This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Armchair game executives. I'm sure if Blizzard is concerned (and I'm sure they are concerned; it's their job to be concerned about the status of their game no matter what the situation) they will make appropriate actions.I'm generally a pretty negative person, but there's really not much I can complain about in Cataclysm. All the bosses and raid mechanics are for the most part new and interesting. The dungeons are all new and interesting. WotLK heroics are a snoozefest compared with the modicum of skill required for the new heroics. The "OMG Recycled Content" is a red herring, I'd say there are VERY few people who actually ran ZG at level and really only saw it while lol-mount-grinding, and even ZA was released nearly 3.5 years ago and stopped being "current" content almost 3 years ago, so that's new to a lot of people too. (And even if you ran them before, the bosses are each a bit different, there's new loot, it's 5 instead of 10 man, and it's kind of a nice throwback).So, 600k down. "Downfall of WoW" or "Mid-cycle fluctuation." Whatever it is, it really doesn't matter what Joe User's opinion is. You can't have a never ending climb of subscribers forever...
Opening up new content outside of new dungeons/raids will be the best idea I can see. They have done it in the past often with pretty good success. Opening the gates, Isle of Quel'Danas, The Argent Tournament. If you look back there haven't been major additions to quests, outside of Silithus and its major changes. For the most part there is a big focus on minor and usually singular quest chain(s) per content patch to intro to the new content. Like the troll quest chain where you bounced around STV eventually ending up at ZG or The Black Knight quest chain. There were also the attunement quest chains that BC content was known for. Although with each of these new content additions it will be important to add rewards that make doing the added content worthwhile but not dimish the playability of the previously added content. For example, the firelands will be a new place to do dailies, with nice higher item level gear. That dimishes the content of doing the Tol Barad dailies because the "useful" rewards will be lower in item level and the currency used their useless to those who have already collected the mounts and pets. An idea could be to add more rewards there but have them focus on PvP instead. Have a straight exchange of Tol Barad marks to honor, add some sort of heirloom, or even add new higher item level items/replace the current ones (not update since they would need to be repurchased) Minor tweaks to old content can keep people going on longer with a wider base of things. Already the originally added heroics to Cata have outlived their usefulness and are now just milked for their points instead of gear. It would also be great if professions were somehow more active in content patches not just for high end gear. A new rep that comes out that instead of selling just straight armor also sells recipes for BoP gear thats higher item level, but is harder to make than average pieces. It would help the economy.Yay for wall of text.
You know why? Simple.1) Gears look very very ugly since WOLK. (BC gears actually got their own flair)2) No improvements on character outlook, animations.3) Various imbalance issue among the classes (esp Mages)4) Reputation grind seems endless.5) Homogenisation / Normalisation is just bad. 6) Game content starting to be too easy in WOLK (in turn giving birth to many moronic players who won't learn and having noobish attitude forever)Seeing so many reasons, i am not surprised why the subscribers will decline.
"erosion from the bottom up" is what I posted on s thread a few months back, when someone posted that Blizz was adding new customers. The latest figures bare that out. There is a very old business adage "when you try to please everyone you please no one"In trying to boost subscriptions, Blizz alienated the foundation of players who first supported this game. Most of those customers were not also Xbox/PS players. WoW was not suppose to be a lock-n-load game. It was when I started playing about immersion/community/growing.Most of today's players are very good gamers which is why they can consume contents so fast, but they don't make for good WoW players. WoW filled a niche for people who kind of fell between the cracks of the gaming world. People like myself to use an example. I never play Xbox/PS, but I took to WoW. I played the game reasonably well. I played at a casual pace. There were no aspects of the game that bored me. I enjoyed the many aspects of sharing/reading ideas/opinions inside/outside the game. To me WoW was comparable to playing chess. People play chess for a lifetime without getting bored..why? Maybe because there is a certain lure, challenge and yes even a bit of ego in going up against an opponent. To get better at chess, requires a certain amount of intellect. WoW used to require some as well if you wanted to exceed. In homogenizing this game, WoW has removed so much of that. This of course appeals to the lock-n-load gamers who level one toon, hack and slash through contents and either quickly succeed and move on or worse hang around being impatient, unfriendly and spewing venom on the rest of us. How to try and fix this?Well it starts by deciding who has precedent, your stockholders or game holders.It starts by deciding once and for all are you going after the gamers who are one and done type players or are you going after the smaller pool but one that can be expected to provide longevity and stability to their base.a few more tips.A.) bring back ego.This game needs that certain level of seemingly unreachable contents. Not harder like in heroics, I'm talking exclusive. This feeds the drive to improve oneself. The elitist players, the ones that create addons, that make spreadsheets, that wear legendary gear are not the enemies of this game. They are the proof that anything can be accomplished, it's just a matter of time and understanding. Those elitist taught me how to play. B.) Leave progression alone. Don't negate old contents with each new content patch. This process has killed the casual player/guild, which make up the bulk of the community in this game. I'll get to where I want to go, just let me do it at my own pace.C.) Bring back individuality. Blizz could take few pointers from Rifts talent tree design.D.) They revamped the old world and hardly any old player took to it. How about giving an exclusive race/class mount for leveling up new toons to 85.E.) Give crafting profession back their exclusiveness. A.E. when weapon blacksmith could create the epic Blazefurry for only themselves. This denoted a certain dedication and pride. Being allowed to Sell epics removed its uniqueness. Geez if players can't be patient enough to earn epic gear then this is not the game for them.F.) For godsakes find a way to balance the realm populations. If your stuck on a low pop-poor economy server your options are to pay through the nose and leave server friends or suffer through it.G.) Give limited amount of free transfers per year. I mean seriously, 55 bucks if you want to bring a toon over to a new server and switch factions. Talk about price gouging, these guys are like the oil companies. Making it financially difficult for people to be with family/RL friends is a sure fire way to lose customers.Well I said my two bits, if anyone at Blizz is reading.
Losing 600k subs in 3 months right after a new expansion came out is a bit strange. Sure the numbers themselves aren't that horrifying, WoW is still doing very well, but when put in context it probably doesn't make stockholders very happy.It also doesn't reflect how bored a portion of active players are; there are many who are still paying a subscription without regularly playing the game; those are not accounted for, but it's pointless to try to devise a way to measure that.Hopefully for Blizzard Q2 numbers will up, otherwise this will confirm that the game has hit a serious bump in the road (just a wild guess, they're probably rushing to launch patch 4.2 well before Q2 is over to drive players back to the game to improve the numbers in the quarterly report).Cataclysm hasn't been very good to my small F&F guild, most of us went on a break out of sheer boredom by the time the holidays were over; that's less than a month after Cataclysm launched. We all brought our multiple lv80s to 85, went on to grind professions, reps and gear only to be hit with the same "damnit, this is not fun" feeling.
For me Cata was a Huge hit. I've never enjoyed button mashing in raids over and over and over. That is as appealing as fishing in real life with a rock tied to my line instead of a lure and bait. I still enjoy questing/exploring the world that Blizz created. I enjoy questing and leveling toons and I even read the quests and follow the story lines. In Cata there are tons of new quests which for me has freshened up the game immensely. There are many that want to get to the highest level as soon as they can, caring nothing about what happens on the way. In WoTLK I got my warrior and hunter to 80. That was pretty cool. But then I looked around and was saddened by a dead end. Oh sure I could have answered the call to: LFG need all,, LFG need two DPS and a healer and for what? the best gear? a new mount? so I could do some S&M in front of the AH? fine for some, /boring for me. Over the top boring. I am, after 3+ years, still interested in the "World" of Warcraft. The world created by WoW. I enjoy earning gold, and earning it the easy way, farming herbs and ore. Just pick and sell. No matts, no working for tips. Just dump in the AH and move on. I also enjoy helping new players. Teaching my views on earning gold and what gear to get. It breaks my heart to see a level 15 hunter with strength, cloth, intel etc... along with using a turtle as a pet rather than a cat or wolf. I'll make gear for new players such as that and give gold and advice to those that I perceive as being worthy of such gifts. One of my "students" rewarded me with a thousand gold a month later. He said he made tons of gold and wanted to show his appreciation for my help when he was lost in WoW.All of this works very well for me.I feel good being one of the good guys. [But to be sure, I am also on many ignore lists as I m quick to jump on an idiot in /2 for being an ass monkey. There are many different ways to play to WoW. We all have, or will have a style of our own that works for us. For me, I'll keep playing if Blizzy continues doing things that freshen the game as they did in Cata.
Loved Wow for five plus years. LOVED it, me and hubby and all our friends did. 9 pm was my log on time after the kiddies hit the bed. We had a picnic every year in our town for four years for our guildies, all of our out of town/state/country friends were sacking in our houses for a weekend so we could relive the game with wonderful friends weve had forever BECAUSE of Wow. I adored this game for years, had 9 85's before I gave up. It just got old. It got old and dumbed down and I think those little dumbing downs ruined it for me very slowly. Like ramping up quest xp so everyone who "wanted to gooooo" could level up fast then get to 70 (then 80 then 85) to get bored without raiding and have NO idea what all their toon could do. I, honestly, had a lock try to TRADE me a soul stone in kara?. They wanted run throughs, not to get a group and go learn. The give it to me easy mentality ruined alot. That was half about what was fun with vanilla and BC, levelling was fun as hell and being at top level was just as awesome, but totally different fun. But leveling was awesome too. All the "what is this stitches? *dead* DANG IT". Or wanting to weep with happiness because you FINALLY at level 40 got a mount! Or questing for days for your epic mount! Or standing on a quest item youd been looking for. Or all the huge number of sidequests for neat pets, the caverns of time, the weather patterns, the different flavors of everything, etc. It was just awesome! I remember a 4 hour raid in Maura because we sucked, but we had FUN doing it. Stealth runs, etc. And toons werent balanced, they were unique. (begging for a port or water, or a battle res or summon, lol) Gear was unique. Weapons were unique. (Bone shield anyone?) I think they should have made servers for hardcore and for casual gamers and a separate channel other than trade for bs chat. To me they had a heckuva formula on game one and should have kept it but added more lands like it. I loved BC but at the same time, it being another world was a pain. That was really all I disliked. And whoever thought up dailies needs bonked on the head. It was just placating us all to realize "this is all we now have unless its a raid until the xp". I can't tell you why other people quit, but thats why we all did. Our guild has one member that still plays, out of so many I cant count. It just got old. *shrug. We met awesome people on this game, true friends that will be with us forever. And for that I will love Wow forever. I log on and its so sad its painful. So many memories, but this game is done, for us, anyway. When they make a new game with a toon that can be bad and cutesey at the same time again like my lil gnome mage (I AM a girl, ya know... it has to be bad AND cute) I will once again give them my time, my money and I know my friends will too. I'll see you guys then! :)
Subscribers are down because players are getting so good that they are consuming content too fast? So the cure is more expeditious releases of “major new raid and dungeon content”?According to WoWProgress.com there are 1,605,430 level 85 characters that have either personally scored a kill in Tier 11 content, or are members of a guild that has. Since most raiding guilds will likely have some level 85 characters that don’t raid, the actual number of players who do raid will be less. Factor in the number of T11 raiders who also have multiple raiding toons and the number of subscribers who raid drops even more. Performing simple arithmetic, the absolute best case scenario using this raw 1.6M number makes it a fairly safe bet that (of the current 11.1 million subscribers) barely 14% are engaged in raiding. Or to be more succinct… 86% are not.For the 86% who aren’t rocketing through T11/T12 raids and heroics, increased emphasis on more end game dungeon and raid content tells them that their $15.00 a month isn’t as valuable as the $15.00 a month paid by the 14% of subscribers who do raid. Activision Blizzard’s announcement that frequent “major new raid and dungeon content” releases will spearhead the recovery of WoW’s subscribership essentially indicates that 14% is somehow generating more revenue than 86%. So unless the plan to push more of the same only faster is based on a guarantee that 86% of subscribers will drop what they’re doing to catch up, I don’t see how this fixes the problem. The hardcore 14% are getting the fresh content love while more money, increasingly rapid level progression, more achievements and “over the counter” availability of raid quality gear appear to be Blizzard’s primary incentives for the other 86% to keep playing. Maybe it's just time...
Do not start pumping out expansions like there's no tomorrow. You will only end up making it bad quality wise. don't think that speeding out expansions will stop you from loosing subscribers. it's fine atm, what you need is more patches, mini-expansions; not full fledged ones.take your time with expansions so you can make it good! not half-a@@ it so you can keep people interested. do that with patch contents, etc.GalacticKegger has some very good points. don't just look at that 10% of hardcore raiders that are bored and have nothing to do. 90% of the players still got plenty to do before a new expansion is released.
WAY WAY late dude this is like a 3 month necro.
It's prolly burn out and uh. We're in the middle of a bloody recession! People have little cash to spend on the game. For burn out. You try playing a game for 6 yrs and continue to be entertained. It prolly won't happen.