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Calling it now: Legion will be the last WoW expansion
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I actually see artifacts as a way to take RnG away from boss drops coming in the future, there is no reason why artifacts can't continue to level with you into new expansion packs and continue to grow in power as you do... i think this game is far from going into maintenance mode and as long as it's viable they will continue to make expansions for the game... 5.6 million subs is still 5.6 million subs. last year they just rolled out servers in new countries... no point doing that if you're going to put the game into maintenance mode a couple of years later, this game still has plenty of life.
also as others have said there must always be a lich king and i'm sure we'll have to face off against bolvar in the future.. not to mention they are just starting to scratch the surface of titans properly... which i think could lead into a whole other expansion.
your information is flawed, they already announced that a large portion of subs they lost were from the asian countries.... which means it might be more even now than you think, not to mention Orders are basically garrisons 2.0 they wanted to streamline garrisons into something more meaningful and less tedious, so now we have orders... they will see how that plays out and make adjustments and changes where it needs be... everything in WoW is an evolution, they find out what does or doesn't work and try to make it better or scrap it completely... either way they move forward.
WoW is not in maintenance mode but those numbers were always misleading anyway when most of their playerbase is from the East. Put it against the giants in the West and you'll see that WoW is getting surpassed already, which hasn't happened in 10 years.
When Q1 reports came everyone was saying it's still 7mil players "enjoying" the game. Now when Q2 came everyone is saying it's still 5mil players enjoying the game. Little do they know that Q3 will be another giant fall to 3mil, and if Legion comes in 2016 Q2 we might be looking at half the features in this announcement cut out. Not that there was much content presented but still.
EQ has been getting an expansion or 2 a year for the last 10 years with 5% of the players wow has and most of them included 14+ zones raids etc If EQ can do that with 5% of wows players WOW can do it forever.
your logic is flawed, i just checked the servers right now in game and the majority are medium - full
in fact there is 11 low servers currently... 11 low servers out of 220 or something.. and thats just NA, during OCE peak time all servers are basically full thats another 12 servers... and that doesn't even include asian servers... 5.6m subs is still 5.6 million subs.
I'm not playing EQ so I have no idea how big those Zones are.
However I did play WoW and I know that each expansion had less and less content.
Legion is not looking to break that pattern but rather even make it worse.
I think it will be the last expansion where Wow still is number one on the MMO list (and it might dip below one before the release if it takes too long to go up again at launch) but it wont be the last Wow expansion.
Everquest last expansion was just 9 months ago and it is F2P which Wow might become after this one. So, no. It wont be the last expansion.
Bot Wow isn't the same game it was after Kaplan left and it wont be that game ever again.
I think this is fair to say. I think WoW won't be number 1 for much longer, especially in the West. It might spike back up to #1 when the expansion hits, but it will likely last even less time then it did with WoD and suffer an even bigger loss. I mean, hell, the next quarter will likely lose atleast another 500k-1mil. From there they still probably have 2 quarters of no content until the expansion. Looking at somewhere in the ballpark of 4 million or less total subs by the time the expansion pre-patch hits and subs bounce back up again until a few months after the expansion.
They might already have less subs then FF14 in the West.
Fact of the matter is though that none of this really matters. They charge a sub, reap the benefits of a cash shop, and they also charge high prices for soon to be frequent expansions. They will be fine even if they end up sitting at around 2-3 million. Most MMOs do more with MUCH less.
that's so untrue about the east.. you need to let go of that.. WoW has admitted they have had mass exodus from eastern players over the last few years... WoW's playerbase is not as eastern heavy as you think it is anymore
No, they don't. If you look on Wows population by country from 2011 (recent one we got) then 30% of the players where in china and another 10% is from Korea and Taiwan. That is the most recent numbers we have but lets assume the percentage is about the same.
That would mean 3.35 million Wow players would be western players. That is however just an guess but it is a guess with at least some backing. Lets be generous, lets take away half that number (which is pretty insane) and get 1.7 million western players for Wow.
Now, FF XIV might have had over 5 million accounts since launch but those the accounts created but estimates places it on between 800K-1.2M active subs. Lets be generous and say 1.5M. Oh, and that is total number of subs but lets pretend they all live in the west (and to do this we count Japan as the west as well). Sure those numbaers are from spring and before the expansion but we are still being generous enough.
Still Wow is larger even if we count severely to FFs advantage. FF XIV is surely the second largest P2P MMO, noone is doubting that and it might very well pass Wow but I have a feeling that wont happen until somewhere 2017 unless Wows players bleed over to it a lot.
I ain't saying my math here is exact or even close but it isn't totally bogus either as a lot of people here states numbers like Wow having close to zero Chinese players or over 5 million western players.
Also to note is that the Korean players is a rather huge group for Wow and they do count monthly fees as well as you can count FFs Japanese players as Asian or Eastern and we know a lot of FFs players are from Japan.
Wow is falling but it will still be at the top until at least after the next expansion with maybe the possible dip just before I predicted.
these numbers seem fairly reasonable, even blizzard admitted they have been losing a lot of subs from the east, so it's not an invalid assumption to make that between 1.5 - 2m subs could still be western based....
it's also hard to take a lot of peoples credibility seriously when they are saying things like "wow will never get back 16 million subs" of course they wont get back 16 million, at no point in time did they ever have 16 million, they most active subs they have ever reported is 12 million and that was during wrath of the lich king.
regardless, the sky is not falling and new xpacks will keep rolling out and in a year when they're announcing another expansion i'm sure this thread will pop up again spouting that the next expansion is going to be the last one for sure.
I don't get the mentality... ffxiv has maybe 1.2 million subs and it's a success and thriving, WoW get's below 7 million and it's the end of warcraft, that's not how it works... having 5.2 million regardless of where they are located still makes it a big deal.
Edit - You could even argue "oh but what about people who arent subbed and are playing with WoW tokens", yeah thats just more revenue for blizzard... for that 200,000 people that just bought a WoW token.. blizzard made $20+ off the person selling it, thus making their monthy sub revenue increase by $5 per person.... why would you stop making expansions / put the game into maintenance mode when you can make more money off people montly, by introducing a cash shop item that grants a month of play when you sell it. Not to mention the person selling a token just paid his $15 sub + $20 for the token... making his monthly expenditure $35
1) The Burning Legion story doesn't end with a battle on Azeroth, they are much too massive in scope for that. which is why I was hoping for a Legion expansion that attacks them on their turf in a vastly alien world like we haven't seen before.
2) Can the Warcraft story end without resolution of the titans and old gods?
3) I expect smaller and smaller expansions from now on but I don't see them stopping without trying a full F2P model.
Absolutely zero chance of this being the last expansion. Though there's always a possibility of any expansion being the last "traditional" expansion.
Far too many things are still left open -- and simply collecting Titan artifacts does not mean we magically summon them. All we're doing is borrowing titan power to close a rift. We also are not told if we will have a conclusion with Azshara. Only that we will see her in a zone. This could just be a part of something in the future. In addition, we don't even know if we will see Sargeras, who is the most powerful entity in the Universe that commands the Legion. It will be a stretch to fight Gul'dan and then move to the most powerful leader in all Universes at the same level (we'd have to just look at Gul'dan and kill him and have no trouble at all if we're strong enough to fight the big boss). More than likely, they will have another filler expansion, potentially with Azshara and a few old gods, then we will figure out a way to chase the Burning Legion and try to end or contain them. Which could even lead to actually meeting the Titans thereafter who deem our world infected via The Calculator's assertions and that alerting the Titans would doom the world.
We still have Kul Tiras, most of the Old Gods, Sylvanas, Bolvar, Medivh (and son), Jaina, Various worlds they've mentioned throughout WoW (including in game books), etc. The Emerald dream was already fixed in a book, yet they're bringing it back somehow due to popularity (likely us following the book's setting). We even have the Great Dark, the Twisting Nether, the Ethereals and their world that was conquered by The Hunger, etc. etc. etc.
When they announced Draenor, they mentioned several more expansions that were already in the works (in planning or development). If they decide to make a "last" expansion, it will likely be with player made content via the Twisting Nether and the illusions thereof.
Keep an eye out on their developer levels, as they keep on saying they have the most developers on WoW than ever before and that there is more to come.
Sure the original post may not have had malice but after reading the first three pages it's hard to say the OP doesn't have any malice in his intent.
Malice, and ANY malice are pretty different qualifiers.
Does "any malice" equate to a temper tantrum?
Apologize for my annoying Zen attitude. I thing I'm going to need it through the weekend...
To be honest do I think that 3 million western subscribers is spot on but it could as well be 1.5M more or less, I was just counting the lowest possibility and comparing it with the highest for FF XIV. That the western subscribers gone down with more than 50% compare to the eastern sounds like very wishful thinking from someone that never bother to do the math.
And I agree with you about tokens. Who pays someones account doesn't really matter, just that someone does. Otherwise we couldn't count kids who have a mom paying for them, and that would hurt Wows number pretty badly as well. Just be careful so you don't count them both as a cashshop income when they buy the token and as a subscription for figuring out Wows income, that would count them twice but for subs they are subs.
Always wondered to people that "live" only for their hate toward games, things, people, ... Why they bother so much with thing that they obviously hate. Shrinks will never run out of job.
Someone here said WoW is huge.
No, my friend. WoW lost 8 million players in last year. It lost 65% of whole player base in just one year.
The 5 million players might sound good or more than any other MMO. But this 5 million will be zero , if they dont stop the speed of decline.
And so far all they managed is to make it worse.
This expansion will make them or break them.
Blizzard are smart company. If the expansion somehow reverses downward trend (which i highly doubt) than it will not be the end.
But if it does not... Blizzard are not known to bet on a loosing horse.
still don't get how people tend to call the apocalpyse.
Is it so hard to just like, you know, play the game if you like it and play something else if you don't?
What should the normal player care if its either the last expansion or not? Some people really sound like some doomsday prophet trying to get it to happen somehow.
Of course, everything has an end - so does WoW - but what does it matter when that will be? If you enjoy the game, go play it for the time being, if not, whatever - find yourself another game you enjoy more.
(Iam not a WoW Player/Fanboy btw, thought i mention that here before people tear me apart)
You called it!
See you in a year.
A question.
After watching the WoW movie teaser with the SW fly over,and seeing it in all it's glory,
I have to wonder.
How can you log in WoW and play in WoWs version of SW ,that comparatively looks like
a birthday cake ornament?
A small comment.
WoW,I believe,is still the best game in it's class,with the classic quests/dungeons/raids format.
The only game that challenged it,on a design level,is GW2.
The irony.In it's latest iterations,it feels a more modern game than some of it's younger contenders.
And given how games with 1/10th of it's projected 2-3 million subs have been going on for many
many years,I'd say that WoW still has many many years to go.
Blizzard did well for scrapping Titan.
They didn't need a Titan.
If they wanted to build a modern massive online game they should go for WoW 2.
The problem here is.
When you can build an entire game for the cost of a WoW raid,and make hundreds of millions out
of it,do you still have the drive to invest hundreds of millions on creating an epic WoW 2?
I don't believe so.
But that doesn't mean that this is the last WoW expansion,just that all the expansions after this
will be more or less like all the expansions before.
P.S -Die! Die at last.Please diiieeeee.
-No.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
2. Even after "bleeding subs", it still has more subs than most its competition combined.
3. There are a TON more xpacs left to do: there has yet to be a tauren centric one yet, and surely Bolivar must make his debut as the LK before this all ends.
4. I will give creedence to a lot of your theories. With the movie, it would be a sick time to bring out WoW2, perhaps set in the past like the movie. And bringing back what is essentially Burning Crusade 2.0 with god mode weapons does seem suspect. Plus, how much higher will people be willing to vertically grow a character? 110 is already getting silly.
5. But the bottom line is, you keep making this estimation by insisting YOUR view of their current catalog is THEIR view. It's not.
Nope that's crazy talk. Theres no way they are going to 'can' something that profitable because they are "bored" with the IP(s).
The thing that makes the most sense is: They just lost HALF OF THEIR PLAYERS so they are throwing EVERYTING they have been saving for a "Rainy day" into the frey to stabilize the problem.
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