Stop with the 10 million players crap. Don't forget the majority of those 10 million players are from the Asian markets where Blizzard makes less money from compared to the European and North American markets.
And to all the fanbois: THE NORTH AMERICAN MARKET IS STAGNATING AND POSSIBLY DECLINING. Same with the European market.
I cancelled my subscription and now I doubt I will be coming back for Wrath of the Lich King as I had originally planned and so have many other people I know.
I'm all for personal arena ratings for arena gear but needing personal rating, regardless of what it is, for the non-arena gear is not a bright idea. Assuming that you still have to do battlegrounds to get these items then requiring an arena rating to purchase BG rewards is the stupidest idea Blizzard have ever had. Personal ratings for the 5 set pieces and all weapons (including wands) is a great idea. But arena ratings for BG rewards is beyond moronic.
No the majority is not in asia... they have others games there. For many players wow was the first mmorpg, and thats why they will most likely coming back over and over again. lizzard has enough money to analyse the market and develop the game in the right direction.
WAR runs a good marketing campain, interessting for younger and older people. I believe they will also get a playerbase around 1 million and will be the second succsesfull mmo after wow. The experience from daoc + the ip of warhammer is a great mix.
This e-sport crap I dont like too. But nobody force me to do this, so I dont understand the problem. Well and I think for every whining player troll there are 10 players who likes the new stuff and quitly enjoy the game, so wow will last for a very long time.
No the majority is not in asia... they have others games there. For many players wow was the first mmorpg, and thats why they will most likely coming back over and over again. lizzard has enough money to analyse the market and develop the game in the right direction. WAR runs a good marketing campain, interessting for younger and older people. I believe they will also get a playerbase around 1 million and will be the second succsesfull mmo after wow. The experience from daoc + the ip of warhammer is a great mix. This e-sport crap I dont like too. But nobody force me to do this, so I dont understand the problem. Well and I think for every whining player troll there are 10 players who likes the new stuff and quitly enjoy the game, so wow will last for a very long time.
According to those estimates 5.5/10 of those 10 million are Asian. Yes, that chart is an estimate but if you have anything more reliable than please tell me. Regardless if the Asian market is the majority or not it is biggest market by a long margin.
WoW in North America has only gained 500,000 new subscribers in the past year whereas Asia has picked up 1 million
By the way Lineage has dropped 2 million + players in the last few years and Lineage II around 1 million. Asians play WoW.
Nevertheless wow still has around 4-5 million European and North American subscribers but it will be interesting in the upcoming months to see what happens to those numbers. With AoC to come out and WotLK still a long way off do you honestly expect that WoW will not haemorrhage subscribers? Old content + new games and things look tough for WoW in the European and North American markets. 1-1.5 million subscribers lost in those markets is a safe prediction
No the majority is not in asia... they have others games there. For many players wow was the first mmorpg, and thats why they will most likely coming back over and over again. lizzard has enough money to analyse the market and develop the game in the right direction. WAR runs a good marketing campain, interessting for younger and older people. I believe they will also get a playerbase around 1 million and will be the second succsesfull mmo after wow. The experience from daoc + the ip of warhammer is a great mix. This e-sport crap I dont like too. But nobody force me to do this, so I dont understand the problem. Well and I think for every whining player troll there are 10 players who likes the new stuff and quitly enjoy the game, so wow will last for a very long time.
According to those estimates 5.5/10 of those 10 million are Asian. Yes, that chart is an estimate but if you have anything more reliable than please tell me. Regardless if the Asian market is the majority or not it is biggest market by a long margin.
WoW in North America has only gained 500,000 new subscribers in the past year whereas Asia has picked up 1 million
By the way Lineage has dropped 2 million + players in the last few years and Lineage II around 1 million. Asians play WoW.
Nevertheless wow still has around 4-5 million European and North American subscribers but it will be interesting in the upcoming months to see what happens to those numbers. With AoC to come out and WotLK still a long way off do you honestly expect that WoW will not haemorrhage subscribers? Old content + new games and things look tough for WoW in the European and North American markets. 1-1.5 million subscribers lost in those markets is a safe prediction
Of course WOW will lose players, the game is going on a second expansion. Most MMOs lose a whole lot more than WOW has by this time. Just know, many people said LOTR would cut into the playerbase...ya right. Plenty of people will go play AoC and WAR. Plenty of people will also come back when their expectations aren't met.
10 Million accounts are 10 million accounts. Fine, ignore the entire Asian market and compare numbers. WOW still blows every MMO away. Got a problem? Do those numbers some how matter to your enjoyment or bitterness? You must be bitter because why would a happy person give a crap about population numbers?
[[ DEAD ]] - Funny - I deleted my account on the site using the cancel account button. Forum user is separate and still exists with no way of deleting it. Delete it admins. Do it, this ends now.
This e-sport crap I dont like too. But nobody force me to do this, so I dont understand the problem. Well and I think for every whining player troll there are 10 players who likes the new stuff and quitly enjoy the game, so wow will last for a very long time.
If you want to PvP at the endgame, you have to do Arena and thats all there is to it. Any other statement to the contrary is BS. The whole 70 bracket was handled very poorly from what I could tell. As a fresh 70, I had the lifespan of a fly in battlegrounds and couldn't do much more than make a buzzing sound in the other teams ears. I was in for one hell of a long, tedious gear grind that required Arena gear for me to be effective.
Beyond the Arena controversy, there is the oft-dismissed profession issues. With the release of the expansion, they implemented jewel crafting. Jewel crafting was a great profession that actually worked for everyone, and was vastly superior to all of the other professions. Instead of taking what they learned from jewel crafting and applying it to other professions, they destroyed jewel crafting. I anticipate a repeat of this in the next expansion with the new Inscription profession.
Now read this next segment if you intend to play WotLK, its lengthy but you will see my point at the end:
What finally sealed the deal for me with WoW had to do with a problem inherent in the game. Large mobs out in the world tend to evade bug. I went to a lot of trouble collecting a lot of X to summon Y in a dangerous spot, so that Y evade bugged and all of X disappeared. GMs would not restore X unless I burned one of my limited account restorations. I followed up on the customer service forum where I was more or less told to screw off by people whom I am 100% were Blizzard employees. After they had their bit, an official came in and said the same thing with the added threat that they just may not ever offer me the chance to use my limited account restorations again.
Limited account restorations are meant for user side errors, like if you deleted a character and changed your mind later, otherwise they wouldn't be limited. It'd be like saying Blizzard only ever intends to fix X number of problems and errors that the game causes you, which I think we can agree is insane. Sure enough I encountered that latter argument in a phone call to them, and they were desperate for me to just take the hit for what happened. Besides the person on the line being really rude, I feel like they were trying to trick me into a terrible deal- to take the offer of using an account restoration this one time, would mean that I ever thought it was okay, and that they would do it again in the future.
How does this story matter to any of you? Because from the looks of it, WotLK has a ton of these huge monsters that are prone to evade bugs. They do not scale the center of gravity to the model size. Durn the Hungerer and the Netherwing patriarch are other well known examples of this problem. It's very likely that you will have a bunch of quests to summon a monster with a huge model out in the world, and you will be put in the same situation I was in.
___________________ Sadly, I see storm clouds on the horizon. A faint stench of Vanguard is in the air.-Kien
Just know, many people said LOTR would cut into the playerbase...ya right. Plenty of people will go play AoC and WAR. Plenty of people will also come back when their expectations aren't met.
Actually a lot of people have quit WoW to play LotRO, especially recently, and they are staying there.
10 Million accounts are 10 million accounts.
I guess as far as Blizzard is concerned. However, I couldn't care less about the asian accounts. As far as I am concerned, there are only maybe 2 million players in NA active at the moment.
You must be bitter because why would a happy person give a crap about population numbers?
Actually happy people are the ones who love to talk about the numbers. Thats pretty much what fans do, in fact. They revel in the success, and numbers are a universal way to show it off. Go into the WoW forums, and the first thing people will use as a defense are the population numbers.
___________________ Sadly, I see storm clouds on the horizon. A faint stench of Vanguard is in the air.-Kien
Of course WOW will lose players, the game is going on a second expansion. Most MMOs lose a whole lot more than WOW has by this time. Just know, many people said LOTR would cut into the playerbase...ya right. Plenty of people will go play AoC and WAR. Plenty of people will also come back when their expectations aren't met. 10 Million accounts are 10 million accounts. Fine, ignore the entire Asian market and compare numbers. WOW still blows every MMO away. Got a problem? Do those numbers some how matter to your enjoyment or bitterness? You must be bitter because why would a happy person give a crap about population numbers?
Who are you to decide if someone is bitter or happy because he or she discusses subscriber numbers? To suggest that I am bitter because I am discussing subscribtion numbers for WoW is specious to say the least.
I never said LOTRO would kill WoW. I hadn't even heard of LORTO until a few days before it was released. Anyway, LORTO is one of the few mmorpg's gaining in number. Theres been a quite a few people leave WoW for LORTO. Hell, I even know people who left WoW to go to D&D and Vanguard.
The difference is that Age of Conan and Warhammer are much much much better known than any other rival mmorpg (does WoW even qualify as an mmorpg anymore?). Do you honestly expect WoW to have this market share forever? Even countrike (crap game it is) has lost a players to the Battlefield series and especially CoD4 (both crap games) in recent times.
I'm not ignoring the Asian markets. I don't know how well AoC and Warhammer will do in the Asian markets. As someone pointed out earlier, Asia has its own games, I assume he was referring to the Lineage series, but in recent years they have taken a beating from WoW. Also, the biggest and most profitable markets are from the North American and European markets where they pay a flat $15 a month. In places like China they pay something like 4 cents an hour to play and Blizzard do not get the full amount of that 4 cents. 1500 divided by 4 = 375. I doubt the average Chinese wow player plays 375 hours a month. Thats over 12 hours a day. And even if a person does play 375 hours a month then he/she only generates the same amount of money as a European or North American monthly subscriber - and that money has to be shared with the company running WoW in China.
washo - first, you seem very angry and hate everything.
Second, you have the per hour figures wrong, in China you buy a game card which has like 66 hours of game time on it. These game cards go for like 30rmb($1 = 7.5rmb) which means a lot more than 4 cents to play.
Also, included in the 5.5 million Asians are Koreans and Japanese. Koreans pay a lot, Japanese I dont know.
But none of this matters because you hate WoW so much you obviously have no interest in logic or reason.
This e-sport crap I dont like too. But nobody force me to do this, so I dont understand the problem. Well and I think for every whining player troll there are 10 players who likes the new stuff and quitly enjoy the game, so wow will last for a very long time.
If you want to PvP at the endgame, you have to do Arena and thats all there is to it. Any other statement to the contrary is BS. The whole 70 bracket was handled very poorly from what I could tell. As a fresh 70, I had the lifespan of a fly in battlegrounds and couldn't do much more than make a buzzing sound in the other teams ears. I was in for one hell of a long, tedious gear grind that required Arena gear for me to be effective.
Sounds to me like you haven't played in a while. What you said above was true about a year ago. Then they started making the previous season's Arena gear available with BG tokens. People still complained that BG tokens were too tough to get because everyone in there had resilience and you had to take your lumps until you saved enough tokens to get some gear with resilience. So Blizzard listened and in 2.4 they introduced a new set for every class of 5 pieces of gear with resilience and all you had to do to get it was to become honored with the 5 outland reps of Honor Hold, Cenerion Expedition, Lower City, Sha'Tar and Keepers of Time.
You can get to honored rep with Honor Hold, Cenerion Expedition, Lower City and the Sha'Tar just by doing quests in outland. It requires absolutely no grinding whatsoever, just do the quests while you level up to 70 and you'll get there. With Keepers of time you have to run an instance or 2 and that's it. When you hit 70, just go buy the gear from each vendor, costs around 15-20g apiece which takes about an hour or 2 to get doing dailies. It's not epic gear, it's superior (blue) but it's decent enough to be viable in BG's. Then start running BG's and within a day or 2 you can start to replace the Blue's with Epics 1 piece at a time. Before you know it you have Arena quality gear and you did ABSOLUTELY NO ARENA'S EVER!
Now read this next segment if you intend to play WotLK, its lengthy but you will see my point at the end:
What finally sealed the deal for me with WoW had to do with a problem inherent in the game. Large mobs out in the world tend to evade bug. I went to a lot of trouble collecting a lot of X to summon Y in a dangerous spot, so that Y evade bugged and all of X disappeared. GMs would not restore X unless I burned one of my limited account restorations. I followed up on the customer service forum where I was more or less told to screw off by people whom I am 100% were Blizzard employees. After they had their bit, an official came in and said the same thing with the added threat that they just may not ever offer me the chance to use my limited account restorations again.
Limited account restorations are meant for user side errors, like if you deleted a character and changed your mind later, otherwise they wouldn't be limited. It'd be like saying Blizzard only ever intends to fix X number of problems and errors that the game causes you, which I think we can agree is insane. Sure enough I encountered that latter argument in a phone call to them, and they were desperate for me to just take the hit for what happened. Besides the person on the line being really rude, I feel like they were trying to trick me into a terrible deal- to take the offer of using an account restoration this one time, would mean that I ever thought it was okay, and that they would do it again in the future.
How does this story matter to any of you? Because from the looks of it, WotLK has a ton of these huge monsters that are prone to evade bugs. They do not scale the center of gravity to the model size. Durn the Hungerer and the Netherwing patriarch are other well known examples of this problem. It's very likely that you will have a bunch of quests to summon a monster with a huge model out in the world, and you will be put in the same situation I was in.
First off, Durn the Hungerer is not summoned, he freely walks around and all you have to do is find him and kill him so if he evades, you're not out anything except the chance to kill him right then. If you submit a ticket, they'll fix him or you can just wait till he resets on his own. Not sure about Netherwing Patriarch.
As far as the problem you had, I don't understand why you didn't just take the limited account restoration option and be happy about it. This is the first I've ever even heard of such of thing and have never heard of anyone even using it before. The fact that they even offered it to you tells me they were trying to help but apparently you didn't appreciate the help they were trying to offer. I sympathize that you didn't cause the issue, however you cut off your nose to spite your face. When Blizz says "oops we made a mistake we'll give you a do over only this is the last one your gonna get", the correct response is "Thank you very much".
I'm sitting here grinning at all the negative vibs some of these guys are giving WoW. I mean come on, the game's going on 4 years old. Of COURSE it will lose players, hell even a few of my friends have left and came back. That's what happens to a game that's ESTABLISHED and deserving of their place in gaming history. By the way before any of you try to point out that I may lack a sane mind I actually played LoTRO and canceled. Don't get me wrong it was a good game but it didn't hold my interested, besides I had time "invested" in WoW already (well that and my friends and wife didn't seem to be interested in LoTRO). But that's another battle these new MMOs have to face (convincing not only players but their entourages).
I'm sorry to say but WoW is a well polished game with TONS of content and a developer that's not blind enough to ignore how it's core group of subscribers are changing their playing habits. They saw the drop off of big guilds with 40-man raids, they saw the tedious, unforgivable grindfest of BG PvPing ranks, they saw the inflexible Tier sets and the need for multiple sets for certain classes. And trust me I saw developers KILL their own games listening to the wrong group of players. UO and the spilt worlds, SWG and the call for jedi, DAoC and the popular Albion faction.....all these and more examples of bad input from players out there that ruined their respective MMOs. But that's the difference between listening to the voices of 200k as appose to 10mil ( I hate to used that figure again)
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
The more I watch what the current development team is doing to WoW, the more I'm convinced they've gotten so high off of their good publicity, that they believe they can do no wrong. What prompted this little outburst from me? Well, ever since their introduction last year, arenas have been a point of contention; the developers have rebalanced PvE and non-arena PvP around them, and then a few months ago actually announced that they're decided to turn WoW into an "e-sport". As if these the recent trend towards "World of Arenacraft" wasn't enough, the devs have now decided that gear gotten from BGs will require an arena rating. Most of the playerbase (including quite a few arena players, from the posts I've read) haven't been happy with arena becoming the new raiding of WoW (meaning that everything is balanced around it), and so Blizzard goes and now tells anyone who wants to do any kind of organized PvP that they'll have to do arena to buy their gear? This does not sound like a good business decision, as is demonstrated by the huge uproar on their forums, with BG PvPers, PvEers and arena players alike all teaming up to bash this as a horrible idea. So here's my question: does whoever makes these sorts of decisions at Blizz look at the same market as the rest of us? Do they really think having arena take over the game is going to stave of Age off Conan (which comes out next month)? Do they not realize that pissing off the majority of the game's player base isn't something you can get away with when there's competition on the horizon, sometimes only a month or so away? What are they thinking?
yep the whole focus of pvp is arenas now. now that you have to have arena ratings in order to get bgs reward is stupid. it's the reason i canceled my account it will expire may 8th...1 month shy of being 3yrs. i defended the game up until this point.
washo - first, you seem very angry and hate everything. Second, you have the per hour figures wrong, in China you buy a game card which has like 66 hours of game time on it. These game cards go for like 30rmb($1 = 7.5rmb) which means a lot more than 4 cents to play. Also, included in the 5.5 million Asians are Koreans and Japanese. Koreans pay a lot, Japanese I dont know. But none of this matters because you hate WoW so much you obviously have no interest in logic or reason.
Regardless of what the Chinese pay for WoW, it is a well known fact that a lot of the money generated in China goes to The9 who are the licensed operators in China. Given that Asia wow only has 1 million more subscribers than Europe + North America it is say to that WoW Asia makes less profit for Blizzard than Europe + North America. China makes up a big chunk of the Asian wow market. But the Asian market has the biggest growth potential.
I am a critic of WoW and I'm entitled to be. Played the game for a long and put a lot of effort into it. Or am I now allowed freedom of speech on this matter because you don't like it?
The Blizzard devs can do what they want because no matter what 10 million of you will subscribe and spend countless hours grinding away characters restricted to levels and classes so you can cap out and participate in boring Macro PvP.
washo - first, you seem very angry and hate everything. Second, you have the per hour figures wrong, in China you buy a game card which has like 66 hours of game time on it. These game cards go for like 30rmb($1 = 7.5rmb) which means a lot more than 4 cents to play. Also, included in the 5.5 million Asians are Koreans and Japanese. Koreans pay a lot, Japanese I dont know. But none of this matters because you hate WoW so much you obviously have no interest in logic or reason.
Regardless of what the Chinese pay for WoW, it is a well known fact that a lot of the money generated in China goes to The9 who are the licensed operators in China. Given that Asia wow only has 1 million more subscribers than Europe + North America it is say to that WoW Asia makes less profit for Blizzard than Europe + North America. China makes up a big chunk of the Asian wow market. But the Asian market has the biggest growth potential.
I am a critic of WoW and I'm entitled to be. Played the game for a long and put a lot of effort into it. Or am I now allowed freedom of speech on this matter because you don't like it?
Well his figures works out to a whopping .06 cents per hour for play time, ya a long way from .04 cents, anyone else up for splitting hairs?
Do they not realize that pissing off the majority of the game's player base isn't something you can get away with when there's competition on the horizon, sometimes only a month or so away? What are they thinking?
They're thinking, "What competition?" And guess what? They're right. AoC isn't competition for WoW.
Thats what you think
Many people are quitting wow because of the stupid stuff the developers are doing
Then again,i dont want any of the wow community to come over to AOC because i think it will destroy the game,specially any of those 5 year old fanbois that play it
Just because it has "Blizzard" Plasterd all over it doesnt mean its gods gift to mankind
Im glad the season 4 non-set epics will require a personal rating. When they introduced the personal rating requirement with season 3 I thought it didnt go far enough. I think season 4 is a little leinent too. No more "welfare epics". No more scrub noobs grinding out arena points by losing 10 games a week or cheating. I swear, it really is the players that are screwing up WoW. First everyone complains about "welfare epics" and now people are complaining that they cant get "welfare epics". Make up your minds people.
yeah then there is people that can raid get badges out of kara and get some of the bg/arena gear with badges which is a real interesting way of getting pvp gear and trading tier tokens in for season pieces too.
i agree that blizzard has lost there minds a little bit, prebc pvp was pretty balanced because it was based around large group pvp and 1v1, pve was also pretty balanced, once arenas came into the picture they started attempting to balance everything around it, since then every class has gotten nerfed/buffed like no tomorrow causing specific classes to suffer tremendously and others to benefit, the ones that got nerfed are now also suffering in pve which is sad really...
im just hoping that with the next tier of talents and wotlk gear/skills pvp gets balanced again
I just quit... I didn't like the direction the game was going so after 3 years it's time to go outside and see whats going on in the world. I'm ready for something new, I'm not sure if AoC or WAR are it though... need to do some research...
Strange, I have a feeling the game is going in the same direction it always has. Play, get loot, pwn noobs, get bored, get a friend in, get loot together and pwn more noobs....
It seems that only diference is that now, there is more ways to get there. Anyone, except soloers can find a way to do it. Even soloers can get "beta" gear, not quite good as the top stuff but still, much better than beeing oficialy steamrolled everywhere you go just because you didn't do the same thing everyone else does.
One thing is true though, you cant use WoW to cure real life deficiencys efective as you could before.
They are most likely smoking the failure of Failcom. They must be woundering what all the hype was about infact I doubt it even bothered them lol. Another 1 bites the dust lol.
10 blizzard- 0 the rest.
Lotro-Failure so called wow killer we were told by the faonbois
TR - another next gen wow killer we were told
PoTBS- for months told by fanbois it will revolutionise the mmo market
Aoc- lol next gen wow killer LMAO, after countless delays.
Vanguard-wow killer yeah right, but still a seamless world compared to Aoc lol.
War- Delays and more delays wont be released until mid next year if then lol.
EQ2-Failure
Marvel online-Microsoft were so scared they scrapped it lol, now crytpitc going the same route and even more boring than b4.
Fury-Folded
ETC ETC ETC ETC
while you keep saying wow will die, it goes from strength to strength. While all the other games die lol. What game will die first you should ask besides from wow lol. The only thing ever going to destroy wow will be Blizzards next mmo and thats a few years away, so like all things have cycles wow will gradually slow down in momentum.
They are most likely smoking the failure of Failcom. They must be woundering what all the hype was about infact I doubt it even bothered them lol. Another 1 bites the dust lol.
Wow you can call a race before it even starts, that is amazing. Gonna call you the Great Demz2BamBinni!!! Also Fox News is looking for people like you, you sir have a future!!!!!
Note: I don't believe AOC will be a WoW killer. WoW is like a war experienced general, it will never die, it will just faaaaaaaddddddddeeeeee away. More people will eventually move to other mediums, MMO's are becoming varied and we actually have choice today. And each one of those "other" MMO's will have WoW to thank for introducing new people to the genre and then boring them to tears allowing them to experience variety.
Comments
Stop with the 10 million players crap. Don't forget the majority of those 10 million players are from the Asian markets where Blizzard makes less money from compared to the European and North American markets.
And to all the fanbois: THE NORTH AMERICAN MARKET IS STAGNATING AND POSSIBLY DECLINING. Same with the European market.
I cancelled my subscription and now I doubt I will be coming back for Wrath of the Lich King as I had originally planned and so have many other people I know.
I'm all for personal arena ratings for arena gear but needing personal rating, regardless of what it is, for the non-arena gear is not a bright idea. Assuming that you still have to do battlegrounds to get these items then requiring an arena rating to purchase BG rewards is the stupidest idea Blizzard have ever had. Personal ratings for the 5 set pieces and all weapons (including wands) is a great idea. But arena ratings for BG rewards is beyond moronic.
No the majority is not in asia... they have others games there. For many players wow was the first mmorpg, and thats why they will most likely coming back over and over again. lizzard has enough money to analyse the market and develop the game in the right direction.
WAR runs a good marketing campain, interessting for younger and older people. I believe they will also get a playerbase around 1 million and will be the second succsesfull mmo after wow. The experience from daoc + the ip of warhammer is a great mix.
This e-sport crap I dont like too. But nobody force me to do this, so I dont understand the problem. Well and I think for every whining player troll there are 10 players who likes the new stuff and quitly enjoy the game, so wow will last for a very long time.
According to those estimates 5.5/10 of those 10 million are Asian. Yes, that chart is an estimate but if you have anything more reliable than please tell me. Regardless if the Asian market is the majority or not it is biggest market by a long margin.
WoW in North America has only gained 500,000 new subscribers in the past year whereas Asia has picked up 1 million
By the way Lineage has dropped 2 million + players in the last few years and Lineage II around 1 million. Asians play WoW.
Nevertheless wow still has around 4-5 million European and North American subscribers but it will be interesting in the upcoming months to see what happens to those numbers. With AoC to come out and WotLK still a long way off do you honestly expect that WoW will not haemorrhage subscribers? Old content + new games and things look tough for WoW in the European and North American markets. 1-1.5 million subscribers lost in those markets is a safe prediction
According to those estimates 5.5/10 of those 10 million are Asian. Yes, that chart is an estimate but if you have anything more reliable than please tell me. Regardless if the Asian market is the majority or not it is biggest market by a long margin.
WoW in North America has only gained 500,000 new subscribers in the past year whereas Asia has picked up 1 million
By the way Lineage has dropped 2 million + players in the last few years and Lineage II around 1 million. Asians play WoW.
Nevertheless wow still has around 4-5 million European and North American subscribers but it will be interesting in the upcoming months to see what happens to those numbers. With AoC to come out and WotLK still a long way off do you honestly expect that WoW will not haemorrhage subscribers? Old content + new games and things look tough for WoW in the European and North American markets. 1-1.5 million subscribers lost in those markets is a safe prediction
Of course WOW will lose players, the game is going on a second expansion. Most MMOs lose a whole lot more than WOW has by this time. Just know, many people said LOTR would cut into the playerbase...ya right. Plenty of people will go play AoC and WAR. Plenty of people will also come back when their expectations aren't met.
10 Million accounts are 10 million accounts. Fine, ignore the entire Asian market and compare numbers. WOW still blows every MMO away. Got a problem? Do those numbers some how matter to your enjoyment or bitterness? You must be bitter because why would a happy person give a crap about population numbers?
Probably the best damn Cubans around.
Beyond the Arena controversy, there is the oft-dismissed profession issues. With the release of the expansion, they implemented jewel crafting. Jewel crafting was a great profession that actually worked for everyone, and was vastly superior to all of the other professions. Instead of taking what they learned from jewel crafting and applying it to other professions, they destroyed jewel crafting. I anticipate a repeat of this in the next expansion with the new Inscription profession.
Now read this next segment if you intend to play WotLK, its lengthy but you will see my point at the end:
What finally sealed the deal for me with WoW had to do with a problem inherent in the game. Large mobs out in the world tend to evade bug. I went to a lot of trouble collecting a lot of X to summon Y in a dangerous spot, so that Y evade bugged and all of X disappeared. GMs would not restore X unless I burned one of my limited account restorations. I followed up on the customer service forum where I was more or less told to screw off by people whom I am 100% were Blizzard employees. After they had their bit, an official came in and said the same thing with the added threat that they just may not ever offer me the chance to use my limited account restorations again.
Limited account restorations are meant for user side errors, like if you deleted a character and changed your mind later, otherwise they wouldn't be limited. It'd be like saying Blizzard only ever intends to fix X number of problems and errors that the game causes you, which I think we can agree is insane. Sure enough I encountered that latter argument in a phone call to them, and they were desperate for me to just take the hit for what happened. Besides the person on the line being really rude, I feel like they were trying to trick me into a terrible deal- to take the offer of using an account restoration this one time, would mean that I ever thought it was okay, and that they would do it again in the future.
How does this story matter to any of you? Because from the looks of it, WotLK has a ton of these huge monsters that are prone to evade bugs. They do not scale the center of gravity to the model size. Durn the Hungerer and the Netherwing patriarch are other well known examples of this problem. It's very likely that you will have a bunch of quests to summon a monster with a huge model out in the world, and you will be put in the same situation I was in.
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Sadly, I see storm clouds on the horizon. A faint stench of Vanguard is in the air.-Kien
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/12/13/
10 Million accounts are 10 million accounts.
I guess as far as Blizzard is concerned. However, I couldn't care less about the asian accounts. As far as I am concerned, there are only maybe 2 million players in NA active at the moment.
You must be bitter because why would a happy person give a crap about population numbers?
Actually happy people are the ones who love to talk about the numbers. Thats pretty much what fans do, in fact. They revel in the success, and numbers are a universal way to show it off. Go into the WoW forums, and the first thing people will use as a defense are the population numbers.
___________________
Sadly, I see storm clouds on the horizon. A faint stench of Vanguard is in the air.-Kien
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/12/13/
Who are you to decide if someone is bitter or happy because he or she discusses subscriber numbers? To suggest that I am bitter because I am discussing subscribtion numbers for WoW is specious to say the least.
I never said LOTRO would kill WoW. I hadn't even heard of LORTO until a few days before it was released. Anyway, LORTO is one of the few mmorpg's gaining in number. Theres been a quite a few people leave WoW for LORTO. Hell, I even know people who left WoW to go to D&D and Vanguard.
The difference is that Age of Conan and Warhammer are much much much better known than any other rival mmorpg (does WoW even qualify as an mmorpg anymore?). Do you honestly expect WoW to have this market share forever? Even countrike (crap game it is) has lost a players to the Battlefield series and especially CoD4 (both crap games) in recent times.
I'm not ignoring the Asian markets. I don't know how well AoC and Warhammer will do in the Asian markets. As someone pointed out earlier, Asia has its own games, I assume he was referring to the Lineage series, but in recent years they have taken a beating from WoW. Also, the biggest and most profitable markets are from the North American and European markets where they pay a flat $15 a month. In places like China they pay something like 4 cents an hour to play and Blizzard do not get the full amount of that 4 cents. 1500 divided by 4 = 375. I doubt the average Chinese wow player plays 375 hours a month. Thats over 12 hours a day. And even if a person does play 375 hours a month then he/she only generates the same amount of money as a European or North American monthly subscriber - and that money has to be shared with the company running WoW in China.
Want me to go on?
washo - first, you seem very angry and hate everything.
Second, you have the per hour figures wrong, in China you buy a game card which has like 66 hours of game time on it. These game cards go for like 30rmb($1 = 7.5rmb) which means a lot more than 4 cents to play.
Also, included in the 5.5 million Asians are Koreans and Japanese. Koreans pay a lot, Japanese I dont know.
But none of this matters because you hate WoW so much you obviously have no interest in logic or reason.
Sounds to me like you haven't played in a while. What you said above was true about a year ago. Then they started making the previous season's Arena gear available with BG tokens. People still complained that BG tokens were too tough to get because everyone in there had resilience and you had to take your lumps until you saved enough tokens to get some gear with resilience. So Blizzard listened and in 2.4 they introduced a new set for every class of 5 pieces of gear with resilience and all you had to do to get it was to become honored with the 5 outland reps of Honor Hold, Cenerion Expedition, Lower City, Sha'Tar and Keepers of Time.
You can get to honored rep with Honor Hold, Cenerion Expedition, Lower City and the Sha'Tar just by doing quests in outland. It requires absolutely no grinding whatsoever, just do the quests while you level up to 70 and you'll get there. With Keepers of time you have to run an instance or 2 and that's it. When you hit 70, just go buy the gear from each vendor, costs around 15-20g apiece which takes about an hour or 2 to get doing dailies. It's not epic gear, it's superior (blue) but it's decent enough to be viable in BG's. Then start running BG's and within a day or 2 you can start to replace the Blue's with Epics 1 piece at a time. Before you know it you have Arena quality gear and you did ABSOLUTELY NO ARENA'S EVER!
As far as the problem you had, I don't understand why you didn't just take the limited account restoration option and be happy about it. This is the first I've ever even heard of such of thing and have never heard of anyone even using it before. The fact that they even offered it to you tells me they were trying to help but apparently you didn't appreciate the help they were trying to offer. I sympathize that you didn't cause the issue, however you cut off your nose to spite your face. When Blizz says "oops we made a mistake we'll give you a do over only this is the last one your gonna get", the correct response is "Thank you very much".
I'm sitting here grinning at all the negative vibs some of these guys are giving WoW. I mean come on, the game's going on 4 years old. Of COURSE it will lose players, hell even a few of my friends have left and came back. That's what happens to a game that's ESTABLISHED and deserving of their place in gaming history. By the way before any of you try to point out that I may lack a sane mind I actually played LoTRO and canceled. Don't get me wrong it was a good game but it didn't hold my interested, besides I had time "invested" in WoW already (well that and my friends and wife didn't seem to be interested in LoTRO). But that's another battle these new MMOs have to face (convincing not only players but their entourages).
I'm sorry to say but WoW is a well polished game with TONS of content and a developer that's not blind enough to ignore how it's core group of subscribers are changing their playing habits. They saw the drop off of big guilds with 40-man raids, they saw the tedious, unforgivable grindfest of BG PvPing ranks, they saw the inflexible Tier sets and the need for multiple sets for certain classes. And trust me I saw developers KILL their own games listening to the wrong group of players. UO and the spilt worlds, SWG and the call for jedi, DAoC and the popular Albion faction.....all these and more examples of bad input from players out there that ruined their respective MMOs. But that's the difference between listening to the voices of 200k as appose to 10mil ( I hate to used that figure again)
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
yep the whole focus of pvp is arenas now. now that you have to have arena ratings in order to get bgs reward is stupid. it's the reason i canceled my account it will expire may 8th...1 month shy of being 3yrs. i defended the game up until this point.
I am a critic of WoW and I'm entitled to be. Played the game for a long and put a lot of effort into it. Or am I now allowed freedom of speech on this matter because you don't like it?
The Blizzard devs can do what they want because no matter what 10 million of you will subscribe and spend countless hours grinding away characters restricted to levels and classes so you can cap out and participate in boring Macro PvP.
I would say they are doing the right thing.
Tecmo Bowl.
I am a critic of WoW and I'm entitled to be. Played the game for a long and put a lot of effort into it. Or am I now allowed freedom of speech on this matter because you don't like it?
Well his figures works out to a whopping .06 cents per hour for play time, ya a long way from .04 cents, anyone else up for splitting hairs?
Lol
Thats a funny one
Allaince ALWAYS won on my server,if i was lucky i got a few badges a day
I never even knew u get 3 badges from a win until just a few days ago when we actually WON a bg
Are you sure you played level 70 battlegrounds?
They're thinking, "What competition?" And guess what? They're right. AoC isn't competition for WoW.
Thats what you thinkMany people are quitting wow because of the stupid stuff the developers are doing
Then again,i dont want any of the wow community to come over to AOC because i think it will destroy the game,specially any of those 5 year old fanbois that play it
Just because it has "Blizzard" Plasterd all over it doesnt mean its gods gift to mankind
this isn't surprising though, Warcraft 3, Starcraft basically revolves around this. It's Blizzard roots.
yeah then there is people that can raid get badges out of kara and get some of the bg/arena gear with badges which is a real interesting way of getting pvp gear and trading tier tokens in for season pieces too.
i agree that blizzard has lost there minds a little bit, prebc pvp was pretty balanced because it was based around large group pvp and 1v1, pve was also pretty balanced, once arenas came into the picture they started attempting to balance everything around it, since then every class has gotten nerfed/buffed like no tomorrow causing specific classes to suffer tremendously and others to benefit, the ones that got nerfed are now also suffering in pve which is sad really...
im just hoping that with the next tier of talents and wotlk gear/skills pvp gets balanced again
I just quit... I didn't like the direction the game was going so after 3 years it's time to go outside and see whats going on in the world. I'm ready for something new, I'm not sure if AoC or WAR are it though... need to do some research...
Strange, I have a feeling the game is going in the same direction it always has. Play, get loot, pwn noobs, get bored, get a friend in, get loot together and pwn more noobs....
It seems that only diference is that now, there is more ways to get there. Anyone, except soloers can find a way to do it. Even soloers can get "beta" gear, not quite good as the top stuff but still, much better than beeing oficialy steamrolled everywhere you go just because you didn't do the same thing everyone else does.
One thing is true though, you cant use WoW to cure real life deficiencys efective as you could before.
They are most likely smoking the failure of Failcom. They must be woundering what all the hype was about infact I doubt it even bothered them lol. Another 1 bites the dust lol.
10 blizzard- 0 the rest.
Lotro-Failure so called wow killer we were told by the faonbois
TR - another next gen wow killer we were told
PoTBS- for months told by fanbois it will revolutionise the mmo market
Aoc- lol next gen wow killer LMAO, after countless delays.
Vanguard-wow killer yeah right, but still a seamless world compared to Aoc lol.
War- Delays and more delays wont be released until mid next year if then lol.
EQ2-Failure
Marvel online-Microsoft were so scared they scrapped it lol, now crytpitc going the same route and even more boring than b4.
Fury-Folded
ETC ETC ETC ETC
while you keep saying wow will die, it goes from strength to strength. While all the other games die lol. What game will die first you should ask besides from wow lol. The only thing ever going to destroy wow will be Blizzards next mmo and thats a few years away, so like all things have cycles wow will gradually slow down in momentum.
Wow you can call a race before it even starts, that is amazing. Gonna call you the Great Demz2BamBinni!!! Also Fox News is looking for people like you, you sir have a future!!!!!
Note: I don't believe AOC will be a WoW killer. WoW is like a war experienced general, it will never die, it will just faaaaaaaddddddddeeeeee away. More people will eventually move to other mediums, MMO's are becoming varied and we actually have choice today. And each one of those "other" MMO's will have WoW to thank for introducing new people to the genre and then boring them to tears allowing them to experience variety.
Thank you Blizzard!!!