I used to say Blizzard still does more good choices than bad, but not any longer. Enjoyed in full Wod for 1 month ... then lost completely wish to play. Switched to Swtor with great joy and played it up to few weeks ago. Now I'm back to Gw2, guess at least for few months. Wod for me is worst expansion so far with too many mistakes this time (not to mention that disgusting "new" models). Still, as said, very fun ... but for 1 month only. MOP was very fun for me for approx 6-7 months before I needed a break. Still maybe Wotlk is best expansion ever, closely followed by lush of MOP expansion.
The same way they always do. WoW is/was a fluke in the MMORPG scene. A combination of right things at the right time that made it wildly successful, I doubt the majority of WoW's playerbase is actually happy with the game, but they stick around, or keep coming back, because of the high population. The population stays high because a dissatisfied playerbase sticks around/keeps coming back.
It's a catch-22, simply they haven't made enough blunders, or a singularly large enough blunder, to drive away enough people to fall. It's coming though, the whole 'cross-realm zoning' thing is server merges by another name, the leveling game has dyed out to asian gold farmers, pvp twinks, alts, and returnees. Rare is the newbie to WoW these days. A constantly inflated level cap, constant ilvl and stat bloat, the tower eventually topples.
Really?
Do you eat food you dont like just because the restaurant that sells it is full of people? Do you waste money on things you dont care about just because many people do it?
People who stick to WoW have their reasons to do it, and im pretty sure none of those reasons is the high population. They make the high pop by sticking to the game in high numbers. I never sub to WoW for more than one month at a time (with a total of maybe 3-4 months a year) but when i play, i only do it for the lore. Im sure long time players have good reasons to stick with the game.
You can't compare WoW with a Resturaunt because they aren't even the same business model.
Now, every, and I do mean EVERY, post-WoW MMO I have played, and if it's on the list I've invested a minimum of a month of 40 hour weeks into it, I talk to people. It's actually part of my job, market research... anyway back on topic. In every, single, case, I have heard, time and time again, "I like this game better, but there's nobody to play with, I'm just going to go resub to WoW".
MMOs are, by nature, social games, the majority of the content is designed for more than one player, if you can't enjoy that content because there aren't any players to enjoy it with, you get bored and move on. Or go to the place where you know you can always get into content because the population is high.
WoW was around this sub level prior to the expansion and got 3m subs simply by releasing an expansion. They will launch a new expansion and get a boost in subs again.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
WoW was around this sub level prior to the expansion and got 3m subs simply by releasing an expansion. They will launch a new expansion and get a boost in subs again.
Agree.
The question is: what will the sub level be prior to the next expansion. In - maybe - 2017.
At that point the question might be: how does WoW bounce back from a <<insert your own 3+ number drop>>.
WoW was around this sub level prior to the expansion and got 3m subs simply by releasing an expansion. They will launch a new expansion and get a boost in subs again.
Agree.
The question is: what will the sub level be prior to the next expansion. In - maybe - 2017.
At that point the question might be: how does WoW bounce back from a <>.
As the subs before and after the expansion effect are roughly the same, i don't think it really matters tbh
I think that's the wrong question. I think they know that they'll never recover those accounts for a sustained period. I think they know that they can get bumps that recapture some of them for short periods of time. In order to achieve that, I think they will need to increase the frequency of expansions.
The question to me, would be 'How do they slow the decent of subs?' The juggernaut that is WoW is winding down in the life cycle of MMOs. This will take years, but it is happening. That means that they will try to slow that down in order to draw that out as long as possible to keep the profits flowing. The answer to my revised question remains the same as your question. Expansions.
Blizzard should really start thinking along the lines of making a NEW online game, next generation. They have the knowledge to do this, before its too late.
They should have an Idea now on things. They need to make things better. Cut down the speed of leveling up (since games started that, they have failed). People speed level yes, once capped they dont have much to do, bugs are also found, but when the whole game community can cap in a week or 2 of just casual play, something is wrong there.
It does not give the programmers a chance to work on end game content (but they have to rush it), letting in more bugs than necessary. 1 thing i like about the game i am playing right now (Elder Scrolls Online) is that it is not a very quick leveling game. Played a week, not hardcore, but certainly not casual (put enough to have it in between) and i just about hit lvl 24 and thats with subscriber bonus to XP gains. Though the game isnt brilliant, it is fun to play (or at least it is right now for me).
WoW kinda lost that aspect for me and i really doubt that Blizzard can recover from the subscriber loss's. That right now should be a warning sign, but it is still #1 as it probably still have 3x the subscriber numbers to its rivals, and it also is what an 11 or 12 year old game that has held its graphical quality intact and still looks nice today, cannot say that about other games released in 2003/4 (i think it was around there).
Expansion release's for WoW is about right in my opinion, look at EQ that was releasing 1 expansion every 6 months and lots of people did not bother buying but it was SoE's way of pulling in more money, Blizard made decent expansions and then added new content over time, if they started doing it as expansions there subs would plummet faster, players would not purchase as much especially with a monthly subscription ontop as well.
Its just the game is done too quickly (they tried to slow it down by removing flying, didnt work), however what is the point in having flying in the game since they are wanting to turn off that aspect.
Death by a million cuts is what is happening to WoW. People claim the age is a factor, but I totally disagree. If they kept the core elements of what made this game fun instead of changing everything from class mechanics, to adding and removing game systems each expansion, this game wouldn't be experiencing the huge sub churn it has experienced the last few years.
I always see people knocking things because they are old in gaming, but yet people eat the same food all the time, they watch the same sports year after year, they watch the same movies and listen to the same music. The age of something doesn't make it less fun, sure things can get boring at times but that is why we have variety in life. Take a break, go play the huge library of games on your steam library! :P
Honestly the only hope Blizz has to save this game is to kind of return the game to it's roots. They need to combine some the modern changes with the old designs in order to recapture the flavor that made previous expansions so much fun.
They are not going to ever recover. Blizzard speaks with its actions. It cancelled its next gen mmo Titan, basically saying they see no future in MMOs. They are putting the majority of their dev resources into more heavily monetized freemium P2W games like Overwatch, Heartstone, and Heroes of the Storm. WOW is languishing, they are too cheap to include flying from here on out. Also WOD was another step that replaced traditional MMO expansion fair with cheesy might as well be browser based gameplay called garrisons. I don't know what else they can do to give their old school MMO players the bird.
Forget about thee supposed repop when the next expansion hits. They flubbed the roll out of WOD so badly, I and many others will never again buy a WOW expansion prior to release. We have learned our lesson and it will be wait and see if it is OK or another buggy, crashing, mess with more browser like play.
I knew this day would come when Activision took it over.
It is a wonderfull game. More games should encourage addons like WOW.
Some moments will stay with me for the rest of my life, but it's clear it is no longer Blizzards first priority.
I think Wow is going the way of Anarchy Online, the company will keep it running and inject minor bits of content, but the player base will dwindle as people realize the future only holds fewer others to play with. The speed of that decline will be directly proportional to how well Overwatch, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm do financially.
I came to WOW after playing many other MMOs including Perfect World and Anarchy Online, and at first I was quite underwhelmed. The graphics are top notch in design, but the game play it self is rather ho hum compared to old (AO) and new games (GW2). I really wish it would continue to evolve, but it looks like Blizzard has put it on maintenance mode to squeeze out all the cash it can before more people get the picture that there will be no new and better content other than cheesy browser based play that takes place removed from the virtual world.
It just seems that they gave up on WoW. I can't really blame them though. Some of their employees have been working on it for 10 years now, and their passion for it is probably gone now. They're just treating it like it's in maintenance mode now, especially by rehashing old content all the time. They should get some fresh blood to rejuvenate the passion. WoW needs new writers and new devs, and it needs to go back to it's roots and stop making so many radical changes.
Its too stagnant and the is dumbed down too much. Removal of talent trees was a mistake a huge mistake, the road Ghostcrawler put them on was the wrong path and until they abandon his strategy of since I dont understand it It must be removed from the game, it will never recover.
In their quest of homogenization they funny enough, congested the game with nearly useless professions, butchered the lore, hacked the classes apart and removed the fun from the game. They also created a permanent gear wall in every aspect of the game that players run into immediately. It used to be a level 29 entering a BG maybe one or two guys had epic gear sets and you still had a chance to kill them. Now its an armored horde in heirlooms and no one learns pvp skills because its not as fast and loose as it used to be.
They slowly made classes less fun to play because the fun things they could do resulted in to many hurt feelings, some of which were from Ghostcrawler himself, who didnt even understand the mechanics of mind control.
How many MMO's out there would murder their grandmothers for 7 million subscribers? This happens every year and every year you guys squabble over the death of WoW. The game isn't going anywhere. Deal with it!
Originally posted by husscool How many MMO's out there would murder their grandmothers for 7 million subscribers? This happens every year and every year you guys squabble over the death of WoW. The game isn't going anywhere. Deal with it!
You didn't answer the question of the post, and you apparently didn't bother reading anything as well. This hasn't happened every year, maybe you should look at the numbers, and it hasn't happened in this short of time, ever. The game is not well off right now, the best players in the entire game are quitting, without people hyping the game with streams, upcoming PvP tournaments, seeing who's getting world first, having tutorials, theorycrafters, the game won't do very well.
I'm not saying they're missing all of that, but like I said, when it's rare to even find a 2200 arena stream daily for WoW, and the #1 US guild for PvE for years all have quit. That's not a good sign.
When all is said and done, more is always said than done.
Death by a million cuts is what is happening to WoW. People claim the age is a factor, but I totally disagree. If they kept the core elements of what made this game fun instead of changing everything from class mechanics, to adding and removing game systems each expansion, this game wouldn't be experiencing the huge sub churn it has experienced the last few years.
I always see people knocking things because they are old in gaming, but yet people eat the same food all the time, they watch the same sports year after year, they watch the same movies and listen to the same music. The age of something doesn't make it less fun, sure things can get boring at times but that is why we have variety in life. Take a break, go play the huge library of games on your steam library! :P
Honestly the only hope Blizz has to save this game is to kind of return the game to it's roots. They need to combine some the modern changes with the old designs in order to recapture the flavor that made previous expansions so much fun.
It's pretty much the age. I wouldn't play wow no matter what changes blizzard made. You can't play one game for 11 years lol.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Originally posted by husscool How many MMO's out there would murder their grandmothers for 7 million subscribers? This happens every year and every year you guys squabble over the death of WoW. The game isn't going anywhere. Deal with it!
Investors do not see it that way. A drop this huge is alarming. Nobody likes to see their wealth declined after they accumulated it over the years. It doesn't matter if it's 100 dollars, or 1 billion. Once you start seeing that money decline, you try to get more.
So, I'm curious what do you guys think Blizz can do to attract some more players back to the game?
They can't.
Unless some other game comes with revolutionary content which Blizzard might copy for own use they will stick to the "kill this xx times, loot it and bring it to me" rinse & repeat quests, same raids and same grinds/gear threadmill.
They will add more fluff to the cashshop though to compensate for losses.
But as long as people are paying for the cashshop the game will be good, even with 1-2M on it. All you need is 1 full server.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
Originally posted by husscool How many MMO's out there would murder their grandmothers for 7 million subscribers? This happens every year and every year you guys squabble over the death of WoW. The game isn't going anywhere. Deal with it!
You didn't answer the question of the post, and you apparently didn't bother reading anything as well. This hasn't happened every year, maybe you should look at the numbers, and it hasn't happened in this short of time, ever. The game is not well off right now, the best players in the entire game are quitting, without people hyping the game with streams, upcoming PvP tournaments, seeing who's getting world first, having tutorials, theorycrafters, the game won't do very well.
I'm not saying they're missing all of that, but like I said, when it's rare to even find a 2200 arena stream daily for WoW, and the #1 US guild for PvE for years all have quit. That's not a good sign.
The best players are quitting? How the fuck do you determine who the "best" players are. Is there even such a thing?
This was pretty much their sub numbers before the expansion. The usual spikes during an expansion launch often goes away afterwards, especially if your game is so old. There is nothing to analyse here.
Originally posted by observer
Originally posted by husscool How many MMO's out there would murder their grandmothers for 7 million subscribers? This happens every year and every year you guys squabble over the death of WoW. The game isn't going anywhere. Deal with it!
Investors do not see it that way. A drop this huge is alarming. Nobody likes to see their wealth declined after they accumulated it over the years. It doesn't matter if it's 100 dollars, or 1 billion. Once you start seeing that money decline, you try to get more.
This drop can be explained. Also you do realise that investors don't invest in like a product. They invest in a company. If I were to buy shares in the company, I would look at the total perforamance of activision-blizzard. Blizzard have a lot of other games which bring in solid revenue, WoW still brings in a lot of revenue.
WoW is a cash cow at the moment. You know what you do with cash cows? You milk them and funnel the money into developing new products. That's what almost every business does. (google BCG matrix). The best strategy with a very mature product like WoW which has limited potential for growth is to extract the cash and invest it into new products.
Blizzard are doing just that. Hearthstone is massively successful and they are looking to expand their game portfolio with HOTS and Overwatch.
But then again vast majority of people on these boards defy all logic and would take actions which are definitely not considered best business practice.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
As to leaving WoW and not going to another MMO, I'm not one of those people. Currently subbed to FFXIV and even got the expansion ordered. Also subbed to Tera. Don't like PvP very much. Can't seem to get it quite right and it seems to have a twitch factor involved in winning at it. Old bugger here so my response time isn't that great. Also don't care much for winding up being a practice dummy for PvPers. As to the main topic, WoW is going to probably slowly die. WoD expansion has left me "meh". So I'm letting my sub run out. Hope before it's gone they'll have Tanaan Jungle open for regular questing and exploration.
There have been things Blizzard has done since the days of Wrath of the Lich King that have worked to hasten this game's demise, but by and large, this is just an old game and the MMO genre is dieing. World of Warcraft will be around for years to come, but aside from brief spikes in player count every time a new expansion is released, I don't anticipate anything that they do will grow their playerbase at this point.
So, I'm curious what do you guys think Blizz can do to attract some more players back to the game? It's quite clear WoD was hyped, but it didn't hold enough interest than Blizzard wanted if I had to guess.
I quit for like 4 months starting in December and just came back a little bit ago, I think what they did to PvE is pretty bad, most of the hardcore raiders I know stopped playing, the #1 US guild in the game broke up and most of them raid casually/quit, a lot of top 100 guilds quit, a lot of hardcore PvPers are playing LoL or CS:GO now, and don't even bother with WoW.
I mean, it's a pretty big mess besides playing casually a few hours a night or whatever.
To me, all the expansion did was make the game easier for new players, they lowered the skill cap that PvE had with renaming difficulties and changing the way raids worked, they got rid of snapshotting which was basically the biggest factor in MoP PvE between a decent player and a good player, a bunch of the skills that weren't used often, but were optimal in a few situations are gone. You can gear without even raiding, ect.
PvP, adding all CC on like 3 different DRs, so positioning isn't nearly as important, neither is CD usage. I mean all the way up to like 2k CR is players that would've probably never been past 1600 in MoP.
Idk, there's my rant. I've played for going on 5 years now, I've been subbed for the majority of that time, but I feel like WoD has let a lot of their hardcore playerbase down, and apparently, that's 30% or more of their total players.
What's Blizzards next step with WoW in it's current state? How do they even maintain their current sub count let alone attract new ones, I hope it isn't with boring gimmicky patches and literally insane buffs like in 6.2.
--
P.S. I'm still subbed, I'm having fun PvPing on a few different classes, and it's still basically the only game I play right now, but I'm not having nearly enough fun as I was in MoP, or even Cata.
I'll probably play until the new PoE xpac, and then quit for a bit depending on how PoE goes.
Com back and ask this question when Blizzard does the same thing that SOE did with SWG. That being drive more than 90% of the player base away with one patch. Before the NGE was released there were nearly 400K players in the game. Yes in todays world that is low but back then it meant the game was doing well. Then the NGE was released. One week after the NGE was released the game went from 400K to 50K. Then SOE pulled the plug on SWG. You ask "How is WoW going to come back from losing 3 Million Players?" I say it doesnt need to. Even with 7 Million players it is still the most played MMO out right now.
"Possibly we humans can exist without actually having to fight. But many of us have chosen to fight. For what reason? To protect something? Protect what? Ourselves? The future? If we kill people to protect ourselves and this future, then what sort of future is it, and what will we have become? There is no future for those who have died. And what of those who did the killing? Is happiness to be found in a future that is grasped with blood stained hands? Is that the truth?"
My wow journey began august 2005. Been playing on and off ever since. The state of the game as it is doesn't hold my interest for too long. My prognosis is that the subs will still keep dropping drastically. To be dramatic I would say wow has become a one giant chat/forum moba...
Talking about games where thousands of players exist simultaneously in a single instance and mechanics related to such games.
A lot of people here haven't played WoW in a while/ Just want it to die but in reality blizzard can bounce back if they change their formula. The biggest issue above all else has been content pacing, everytime a patch comes it its overdue and thats a problem. People come back for the overdue patch in hope of a miracle or that maybe the next patch will come out sooner. It never does. I've been saying it for a few years now, wheres all the money going blizz?
This brings me to the other huge issue, lack of uninstanced content. The no flight experiment was a failed attempt to bandage WoWs lack of player interaction in the world or ANY interaction with the world what so ever. The average WoW player logs in right now to do their garrison and logs off. In MoP it was check your farm/dailies, log off. If you're raiding that night it was log in, check farm/dailies, raid, then log off. Where's the immersion? Though classic/BC were riddled with their own problems I was without a doubt immersed in my character. Even in WOTLK though it was primarily through quest hubs, I still felt like a part of the world.
Just take a look at their patches for the past few years. The typical patch for them includes one or multiple of the following: A daily quest area, a raid tier, dungeons. How about making crafting relevant? Ashrans world pvp was a nice attempt at something new, but it ended up like illum in swtor or tol barad before it. The timewalking dungeons is a pretty good concept and carries that nostalgia value, but why the hell are you restricting content to a specific part of the week WHEN THERE ISN'T ENOUGH CONTENT. I won't even go into the arena PvP meta right now because I haven't followed it recently, but to my knowledge that side of that playerbase hasn't been happy in a while either.
If WoW wants to bounce back they first and foremost need to bring patches out quicker. The feeling of having too much to do in a game like this is a good thing, and right now that really doesn't exist even for those who don''t play very frequently. Second, they need to vary the type of content they introduce and immerse the players again. Blizzard is known for hard instanced encounters but don't venture out into other areas of content very often. Most of their raid bosses are pretty solid, and I think making heroic/normal difficulty flexible was a good move for the PUG raiding scene. As for the hardcore mythic raiding scene, i can't think of one good reason to make the hardest difficulty 20 man instead of 10 man when high end raiding population is on a decline and that's something they should reconsider in the future but not a primary reason of why the game has lost so many subs.
TLDR: Bringing out patches faster + Immersing players again + Varying content = They can bounce back from sub loss. People are tired of logging in just to raid or just to look at a garrison/daily activity.
I don't know if that would do it. I stopped playing during The Burning Crusade and I went back a while ago to see if it could grab me. It didn't. Everything was, or at least seemed, so much easier. To the point that it simply wasn't fun. Seeing everyone just stand around the city was pretty depressing, the removal of the talent trees was what I had the hardest time with, then running through dungeons that literally lasted mere minutes with everything in it being steamrolled as if it was made of wet cardboard...
Needless to say, I didn't last long in the game. Those are just a few of the problems I had with the changes. I don't think speedier content updates is going to fix it's issues, at least not for me. I was a bit shocked at just how much the game had changed. What was crazy to me was a majority of the changes were done on systems that I felt didn't need it, at all. It's just a different game now.
Comments
You can't compare WoW with a Resturaunt because they aren't even the same business model.
Now, every, and I do mean EVERY, post-WoW MMO I have played, and if it's on the list I've invested a minimum of a month of 40 hour weeks into it, I talk to people. It's actually part of my job, market research... anyway back on topic. In every, single, case, I have heard, time and time again, "I like this game better, but there's nobody to play with, I'm just going to go resub to WoW".
MMOs are, by nature, social games, the majority of the content is designed for more than one player, if you can't enjoy that content because there aren't any players to enjoy it with, you get bored and move on. Or go to the place where you know you can always get into content because the population is high.
Playing: Secret World: Legends
Waiting for: Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
WoW was around this sub level prior to the expansion and got 3m subs simply by releasing an expansion. They will launch a new expansion and get a boost in subs again.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Agree.
The question is: what will the sub level be prior to the next expansion. In - maybe - 2017.
At that point the question might be: how does WoW bounce back from a <<insert your own 3+ number drop>>.
As the subs before and after the expansion effect are roughly the same, i don't think it really matters tbh
I think that's the wrong question. I think they know that they'll never recover those accounts for a sustained period. I think they know that they can get bumps that recapture some of them for short periods of time. In order to achieve that, I think they will need to increase the frequency of expansions.
The question to me, would be 'How do they slow the decent of subs?' The juggernaut that is WoW is winding down in the life cycle of MMOs. This will take years, but it is happening. That means that they will try to slow that down in order to draw that out as long as possible to keep the profits flowing. The answer to my revised question remains the same as your question. Expansions.
I self identify as a monkey.
Blizzard should really start thinking along the lines of making a NEW online game, next generation. They have the knowledge to do this, before its too late.
They should have an Idea now on things. They need to make things better. Cut down the speed of leveling up (since games started that, they have failed). People speed level yes, once capped they dont have much to do, bugs are also found, but when the whole game community can cap in a week or 2 of just casual play, something is wrong there.
It does not give the programmers a chance to work on end game content (but they have to rush it), letting in more bugs than necessary. 1 thing i like about the game i am playing right now (Elder Scrolls Online) is that it is not a very quick leveling game. Played a week, not hardcore, but certainly not casual (put enough to have it in between) and i just about hit lvl 24 and thats with subscriber bonus to XP gains. Though the game isnt brilliant, it is fun to play (or at least it is right now for me).
WoW kinda lost that aspect for me and i really doubt that Blizzard can recover from the subscriber loss's. That right now should be a warning sign, but it is still #1 as it probably still have 3x the subscriber numbers to its rivals, and it also is what an 11 or 12 year old game that has held its graphical quality intact and still looks nice today, cannot say that about other games released in 2003/4 (i think it was around there).
Expansion release's for WoW is about right in my opinion, look at EQ that was releasing 1 expansion every 6 months and lots of people did not bother buying but it was SoE's way of pulling in more money, Blizard made decent expansions and then added new content over time, if they started doing it as expansions there subs would plummet faster, players would not purchase as much especially with a monthly subscription ontop as well.
Its just the game is done too quickly (they tried to slow it down by removing flying, didnt work), however what is the point in having flying in the game since they are wanting to turn off that aspect.
Death by a million cuts is what is happening to WoW. People claim the age is a factor, but I totally disagree. If they kept the core elements of what made this game fun instead of changing everything from class mechanics, to adding and removing game systems each expansion, this game wouldn't be experiencing the huge sub churn it has experienced the last few years.
I always see people knocking things because they are old in gaming, but yet people eat the same food all the time, they watch the same sports year after year, they watch the same movies and listen to the same music. The age of something doesn't make it less fun, sure things can get boring at times but that is why we have variety in life. Take a break, go play the huge library of games on your steam library! :P
Honestly the only hope Blizz has to save this game is to kind of return the game to it's roots. They need to combine some the modern changes with the old designs in order to recapture the flavor that made previous expansions so much fun.
Easiest answer.... release the next expansion!
I think we'll probably be hearing about the next expansion at this years Blizzcon.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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They are not going to ever recover. Blizzard speaks with its actions. It cancelled its next gen mmo Titan, basically saying they see no future in MMOs. They are putting the majority of their dev resources into more heavily monetized freemium P2W games like Overwatch, Heartstone, and Heroes of the Storm. WOW is languishing, they are too cheap to include flying from here on out. Also WOD was another step that replaced traditional MMO expansion fair with cheesy might as well be browser based gameplay called garrisons. I don't know what else they can do to give their old school MMO players the bird.
Forget about thee supposed repop when the next expansion hits. They flubbed the roll out of WOD so badly, I and many others will never again buy a WOW expansion prior to release. We have learned our lesson and it will be wait and see if it is OK or another buggy, crashing, mess with more browser like play.
I knew this day would come when Activision took it over.
It is a wonderfull game. More games should encourage addons like WOW.
Some moments will stay with me for the rest of my life, but it's clear it is no longer Blizzards first priority.
I think Wow is going the way of Anarchy Online, the company will keep it running and inject minor bits of content, but the player base will dwindle as people realize the future only holds fewer others to play with. The speed of that decline will be directly proportional to how well Overwatch, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm do financially.
I came to WOW after playing many other MMOs including Perfect World and Anarchy Online, and at first I was quite underwhelmed. The graphics are top notch in design, but the game play it self is rather ho hum compared to old (AO) and new games (GW2). I really wish it would continue to evolve, but it looks like Blizzard has put it on maintenance mode to squeeze out all the cash it can before more people get the picture that there will be no new and better content other than cheesy browser based play that takes place removed from the virtual world.
How does WoW bounce back from 3mil decline in subs?
Launch Vanilla servers + BC servers
So, did ESO have a successful launch? Yes, yes it did.By Ryan Getchell on April 02, 2014.
**On the radar: http://www.cyberpunk.net/ **
Its too stagnant and the is dumbed down too much. Removal of talent trees was a mistake a huge mistake, the road Ghostcrawler put them on was the wrong path and until they abandon his strategy of since I dont understand it It must be removed from the game, it will never recover.
In their quest of homogenization they funny enough, congested the game with nearly useless professions, butchered the lore, hacked the classes apart and removed the fun from the game. They also created a permanent gear wall in every aspect of the game that players run into immediately. It used to be a level 29 entering a BG maybe one or two guys had epic gear sets and you still had a chance to kill them. Now its an armored horde in heirlooms and no one learns pvp skills because its not as fast and loose as it used to be.
They slowly made classes less fun to play because the fun things they could do resulted in to many hurt feelings, some of which were from Ghostcrawler himself, who didnt even understand the mechanics of mind control.
You didn't answer the question of the post, and you apparently didn't bother reading anything as well. This hasn't happened every year, maybe you should look at the numbers, and it hasn't happened in this short of time, ever. The game is not well off right now, the best players in the entire game are quitting, without people hyping the game with streams, upcoming PvP tournaments, seeing who's getting world first, having tutorials, theorycrafters, the game won't do very well.
I'm not saying they're missing all of that, but like I said, when it's rare to even find a 2200 arena stream daily for WoW, and the #1 US guild for PvE for years all have quit. That's not a good sign.
It's pretty much the age. I wouldn't play wow no matter what changes blizzard made. You can't play one game for 11 years lol.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Investors do not see it that way. A drop this huge is alarming. Nobody likes to see their wealth declined after they accumulated it over the years. It doesn't matter if it's 100 dollars, or 1 billion. Once you start seeing that money decline, you try to get more.
Make the biggest expansion ever with a major update to the graphic engine and launch on consoles with cross platform play.
Problem solved.
They can't.
Unless some other game comes with revolutionary content which Blizzard might copy for own use they will stick to the "kill this xx times, loot it and bring it to me" rinse & repeat quests, same raids and same grinds/gear threadmill.
They will add more fluff to the cashshop though to compensate for losses.
But as long as people are paying for the cashshop the game will be good, even with 1-2M on it. All you need is 1 full server.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
The best players are quitting? How the fuck do you determine who the "best" players are. Is there even such a thing?
This was pretty much their sub numbers before the expansion. The usual spikes during an expansion launch often goes away afterwards, especially if your game is so old. There is nothing to analyse here.
This drop can be explained. Also you do realise that investors don't invest in like a product. They invest in a company. If I were to buy shares in the company, I would look at the total perforamance of activision-blizzard. Blizzard have a lot of other games which bring in solid revenue, WoW still brings in a lot of revenue.
WoW is a cash cow at the moment. You know what you do with cash cows? You milk them and funnel the money into developing new products. That's what almost every business does. (google BCG matrix). The best strategy with a very mature product like WoW which has limited potential for growth is to extract the cash and invest it into new products.
Blizzard are doing just that. Hearthstone is massively successful and they are looking to expand their game portfolio with HOTS and Overwatch.
But then again vast majority of people on these boards defy all logic and would take actions which are definitely not considered best business practice.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Com back and ask this question when Blizzard does the same thing that SOE did with SWG. That being drive more than 90% of the player base away with one patch. Before the NGE was released there were nearly 400K players in the game. Yes in todays world that is low but back then it meant the game was doing well. Then the NGE was released. One week after the NGE was released the game went from 400K to 50K. Then SOE pulled the plug on SWG. You ask "How is WoW going to come back from losing 3 Million Players?" I say it doesnt need to. Even with 7 Million players it is still the most played MMO out right now.
"Possibly we humans can exist without actually having to fight. But many of us have chosen to fight. For what reason? To protect something? Protect what? Ourselves? The future? If we kill people to protect ourselves and this future, then what sort of future is it, and what will we have become? There is no future for those who have died. And what of those who did the killing? Is happiness to be found in a future that is grasped with blood stained hands? Is that the truth?"
I don't know if that would do it. I stopped playing during The Burning Crusade and I went back a while ago to see if it could grab me. It didn't. Everything was, or at least seemed, so much easier. To the point that it simply wasn't fun. Seeing everyone just stand around the city was pretty depressing, the removal of the talent trees was what I had the hardest time with, then running through dungeons that literally lasted mere minutes with everything in it being steamrolled as if it was made of wet cardboard...
Needless to say, I didn't last long in the game. Those are just a few of the problems I had with the changes. I don't think speedier content updates is going to fix it's issues, at least not for me. I was a bit shocked at just how much the game had changed. What was crazy to me was a majority of the changes were done on systems that I felt didn't need it, at all. It's just a different game now.