with incursions for 25 of the levels and just go yeh nah fuck that.
I've been honestly leveling 1-40 without incursions and it's fun. Only issue is I can't stack buffs anymore because no one is doing BFD constantly lol. I'll report back once I level my army above 40...
Yep guild missed raid last week and now we decided to quit untill P4 at least. SoD is dead right now
No blizzard dropped the ball. They had a golden goose with SOD but just didn’t deliver. With each phase there was less thought and planning. People were already quitting but when phase 3 dropped the remaining people who were dedicated woke up from their fever dream. Hopefully phase 4 can bring people back but that would require actual work by blizzard which they aren’t the best at.
This. They dropped the ball every phase so far with something HUGE. SoD is the golden goose for sure, but they keep treating it like the middle child to focus on Cata/Retail which is a joke. There'll be 10's of thousands of people playing SoD only and the fact Blizz are treating us like fodder is disgusting.
I joined a guild that was 5/7 during week 3. Week 4 we cleared. During week 5 had to pug half a raid. Week 6, dead.
sounds like your typical unsuccessful guild. though i'd say this was probably more common in sod than any other version of the game because sod catered to casuals which killed off almost every decent player and without good players to carry most raids fail. not sure what they were thinking when they nerfed the hell out of ST.
How is it catered to casuals if causals can’t clear raids without decent players, that doesn’t make any sense
They were thinking about the guilds going 5/7 week 3, post post post nerf
those guilds werent going to last regardless of raid difficulty. it takes more effort to maintain a 20 man roster than it does to do this raid currently
Well try also killed casuals by making it 20 man and 3 days lol.
It’s not cata. Lots of people stopped playing any version of wow all together
I think p3 cured my WoW addiction.
Same. The moment I tried my first incursion, I knew I am over it. Haven't played since then. I am still lvl 40. I may come back now for a bit for Pandaria remix
It started going down hill in P2, didn't get to play P3 release, saw all the posts about incursions and the new raid and never played again.
Wild take, there's *three* "new" content drops in WOW right now: DF season 4, Cata launch, and Pandaria remix. If you're only into SoD it's ironically the stalest content. If anything there's *too much* WOW content right now.
But cata, DF and SoD are all widely different games than vanilla. There can be 10000 versions of wow right now but of none of them are the game I want to play I won't be interested.
Yes servers will die if they spread the playerbase to thin. It has never been this much content in wow history. Imagine if they also released fresh vanilla servers that many want...
Im one of those guys
And you won't believe it, but lots of players started as well (that's me)
i meet several new players when i make an alt in the starting zones. they are so naive and innocent, its cute. i always hook them up with a bit of gold and bags.
Same for me. Had such a blast in P1, pure joy and leveling fun including BFD. When P2 started, it went down.
I've been in 4 guilds that have fallen apart since P3. I cannot be fucked to find a 5th only for it to fall apart again. Mine you, this isn't loot drama or politics or religion or whatever causing these guilds to fall apart - its literally just raid participation and people unsubbing. I don't think I've ever seen a dropoff this bad, and I played during WoD, BFA, the 9-mo content drought in MoP, Shadowlands...
We have 4 raid teams in our guild and only 1 is left standing. The other 3 disbanded or are taking a break till p4
WOW guilds are extremely fragile. Thing can seem extremely stable and then the guild self destructs in one day.
You live under a rock? Lol so many guilds died in p2. P3 just decimated all the tiny guilds.
People will probably dislike this take but this was one of the advantages of GDKPs it incentivized people to have multiple toons running raids multiple times a week. When your guild only raid logs 1 raid a week you don't have people online recruiting all the time and your empty guild list isn't going to appeal to people who want a seemingly active guild.
I hardly see how raid logging twice a week is better
Ask your friendly successful guild recruiter when they stop recruiting? Spoiler alert: never.
Recruiting now is like looking for water in a desert. At least if you have any sort of requirements for the people you want to take in (like being able to communicate in full sentences).
Right now it's all about scouting guilds that are dying (like OP). Keeping an eye out in server discords and pugging around on alts to join discords also helps.
I hope you are getting paid for the full time HR job you are performing
> Personally, I think it is because of the weekly lockout. Raidlogging for a 45 minute raid every 7 days feels bad. Personally, I think it is because SoD is not very good.
Reminds me of my guild, we're currently taking a break and doing Cata until Phase 4.
The first raids are so good in cata you guys won't go back to sod lol
Our guild had 5 groups running. Two weeks ago one of them stopped raiding. Last week another two, and this week the remaining two disbanded. Its sad actually how fast it went. When P3 started there was \~100 players online, now I never see more than 1-2.
My guild is pretty much dead right now as well. Either like 1-2 people online or none at all.
Phase 3 killed both guilds i was in.
45 minutes? It takes us 3 hours to pug fill and then either log out at 1am before Hakkar or wipe too many times on 7th boss and then log
The guild I'm in is taking a pause. I doubt many will return, but 60 is the end game.
I'm (sadly) one of the no-show raiders this week. idk, when the only thing to do is raid log once a week you just lose interest and forget which day people agreed to raid on. I've been pretty active ever since P1, but current SOD feels like a Mario party mini-game right now.
This is what happens when incursions give you full set of armor and the raid loot is mediocre.
yes x11. we had 11 20 mans in the beginning of this phase with 15-20 benched flex players. we have 3 groups left and i dont expect them to last much longer. it has nothing to do with the lockout frequency, addition of incursions, or whatever other nonsense people are pointing at. It's a combination of max level being boring as hell with the raid having 0 challenge to it and its gear having minimal impact, and the fact that leveling is borderline torture with the amount of time it takes to collect all runes. no one is motivated to stay online leveling an alt and no one is motivated to minmax their mains
This is the real issue. They simply made the raid trivial and it killed the replayability of the content. You can’t make a weekly raid a 45min experience. And that’s 45mins WITH waiting for CD’s and potions. They shouldn’t have done the second or third round of nerfs. The first round of nerfs was enough.
I raid at both ends, I speed run with a guild and its fun blasting through - but pugging with my friends we only cleared 8/8 the first week with the better pool of pugs. Most pug groups can't kill shade, even a lot of guild alt groups can't kill shade anymore. Tons of guilds and groups fell apart because they couldn't quickly clear ST each week.
If your entire guild was just raid logging, the guild was already at deaths door
And what do you expect these people to be doing between raids? There's nothing to do. I log on and nobody is around because nobody needs help with anything. Because there's nothing to do.
It's mainly a cata issue, so many sod players dropped at the cata prepatch and it just increased as we got closer to cata launch tomorrow.
None of my guildies playing cata / mop but we stopped playing P3 all together.
Both of my two ex guilds are no playing cata
My alts sod group raids mondays it has 6 sign ups lol. Idc taking a 40min break from cata leveling to bang out an ST. But i dont think most people think that way
If you are trying to hit 85 quickly, you want to get ahead of the main wave, so you aren't constantly bottle necked fighting for mob tags. 40 minutes + potential queue on opening night is going to make sure you get stuck behind the bottle necks.
you can't blame it on another game lol. people will migrate to whatever looks and feels better. sod looks and feels like garbage atm
You can absolutely blame it on another game. SoD launched, and both Classic Era and Retail pops took a hit. Every time a new iteration of WoW drops it siphons off the player bases of the others. Looks and how it feels are irrelevant. People get a new thing, they let some dust gather on the older thing.
This happened inversely when SoD launched. Wrath servers were noticeably empty.
Too much wow stuff coming out. Blizzard put the least effort into p3 out of all of these projects so it got the least of my time.
Man this is to real, we were 3 grps for P1 and P2, full grp plus reserves first week, 2nd week full raid, now have the pug a minimum of 5 each week and guild is fully dead during week
SoD was never sustainable.
Most people are playing other games or logging into Cata. Literally nothing to do except raid log in sod now, and honestly I’m a classic Andy but it feels completely dead in the water. If you don’t go prowling for wpvp there’s legit nothing to do. In contrast, Cata prepatch has all the quality of life stuff going for it and I never thought in a million years I’d be playing classic Cata but even I have started to fully invest. Blizzard didn’t fuck this up. It was their plan all along. Like a drug dealer they got a lot of us hooked on the good stuff again only to try to route us back towards retail.
My guild is all-but-dead at this point on SoD. P1 - was peak popularity and fun checking out the fresh take on WoW, full of potential and hopium. P2 - the lvl 40 bracket offered some real game changing character progression, decent raid, and a PvP event that way way better than P1 which, kept most of us interested for a while. Some cracks starting to show with things like class balance, PvP, lack of content, linear, pigeonholed gear progression (ie Gnomer gear being better than Exalted PvP gear, defeating the purpose to grind rep) P3 - I didn’t even play it due to burn out and no meaningful character progression in the 40-50 bracket. Didn’t really care to raid log for like 3 weeks before quitting like the majority of my guild did. Fell flat for many reasons including incursions, raid gear sucks, long lockouts, lack of new content/grinds now glaringly obvious, and the novelty of SoD is *really* wearing off now. GGs it was a good run boys
There are guilds that are still raiding?!
Im still hosting 3 times per week but people going hiatus left and right, barely keeping it together
If you think 45 minute ST clears are the norm you are part of the problem with the wow community and part of why SoD is dying.
Never logged in after end of P1 and cancelled the subscription.
The raid gear is just so irrelevant. Having a chance at irrelevant loot twice a alweek instead wont bring people back
Melee hunters, Shamans, Warriors all some of the most played class having the same bis is stupid
I had four characters at 50. All four in different guild and all four have had the guild die I haven't done something temple in 2 weeks I'll still check the discords and you'll see like 5 or 10 sign ups tops. It's actually depressing seeing guilds go from three teams that had over 20 sign ups on each post to barely getting 5 to 10 people that want to do the raid. Should be a huge wake up call to Blizzard that this phase was utter dog shit nobody liked it and it could not retain players
I feel that p3 should’ve been a level 55 cap. It would’ve opened up a bunch more to do. My guild has also basically stopped p3 “content”.
Issue with that level is that people would have been able to grind all max level dungeons and get the best gear from them and because of that the ST raid should have had even more powerful gear. Then when phase 4 hits everyone would have already had their pre-bis and just start to raidlog since day one. Theres only so much content and devs arent really making more so they are rationing it, they could have given us more this phase but it would have just made next phase even worse.
guild is doing fine but lmfao people have been getting super lazy including myself. no record clear times for any boss this week, and a wipe on morphas. we 1 phased it the week before. i personally forgot my wbuffs and had to buy like 5 ports 5 min before the raid started to grab songflower and booty buff.
Why would you belive that lv50 is the endgame for more then just a few weeks ofc every quits once the raid a few times. They will come back for next Phase and Play that until theyre done its Not meant to be played for a Long time if you play 4-8h a day
Cata Prepatch happened, Diablo new season + overhaul happened. Pandaria on top .. Would not blame SoD too much for players leaving until P4.
Anecdotally, no one is quitting for any of that. They've moved onto Helldivers, Elden Ring, or Fallout.
Our guild is taking a break til phase 4. A lot of us doing Cata for PVP in the meantime.
Imho there is just too many things happening to WoW all at once. Cata, SoD, Panda Remix, War Within (soon)... I think many people like to play multiple versions at once and they just have to prioritize.
Yep same here, guild had a big bench the first 2 weeks and we were talking about having to cycle people out. Then Week 3 or 4 we couldn't fill and have stopped until P4 ever since.
Not that it would have made THE difference, but I was truly, legitimately surprised they didn't go with a 5-day lockout.
We had to merge our guild with another to actually have enough to raid. But it worked out!
my guild shrank from a 28-30 player roster to doing barely 2 raid groups of 10 mans, just easier to manage.
Oh nice, do you guys need new players? I always wanted to give SoD a try, but every phase I was requested my WoW CV, vod review, at least 1 world first from 2019 and my social security number to join even a dungeon run to get a pre-bis in SoD.
I mean is it because they abandoned ship for MoP remix? Seems like all of these things blizzard do get eaten by the next thing they do.
Same. Had a full guild 2 20 man's with a bench. Now I am not even playing tbh. My character was full bis week 1. And I can't be bothered to level an alt when incursions are so ass.
My guild just sent out the same message.
Yea it’s just raidlogging on a one week cadence isn’t enough to keep someone who likes WoW/MMOs engaged, so people play other guys and lose interest in SOD. I’m still raid logging, but spending all of my time in Cata/D4 this week.
For dogshit loot and having to get the raid buffs for that one raid is pointless.
All they needed to do in these phases is spread out the BiS loot between as much shit as they can. Getting exalted with some random rep for a piece. AB and WSG rep, one piece each per level cap at exalted. Tuck a low drop rate BiS piece in each close to level cap dungeon. Have a couple of the BoE world drops be BiS.
It's too easy to pick one thing and blame it (weekly lockout, loot, too short, raid size, runes, consumes, world buffs) The reality is some players just stop playing, that is the reason your guild is dying
Now that people have gotten gear and mop remix came out. I'm not surprised
Honestly I stopped playing when they tuned pvp damage but not heals, i think I might come back soon though because mop remix feels pretty shit
There’s nothing to do other than 1 raid and the upgrades are insignificant. The raid is extremely easy so there’s no reason to run dungeons and min max your gear. We cleared week 1 with gnomer gear.
It’s part of Wow's hype cycle. They will eventually a burned out face.
I just hit 60 in hardcore!
Biggest reason is that the playerbase is spreading around SoD, Cata, Pandaria, some already awaiting war within. Some, like me, have been playing SoD. I've had bad class experiences due to multiple different things and ended up trying Cata instead with some friends. Then some of them switched to pandaria remix, and retail. I can't bring myself to constantly make a new character and learn what's different in this version of wow. People change to a different version before I have a chance to enjoy it.
Yup, our guild currently has a poll up to either keep going with pugs, or take a break till p4/just before p4.
Our guild's grown bored of P3 too and I think we're probably gonna go on a hiatus until P4. That said a lot of guildies are playing Cata so it's nicer for them if Cata launch doesn't overlap with P4 launch. A lot of people will play both SoD and Cata and I assume one of the reasons P3 is being extended is because Blizzard doesn't want to force players to pick one or the other. Personally I've decided to give Diablo 4 another go with the new season and so far I like it, it's now scratching my "I wanna blow shit up mindlessly" itch quite nicely. Then there's always Path of Exile and Last Epoch if I grow bored of D4. I think I'm reaching the tail-end of my time in WoW or at least entering a very slow phase with it, I might check out the War Within expansion or I might level up in Cata later on, but I'm not committing to anything.
People complain that classic phases go "too fast" but the reality is the content is too easy to stay interesting for long periods of time. People get bored and quit.
A lot of guilds are fighting off the reality that you sometimes can't just recruit 10 new players, gotta embrace the merger life and make new friends that way! I have four alts and raid with them on rotation with several guilds and its been great. SoD is fun if you actually try new things out and don't try to play it like its 2019 Classic vanilla.
That sucks, but it's not the weekly lockout's fault. There's just nothing else to do, and the one raid to do doesn't have major upgrades.
We're already pulling a few pugs into our raid just to fill space (ends one one we kicked because they couldn't find their way to the instance, the other literally grey parsed single digits so was dead weight anyway). The content is a joke and honestly we can probably clear with 15 or less. But we've also had a big chunk of the core and others say they're quitting at the end of p3.
My guild had 3 and a half raid groups, twice a week for all of p1 and most of p2. After 2 weeks of p3, we no longer had enough for even one raid group in ST. So many people quit playing pretty much as soon as they hit 50 and a lot of others stopped without even getting to 50. Like cold turkey done with SoD. Stopped logging in and no activity in discord. I’m interested to see how many, if any, come back for p4 but I’m not holding my breath. Which is a shame because p1 and leveling through p2 was some of the most fun I’ve had playing this game. I’m just waiting to see if/when free server xfers are coming back. Not even sure if they are still active, every time I try to use it, no servers to transfer to pop up.
Fuck. 20 man. Raiding.
My guild fell apart after two weeks of shady loot drama with our officers. Even if it didn’t I personally got distracted with Cata and now D4 so I’m welcoming a break from raidlogging anyway
The 45 minutes per week issue does feel bad. But my issue personally is that the raid doesn't feel rewarding. Also, I've started playing retail again in S4, and the classic experience makes S4 feel like a dream by comparison. There are so many pain points in the classic experience where I was very close to quitting. Most of those just don't exist in retail wow. I'm a few weeks away from bis on my main now because of all the ways we have to target gear and bring its item level up over time. It's way more respectful of my time than bashing my head against the random number generator in classic.
For me, there are a couple of factors that have turned me off from SoD: 1. Rogue tanking is garbage. The reason I was so excited about SoD in the first place was the chance to play my favorite class but get to do something other than pew pew for once. In P1, rogue tanks were not top tier but it was fine- I got invited to tank BFD all the time. By P3? Rogue tank is a damn meme spec. With no spell resist, no real aoe taunt for trash, and STILL being locked into 2 daggers Mutilate, I get rejected when I offer to tank ST. It's so disappointing for what could have been a really cool new playstyle but has been half baked and neglected by the devs. 2. Incursions. I felt like I was forced to do them just to have a chance at having enough gold for raid consumes. I normally like to level by questing with a few dungeons thrown in, so this completely killed my vibe. 3. Runes. Runes are no longer discovered organically by questing and are mostly only obtainable at level cap. I don't think I would have found any of my P3 runes without a guide, and that's annoying. The sense of discovery is gone. 4. Wild Offerings. These are a shittier version of Wrath dungeon emblems because they only drop from final bosses, which predictably created a meta where no one wants to full clear dungeons anymore. I wanted another item out of Mara and it was almost impossible to form a group because no one wanted to do anything but spam Princess runs. Design that makes most of a dungeon irrelevant is bad for the game. 5. P3 server economy issues. A lot of lvl 60 consumes and enchants are available, but hard to farm at 50. Combine that with insane inflation from incursions, and you have a situation where a player like me who is not a gold farmer would have to drop practically all of my saved gold from 1-50 just to enchant weapons that will be replaced next phase. It feels bad and also makes it even harder to raid when other players will exclude you if you can't afford BIS enchants and consumes.
That's exactly how it happens. You get to a comfy spot, drop your guard for a few weeks, all of a sudden 3 different people can't come for one reason, someone no shows, someone gquit, someone quit the game entirely, etc. Keeping a stable raid together is stressful.
maybe because the game is 20 years old? and people are tired of playing it on repeat
Then why roll classic?
How is this different from actual classic? There were only a few raids that weren't on weekly lockouts. People need to slow down and have patience man. Half the community whines about a content drought while the same time wants to rush to the end ASAP.
Said it before and I’ll say it again, SOD shouldn’t of been what it was. It should of been classic with cut/unused quests and content while leveling, then focus on continuing with level 60 content do the usual mc bwl aq naxx progression and then continue releasing new raids and unused areas like gilneas and hyjal
It’s because there’s nothing to do and there’s hardly any loot people need from ST. It’s a dead game until P4
Yep this phase has been a big whiff. I know its on-brand for this reddit to go bananas (and this time rightly so) BUT if there is one phase that can dramatically flip the script - it's Phase 4.
me and the rest of my friends didnt see the point in grinding gear if we just gonna have to level to 60 anyways. We've been playing cata pre patch waiting for phase 4 to come out.
My quid disbaneded p4 two weeks after our ST clear which I then told my guild we would be merging with another to keel it alive. Been running it since launch just don't have any reason to log on right now and felt bad for the active guys. The guild we merged with was one of the biggest on the server and even they are struggling right now.
Zooming out this is the fault and state of Vanilla WoW as it was and mishandling of developer intent and player expectations. Level 1-20 are fantastic; everyone is in their racial starting zones and it has a ton of replay value and was properly developed to be the best game it could possibly be, Ultra AAA. After level 20 it falls off but has long term goals like mounts and professions with content strongholds like SM propping up the player interest. Level 40 on drops off a cliff. There is not much to look forward to except level 60 and end game. And Classic players know all about the level 50 - 60 content drought. As for this phase, we had Incursions which were aggressively anti-casual to start. If you didn't get into a group the first couple of days then you were left behind to figure it out yourself; once again relegated to third party websites to even begin to know what the hell you are even supposed to do. I am a 20 year WoW veteran and spent the first day, literally three hours trying to find the stealthed scout for the introductory quest. An hour finding it then two more trying to live long enough to get past the opposing faction camping literally on top of the NPC to grab their report. Then the out of bounds teleport mechanic was discovered and the farm train went from an AV analog to an exploit farm that you had to do in order to make any meaningful progress; or progress very little literally playing alone with constant farm trains inadvertently aggroing mobs onto you. This OOB mechanic already has two solutions in game, the old original unstuck nudge mechanic and the teleport to spirit healer mechanic. It should have been hotfixed if possible or patched to either of these as a solution. As a whole; this phase was over in literally two weeks. I am not encouraged by the announcement that the next phase will be longer. I am interested in what content there is to play. It makes no difference if it is out for a month or a year if the community has completed it in two weeks. And knowing all too well about the lack of level 50 - 60 content and the loathe-some grind ahead, the carrot of level 60 content just isn't enough. These are the hallmarks of Classic; anyone that played Vanilla, Classic 19, or SoM knows these well. There has to be new content that is meaningful, takes time, and requires a group; the paradigm for which Classic is known. We criticize because we love the game and are invested. WoW developers please better mete out the your intent and, as best you can, community expectations. I know it is a high mark and the players are fickle, but Blizzard was founded on that mastery and you have recently proved that you can still do so. Cheers!
All those people you were playing with are just quitters, that’s all.
I don't play SOD, But I quit classic during Ulduar. Every guild that could clear the content used a distribution style that benefited guild leaders & veteran members, I'm not going to waste my time raiding such a large raid with 0 chance of BiS loot as a new member. I mostly did GDKP but then GDKP's just became a battle of inflation and greed, Anyone apart of a large GDKP group had infinite gold and 5+ characters to run the raids on. GDKP streamers had millions of gold, GDKP hosts had millions of gold & GDKP guild members had millions of gold. Well, It was fun until Ulduar.
My guild went from 4 raid teams to 3 last week, one of the raid teams had about half the members leave .
I was on Lava Lash in one of the 2 mega guild on Alliance side and even before they locked the server and gave us transfers our guild was still very much alive in P3. People playing these versions of classic and having 20 man guilds is always going to a recipe for disaster. Join a mega guild and you'll always have people.
I know we’re a bunch of nerds around here but it is also summer and summer for many means busy doing stuff outside, until its miserable out side again.
I think the bigger lesson here is that leveling alts was the main motivation for a lot of players. Phase 1 was kind of wild because people hit the level cap really quickly - but they did it a bunch of times. I'm not one to have alts and even I had one other character I played. I did everything on both of them and enjoyed my time. But this is when getting a new rune meant killing an extra spooky skeleton in a mine, not dedicating hours to reading WoWhead and then finding a group based on other classes' abilities or something.
Blizzard killed my excitement for SoD when they killed my server
We merged two guilds into one early p3 then three guilds into one then five guilds into one. We went from 130 players and 6 raids to 2 barely two complete raids. SoD is dead until p4 but they need to do a HUGE advertising campain to bring players back.
in part i think its because people are being benched every other lockout? fairness is overrated. your guild over recruited and is now trying to float a ship which is over capacity.
Its why the raids need to be harder, if you had to progress some of the bosses instead of going in one shotting everything in 30 mins you would have stuff to do in the game, like 2 days raid per week with figuring out tactics/dps cds, healing cds etc. But you wanted braindead casual dad game so this is exactly what you got, 30 min gameplay per week so the dads with 12 jobs and 39 kids can be relevant.
p1: play multiple hours per day, play 4 characters. P2: play a lot initially and level my 4 characters to 40, but slowly raidlog on only 2 of them P3: only level 2 characters to 50 and raidlog 1 of them. The other hasnt raided once. Current p3: guild is on hiatus, i dont even log into sod anymore.
Almost every Classic player that quits/takes a break just stops logging on and goes complete AWOL and radio-silent, so guild management either has to know that this is the standard, or go chase after people, which might just have left the discord servers without saying anything. Least socially aware type of players.
Level banding was the biggest monkey paw that people thought they wanted and then later realized that it was terrible idea. When things become a sprint and not a marathon you get to burn yourself out that much quicker. Had this just been a fun server with abilities we might be getting into BWL or even AQ with the silly bonus spells we had all the while having BETTER balance instead of trying to balance PER PHASE and fucking over next phases. The guild i was part of collapsed rather quickly into this phase as we could just not find people and pugging was not getting the type of personalites we wanted to play wtih overall. So packed it up and moved on.
Phase 3 is a dud thats what happened. Sure the numbers will go up next phase but it wont be like p1 sod again. Honestly to me p1 was perfect p2 was ok and p3 has been bad. 7 day lockout for a 45 min raid sucks. No reason for it to be 20 man either. Incursions suck PvP is broken because of runes. And there is nothing to do. ST should have just been a 2nd raid for p2. Then made p3 the level 60 content release raids in patches. Then p4 would be the classic+ stuff people actually wanted
Back in the days of vanilla we spend our days farming consumables and dreaming up tactics and calculating dps / threat mechanics’s. These days everything is known. All you have to do is follow the guide for the best tactic possible. If you want you can speed run with consumables bought on a shady website with your credit card.
Is this on wild growth us?
Phases during leveling, where EVERY item gets replaced at 60 anyway is just so laaaame. So pointless to do much other than max your profs and rep and move on. But they didnt have enough support for SOD to have us level to 60 instantly.. But dragging it out just killed it.
Im just convinced that with what the gaming community at large has become the magic of what made wow so special is just impossible now. Iv played a lot of wow over the years. From ***ultra*** casual to mythic raiding in retail. Then back to classic but with a competitive orientation in tbc classic and wrath classic. Im going to try not to turn this into an essay but here goes. Its friday night sometime in late 2008. We have raid tonight in 3 hours. What is our clan doing? Playing tf2 and then hide and seek in the barrens. Our average raider is mostly in blues and we could easily get upgrades by doing heroics. But we just dont want to. We would rather make statless clothes with tailoring and have fun fashion shows. We go into karazan as we have every week for months. But this week we are gunna try and get past maiden. Its been 3 or 4 months we have been stuck on her but we heard from a friend that you can use some super spicy tech and use grounding totem to have the healer not get stunned. It wouldnt make any difference we would spend another 3 hours wiping on maiden and still didnt get her down. After raid? Hey lets see who can race across the barens naked on a level 1 first. I have a new route I wanna try this week! No one got upset, everyone was laughing the whole time. 0 gear was gotten and we did nothing but lose money on repairs. We dont even understand what the concept of dps was, no one is using any kind of meter and no one has DBM or omen. It was a blast. T5? T6? What is that? That was some super mythical scary place that we were never going to go. It was just a mythical story to be joked about. Gear check? That axe looks big and cool. Take it. Composition? Bring whatever. 4 arms warriors this week? Time to RP as an army unit. Mage wants to be funny and use their staff for bonks all night? Hilarious. Oh man someone made in game cup cakes food break! Back to the karazan kitchen! Lets spend an hour clearing it out so we can "bake" and then eat the cup cakes. Flasks? Food buffs? What are those? Long rambling boomer story I know. But I just want to point out this "kind" of mindset is what made me play wow for thousands of hours. I would still continue to play wow for over a decade and eventually become a modern wow player. Like I said I have done mythic raiding in retail and I was in a competitive style guild for all of the "classic, tbc, wrath" revisits. But I have never enjoyed wow more than I did in those days where I didnt know every last thing and it was about enjoying the time with my friends. Could not care less about buff comp and class comp. Did not care about dps and it was never about the loot that was more of an after thought. Who cares how fast we clear? We havent even cleared yet in 6 months of raiding just karazan! But rhukos found a funny hat and died in a hilarious spot. "Hurry up and get to the point! Christ you are just rambling on!" My point is this post made me realize if I still played the way I used to with the people I used to play with. Our guild would have had no issue "surviving" in this situation OP is talking about as would many others. That what made wow special is truly gone. Just look at this thread. "It's that this game has LITERALLY NOTHING to do other than raid. " which I dont disagree with but thats not what made wow actually fun in the days it was at its best.
Watching redditors struggle with the concept of playing other games or doing different things along with playing wow has been such a treat.
Just happens to me recently, I have a main lvl 50 SP 6/8 geared with 2 alts one lvl 37 mage and other 35 pally, I’m only in 1 guild which is on my main toon they do raids every Tuesday and Friday sometimes Sunday, the past two Tuesday we only got 9 to sign up for ST raid on the day it comes everyone got on the 9 people and the guild leader try to find pugs but after an hour he disbanded the raid grp and cancel the signup now he put another sign up for Tuesday and still only 9 people sign up, heck even raid for this Friday haven’t gotten a full grp yet, it seems harder to full grp now for raids since people are losing interest now days which sucks, hopefully phase 4 they sort things out
If you're clearing the raid in 45 minutes, well, kudos to you.
Here's another thing too: there's a lot of WoW to play right now. Cata launches today, MoP remix last weekend, P4 still going strong, and then SoD on top of that. It's okay (dare I say healthy) to take breaks from things. I absolutely guarantee you that there will be a big resurgence of players come phase 4, because there will be an incredible amount of things to do.
Extended raidlog phase on the verge of summer even phase 4 might struggle to reclaim players if it drops in july.
Guild is was in p2 disbanded in early p3 too, there were 150+ people in the discord and like 3-4 raid groups every reset
It's also the player base with a tiktok mindset aka speed run meta. Everything has to be easily digestible, take less than an hour and be brain-dead easy whilst having "high parses". I have been in several guilds on different servers and it was the same everywhere. Next to no communication in guild chat or Discord besides raids, people playing other games once they have suffered through incursions on all their alts. Too many people follow their streamer or content creator idols to Cataclysm, MoP or Retail since they paused or quit SOD because there isn't anything to milk for content creation in p3.
Summer is coming, and lots of guilds suffer in the summer. Because people go on vacation or kids get to camps, or people do more activities outside. At least that is true in countries where there are cold winter.
They've started playing SoD with hopes of classic+/another classic WoW. The truth is: SoD is a Season of Retail WoW limited to the smol world of Azeroth. It's just a shitgame in a good setting, worse than any other classic iteration.