They already took a 12% hit at the beginning of the year. They're handing out levels now for cash with their new program. Bad news for the game overall Grab some popcorn and watch the titanic.
12% hit the beginning of the year? You are pulling that out your butt. WOW announced in May that it reached 10.9M subscribers, it's highest point ever. WOW continues to hold the #5, #7 and #8 spots on the weekly PC games sales in North America.
They are continueing to make leveling easier because it's a normal state in a 4 year old game that the majority of players are at max level. If you invite a friend to play the game, they don't want that friend to have to spend 3 months leveling alone. They want them to catch up as quick as possible and be able to join their friends. The change in leveling is a result of decreasing subscriptions, instead it is the result of the level cap being raised.
98% of the people here will (re) play the new expansion WotLK. Most will even lie about it here.
Because just everyone wants to be there.
The fans will love it, The haters will hate it, but everyone wants at least see and try it.
The difference with Wow is : most people keep playing it for months, while the other MMO's gather dust after 4 weeks.
---
And there is a big difference between TBC and WotLK: ------>people now actually want to have upgrades on their gear: the times of the old Wow elite grinding raiders are gone forever. Grinding in Wow these days? You gotta be kidding: far too many gold quests and options to even kill one boar to grind.
The modern Wow player is used to it, to have a new gear set every 6 months (be it through PvP, PVE or crafting) and so moving along with the general PVE progress of top guilds.
We all buy new cell phones every year in RL also don't we.
Well Wow is based on this very simple mechanism. We restart consumption every day/week/month/year of our lives and everyone wants to know how it will be tomorrow.
That's why the "it" game won't end soon. We want it to never end even when we "love/hate" it.
12% hit the beginning of the year? You are pulling that out your butt. WOW announced in May that it reached 10.9M subscribers, it's highest point ever. WOW continues to hold the #5, #7 and #8 spots on the weekly PC games sales in North America.
They are continueing to make leveling easier because it's a normal state in a 4 year old game that the majority of players are at max level. If you invite a friend to play the game, they don't want that friend to have to spend 3 months leveling alone. They want them to catch up as quick as possible and be able to join their friends. The change in leveling is a result of decreasing subscriptions, instead it is the result of the level cap being raised.
I'm not pulling that out of my butt. If I'm lying why are they going to extreme in their RAF program?
Making leveling easier should apply to everyone in the game not just those willing to fork over cash. They're just tuning the game into ways to milk money now. Like Item mall games.
WoW fanboi: "lolz 11.5 million customers, itz obviously da best"
I'm not pulling that out of my butt. If I'm lying why are they going to extreme in their RAF program? Making leveling easier should apply to everyone in the game not just those willing to fork over cash. They're just tuning the game into ways to milk money now. Like Item mall games.
Let me ask you something ...:
Does it hurt? Those 10.9 million subs paying for Wow?
It's obvious why they are going to "extreme": They want even more. Wouldn't you ?
I'm not pulling that out of my butt. If I'm lying why are they going to extreme in their RAF program? Making leveling easier should apply to everyone in the game not just those willing to fork over cash. They're just tuning the game into ways to milk money now. Like Item mall games.
Let me ask you something ...:
Does it hurt? Those 10.9 million subs paying for Wow?
It's obvious why they are going to "extreme": They want even more. Wouldn't you ?
Well it's not fair to those 10.9 million who happen to be leveling alts. Why aren't they receiving triple xp for forking over years worth of subscriptions?
I think a few courses in business ethics might be needed here.
WoW fanboi: "lolz 11.5 million customers, itz obviously da best"
I didn't get to vote because you didn't have an appropriate response for me to choose.
WoW's subs will decrease, not because of some other game, but because of WoW itself. Being mind-numbingly boring and obssessively catering to phat lootz uber-trolls.
Blizzard could have done more to refine the old world and make BGs more fun that could have balanced this out, instead we have a ghost-world that exists for solo grinding and a still-not-fun Warsong Gulch.
So I predict the ultimate WoW killer will be ... WoW.
If I could vote (the 'vote' button never appears in these forums for me), I would say the subscriptions will increase due to WOTLK (this is not an option on your poll).
WoW is still the only product of it's kind on the market. All the followup games seem like they're either full of problems, or working as intended but not very well-thought out game ideas.
- Phos
AAH! A troll fire! Quick, pour some Kool-Aid on it!!!
It will get replaced eventually but not anytime in 2008 nor 2009, meanwhile the WoW subscription base is just being chipped by the new mmos that are coming out.
Well lets see. in the past two months I have seen on Argent Dawn the streets of Stromwind go from Bustling to where the hell is everybody on Saturday night, several larger guilds are no longer larger guilds and several more are no longer around. There is a reason for this and that reason quite simply is WAR.
WoW's subs will decrease... Yes. Just not drastically anytime soon. Granted, it will get a spike in subs once WotLK releases, but it is more of the same. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying WoW is a bad game... Well... Actually I think it is, but there are plenty addicted to the mind numbingness of it all... I had plenty of fun up until 70 and I realized that all I'm doing is grinding for gear and I stopped the game for good. Anyways, I digress. WoW will eventually dwindle down to a game with thousands of subs instead of millions... It's just a matter of time.... And yes, I'll be playing WAR instead of ever considering WoW again so meh...
There's a line from a Yeats' poem that seems to describe WoW....
I can't speak for a large number of people but recently, myself, my brother, my wife, my rl friend edward, and 4 of our guild memebrs quit wow, played the lotro demo ( for something to do) and will be playing war when it comes out.
I'm not pulling that out of my butt. If I'm lying why are they going to extreme in their RAF program? Making leveling easier should apply to everyone in the game not just those willing to fork over cash. They're just tuning the game into ways to milk money now. Like Item mall games.
Let me ask you something ...:
Does it hurt? Those 10.9 million subs paying for Wow?
It's obvious why they are going to "extreme": They want even more. Wouldn't you ?
Well it's not fair to those 10.9 million who happen to be leveling alts. Why aren't they receiving triple xp for forking over years worth of subscriptions?
I think a few courses in business ethics might be needed here.
So you are avoiding the subject... what happened to your 12% decrease? you know, the number you pulled from your butt. A blizzard employee, who is under the watch of the Security and exchange commission stated they reached 11.9 million in May.. where is your proof they lost 12% of subscribers?
And as far as ethical business practices. You never saw a phone company offer new customers a discounted rate on their first 3 months? Wow, how unfair is that.. people who have been with them years are paying more than new customers???
This isn't about Blizzard losing customers.. this is simply about Blizzard wanting to give new players a chance to catch up to their friends before Wraith launches. I mean think about it. I want to invite a friend, would it work if I said " yeah, join this game, you'll never be able to adventure with me because you'll never catch up". There are so many restrictions on this offer that the only people who DO get the exp boost are the ones who actually do help their friends adventure. It also means that those new players are ready to buy the expansion!! You don't get to 11 million subscribers without having a good business sense.
Also, Blizzard HAS made leveling easier for everyone in the game. They removed elite/group quests from 1-60, they lowered the exp needed to gain levels from 30-60, they increased exp given from quests from 20-60 AND they lowered the level requirements for mounts from 40 to 30 (makes traveling much faster). Blizzard has also stated that once Wraith launches, they are going to reduce the exp needed to level from 60-70.
World of Warcraft is the most succefull game in MMORPG game ever. At the current state WOW has about 10,9 Subs world wide and with the WOTLK to become true in a few months the most propably is wow to increase its numbers. Do you believe that smg could stop this in near future? After the fail of AOC to decrease WOW numbers (except the first week of AOC launch that almost everybody was trying AOC) do you believe that others new MMORPG could decrease WOW subs. Express your opinion with a vote
No. WoW's growth is leveling off, yes. However, if they have a holiday release of Wrath, that will create a massive surge of new players. Wrath-related growth will continue for at least six months after its release, at which time the game will probably return to its previous trend.
At the very earliest, WoW will suffer a monthly loss in total players in late '09. It will almost definitely suffer one sometime in 2010, though that may not necessarily be the start of the game's decline. More likely, it will simply mean a period of up and down swing before the actual decline begins.
I think WAR will do ok i.e. 500k to 1.5 million subs at the 12 month mark.
It wont put a massive dent in WoW though as I think most of it's subscribers will come from EU and USA where as WoW is strongest in Asia.
Maybe when you lump AoC, War, Aion, Jumpgate, Chronicles of the Spellborn, etc. all together you might see a downturn in WoW's active subs. But at the end of the day that number is what ever Blizzard says it is - we have no way of checking.
All I know is the servers in EU are a whole lot quieter now than they were in 2005 and 2006. I would have sworn their next statement after the 'breaking 10 mill' one would have been either keeping quiet or saying things have slackened off. There's no evidence of growth on the servers I play, only the opposite.
End of the day I've pre-ordered the WAR CE edition but I'm not done with WoW yet and will probably get WotLK as well. WAR wont be installed until I'm ready I only have time for 1 MMO at a time. I would have preferred WAR to come out in Spring '09 I would have been ready for it about then.
_________________________________________ You can walk the walk but can you talk the talk?
All I know is the servers in EU are a whole lot quieter now than they were in 2005 and 2006. I would have sworn their next statement after the 'breaking 10 mill' one would have been either keeping quiet or saying things have slackened off. There's no evidence of growth on the servers I play, only the opposite.
I can't speak for 2005, but I play on an EU server, and day after day most of the mid level zones are empty except for a few level 70's passing through. I have played for hours at a time and never seen a single post in the General channels in many zones, and I do a /who for my level range and I am quite often the only one listed in the entire zone.
World of Warcraft is the most succefull game in MMORPG game ever. At the current state WOW has about 10,9 Subs world wide and with the WOTLK to become true in a few months the most propably is wow to increase its numbers. Do you believe that smg could stop this in near future? After the fail of AOC to decrease WOW numbers (except the first week of AOC launch that almost everybody was trying AOC) do you believe that others new MMORPG could decrease WOW subs. Express your opinion with a vote
No. WoW's growth is leveling off, yes. However, if they have a holiday release of Wrath, that will create a massive surge of new players. Wrath-related growth will continue for at least six months after its release, at which time the game will probably return to its previous trend.
At the very earliest, WoW will suffer a monthly loss in total players in late '09. It will almost definitely suffer one sometime in 2010, though that may not necessarily be the start of the game's decline. More likely, it will simply mean a period of up and down swing before the actual decline begins.
One of the reasons for the drop off in growth (heh.. in growth, not subscriptions) is that we are at the very end of an expansion cycle. Every game has this going on. The 4 months leading up to an expansion are the worst times.. then there is a big spike at the expansion.
Blizzard really propogates this themselves though by taking 2 years per expansion. It is great for players because they add a ton of free content instead of focusing soley on expansions like UO and EQ did. If they did an expansion every year, there wouldn't be nearly the flattening of the growth curve as we have now.
Warhammer is going to be interesting. They are doing a lot of the same things wrong that Funcom did. They still haven't lifted the NDA or started a large beta test. The game is going to be released in a month and will have very minimal testing. You know WotLK is going to be bug free, but are players going to play an unbalanced and buggy Warhammer insteada of getting their characters to 80 in WOW.
So you are avoiding the subject... what happened to your 12% decrease? you know, the number you pulled from your butt. A blizzard employee, who is under the watch of the Security and exchange commission stated they reached 11.9 million in May.. where is your proof they lost 12% of subscribers?
And as far as ethical business practices. You never saw a phone company offer new customers a discounted rate on their first 3 months? Wow, how unfair is that.. people who have been with them years are paying more than new customers???
This isn't about Blizzard losing customers.. this is simply about Blizzard wanting to give new players a chance to catch up to their friends before Wraith launches. I mean think about it. I want to invite a friend, would it work if I said " yeah, join this game, you'll never be able to adventure with me because you'll never catch up". There are so many restrictions on this offer that the only people who DO get the exp boost are the ones who actually do help their friends adventure. It also means that those new players are ready to buy the expansion!! You don't get to 11 million subscribers without having a good business sense.
Also, Blizzard HAS made leveling easier for everyone in the game. They removed elite/group quests from 1-60, they lowered the exp needed to gain levels from 30-60, they increased exp given from quests from 20-60 AND they lowered the level requirements for mounts from 40 to 30 (makes traveling much faster). Blizzard has also stated that once Wraith launches, they are going to reduce the exp needed to level from 60-70.
You can find that their sales are down at the beginning of the year. They didn't release an expansion like they did the previous year. It's just natural that would happen.
I'm done with WOW. I have been, but I still like to keep up with it and have considered going back to it from time to time. I'm glad I quit when I did. They're selling levels for cash now in the form of new customers. This is going to be exploited and help to ruin the game. It's the first time I ever saw the integrity of this game breached.
By making leveling easier ONLY for a select few that hand them cash they're going to rope a few instant subscriptions, but the overall game is being damaged now.
Going to the extreme of handing out levels is a pretty good indicator that the game is beginning to sink.
WoW fanboi: "lolz 11.5 million customers, itz obviously da best"
www.mmogchart.com/Chart11.html No. WoW's growth is leveling off, yes. However, if they have a holiday release of Wrath, that will create a massive surge of new players. Wrath-related growth will continue for at least six months after its release, at which time the game will probably return to its previous trend. At the very earliest, WoW will suffer a monthly loss in total players in late '09. It will almost definitely suffer one sometime in 2010, though that may not necessarily be the start of the game's decline. More likely, it will simply mean a period of up and down swing before the actual decline begins.
I think it will take a hit after WAR launches.
It'll recover with WotLK, but nearly as much as it did with BC, and for a shorter amount of time.
I think it will take either a historical loss or gain once the ARM tsunami crashes in on the economy, which appears it will. WoW/MMOs could be the new monopoly
___________________ Sadly, I see storm clouds on the horizon. A faint stench of Vanguard is in the air.-Kien
You can find that their sales are down at the beginning of the year. They didn't release an expansion like they did the previous year. It's just natural that would happen. I'm done with WOW. I have been, but I still like to keep up with it and have considered going back to it from time to time. I'm glad I quit when I did. They're selling levels for cash now in the form of new customers. This is going to be exploited and help to ruin the game. It's the first time I ever saw the integrity of this game breached. By making leveling easier ONLY for a select few that hand them cash they're going to rope a few instant subscriptions, but the overall game is being damaged now. Going to the extreme of handing out levels is a pretty good indicator that the game is beginning to sink.
Man, you must be wanting to go back pretty bad when you use such elborate reasons to justify your WoW abstinence.
Comments
War is comming baby!
It wont decrease, thats sure.
"Wow killers" like AoC few months ago, and upcoming warhammer will make it sure.
I might play WAR...
AION !!!! thats one im looking forward to
But yea wow wont last forever...come 2010-2011 i detect a large decreese in subs.
How the hell do you pronounce Gotye?
They already took a 12% hit at the beginning of the year.
They're handing out levels now for cash with their new program. Bad news for the game overall
Grab some popcorn and watch the titanic.
WoW fanboi: "lolz 11.5 million customers, itz obviously da best"
McDonald's: over 1 billion burgers served
12% hit the beginning of the year? You are pulling that out your butt. WOW announced in May that it reached 10.9M subscribers, it's highest point ever. WOW continues to hold the #5, #7 and #8 spots on the weekly PC games sales in North America.
They are continueing to make leveling easier because it's a normal state in a 4 year old game that the majority of players are at max level. If you invite a friend to play the game, they don't want that friend to have to spend 3 months leveling alone. They want them to catch up as quick as possible and be able to join their friends. The change in leveling is a result of decreasing subscriptions, instead it is the result of the level cap being raised.
98% of the people here will (re) play the new expansion WotLK. Most will even lie about it here.
Because just everyone wants to be there.
The fans will love it, The haters will hate it, but everyone wants at least see and try it.
The difference with Wow is : most people keep playing it for months, while the other MMO's gather dust after 4 weeks.
---
And there is a big difference between TBC and WotLK: ------>people now actually want to have upgrades on their gear: the times of the old Wow elite grinding raiders are gone forever. Grinding in Wow these days? You gotta be kidding: far too many gold quests and options to even kill one boar to grind.
The modern Wow player is used to it, to have a new gear set every 6 months (be it through PvP, PVE or crafting) and so moving along with the general PVE progress of top guilds.
We all buy new cell phones every year in RL also don't we.
Well Wow is based on this very simple mechanism. We restart consumption every day/week/month/year of our lives and everyone wants to know how it will be tomorrow.
That's why the "it" game won't end soon. We want it to never end even when we "love/hate" it.
12% hit the beginning of the year? You are pulling that out your butt. WOW announced in May that it reached 10.9M subscribers, it's highest point ever. WOW continues to hold the #5, #7 and #8 spots on the weekly PC games sales in North America.
They are continueing to make leveling easier because it's a normal state in a 4 year old game that the majority of players are at max level. If you invite a friend to play the game, they don't want that friend to have to spend 3 months leveling alone. They want them to catch up as quick as possible and be able to join their friends. The change in leveling is a result of decreasing subscriptions, instead it is the result of the level cap being raised.
I'm not pulling that out of my butt. If I'm lying why are they going to extreme in their RAF program?
Making leveling easier should apply to everyone in the game not just those willing to fork over cash. They're just tuning the game into ways to milk money now. Like Item mall games.
WoW fanboi: "lolz 11.5 million customers, itz obviously da best"
McDonald's: over 1 billion burgers served
Let me ask you something ...:
Does it hurt? Those 10.9 million subs paying for Wow?
It's obvious why they are going to "extreme": They want even more. Wouldn't you ?
Let me ask you something ...:
Does it hurt? Those 10.9 million subs paying for Wow?
It's obvious why they are going to "extreme": They want even more. Wouldn't you ?
Well it's not fair to those 10.9 million who happen to be leveling alts. Why aren't they receiving triple xp for forking over years worth of subscriptions?
I think a few courses in business ethics might be needed here.
WoW fanboi: "lolz 11.5 million customers, itz obviously da best"
McDonald's: over 1 billion burgers served
I didn't get to vote because you didn't have an appropriate response for me to choose.
WoW's subs will decrease, not because of some other game, but because of WoW itself. Being mind-numbingly boring and obssessively catering to phat lootz uber-trolls.
Blizzard could have done more to refine the old world and make BGs more fun that could have balanced this out, instead we have a ghost-world that exists for solo grinding and a still-not-fun Warsong Gulch.
So I predict the ultimate WoW killer will be ... WoW.
If I could vote (the 'vote' button never appears in these forums for me), I would say the subscriptions will increase due to WOTLK (this is not an option on your poll).
WoW is still the only product of it's kind on the market. All the followup games seem like they're either full of problems, or working as intended but not very well-thought out game ideas.
- Phos
It will get replaced eventually but not anytime in 2008 nor 2009, meanwhile the WoW subscription base is just being chipped by the new mmos that are coming out.
Well lets see. in the past two months I have seen on Argent Dawn the streets of Stromwind go from Bustling to where the hell is everybody on Saturday night, several larger guilds are no longer larger guilds and several more are no longer around. There is a reason for this and that reason quite simply is WAR.
WoW's subs will decrease... Yes. Just not drastically anytime soon. Granted, it will get a spike in subs once WotLK releases, but it is more of the same. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying WoW is a bad game... Well... Actually I think it is, but there are plenty addicted to the mind numbingness of it all... I had plenty of fun up until 70 and I realized that all I'm doing is grinding for gear and I stopped the game for good. Anyways, I digress. WoW will eventually dwindle down to a game with thousands of subs instead of millions... It's just a matter of time.... And yes, I'll be playing WAR instead of ever considering WoW again so meh...
There's a line from a Yeats' poem that seems to describe WoW....
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"
I can't speak for a large number of people but recently, myself, my brother, my wife, my rl friend edward, and 4 of our guild memebrs quit wow, played the lotro demo ( for something to do) and will be playing war when it comes out.
Let me ask you something ...:
Does it hurt? Those 10.9 million subs paying for Wow?
It's obvious why they are going to "extreme": They want even more. Wouldn't you ?
Well it's not fair to those 10.9 million who happen to be leveling alts. Why aren't they receiving triple xp for forking over years worth of subscriptions?
I think a few courses in business ethics might be needed here.
So you are avoiding the subject... what happened to your 12% decrease? you know, the number you pulled from your butt. A blizzard employee, who is under the watch of the Security and exchange commission stated they reached 11.9 million in May.. where is your proof they lost 12% of subscribers?
And as far as ethical business practices. You never saw a phone company offer new customers a discounted rate on their first 3 months? Wow, how unfair is that.. people who have been with them years are paying more than new customers???
This isn't about Blizzard losing customers.. this is simply about Blizzard wanting to give new players a chance to catch up to their friends before Wraith launches. I mean think about it. I want to invite a friend, would it work if I said " yeah, join this game, you'll never be able to adventure with me because you'll never catch up". There are so many restrictions on this offer that the only people who DO get the exp boost are the ones who actually do help their friends adventure. It also means that those new players are ready to buy the expansion!! You don't get to 11 million subscribers without having a good business sense.
Also, Blizzard HAS made leveling easier for everyone in the game. They removed elite/group quests from 1-60, they lowered the exp needed to gain levels from 30-60, they increased exp given from quests from 20-60 AND they lowered the level requirements for mounts from 40 to 30 (makes traveling much faster). Blizzard has also stated that once Wraith launches, they are going to reduce the exp needed to level from 60-70.
www.mmogchart.com/Chart11.html
No. WoW's growth is leveling off, yes. However, if they have a holiday release of Wrath, that will create a massive surge of new players. Wrath-related growth will continue for at least six months after its release, at which time the game will probably return to its previous trend.
At the very earliest, WoW will suffer a monthly loss in total players in late '09. It will almost definitely suffer one sometime in 2010, though that may not necessarily be the start of the game's decline. More likely, it will simply mean a period of up and down swing before the actual decline begins.
Do you really care what we think?
A tiny mind is a tidy mind...
I think WAR will do ok i.e. 500k to 1.5 million subs at the 12 month mark.
It wont put a massive dent in WoW though as I think most of it's subscribers will come from EU and USA where as WoW is strongest in Asia.
Maybe when you lump AoC, War, Aion, Jumpgate, Chronicles of the Spellborn, etc. all together you might see a downturn in WoW's active subs. But at the end of the day that number is what ever Blizzard says it is - we have no way of checking.
All I know is the servers in EU are a whole lot quieter now than they were in 2005 and 2006. I would have sworn their next statement after the 'breaking 10 mill' one would have been either keeping quiet or saying things have slackened off. There's no evidence of growth on the servers I play, only the opposite.
End of the day I've pre-ordered the WAR CE edition but I'm not done with WoW yet and will probably get WotLK as well. WAR wont be installed until I'm ready I only have time for 1 MMO at a time. I would have preferred WAR to come out in Spring '09 I would have been ready for it about then.
_________________________________________
You can walk the walk but can you talk the talk?
I can't speak for 2005, but I play on an EU server, and day after day most of the mid level zones are empty except for a few level 70's passing through. I have played for hours at a time and never seen a single post in the General channels in many zones, and I do a /who for my level range and I am quite often the only one listed in the entire zone.
When that happens, hit the back button and then click on the thread again. The vote button will appear. It's apparently some kind of bug.
www.mmogchart.com/Chart11.html
No. WoW's growth is leveling off, yes. However, if they have a holiday release of Wrath, that will create a massive surge of new players. Wrath-related growth will continue for at least six months after its release, at which time the game will probably return to its previous trend.
At the very earliest, WoW will suffer a monthly loss in total players in late '09. It will almost definitely suffer one sometime in 2010, though that may not necessarily be the start of the game's decline. More likely, it will simply mean a period of up and down swing before the actual decline begins.
One of the reasons for the drop off in growth (heh.. in growth, not subscriptions) is that we are at the very end of an expansion cycle. Every game has this going on. The 4 months leading up to an expansion are the worst times.. then there is a big spike at the expansion.
Blizzard really propogates this themselves though by taking 2 years per expansion. It is great for players because they add a ton of free content instead of focusing soley on expansions like UO and EQ did. If they did an expansion every year, there wouldn't be nearly the flattening of the growth curve as we have now.
Warhammer is going to be interesting. They are doing a lot of the same things wrong that Funcom did. They still haven't lifted the NDA or started a large beta test. The game is going to be released in a month and will have very minimal testing. You know WotLK is going to be bug free, but are players going to play an unbalanced and buggy Warhammer insteada of getting their characters to 80 in WOW.
So you are avoiding the subject... what happened to your 12% decrease? you know, the number you pulled from your butt. A blizzard employee, who is under the watch of the Security and exchange commission stated they reached 11.9 million in May.. where is your proof they lost 12% of subscribers?
And as far as ethical business practices. You never saw a phone company offer new customers a discounted rate on their first 3 months? Wow, how unfair is that.. people who have been with them years are paying more than new customers???
This isn't about Blizzard losing customers.. this is simply about Blizzard wanting to give new players a chance to catch up to their friends before Wraith launches. I mean think about it. I want to invite a friend, would it work if I said " yeah, join this game, you'll never be able to adventure with me because you'll never catch up". There are so many restrictions on this offer that the only people who DO get the exp boost are the ones who actually do help their friends adventure. It also means that those new players are ready to buy the expansion!! You don't get to 11 million subscribers without having a good business sense.
Also, Blizzard HAS made leveling easier for everyone in the game. They removed elite/group quests from 1-60, they lowered the exp needed to gain levels from 30-60, they increased exp given from quests from 20-60 AND they lowered the level requirements for mounts from 40 to 30 (makes traveling much faster). Blizzard has also stated that once Wraith launches, they are going to reduce the exp needed to level from 60-70.
You can find that their sales are down at the beginning of the year. They didn't release an expansion like they did the previous year. It's just natural that would happen.
I'm done with WOW. I have been, but I still like to keep up with it and have considered going back to it from time to time. I'm glad I quit when I did. They're selling levels for cash now in the form of new customers. This is going to be exploited and help to ruin the game. It's the first time I ever saw the integrity of this game breached.
By making leveling easier ONLY for a select few that hand them cash they're going to rope a few instant subscriptions, but the overall game is being damaged now.
Going to the extreme of handing out levels is a pretty good indicator that the game is beginning to sink.
WoW fanboi: "lolz 11.5 million customers, itz obviously da best"
McDonald's: over 1 billion burgers served
I think it will take a hit after WAR launches.
It'll recover with WotLK, but nearly as much as it did with BC, and for a shorter amount of time.
I think it will take either a historical loss or gain once the ARM tsunami crashes in on the economy, which appears it will. WoW/MMOs could be the new monopoly
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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/
Man, you must be wanting to go back pretty bad when you use such elborate reasons to justify your WoW abstinence.