I think many people knew this would happen. Once Diablo 3 launched, much of the World of Warcraft had vanished. Part of that was positive. For instance, more ore, herbs and other materials. Part of it was bad: less (good) people for LFR.
The first two days after D3, I noticed that the queue times for LFR had increased in size dramatically. Before the average queue times were between 6 minutes to 10 minutes. Now, the queue times can go up to 20+ minutes. Worse yet, the queue you get into might not necessarily be the section of LFR that you want. So you can easily spend an hour just waiting for LFR. On my warrior, it took me at least 3-4 hours to complete LFR part 2 one night. I was fortunate as she won all the major items she needed. However, the experience was excruciating because of the numerous wipes, bad groups and waiting involved.
Right now, I’ve noticed that LFR is left with mostly bad players. I’ve seen tanks wearing PVP gear and even hunter boots, healers who won’t do a thing, people AoEing tentacles despite being told numerous times to single target tentacles, etc. Not to mention the ninja pullers are far more frequent. But without good players to prevent wipes, you just have nothing more than trouble and hair pulling.
As a result, I contemplated about how all this played out and why D3 had such a major impact over WoW. Here’s some thoughts:
- With the Annual Pass, everyone received D3 for free. Supposedly, the Annual Pass has a huge chunk of subscribers, so many people were diverted either to D3 or the Mists of Panderia Beta.
- Most people are sick of farming LFR. Both D3 and MoP offer new content. The people who already farmed LFR content either moved onto normal or heroic raids or something else.
- The remaining player base in WoW still doing LFR are those working on alts (hence low DPS, etc.), casuals who are completely clueless or low income people who cannot afford the Annual Pass or D3. In the case of low income people, I believe it’s those who are in school (mostly pre-college), especially pre-teens. Hence why you see ton of ninja pulls.
- There will not be any new patches that introduce new content until MoP. As a result, there is almost no motivation to pursue LFR outside of gearing alts. Since the patch is now a few months old, it’s safe to assume that many people have been able to gear up at least one toon.
For myself, I decided to work on alts while the D3 buzz simmers. Not to mention I’ve been playing D3 too so I balance between both games. Just like others.