asking to poll half of the games subscribers might not be realistic but neither is playing with stats based on 'just a guess' ranging in the millions. And 381 still seems like a pretty weak group especially when they are just online gamers. They could be asking CoD players who don't even own a computer their opinion of WoW. I'm not doubting that WoW is in decline or will be, just that the quality of the survey justifies the conclusion they reached.
Most statistical laymen vastly overestimate the sample size required for, say, a 95% confidence level. Much smaller in relation to total populations than is generally assumed.
Still, I have to agree that a non-randomly selected testing sample of that size is going to have a pretty low confidence level.
On the other hand, they're doing stock predictions. Do you have any idea how many analysts go broke working their own portfolios?
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Blah Blah WOW is dead. yeah we have known this don't need a survey. lets move on here people. this is like talking about an old girl friend who dumped you 8 years ago and now shes really fat. i dont care man.
I'm not currently playing WoW having gone back to CoH until SW:ToR is released. However I would like to know how a survey of only 381 online gamers is supposed to be representative of the more than 10 million Warcraft subscribers ...don't get me wrong, I'd love to see one of the new games due in the next few years (Dark Millenium and World of Darkness, I'm looking at you) knock Blizzards Juggernaut off it's top spot, I just don't think it's very fair to make such a judgement from such a limited sampling. Surely they could have asked even a few more people ...I know that polling half the subscribers is a ridiculous task but come on folks, they polled less than 1%.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
The meat of the story was activision reporting a big loss in subscriptions...and fore casting that they could lose as many as 900k- 1 mill more.
And how that meant that the stock was downgraded...who cares what 381 random players say...its the money men that look like there gonna start ditching the activision stock, stocks go down, activision will start cutting costs, and maybe rush the gay pandas out earlly
I find some people's opinions on this odd. Things like "well of course 2 million people quit, they dumbed the game down so much, it's too easy, etc etc."
Even with the steps they have made to make raiding more accesable, i think it's safe to say a relatively small fraction of the player base raids or does Arena, these people are the ones who are really into the game, but there's not that many compared too casuals. It's a much simplier thing imo, the game is old. I quit after playing since 6 months after launch earlier this year, as did many of the people i had played with for years, Firelands was an easy raid but that wasn't why, we just got bored of the game.
Some of it is added in, i know tons of people who quit because people left the game, crippled their guild, and they didn't want to rebuild. But i really thing it's as simple as it's an almost 7 year old game, they NEED to make it simple and easy to get into because it's hard to hold on to those people who have been paying 15 bucks a month for half a decade.
I've said for a while between 2-5 million could and probably will leave WoW for ToR but 5 million always did seem that it might be nearly impossible to achieve I'm not so sure now . I logged into Darkspear on a ten day welcome back and things really dont seem happy in Azeroth .
General chat was full of I'm bored and negativity about Pandas and ToR was brought up serveral times without the usual TOR sucks and set sail for epic fail comments . There seems to be an acceptance by the players that when its released it'll be like a tsunami hitting Azeroth and that things will never be quite the same in WoW after that . I think theres a real danger now also of losing its pier pressure appeal to children once it stops being the game all thier friends are playing WoW could lose an even higher part of their playerbase .
ToR does look like its going to deliver the goods if that indeed turns to be the case by the end of 2012 it may even knock WoW off its number one slot . I really don't know what Blizzard were thinking with Pandas . It might be embarising but the best thing they could do is trash it an start again on a totally new and different expansion .
But I get the feeling the developers at Blizzard are like a bunch of people in a bus that going to crash into a wall who are thinking how amazing the wall is and how brilliant it will be when the bus crashes into it .
It really didn't have to be this way Blizzard got arrogant ,greedy and lazy .It'll still maintain a playerbase for years to come but the glory days are over .
Lets hope Bioware learn from this now the torch looks like it might be passed to them .
NO MARTIAL ARTS EWOKS EXPANSIONS .
On a side note and in the wake of this news I think Blizzard might annouce an expansion of free to play from levels 1-20 to 1-60 before Christmas .
I just find this hilarious because of all the nay sayers about TOR not being that great or able to complete with WOW. I think you can official call it the WoW killer now. No use making excuses for them they had a good run. But it's time for the next big thing. Between this and GW2 they will capitalize on WoWs shortcomings.
Who care's WoW lives or dies ill never play the game due to fact graphics suck badly.
SWTOR will have good run due to sheer fact that alot of people love Star Wars so half there numbers will be roleplaying junkies that wanna feel like there living as a jedi.
Personally i plan on playing GW2 simply because the devs there are actually WORKING for my money. They listen to the playerbase, the are making important changes to every aspect of the game before release, and they aren't pointing at a video going "look see, yeah the characters talk and you can have a companion, come play our game now please." you know like "other" companies who only innovate in one or two tiny details of a game and expect you to be satisfied with only those two tiny items and never innovate again.
News peices like these are always an ecourangement for more flaming. Nothing good comes out of articles like these.
Believe it or not many people that visit a website that deals specifically with mmorpgs do in fact give a shit (even if it's just a small eensy weensy shit) about what happens to the insanely dominant king of the genre. History is happening right in front of your face and you'd rather just have everyone just stick their heads in the sand.
Even if this news in particular upsets you, there are many people that would like to be informed of such things as they occur. Again, especially on a site dedicated to the fall of certain mmorpgs.
Get used to it, bud. This aint the last thread you're gonna to see on this topic
Fixed that for you.
I'm not an IT Specialist, Game Developer, or Clairvoyant in real life, but like others on here, I play one on the internet.
Dear mmorpg... Why must you fuel the fire? This really isn't game related. It's stock related. Out come the trolls with the fresh feed in the trough...... You guys are almost encouraging trouble at this point..lol
So something like that was really decided by 381 people? I mean that isn't exactly what I would consider even remotly a scientific poll.
I think they decided it based on other factors, like the massive sub loss. The poll was just an extra . And yes I think its not scientific unless we know how the participants were selected.
Edit: And didn't picklebeast post this same thing?
So something like that was really decided by 381 people? I mean that isn't exactly what I would consider even remotly a scientific poll.
I think they decided it based on other factors, like the massive sub loss. The poll was just an extra . And yes I think its not scientific unless we know how the participants were selected.
Edit: And didn't picklebeast post this same thing?
If WoW is suffering "massive sub loss" then it should show up in their 10k. Are people aware that public companies publish revenue statements quarterly?
Hey look! No massive decline. Actually, pretty normal. A rise to a peak in 07, then a big dropoff corresponding to the massive recession, and since then a slow climb back up out of the gutter. Whaddaya know! Blizzards performance looks pretty much like most other companies performance given the economic conditions.
If WoW were bleeding subs by the *millions* do people really not comprehend that this would result in *clear* financial impact?
This idiot "survey" was *speculative*. It's a downgrade assuming they *will* lose subs. If they *already had* the stock would have already been punished.
None of this is rocket science, but MMO 'fans' and 'anti-fans' really are living in their own private delusions fully detached from any kind of reality.
If WoW is suffering "massive sub loss" then it should show up in their 10k. Are people aware that public companies publish revenue statements quarterly?
Hey look! No massive decline. Actually, pretty normal. A rise to a peak in 07, then a big dropoff corresponding to the massive recession, and since then a slow climb back up out of the gutter. Whaddaya know! Blizzards performance looks pretty much like most other companies performance given the economic conditions.
If WoW were bleeding subs by the *millions* do people really not comprehend that this would result in *clear* financial impact?
This idiot "survey" was *speculative*. It's a downgrade assuming they *will* lose subs. If they *already had* the stock would have already been punished.
None of this is rocket science, but MMO 'fans' and 'anti-fans' really are living in their own private delusions fully detached from any kind of reality.
Blizzard still makes $1B in revenue a year, but even on their most recent commercial they said they have 10 million subscribers. (Including Asia most likely). Which is 2 million less than the most recent major announcement of subs. It wouldnt result in an impact since they are no where near being unprofitable. Also, Blizz's stock also includes Activisions business, meaning CoD. That could be inflating it because if you look at the charts, even though CoD had major sales the stock hasnt really risen much at all. So something is balancing out these high cod sales. I dont think the negative weight from the WoW sub loss will show until its a lot "heavier" when WoW is around 8 million subs or less.
WoW already has lost subs, I dont understand how you can deny that. Stock's dont reply to all news and they dont always reply at the time the news is out, not to mention the other factors inflating this stock.
But yes, the survey wasn't well handled and shouldn't be used as "proof" of anything, but we will see in a year what WoW's sub numbers are at. If they are <10 million then the trend is confirmed.
381 players our of 10 million and they came up with those kinds of statistics? People are always going to be leaving MMO's, but I think they would need more people to survey to get a better accuracy on their statistics.
Its kind of funny when I think about it. You know for example when I watch the news and they bring up a comparison. So and so has dropped 50% from 5 years ago. I dont wanna know that kind of comparison. The only year they should bring up is this year compared to last year. Anything beyond that is irrelevant. Its the same thing when you're making future predictions. I dont need to know what kind of increase it'll be in the next 50 years maybe in the next 5-10 years would give you a better idea.
lol wow does not have 10 million subscribers or players. that is an estimated guess by blizzard about how many ppl have trued the game since its lauch nothing about it is current. and wow has been slowly declining for years. and not relevent how many subs a game has lost over 5 years how can u say thats irrelivent. it shows that over that 5 years more and more ppl leave coz blizzard are dumbing down the game. while i agree this article is somewhat pointless as it only surveyed 381 ppl but that doesnt mean ONLY those ppl are gonna leave. alot of wow players will cancel sub when tor launches, how many ppl stay in tor and how many go back to wow is another matter but taking in to account the next wow expan mists of pandaria i know alot of my ppl wont be returning.
and theres no way wow will last another 5-10 years so predications for the game are kinda pointless coz unless i hear otherwise i expect blizz to shut down wow when titem comes in 2014. there would be no point in them maintaing wow when all the attension will be fore titan. so wow is doomed anyway regrdless of tor. mists of pandoria to me suggest that blizzard want to dumb down wow as much as possible to get its loyaly fanbase into titan and not cling to and out dated game where things are not difficult. not to mention the stupid idea of adding panda race. bloody blizz devs enjoyed kung fu panda a little to much. emerald dream would have been a better expan
So something like that was really decided by 381 people? I mean that isn't exactly what I would consider even remotly a scientific poll.
Its a fairly traditonal way of doing polling actually.
The problem with this poll is that we don't know how the participants were selected. If its not random then its like choosing 381 people from a town in Texas and baseing your presidental predictions off of those results.
The problem with this article... is that those that play and enjoy playing the game feel like they need to defend their game and their personal opinions. They often take this type of a post as a personal attack on perhaps their favorite pass-time and then the flaming begins.
As others have stated... we know that WoW (as a game) isn't what it used to be. In an effort to vastly improve the game, they messed with the recipe.
Think of WoW as you would Coke. Cataclysm is 'New Coke' and WoW is 'Classic'. When is the last time you saw a bottle of 'New Coke'?
If and when Blizzard decides to 'unscrew' their mess, they can bring the game back around. Doing so, however, will have its own set of consequences.
Personally, I'm thankful that there are other games and many choices to choose from. While I don't want to be a game-hopper, if I hate what Blizz is doing right now, then I can go play SW:TOR or RIFT or eventually GW2 or Secret World.
Comments
This is when smart investors get excited about buying stock in Act-Blizz after it drops for a while.
Most statistical laymen vastly overestimate the sample size required for, say, a 95% confidence level. Much smaller in relation to total populations than is generally assumed.
Still, I have to agree that a non-randomly selected testing sample of that size is going to have a pretty low confidence level.
On the other hand, they're doing stock predictions. Do you have any idea how many analysts go broke working their own portfolios?
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Blah Blah WOW is dead. yeah we have known this don't need a survey. lets move on here people. this is like talking about an old girl friend who dumped you 8 years ago and now shes really fat. i dont care man.
I'm not currently playing WoW having gone back to CoH until SW:ToR is released. However I would like to know how a survey of only 381 online gamers is supposed to be representative of the more than 10 million Warcraft subscribers ...don't get me wrong, I'd love to see one of the new games due in the next few years (Dark Millenium and World of Darkness, I'm looking at you) knock Blizzards Juggernaut off it's top spot, I just don't think it's very fair to make such a judgement from such a limited sampling. Surely they could have asked even a few more people ...I know that polling half the subscribers is a ridiculous task but come on folks, they polled less than 1%.
just my 2p
Looks like people are finally waking up and smelling the Kotick. And by Kotick, I mean shit.
Ew, did I get any on my shoes?
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
The meat of the story was activision reporting a big loss in subscriptions...and fore casting that they could lose as many as 900k- 1 mill more.
And how that meant that the stock was downgraded...who cares what 381 random players say...its the money men that look like there gonna start ditching the activision stock, stocks go down, activision will start cutting costs, and maybe rush the gay pandas out earlly
Haradek Shadowstalker
EQ,EQII,SWG,AO,DAOC,Planetside,COH,WOW
I find some people's opinions on this odd. Things like "well of course 2 million people quit, they dumbed the game down so much, it's too easy, etc etc."
Even with the steps they have made to make raiding more accesable, i think it's safe to say a relatively small fraction of the player base raids or does Arena, these people are the ones who are really into the game, but there's not that many compared too casuals. It's a much simplier thing imo, the game is old. I quit after playing since 6 months after launch earlier this year, as did many of the people i had played with for years, Firelands was an easy raid but that wasn't why, we just got bored of the game.
Some of it is added in, i know tons of people who quit because people left the game, crippled their guild, and they didn't want to rebuild. But i really thing it's as simple as it's an almost 7 year old game, they NEED to make it simple and easy to get into because it's hard to hold on to those people who have been paying 15 bucks a month for half a decade.
I've said for a while between 2-5 million could and probably will leave WoW for ToR but 5 million always did seem that it might be nearly impossible to achieve I'm not so sure now . I logged into Darkspear on a ten day welcome back and things really dont seem happy in Azeroth .
General chat was full of I'm bored and negativity about Pandas and ToR was brought up serveral times without the usual TOR sucks and set sail for epic fail comments . There seems to be an acceptance by the players that when its released it'll be like a tsunami hitting Azeroth and that things will never be quite the same in WoW after that . I think theres a real danger now also of losing its pier pressure appeal to children once it stops being the game all thier friends are playing WoW could lose an even higher part of their playerbase .
ToR does look like its going to deliver the goods if that indeed turns to be the case by the end of 2012 it may even knock WoW off its number one slot . I really don't know what Blizzard were thinking with Pandas . It might be embarising but the best thing they could do is trash it an start again on a totally new and different expansion .
But I get the feeling the developers at Blizzard are like a bunch of people in a bus that going to crash into a wall who are thinking how amazing the wall is and how brilliant it will be when the bus crashes into it .
It really didn't have to be this way Blizzard got arrogant ,greedy and lazy .It'll still maintain a playerbase for years to come but the glory days are over .
Lets hope Bioware learn from this now the torch looks like it might be passed to them .
NO MARTIAL ARTS EWOKS EXPANSIONS .
On a side note and in the wake of this news I think Blizzard might annouce an expansion of free to play from levels 1-20 to 1-60 before Christmas .
Who care's WoW lives or dies ill never play the game due to fact graphics suck badly.
SWTOR will have good run due to sheer fact that alot of people love Star Wars so half there numbers will be roleplaying junkies that wanna feel like there living as a jedi.
because GW2 is the Chuck Norris of MMO's. just wait.
Personally i plan on playing GW2 simply because the devs there are actually WORKING for my money. They listen to the playerbase, the are making important changes to every aspect of the game before release, and they aren't pointing at a video going "look see, yeah the characters talk and you can have a companion, come play our game now please." you know like "other" companies who only innovate in one or two tiny details of a game and expect you to be satisfied with only those two tiny items and never innovate again.
Fixed that for you.
I'm not an IT Specialist, Game Developer, or Clairvoyant in real life, but like others on here, I play one on the internet.
So something like that was really decided by 381 people? I mean that isn't exactly what I would consider even remotly a scientific poll.
I think they decided it based on other factors, like the massive sub loss. The poll was just an extra . And yes I think its not scientific unless we know how the participants were selected.
Edit: And didn't picklebeast post this same thing?
If WoW is suffering "massive sub loss" then it should show up in their 10k. Are people aware that public companies publish revenue statements quarterly?
http://www.google.com/finance?q=ATVI&fstype=ii#
Hey look! No massive decline. Actually, pretty normal. A rise to a peak in 07, then a big dropoff corresponding to the massive recession, and since then a slow climb back up out of the gutter. Whaddaya know! Blizzards performance looks pretty much like most other companies performance given the economic conditions.
If WoW were bleeding subs by the *millions* do people really not comprehend that this would result in *clear* financial impact?
This idiot "survey" was *speculative*. It's a downgrade assuming they *will* lose subs. If they *already had* the stock would have already been punished.
None of this is rocket science, but MMO 'fans' and 'anti-fans' really are living in their own private delusions fully detached from any kind of reality.
Blizzard still makes $1B in revenue a year, but even on their most recent commercial they said they have 10 million subscribers. (Including Asia most likely). Which is 2 million less than the most recent major announcement of subs. It wouldnt result in an impact since they are no where near being unprofitable. Also, Blizz's stock also includes Activisions business, meaning CoD. That could be inflating it because if you look at the charts, even though CoD had major sales the stock hasnt really risen much at all. So something is balancing out these high cod sales. I dont think the negative weight from the WoW sub loss will show until its a lot "heavier" when WoW is around 8 million subs or less.
WoW already has lost subs, I dont understand how you can deny that. Stock's dont reply to all news and they dont always reply at the time the news is out, not to mention the other factors inflating this stock.
But yes, the survey wasn't well handled and shouldn't be used as "proof" of anything, but we will see in a year what WoW's sub numbers are at. If they are <10 million then the trend is confirmed.
Welcome to the business cycle. Everyone moves from game to game. WoW toi EQ2, back to WoW, to Rift, back to WoW, to SWTOR, back to WoW...
I see a pattern emerging...
Except that EQ2 came out before WoW.
Its a fairly traditonal way of doing polling actually.
The problem with this poll is that we don't know how the participants were selected. If its not random then its like choosing 381 people from a town in Texas and baseing your presidental predictions off of those results.
The problem with this article... is that those that play and enjoy playing the game feel like they need to defend their game and their personal opinions. They often take this type of a post as a personal attack on perhaps their favorite pass-time and then the flaming begins.
As others have stated... we know that WoW (as a game) isn't what it used to be. In an effort to vastly improve the game, they messed with the recipe.
Think of WoW as you would Coke. Cataclysm is 'New Coke' and WoW is 'Classic'. When is the last time you saw a bottle of 'New Coke'?
If and when Blizzard decides to 'unscrew' their mess, they can bring the game back around. Doing so, however, will have its own set of consequences.
Personally, I'm thankful that there are other games and many choices to choose from. While I don't want to be a game-hopper, if I hate what Blizz is doing right now, then I can go play SW:TOR or RIFT or eventually GW2 or Secret World.