Blizzard just announced that they are now down to 5.6 Million subscribers from 7.1 Million subscriber last quarter.
I am not surprised. They made a lot of mistakes in the most recent expansion in my opinion. WoW has long been a very alt friendly game and it is not uncommon at all for many players to have a lot of alts. All of those people, the sane ones anyway, ran into a wall with the garrisons being tied to crafting and to some degree character advancement in various ways. For anyone with alts, it quickly became a chore running each one through various daily tasks at the garrison which could chew up a decent amount of time. Naturally, some people mastered this and did it fairly quickly but I think for most mere mortals it became a pain in the rear more than fun the longer they did it.
I invested in maxing out one garrison very nicely, got two alts leveled up and parked in two more garrisons and then just ran out of steam. I just couldn't see coming up with all the gold needed for expansion, the time spent doing all the things one does there, etc. on more toons. I'd had enough after just one time through myself but then I do not live in virtual worlds to the extent I once did when I played EverQuest. I like to have time for other games too, not to mention stuff like personal relationships, going outdoors, watching a movie maybe, etc.
I felt like Warlords took the grind to a whole new level that felt less optional per character to me. Yes, you could actually skip it I guess but those characters would miss a lot as a result.
The other issue was a tendency for the garrisons to isolate players from one another as garrison grinding is largely a solo affair. A lot of casual players would log in and just do that and then have less time to go out into the world with other people perhaps.
Maybe I am overstating some of this stuff and it is just my own subjective view but that's how it all felt to me. I feel separate garrisons were a bad design decision and that a single garrison shared by all characters on the same account, same faction, same server would have been a very good thing that would have cut down on a lot of busy work. I think they went a little overboard with the money sink there as well. It is expensive doing a complete build up of one garrison, never mind a bunch of them and again, I don't know who with a semi-normal life would have time to maintain a bunch of them and still go out and do stuff like I don't know, maybe group, quest, kill monsters?
The other thing is, even if you played just one character which again, in that game is pretty rare, once you tricked out you garrison, maxed crafting if you like doing that and then either maxed just questing if casual or grouping or raiding or whatever there really wasn't anything compelling to do. It just felt like more of the same old same old stuff. I think the game like all MMOs is showing its age.
There is a reveal of the next expansion happening via a live steam presentation on the 6th of this month (so two days from this writing) at noon pacific time I believe it is. There should be info about this on the Battle.net site for anyone interested. I am going to try to catch that and see what they have up their sleeve for the next one. Hopefully it solves some of the problems I note here. It'll be interesting to see where the heck do they go from where they are now with WoW.
) first ran into the problem facing the WoW end game, May 2005, which is the problem for virtually every MMORPG in existence. I accept its limits and move on (not critiquing you) while admitting I've come back several times to visit. 
