These past few weeks haven’t seen a lot of good news thrown World of Warcraft‘s way. The MMO shed more than a million users over the past year, a development Activision’s CEO called “troubling”. Before that, some of the game’s hardest-core players called it quits, too.
Exodus, on April 26, said it was disbanding as a 25-man raiding guild and had no plans yet to re-form as a 10-man guild. Guild member Killars, in this post, said “this game isn’t to blame,” but rather, “it’s the raiding community,” saying that the competition of top-end raiders carries an “inevitable sort of flaw.
“We’ve basically been killing ourselves off slowly since day one,” Killars wrote. “In the last few years we’ve certainly picked up the pace, but the ‘hardcore raider’ is a dying breed and it’s certainly becoming a more difficult breed to be a part of.”
Killars laments the time commitment and other costs required to get to the top and stay there. “Unfortunately we (hardcore raiders) pushed too hard,” he says. “Tier after tier we just keep adding to the insanity in both farming preparations and actual progressing. It’s almost as if progression itself never really ends after a end tier boss dies. ”
For himself, Killars isn’t quitting; he’s joined another guild. Still, it is not a good sign when hardcore raiding has become too hardcore for the hardcore.
Exodus is dead?! [Facebook, via PCGamesN, h/t Dave Oshry.]
Comments
27 responses to “Top Warcraft Guild Disbands, Blaming The Raiding Community”
Uhh…yeah? It is WoW,
Yeah I’m not quite sure what he meant by that.
The hamster just realised this wheel isn’t actually going anywhere?
Bingo!
He’s talking about is not the progression from tier to tier, he’s talking about once completing a tier there is still an extreme amount of pressure placed on hardcore raiders to constantly keep up that pace by gearing at least two other characters at the same pace, essentially never ending the constant stress of hardcore raiding.
In years gone by hardcore guilds could push themselves to clear content and once they had killed everything and ‘placed’ for that tier they could ease off the throttle untill the next tier comes out. Nowadays it’s non stop go go go.
So, they are basically realizing that being the first to complete a raid no longer gets them the e-peen points that it used to. (in addition to the endless cycle of gear thing)
Dont the hardcore raiders disband every year after the x-pac gets dragged out?
I would be interested to know how many subs blizz hold just in the NA and EU zones these days.
Must get boring doing the same thing over and over. Completing it. Then only to find out it starts all over again with a slight change to the game. I’d get bored too.
There’s a certain amount of irony in people thinking a guild named “Exodus” wouldn’t end this way.
It’s hardly surprising that an MMO of WoW’s age and size is losing subscribers. You can only play a game for so long, and there are so many great alternatives nowadays that it really doesn’t make sense for people new to MMOs to be choosing WoW.
Having tried out a fair few others, RIFT & SWTOR being two of the bigger ones, all they feel like, is that they’re a cheap imitation of WoW, and I ended up going back to WoW because of that. I didn’t want a WoW clone when I stopped playing WoW, but that’s all it felt like I got.
WoW is probably the most friendly MMO to new people I have found. So it really is a good place for people new to MMO’s to start. I started with Runescape though so yeah. That was a while ago now..
I really hope the Elder Scrolls Online can be me my new MMO, I’m tired of going back to WoW. Guild Wars 2 almost did it for me.
Why not come on over to FFXI. That’s something different to WoW 😀
I think they’re looking for something better than WoW, so yeah, FFXI won’t do it. 😉
Oh you.
Yeah, i’ve given up on WoW, though. I just got so bored of the mundane tasks I was doing day in day out.
To be fair, you’ve picked two of the more similar MMOs out there. Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World are both quite different from WoW and neither require a subscription to play. TSW is about $30 and then you can play for free, which is pretty fantastic for a game of it’s quality. Surely new players aren’t actually going to WoW (an old game with a subscription model) when there are modern games that look far better, incorporate different gameplay ideas and only require a one-time purchase.
Well I was specifically told that RIFT & SWTOR were nothing like WoW from mates who had been playing WoW since launch. So yeah, see my disappointment?
PRO TIP: Don’t trust your mates.
Then who I do I trust?! WHO?!
Why, complete strangers of course!
Oh right, good point hadn’t thought about those folk!
I can vouch Rift. I started playing it a few weeks ago.
It takes a lot of things that WoW gets right but is also unique enough to be interesting. You’re not going to feel that lost coming from WoW, but you’re also going to feel that “Oooh this is all new and interesting” feelings you had back in vanilla WoW.
I really feel like Rift perfected leveling though, with Questing/Instant adventures as well as the daily quests for closing rifts and dungeon/warfront dailys. And the talent tree system is insanely better than wow, the amount of option and viability there is is insane.
That said, I didn’t really pick up a lot of the game until around level 35.
This is the reason I can’t get involved in MMOs or other grind-heavy games, the foreknowledge that one day after so much grinding ill look up and realise I’ve wasted my life
Agreed, it kind of makes me wonder if they ever sit back and think “gez, with the amount of time I spent on this game, I could be fluent in another language/know how to play the guitar/have graduated from university…”
Yeah, then we un-sub and pick up a copy of Rocksmith. ^.^
I don’t understand this argument.
Raiding with your guildmates is FUN (or at least it used to be). It’s rewarding clearing raids with your friends and it creates some really great memories.
Believe it or not, playing the game is fun when you’re in your prime of your WoW experience, in fact it’s the most fun I’ve ever had with video games. Looking back on it, it wasn’t at all a waste of time; I met a lot of great people and experienced one of the greatest co-op experiences you can have.
If you’re having fun, it’s not wasted. In fact, having fun is just about the only thing that matters in life.
But Exodus isn’t the top world of warcraft guild… in fact last time I checked they just scraped into the top 10. And they aren’t blaming “the raiding community”, they are blaming the content release schedule :S
He’s not blaming the release schedule, he’s blaming the community. He’s lamenting the viciousness of top level progression raiding (ie. competing for world/server firsts) and that the level of commitment that is now expected of hardcore progression raiders is like trying to run a full marathon at 100m sprint pacing, and it’s because the competition raiding community as a whole pushed it to those levels. There’s literally no rest, it’s all crunch.