(08-28-2015, 10:31 AM)Warren Castille Wrote: Solve for actual number of new players WoW draws with each expansion. WoW had what, ten million subs prior to WoD? Or immediately post-Cata? They lost three to four million over the life of the expansion. If WoW was seeing an influx of new players with each expac, they'd probably be louding "WoW eclipses 25 million accounts" instead of trying to talk about concurrent subscribers. XIV does this, too: They passed two million accounts recently, but didn't disclose active subs.
At this point I feel it's safe to say most people are going back to WoW, not trying it for the first time. XIV's new enough to still get legitimate new blood.
That's all well and good, but what was being discussed was the experience of a new player booting up the game for the first time, and what their interaction with the game would be like, so whether or not people are going back to WoW, or whether or not it is gaining new subs, isn't exactly relevant to the discussion at hand either. As an aside, it seems a little hyperbolic to suggest that no one new at all is trying WoW. This is also shown to be false in Liadan's post. Additionally, I too know a few people that are planning to / already trying WoW in preparation for Legion.
Regarding WoW being a solo game: Only if you want it to be. That's part of the magnificence of player choice. If you want to, you can level up traditionally, do all the dungeons, do whatever. Or you can stick specifically to world-quests. Or you can PvP your way to the top. Or you can roll with a group of buds and explore. Or you can do nothing but slay hard to kill monsters. Or you can jump around the content and level where you want, when you want. Part of the reason why people were somewhat fascinated and / or got a good laugh out of the person that stayed in Pandaria and picked flowers all the way to the level cap is because the idea that you could do that in the first place never even crossed their minds; that's part of the miracle of player choice. It lets you experience a game in a myriad of ways, and perhaps make people think of whether they would like to experience the game that way, too. My own experience was a mixture of dungeons, PvP, and buddy-questing. It was never solitary for me, and I in fact feel much more "alone" in XIV because of its story content, even with a group of friends to talk to.
It seems like a lot of concern here is coming from the idea that "new players won't know the content." To be honest, this situation is no different than no one knowing the content when a new expansion launches. A bunch of people sitting in a boss room on Day 1 aren't going to know what that boss is going to do. Chances are most of the playerbase won't even know what they're supposed to do until at least a month into the expansion, because they're still getting there, and explanations will therefore be necessary. Additionally, if you really feel that that would impact your gameplay experience that much, then coach people through dungeons and tell them to do the same to other people that don't know, or point them to guides and ask them to read. Or, only run with people that have done all the content before you.
Personally, I don't think it takes much more time to say "If you're marked with a meteor, run away from everyone" than it does "you know that thing in <X> bossfight? Yeah do that." The additional effort required is minimal.
I took a break between 2.1 and 3.0, or something like that. I haven't done Turns or Crystal Tower, since those have come up previously in this discussion. If a bossfight called for past mechanics, even though I'm an "old" player, I wouldn't know what to do. That doesn't mean I couldn't learn, and it also doesn't mean that I shouldn't be "playing" the game. As someone else even mentioned, those were intended to be optional pieces of content from the start; would we tell new players to go back to content that is not only old, but also optional in order to ensure that they were on a level that we deemed acceptable?
Forcing a preferred gameplay experience on a person solely for the betterment of your own experience seems somewhat questionable to me.