Jaskalas
Lifer
Check out the new "feature" of patch 5.4, "connected realms". Another name for it is merging servers.
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WoW revenue down 54% in seven months
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Check out the new "feature" of patch 5.4, "connected realms". Another name for it is merging servers.
I would play the crap out of that one
Dulanic
Diamond Member
I quit a year ago and haven't looked back. The hand holding scripted crap just got old. There was no difficulty left and they catered to the casual. I don't miss it a bit, but I do miss mmo gaming. I'm holding out for Camelot unchained which I already paid for in kickstarter and also eq next. I'm worried about eq next being f2p though.
GaiaHunter
Diamond Member
I don't see what WoW has to win by going f2p.
Their player base is likely mostly veterans with several years invested.
New players will mostly likely play other games that offer a more action oriented combat and superior graphics.
Their player base is likely mostly veterans with several years invested.
New players will mostly likely play other games that offer a more action oriented combat and superior graphics.
Subyman
Moderator <br> VC&G Forum
The story originated here: http://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/wow-microtransactions/ They are a "Digital Goods Analyst" that harp on the importance of micro-transactions. So, seems a bit biased. I'm not saying it WoW isn't experiencing a drop, but its good to see where the story originated.
That's good info. Thanks for adding it. I'm ignoring their "analysis" almost completely. The only thing of interest to me is whether the revenue numbers are close to accurate, and what that does or doesn't say about WoW's market and the potential opportunities for competitors.
AViking
Platinum Member
What was the peak for wow? They made a huge philosophical change at the end of BC and I'm curious when exactly they had the most subscribers. In the beginning you played and got as far as you could and got the best gear you could per expansion pack. Sunwell was incredibly hard and not everyone got to do it. So be it. I was fine with not clearing it. Suddenly they felt that everyone should be able to clear everything and get all the gear including the legendaries. This dumbed the game down to ridiculous levels.
No offense to the mouth breathers out there but it's really no fun having to recruit and weed through all the idiots who stand in fire. In vanilla and BC I knew the quality of a player simply by what bosses they had killed. After that you might be able to do it by the guild they were in. Soon guilds were disbanding right and left though and you couldn't do that either.
The only thing WOW really had going for it was that you could build up a team of solid players and play with them for years. Once they dumbed the content down and the playstyle down to the lowest common denominator though the top players slowly started trickling away. Then the game wasn't as fun since WOW really had no way to create good players anymore. Everything was given to everyone.
No offense to the mouth breathers out there but it's really no fun having to recruit and weed through all the idiots who stand in fire. In vanilla and BC I knew the quality of a player simply by what bosses they had killed. After that you might be able to do it by the guild they were in. Soon guilds were disbanding right and left though and you couldn't do that either.
The only thing WOW really had going for it was that you could build up a team of solid players and play with them for years. Once they dumbed the content down and the playstyle down to the lowest common denominator though the top players slowly started trickling away. Then the game wasn't as fun since WOW really had no way to create good players anymore. Everything was given to everyone.
AViking
Platinum Member
Found this. It tends to support the notion that the new model implemented was not effective. This isn't to say that subscription numbers equate to revenue though. The problem there is that people are fed up increasing Blizzard revenue with realm transfer and faction transfer fees.
I'd argue they should revamp the game engine and go back to the Vanilla/BC model of game play.
gorcorps
aka Brandon
shortylickens
No Lifer
General consensus is that too many people would want to play Ghosts.
It's always funny to see how many abulance chasers sit on the sidelines with popcorn waiting for the wow bubble to pop, as if it is their life mission to make wow look bad. I'm not a huge fan of wow myself, but if this was a football game and Blizzard was one team and the naysayers were on the other, it would be a blowout with Blizzard on top.
Even at 50% of it's peak greatness (WOTLK days), wow is still the most profitable/popular mmo in existance and will remain so for at least a few more years. People complain about Blizzard's design choices and how gameplay has suffered, but it doesn't appear to have affected subscriptions as much as player fatigue and aging technology. Not bad for a 8 year old game.
As of today wow still commands almost 8 million subs worldwide. I'm not certain how to converts to revenue because rates vary around the world, but from a player popularity standpoint it is still over twice as popular as even the next most popular game.
My point is that if some of you guys are going to keep beating the drum about how Blizzard keeps f'ing up the game, then you're going to have to actually find some evidence other than the gut reactions from players who preferred vanilla, as if it somehow matters more than people who really like the current model and are actively paying for the game. The bottom line is that the game simply isn't as bad as some describe, because i'm confident if that was the case Blizzard would be dealing with catastrophic reductions in subscriptions instead of a gradual reduction in consumer interest due to aging.
We are also past the point where the Diablo 3 annual wow subscriptions would have worn off, which is an excuse people gave last year to justify how wow kept up in spite of "low interest". Guess quite a few of them decided to stay playing.
Even at 50% of it's peak greatness (WOTLK days), wow is still the most profitable/popular mmo in existance and will remain so for at least a few more years. People complain about Blizzard's design choices and how gameplay has suffered, but it doesn't appear to have affected subscriptions as much as player fatigue and aging technology. Not bad for a 8 year old game.
As of today wow still commands almost 8 million subs worldwide. I'm not certain how to converts to revenue because rates vary around the world, but from a player popularity standpoint it is still over twice as popular as even the next most popular game.
My point is that if some of you guys are going to keep beating the drum about how Blizzard keeps f'ing up the game, then you're going to have to actually find some evidence other than the gut reactions from players who preferred vanilla, as if it somehow matters more than people who really like the current model and are actively paying for the game. The bottom line is that the game simply isn't as bad as some describe, because i'm confident if that was the case Blizzard would be dealing with catastrophic reductions in subscriptions instead of a gradual reduction in consumer interest due to aging.
We are also past the point where the Diablo 3 annual wow subscriptions would have worn off, which is an excuse people gave last year to justify how wow kept up in spite of "low interest". Guess quite a few of them decided to stay playing.
AViking
Platinum Member
Obviously I played and don't anymore. /facepalm I quit during tier 11. For good. Wrath took the fun out of the game and Cata was a waste of time. Pandas? Yeah right...
The game caters to the lowest common denominator in order to maximize profits. That's not for me and clearly millions of others are leaving the game.
Nobody is going to deny that Blizzard has been immensiley successful. I'm simply pointing out that they have overlooked very simple changes that would have kept a lot of subscribers. Most people in my guild didn't leave because of the graphics. They left because the game lagged like crazy on Tuesday, Comcast had problems all the time and it was not solvable, the servers depopulated, there was no world pvp, arenas sucked, bg's sucked, and we were farming the same boring hard modes for months and months only to have them dumbed down to the level that people with the worst hand eye coordination and spacial recognition ever had the same gear as us. It's one thing to server transfer when you get serious about raiding since you find out that the default server you started on is god awful but it's another to have to server transfer every couple years, or more, since servers keep dying. Has anyone looked at Illidan, Chogall, Stormreaver, lately? Those servers were premium servers with a balanced population and top raiding guilds in Vanilla and BC. In Wrath things turned sour everywhere and nobody would do anything except charge people money to go somewhere else. There is zero alliance on those 3 servers today. Look at wowprogress and shed a tear for those servers of yesteryears. Server balance is so incredibly important for both recruitment and just world fun and that was lost in Wrath. Surely those of you who play know how boring the game is when there is nobody out there to world pvp with and there are only a couple 25 mans on your server.
If you are comfortable paying money to server/faction transfer on a regular basis, having no world pvp, and having no raiding guilds to choose from then wow is the game for you today.
The rest of us quit.
What boggles my mind is why there really hasn't been something better released. That's truly the beauty of WOW. No competitor has been able to kill it. They either released when the game was still beta and lost everyone before they got started or they were just terrible. With all the hype around game of thrones and lord of the rings there is a true desire for the genre. I'd like to think that simply releasing a game with a modern graphics engine and not catering to the dumbest players out there would be a gold mine but I'm biased from a high end raider point of view.
For now games like LoL will have to do for many. I'll keep waiting though.
The game caters to the lowest common denominator in order to maximize profits. That's not for me and clearly millions of others are leaving the game.
Nobody is going to deny that Blizzard has been immensiley successful. I'm simply pointing out that they have overlooked very simple changes that would have kept a lot of subscribers. Most people in my guild didn't leave because of the graphics. They left because the game lagged like crazy on Tuesday, Comcast had problems all the time and it was not solvable, the servers depopulated, there was no world pvp, arenas sucked, bg's sucked, and we were farming the same boring hard modes for months and months only to have them dumbed down to the level that people with the worst hand eye coordination and spacial recognition ever had the same gear as us. It's one thing to server transfer when you get serious about raiding since you find out that the default server you started on is god awful but it's another to have to server transfer every couple years, or more, since servers keep dying. Has anyone looked at Illidan, Chogall, Stormreaver, lately? Those servers were premium servers with a balanced population and top raiding guilds in Vanilla and BC. In Wrath things turned sour everywhere and nobody would do anything except charge people money to go somewhere else. There is zero alliance on those 3 servers today. Look at wowprogress and shed a tear for those servers of yesteryears. Server balance is so incredibly important for both recruitment and just world fun and that was lost in Wrath. Surely those of you who play know how boring the game is when there is nobody out there to world pvp with and there are only a couple 25 mans on your server.
If you are comfortable paying money to server/faction transfer on a regular basis, having no world pvp, and having no raiding guilds to choose from then wow is the game for you today.
The rest of us quit.
What boggles my mind is why there really hasn't been something better released. That's truly the beauty of WOW. No competitor has been able to kill it. They either released when the game was still beta and lost everyone before they got started or they were just terrible. With all the hype around game of thrones and lord of the rings there is a true desire for the genre. I'd like to think that simply releasing a game with a modern graphics engine and not catering to the dumbest players out there would be a gold mine but I'm biased from a high end raider point of view.
For now games like LoL will have to do for many. I'll keep waiting though.
I think you're just blinded by your lack of self awareness.
smackababy
Lifer
So, you suggest a company would have a "gold mine" releasing and maintaining a game that caters to the less than 1% of the WoW community? Yeah... sounds like a great business move. There is a reason Sunwell failed. It was not only a huge gear check, it required people to know the mechanics, except Brutallus, who was just a DPS race. Nobody liked it except the ultra high end guilds (think top 100 in the world). So, that is 2500 players that could clear Sunwell (post nerf!) out of the 12 million players? Yeah... a gold mine; if you charge each player $1000 a month.
AViking
Platinum Member
Sunwell went too far. No doubt.
Why does everyone have to have access to everything though? I don't think you need something as insane as Sunwell where only guilds with 6 pairs of Warglaives cleared it but lets be honest here -the current game is too basic. You clear the normal mode instance in a heart beat, clear most of the hard modes pretty fast, finish the instance, and then farm for months. It turns into a hack and slash since by the time the first patch is released you can bypass key mechanics.
Are you honestly saying you prefer that over working on progression? If you had everything from the super easy to the super hard then people would be able to "progress" for the entire patch and it would be more fun.
Why does everyone have to have access to everything though? I don't think you need something as insane as Sunwell where only guilds with 6 pairs of Warglaives cleared it but lets be honest here -the current game is too basic. You clear the normal mode instance in a heart beat, clear most of the hard modes pretty fast, finish the instance, and then farm for months. It turns into a hack and slash since by the time the first patch is released you can bypass key mechanics.
Are you honestly saying you prefer that over working on progression? If you had everything from the super easy to the super hard then people would be able to "progress" for the entire patch and it would be more fun.
smackababy
Lifer
I haven't played Cataclysm and beyond, but WotLK still had hardmodes the majority of people couldn't do. Ulduar was a failure from the community standpoint. Only good guilds could clear the hardmodes and Heroic ToC and ICC couldn't be done except by top guilds.
I had a friend get his guild to pay for my to server transfer to their server and help them clear Algalon and 0 light Yogg a bit before ICC opened because nobody on their server had done it. Afterwards, (once I got 2 server first titles), they paid to transfer me back to Illidan. Raiding in WotLK was still very hard. ICC got huge nerfs (in the form of the damage buff) and Heroic LK took a long time for it fall. There was never a "super easy" end game raid.
The problem is that 90% of the people never saw any Heroic content, thus they didn't get any progression. They saw the "elite" with the green Heroic tag on their gear and were jealous. Well, guess what, those 90% of people offer Blizzard a lot more money than the "elite", so ofc Blizzard caters to them.
I had a friend get his guild to pay for my to server transfer to their server and help them clear Algalon and 0 light Yogg a bit before ICC opened because nobody on their server had done it. Afterwards, (once I got 2 server first titles), they paid to transfer me back to Illidan. Raiding in WotLK was still very hard. ICC got huge nerfs (in the form of the damage buff) and Heroic LK took a long time for it fall. There was never a "super easy" end game raid.
The problem is that 90% of the people never saw any Heroic content, thus they didn't get any progression. They saw the "elite" with the green Heroic tag on their gear and were jealous. Well, guess what, those 90% of people offer Blizzard a lot more money than the "elite", so ofc Blizzard caters to them.
Tweak155
Lifer
I think you have to go back to your first comments in this thread. You didn't come across with very reasonable arguments.
"If you are comfortable paying money to server/faction transfer on a regular basis, having no world pvp, and having no raiding guilds to choose from then wow is the game for you today."
"'Id like to think that simply releasing a game with a modern graphics engine and not catering to the dumbest players out there would be a gold mine but I'm biased from a high end raider point of view."
"The rest of us quit."
"The game caters to the lowest common denominator in order to maximize profits. That's not for me and clearly millions of others are leaving the game."
I'm not defending the post you're responding to, but your post contain just as much falacy. First you pretty much declare that anyone who continues to play the game in it's current form to be dumb and has no right to judge the game, because, as you say, you are a high end raider. You make claims that "millions" left the game because of the reason you cite yet you offer absolutely no proof except to point out that people have left, so therefore obviously it was because of that. Your use of Post hoc ergo propter hoc is by definition a logical falacy (look it up) because you are drawing correlation with no basis. You think the game is stupid, therefore others must think its stupid, therefore millions have left because the game is stupid.
If the quality of the game dropped as precipitously as you describe, the drop in population would have been just as extreme. Instead, what we see is an almost 10 year old game still pulling about 75% of what it did at it's absolute peak which was around 12 million. I would go further to say that your opinions do not represent the feelings of the majority of wow players, because, wait for it, subscription numbers are healthy for an MMO. Very healthy. Maybe not as healthy as wow circa 2008, but extremely healthy nonetheless.
Now I don't think you are wrong in some of your criticisms. I think you make a solid point on where raiding has gone and that world PVP has definitely taken a hit overall. However, it doesn't by extention mean current players are "dumb". Perhaps wow does in fact serve a purpose for many gamers, even if that purpose is foreign to you. The more you blame players and their "ignorance", the more people are going to respond harshly to you.
AViking
Platinum Member
WOTLK did. Which is why I didn't quit until afterwards. Lets review though the entire of the expansion though.
1. Ulduar. I liked this instance. We didn't clear the hard modes before the nerf but had fun trying. Freya and Mimiron were not happening for us until after the nerf. We did zero light eventually for the mount but lets not forget that people were cheating on that hard mode and they were constantly changing the rules with fan of knives and who knows what else so Yogg was a bitch. We got the legendary done but zero light was crazy and props to those who did it early.
2. Worst instance ever. One room. Totally boring. Needed to farm special gear and have the perfect raid comp to get a tribute to insanity. Way too much luck. I can't even begin to swear enough about the random disconnects that we suffered during that instance which would ruin our week. We got it but that was not fun. Probably my worst experience ever raid leading.
3. Good ol' ICC. At this point our server was so unstable that we had to change our raiding schedule. We were wiping on gunship since the server would just remain frozen on Tuesdays. At least during the terrible lag of Ulduar the game would eventually be playable but at this point the game was unplayable. Got the Lich King before the nerf and all the hard modes except 25 Lich King on hard mode. Props to those who could kill that. We would lose 1-2 people during each phase change due to disconnects.
Shit gotta go. Sorry to leave the post half done.
1. Ulduar. I liked this instance. We didn't clear the hard modes before the nerf but had fun trying. Freya and Mimiron were not happening for us until after the nerf. We did zero light eventually for the mount but lets not forget that people were cheating on that hard mode and they were constantly changing the rules with fan of knives and who knows what else so Yogg was a bitch. We got the legendary done but zero light was crazy and props to those who did it early.
2. Worst instance ever. One room. Totally boring. Needed to farm special gear and have the perfect raid comp to get a tribute to insanity. Way too much luck. I can't even begin to swear enough about the random disconnects that we suffered during that instance which would ruin our week. We got it but that was not fun. Probably my worst experience ever raid leading.
3. Good ol' ICC. At this point our server was so unstable that we had to change our raiding schedule. We were wiping on gunship since the server would just remain frozen on Tuesdays. At least during the terrible lag of Ulduar the game would eventually be playable but at this point the game was unplayable. Got the Lich King before the nerf and all the hard modes except 25 Lich King on hard mode. Props to those who could kill that. We would lose 1-2 people during each phase change due to disconnects.
Shit gotta go. Sorry to leave the post half done.
EQ (original) peaked about 5 years in at 500,000 users.. last i heard it still had about 150,000 who play "regular" which is good. most MMOPRG's say they need about 75,000 steady players to break even. EQ has kept these numbers for years.. as a "EQ was my first" i loved the game, but a quick venture back shows its not really playable for me anymore.. I still judge all after by it.. for me it will always be the best, not for any reason other then it was the First.. some of the play mechanics rocked.. true night vision and lack of for other races, a real fear of death, every item felt hard won.. they just dint drop all the time non stop.. all after feel like Pee wee games.. way to easy..
WoW has always skewed numbers.. in the US where most of the early MMORPG's where only released) it keeps about 4-5 million, the rest is all asian accounts.. they do subscriptions quite a bit different then the rest of the world.. most are multi use (internet cafe where you pay as you play, not monthly) and so on. Some very general research put the FARMING accounts (gold sellers) at 4-6 million.. while "everybody" says they dont buy gold.. some reports from Illegal gold selling operations that where closed show its a much different story. Say you dont, but do is the more real thing.
so consider whatever number about half are gold sellers.. still playing but not for enjoyment. And even then.. those numbers are "blow all others out of the water" numbers. WoW wont be going F2P anytime soon, it will leverage the current users with more Pay mounts and crap.. possibly rest state potions (like 99% of the F2P do) for faster leveling. F2P is for the 1 million area.. not the 4-5-6 million area which is still a boatload of cash.
smackababy
Lifer
I read an interview with a Blizzard employee about going F2P for WoW and they had very real concerns about server issues if it happened. They understand the subscription model won't last forever, but they know if they just opened the flood gates, it could end up being unplayable for quite a lot of people due to a surge in players.
Tweak155
Lifer
Do you even read the replies to your posts? Anteaus helped highlight problems with your opinions, but here you are spewing out the same garbage.
In my WoW experience, we didn't have server problems outside of expansion release day / few days. Thus, I could ignorantly say "there were no server problems", but I can step back and realize that was maybe just my server.
All of your complaints are extremely limited in scope / view, but you keep on truckin'.
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