[Solace]

Originally Posted by Vexx

Take a visit to the old Everquest world and witness desolate lands and cities galore.

Once a population stabilizes at the upper end levels, the game-devs would have to create reasons for the account holders to roll new characters. Having them redo the same development leveling storyline becomes painful.

WoW suffers a lot from "whine-engineering" .... (wah, its too hard! wah, I have to walk! wah, it hurts to die!) but most of the other MMOs have fallen to those whines as well over time.

sigh.... the never-ending quest for an MMO that emphasizes some thinking and you die hard if you are careless.

Everquest as a world died when they put in that stupid Plane of Knowledge - and ran with it. I understood the need for smoother transportation because of the expanding world but they went too far in my opinion. I'm happy that Blizzard at least *tries* to make the older areas relevant, through Holiday Events, revamps, quests, or forcing players to go back to old cities by not including vital services in expansion cities (auction house, trainers).

But basically the problem with most MMO's is that as more and more people reach higher levels the balance shifts from a lot of one group running around to another. People want to progression their favorite class further and further, and it's not productive to make another character and focus on that one, and another and so on. So once they cap out the level, they spend time gearing, experiencing high end content, and have little desire to constantly replay older content.

It's an age issue mainly. The initial high interest creates an artificial bloom of players that doesn't even out as newer players join. So after the bloom is over a few months after release, newer players don't get to experience the larger leveling population until the next expansion when the levels increase again.

It's a design flaw but only in the sense that leveling for many players is just a means to an end. They consider max level where the best parts of the game are, and everything else is just a stepping stone to that.

I will say this about WoW though - it's probably a bit too lenient about player mistakes but I do not miss Everquest's level losses and corpse runs one bit.

As far as server population goes I believe that's one of the larger flaws of a faction based system (it effectively splits a server in half), and honestly the faction imbalances have created a need for Blizzard to condense servers a little bit. Not because the population has declined drastically like a lot of people have proclaimed, but because the factions per server can be extremely unbalanced to the point of being desolate for some sides.

The servers that were released with The Burning Crusade had this problem, the amount of players rolling Horde for Blood Elves far exceeded the players rolling Alliance. Because many of these servers were PvP ruleset, players on the Alliance side eventually became frustrated with not finding groups, constantly being attacked and outnumbered by Horde players, and left for servers with better populations.

Originally Posted by MidnightViper88

I don't play WoW at all, but just as a general spectator, it must be dying out of they hire people like Mr. T and William Shatner to try to convince you that even celebrities have the time to play such a game...

The WoW universe and its community are very heavy on pop culture references. The player base grows quite a bit every year, they really don't need Mr. T telling people to play.