How a constructive debate should be structured is that one person presents their view, someone disagrees whilst providing sound logical &/or factual reasoning..
Let's not play that game. You're already abhorrent enough. You just don't want to take anything I say as a logical or factual opinion - not the assumption that it isn't.
If graphics are ever the thing that pull anyone to a game, well, power to them. The only reason I ever downloaded Crysis was to benchmark my computer, but that's the thing, I was only benchmarking the performance and capability of my machine. Crysis, as a game, did not interest me one bit. It's an FPS. That's not what I do. And I'm certain that, for most people, what turns them off a game is the game. I would not play WoW if I did not enjoy the game. I would not stay or leave depending on how it looked or what it looks like 5-10 years from now, either because it doesn't improve or worry that it might not.
I like grinding. I like progression. I like stats. I like theorycraft. People here berate Pokemon all the time, but I still enjoy Pokemon. I like it better even more now because it gained much more mathematical complexity in its gameplay. I don't care that it's still a mess of sprites and pixel art that's not par with other 3D games on the DS. The gameplay will exceed that.
So, you have to understand that when you tell me that there is a vast untapped market of people that would find WoW suddenly appealing with a graphic overhaul, that I look at your post and laugh. I laugh and shake my head knowing that, the game I play and experience and read about, has players who aren't as fortunate as more veteran gamers to have a better PC and already run the game on low with poor performance.
You cannot create a game that can cater to people who cannot invest a lot of time into the game or money into a gaming PC to run just one game.
There were people at the dawn of WotLK on the forums that couldn't support the DVD install. Even I had a DVD-ROM on a computer that barely ran the game at 15 FPS on lowest settings at a 1024 resolution. And that was on a basic computer from Best Buy, you know, the shit a lot of families buy?
Look how successful the Wii is compared to its competitors. DS vs PSP anyone? You can argue that the games are significantly worse quality but it has more units sold. The Wii is just living proof that there is a market in those who aren't gamers yet or casual and here you have Kinect and Move trying to capitalize in on that. Isn't that similar to what other MMO's are doing with WoW? How many WoW clones and WoW killers have come out to not even put a dent in their subscribers? Warhammer and Aion were both hyped. What the hell happened to those?
I'll agree that there are people who love running their games on high or ultra and get cards to do so, but I don't think that these are the type of people to be suddenly interested WoW nor do I think that there would be enough of these to outnumber the people who would see a performance loss in their game. You say that they aren't expanding their market, but I just think they aren't expanding to your market - the market more likely to be finicky and complain.
As I have said, the game's graphics aren't as bad as you make them out to be and have seen improvements overtime. If Blizzard one day sees your philosophy and a spike in their subscriber base of graphics being this ultimate deciding factor, then I'll eat my hat.
Also, might as well...
Mazty said:
Better graphics = more subscribers comes from the numbers of people who buy high performing graphics cards which is in the millions:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/amd_shipped_16_million_5000_series_cards_9_months
No. You missed my point entirely. MMO's that have superior graphics compared to WoW cope with hardware strain by instancing off areas and thereby reducing how much they have to render or load at that time. WoW does not do this. Blizzard aimed to make the world seamless. It's actually advertised on their trial.
They could give the game better graphics and not have instance gates between each zone but this huuuuuurts performance.
Mazty said:
-Strawman. I said there were other faults with WoW such as expansions negating raids and equipment and broken classes such as the rogue. But considering the nature of the thread, there was no need to bring them up & for whatever reason, you had decided to ignore those complaints when I brought them up a few posts back to show that graphics are not the only issue with WoW.
I think I brought them up first. If anything, I'm the one arguing that someone is much more likely to quit for those reasons rather than graphics. So, what the hell is this even about?
Mazty said:
-Strawman. Uncanny valley can be passed with better graphics, they are not an certain pit fall with every game with good graphics e.g. good graphics does not mean you have to have a setting which lands in the valley.
Of course it doesn't. The better the graphics, the closer you can get to emulating genuine human emotion. Heighten your expectations, the more you close out.
Mazty said:
Cut scenes are very, very expensive. The programs may cost thousands of dollars, but they are very cheap in comparison to the man hours and render time needed to make the scenes. So expense would most certainly be factored in when making cut scenes.
Hello automated response. As it stands now, WoW only does one cinematic per game in WoW. Everything else they do is glorified machinima or fixed camera segments. So yes, that one cinematic per game: very, very, expensive.
Blizzard already broke the mold that they need to in order to make money. And they are going to continue with what they have in place to make money. If the people who care about graphics boycott the game, they wouldn't even notice. If you won't play it because it looks bad or because the game sucks, they don't care. They make money anyway. If you point to Cryengine 3 and say "it should look like this," it just isn't feasible from a business standpoint. They currently make 69.4 dollars a second from WoW alone. Why change it? Even if technology has advanced, they make money now. Maybe if you showed up at their headquarters with a feasibility study proving that better graphics would get them more subscribers, they would do it. However, they must have considered that for each expansion and realized that it's completely unnecessary from a business standpoint.
In one of your posts you said people in "other industries" don't put up with this. I find this to be incredibly untrue. Cars have been developed that are powered by Hydrogen fuel cells. Meanwhile the average person here in the US has been using roughly the same kind of engine for 100 years. We don't have mag-lev trains, bullet-trains or supersonic passenger planes, but they do exist. Most of our power plants are coal or oil amidst a few natural gas and nuclear reactors. The advanced technology exists, but they make money using the older stuff. Land-based telephone lines still use the same copper wire that's been coming into our houses for over 150 years. WoW makes money with what it has? It will continue to use what it has.
Just a small nitpick... Patent law and copyright law tend to prohibit other sources of fuel in the US. Just sayin'.
If you really think about it, what could better graphics do for them? Let's think for a minute: Assume they make a new engine. Assume they make it scalable so all of their player-base that can currently run the game can continue to run the game with no problems stemming from it. That's not unreasonable. It'd take time, money, but whatever, they can do it. Then what?
What market do they get? The top 1% of gamers, top 5% of PC gamers, that would only play WoW if it looked fantastic? Does that help them make money? If anything, that's the most finicky market there is, and they'd probably just hop off the bandwagon when Crysis 2 comes out. What other market can they get? The market of non-gamers who says the game looks too ugly? They'll try it and before level 10, probably quit because it's not their cup of tea. If you truly believe that better graphics would make WoW easier to market to new players, then you'll have to bring some proof about it next time.
What I've learned in trying to debate Mazty is that he tends to try to wear people down by saying X is Y in certain circumstances. No matter how reasonable your argument, he tends to ignore it for his own "superior" view. Still I'm glad to read your post and most of the reasons that you and Nostalgia give are reasons I won't support the Blizzard juggernaut. Basically, I figured I'm just renting the game, it's not fun to me, and while the graphics aren't top notch, Blizzard does cater to its customer enough to understand what it is they ARE looking for.
Just a small nitpick... Patent law and copyright law tend to prohibit other sources of fuel in the US. Just sayin'.
What I've learned in trying to debate Mazty is that he tends to try to wear people down by saying X is Y in certain circumstances. No matter how reasonable your argument, he tends to ignore it for his own "superior" view. Still I'm glad to read your post and most of the reasons that you and Nostalgia give are reasons I won't support the Blizzard juggernaut. Basically, I figured I'm just renting the game, it's not fun to me, and while the graphics aren't top notch, Blizzard does cater to its customer enough to understand what it is they ARE looking for.
You are absolutely right. But who makes the patent and copyright laws? Can't they be changed? If the government wanted to support another fuel, they could. They just don't want to.
I find it amazing that he would come to this thread and complain about the graphics of WoW. The thing is, this video isn't a trailer. It's a community unlock. It's not for someone who's never seen the game. It was unlocked through facebook/twitter/'community' sharing events and such. For someone who is already captivated by the WoW universe, this video is pretty incredible and will only make them excited - it's sort of a "Earned by WoW players for WoW players" video. It's not like this is the ad or anything...
And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say it looks good compared to any new game, but I'm just saying that the WoW engine actually has improved quite a bit since its original launch.
Mazty said:
....? We met before? The only reason I see my view as 'superior' is that I give/try as best I can to give it substance rather than relying entirely on opinion e.g. graphics sell due to gpu sales & HD remakes. There hasn't been anything shown to say otherwise just enough strawmen to set up a generation of farmers.
If anything, your arguments are more strawman than anything we have. Radeon GPUs selling does not mean everyone let alone WoW players are buying them for graphics. Like Nostalgia said, I'm sure plenty of them were for performance. If you had the previous card that was being upgraded from, I bet over half were integrated cards or outdated cards. It's not like most people who had a 5850 or 5770 goes out and buys a 6870. I'd think most of the sales are based around performance, not trying to run shit on ultra with 3 monitor Eyefinity at 7680 x 3200.
HD Remakes? I'll be honest. I was gifted Serious Sam Episode 1 HD, and loved it, so I bought Episode 2 HD. It had been a very long time since I played Serious Sam. Did I buy it for the improved graphics? It was a contributing factor, but the main reasons I bought the remake were these: Multiplayer coop servers through Steam. Easy compatibility with Win7. Not needing to find the damn CD to install or play the game. Voice chat. Nostalgic purposes. And to play through with friends who didn't have the original. Now, does everyone buy it because of that? No. I'm just saying, not everyone buys an HD remake for the HD graphics. Maybe not everyone got to play the game the first time, or the social aspect of it has been improved, or something.
Doesn't the new God of War have trophies and such? I'm sure some people got it just for that. Not the majority, but it'd be ignorant to say "HD remakes sell because of the graphics and only the graphics." I'm sure some people didn't get to play the game the first time around, or don't have their PS2 anymore and their new PS3 can't play PS2 games. Maybe a re-release would seem tacky, but all the added features combined are more like a combo platter of reasons to buy an HD remake. And besides, an HD remake is appealing for most studios - most of the hard conceptual work is done. It's more about remodeling things with more poly-count. I'm sure it's much cheaper when you don't need to hire a storyboard/writing team, which would only lead to a higher profit margin, right?
Anyway, I just think your "proof statistics" are simply, well, not exactly proving anything.
....? We met before? The only reason I see my view as 'superior' is that I give/try as best I can to give it substance rather than relying entirely on opinion e.g. graphics sell due to gpu sales & HD remakes. There hasn't been anything shown to say otherwise just enough strawmen to set up a generation of farmers.
If anything, your arguments are more strawman than anything we have. Radeon GPUs selling does not mean everyone let alone WoW players are buying them for graphics. Like Nostalgia said, I'm sure plenty of them were for performance. If you had the previous card that was being upgraded from, I bet over half were integrated cards or outdated cards. It's not like most people who had a 5850 or 5770 goes out and buys a 6870. I'd think most of the sales are based around performance, not trying to run shit on ultra with 3 monitor Eyefinity at 7680 x 3200.
HD Remakes? I'll be honest. I was gifted Serious Sam Episode 1 HD, and loved it, so I bought Episode 2 HD. It had been a very long time since I played Serious Sam. Did I buy it for the improved graphics? It was a contributing factor, but the main reasons I bought the remake were these: Multiplayer coop servers through Steam. Easy compatibility with Win7. Not needing to find the damn CD to install or play the game. Voice chat. Nostalgic purposes. And to play through with friends who didn't have the original. Now, does everyone buy it because of that? No. I'm just saying, not everyone buys an HD remake for the HD graphics. Maybe not everyone got to play the game the first time, or the social aspect of it has been improved, or something.
Doesn't the new God of War have trophies and such? I'm sure some people got it just for that. Not the majority, but it'd be ignorant to say "HD remakes sell because of the graphics and only the graphics." I'm sure some people didn't get to play the game the first time around, or don't have their PS2 anymore and their new PS3 can't play PS2 games. Maybe a re-release would seem tacky, but all the added features combined are more like a combo platter of reasons to buy an HD remake. And besides, an HD remake is appealing for most studios - most of the hard conceptual work is done. It's more about remodeling things with more poly-count. I'm sure it's much cheaper when you don't need to hire a storyboard/writing team, which would only lead to a higher profit margin, right?
Anyway, I just think your "proof statistics" are simply, well, not exactly proving anything.
Well unfortunately you're not providing counter-evidence, but just trying to dismiss what I have said with assumptions rather than sourced counter arguments.
16 mill GPUS sold means that what was considered good a few years ago could be ran on your standard PC in the same way that as ABS was once a luxury, it's now a standard feature.
...Why are you talking about eyefinity and ultra performance...? Saying that most were upgrades from awful cards just reinforces my notion that graphics can be increased without worrying as much about accessibility as the performance of a basic card is greater than a basic card 5 years ago. Either way, neither of us has anything other than speculation for why people upgraded - all we do know is that there are a lot of very capable cards out there when compared to 5 years ago.
Not everyone buys HD remakes for the graphics, but some do. Again, neither of us have any sales & motivation figures to make this anything more than speculation, but what we do know is that a large selling point of the game is that they have been remastered in HD, hence the titles. Working from that, it wouldn't make business sense to work that into the title if it wasn't a selling point.
I never said they sell just because of the graphics, strawman alert .
All I can say is that millions of decent GPUs have been sold, and graphics are a selling point for games. I've yet to see any source that actually shows that that is wrong...
All you're doing is showing evidence that a positive could be true. E.g., that there are gamers who consider it worth buying a game like Metro 2033 or Crysis on the strength of its graphics alone.
You are not proving the converse; that these same gamers are *less* likely to buy a game if the graphics aren't at the top-notch level.
....? We met before? The only reason I see my view as 'superior' is that I give/try as best I can to give it substance rather than relying entirely on opinion e.g. graphics sell due to gpu sales & HD remakes. There hasn't been anything shown to say otherwise just enough strawmen to set up a generation of farmers.
1) Yep [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.164313-Avatar-Breaks-Even-Surprises-Everyone?page=4#4299380]. Rather I dropped the convo when I realized we weren't going to change our minds on how we viewed stuff. Since then, I've written on other topics. *shrug*
2) If graphics were the most important thing for computer sales, we wouldn't have This [http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/], this [http://store.steampowered.com/treasurehunt], or even this [http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/]. Graphics are great, but as soon as a video card is out, it's old. There's certainly a limit to how far graphics can go. There's more evidence that better gameplay rather than graphics moves titles (along with crazy sales and discounts out the wazoo).
Valiance said:
Gindil said:
Just a small nitpick... Patent law and copyright law tend to prohibit other sources of fuel in the US. Just sayin'.
What I've learned in trying to debate Mazty is that he tends to try to wear people down by saying X is Y in certain circumstances. No matter how reasonable your argument, he tends to ignore it for his own "superior" view. Still I'm glad to read your post and most of the reasons that you and Nostalgia give are reasons I won't support the Blizzard juggernaut. Basically, I figured I'm just renting the game, it's not fun to me, and while the graphics aren't top notch, Blizzard does cater to its customer enough to understand what it is they ARE looking for.
You are absolutely right. But who makes the patent and copyright laws? Can't they be changed? If the government wanted to support another fuel, they could. They just don't want to.
I find it amazing that he would come to this thread and complain about the graphics of WoW. The thing is, this video isn't a trailer. It's a community unlock. It's not for someone who's never seen the game. It was unlocked through facebook/twitter/'community' sharing events and such. For someone who is already captivated by the WoW universe, this video is pretty incredible and will only make them excited - it's sort of a "Earned by WoW players for WoW players" video. It's not like this is the ad or anything...
And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say it looks good compared to any new game, but I'm just saying that the WoW engine actually has improved quite a bit since its original launch.
The Senate and House sure don't. Remember, the RIAA lobbied heavily for just the DMCA. There's currently a 33 billion dollar sugar tariff that makes certain lobbies for sugar very rich while fructose (which feeds cancer cells) a cheaper but poorer substitute.
Oil companies also lobby to stop any innovation in the oil field. Oddly, there's not a lot of patents in the green field because they're too busy innovating. It's not the government that's the problem, it's the campaigning and lobbying that keeps us back.
And the youtube does serve as an ad in a sense. It's Blizzard saying "hey, look what we got now!" I have never played WoW myself, but I do admit that it's pretty gorgeous to look at. Graphics don't change my opinion that I'm sure as hell not going to be paying them 30$ bucks a month for a game I don't have a lot of time to invest in.
2)I never claimed graphics were the most important thing! Swear to god I'm going to go crazy if someone makes this strawman argument again =p The point I've been trying to make is that graphics are important and can help sell a game, hence why from a business point of view Blizzard should improve the graphics, and for the simple reason of value for money, WoW players should ask for an improvement.
And what we've been trying to say is that while graphics "might" be important for "certain" demographics, Blizzard has improved WoW's graphics over the years in several ways. I still think they look pretty bad compared to anything new, but that's irrelevant. It's not like the deal-breaker is the graphics for the other demographics - which Blizzard has (correctly, from a business standpoint) decided to not cater to.
Mazty said:
Well unfortunately you're not providing counter-evidence, but just trying to dismiss what I have said with assumptions rather than sourced counter arguments.
16 mill GPUS sold means that what was considered good a few years ago could be ran on your standard PC in the same way that as ABS was once a luxury, it's now a standard feature.
...Why are you talking about eyefinity and ultra performance...? Saying that most were upgrades from awful cards just reinforces my notion that graphics can be increased without worrying as much about accessibility as the performance of a basic card is greater than a basic card 5 years ago. Either way, neither of us has anything other than speculation for why people upgraded - all we do know is that there are a lot of very capable cards out there when compared to 5 years ago.
Not everyone buys HD remakes for the graphics, but some do. Again, neither of us have any sales & motivation figures to make this anything more than speculation, but what we do know is that a large selling point of the game is that they have been remastered in HD, hence the titles. Working from that, it wouldn't make business sense to work that into the title if it wasn't a selling point.
I never said they sell just because of the graphics, strawman alert .
All I can say is that millions of decent GPUs have been sold, and graphics are a selling point for games. I've yet to see any source that actually shows that that is wrong...
I am dismissing what you have provided because you have no basis on your assumptions. You take a fact, or a statistic, rather, and form a hypothetical, unproven assumption over it.
For example, you have a fact - a bunch of GPUs sold. One of your earlier posts said 3 million in a couple months, now you're at 16 million, but whatever. Point is, a bunch of GPUs sold. You were saying before, "clearly this means that 16 million potential WoW players care about graphics."
Same thing with the HD remasterings.
Now you know what's funny? This:
Either way, neither of us has anything other than speculation for why people upgraded - all we do know is that there are a lot of very capable cards out there when compared to 5 years ago.
Not everyone buys HD remakes for the graphics, but some do. Again, neither of us have any sales & motivation figures to make this anything more than speculation
If you decide to backpedal and say that neither of us have any speculation as to why these things happened, why did you bring them up in the first place? I really don't think they hold much volume in a "constructive debate" (your term).
I don't think I have to say much else other than your 9800GT "budget" card doesn't come standard like ABS. If you buy a family PC in a store, or some kid's parents does, it will probably have an integrated card. And if I need to quote sales figures, you're just being ignorant. If you're going to make a claim that there's 16 million (or however many people bought the ATI cards) people just waiting for WoW's graphics to get better for it to interest them, you need to find SOME support.
If you don't mind, I'm going to use Call of Duty: Black Ops as an example of a game that looks quite pretty, is aimed for the "enthusiast" market of today's world, and was a huge sales hit.
If you check the 360 and PS3 make up about 95% [http://www.vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php?name=&publisher=&console=PC&genre=&minSales=0&results=50&sort=Total#] of the first-day market share for CoD:Blops. Let's be generous and say it's 90% after a couple months. That still leaves the PC version of an enthusiast-marketed game selling very, very little compared to WoW's ridiculous amount of sales. I thought this was common knowledge.
Here's a quoted post [http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1585766] I found from the steam forums:
The only unit figures I could find were launch day sales in only two regions. On launch, Activision says that it sold a total of 5.6 million units. Let's run with these figures, although obviously they are higher now.
The remaining 5% which makes up PC/Wii/DS sales is 280,000 units. Let's call it 200,000 PC units that were sold on launch day, simply because there are more FPS gamers on PC than there are on Wii and DS.
Steam at present records the peak traffic of Black Ops as being 108,000 simultaneous players. We can say that 54% of the units sold on launch day are being played. What happened to the other 46%?
What, indeed, happened to the other 46%? People don't buy a game just to not play it, do they? I know I sure as hell didn't. Remember that more units have been sold since launch. So even if the majority of PC users are, in fact, playing it, 46% is a lot of ♥♥♥♥ing players missing.
46% of players missing is not something to be dismissive of.
Do you still think that if WoW captured the enthusiast market, whatever it is, not even 500,000 players (being generous, again) that they would care? Even if they did, think of the investment they would have to make. It would would take MANY more improvements in WoW than just a total graphics overhaul to pull in this enthusiast market, including combat design, PvP balance, PvE content, etc.
And how many of them would stay? Wouldn't they move onto the next big thing? WoW is not modifiable. You can not use user-created maps, mods, gear, locations, or whatever, unless you want to run a private server which is more than kind of illegal. Without the staying power, Blizzard would need to make a game that continues to keep this market. Now, think of this - IF they were able to make WoW a game that enthusiasts would care about, let's make the HUGE HUGE HUGE HYPOTHETICAL ASSUMPTION that they can do this and ALSO not fuck up the game for the rest of their 12 million subscribers.
If they do that, and make a game that can keep the fickle upper-tier PC gamer invested for a while, they need to continually improve the game to appease both them and their other demographics, effectively doing twice the work, creating twice the content, and working hard on things to the point of ridiculousness. Their current market simply doesn't care that Blizzard does a half-assed job. Look at Wrath of the Lich King for example. It had, what, two new arenas? Two new battlegrounds that players hated, one of which played like Assault from UT (Strand of the Ancients) and one that played like Onslaught/Warfare from UT? (Isle of Conquest). Plenty of things in Wrath were fucking awesome (ie: Ulduar), but Blizzard totally wrecked 2v2 Arena with Deathknights (they even admitted this and removed 2v2 from giving arena titles due to lack of balance), and made PvP in general a more casual thing. The closest they got to a competitive audience was their level 70 arena tournament(s).
And if I was an enthusiast, a competitive player-vs-player game, do you know what I would do if I had a game that had ONE CTF map, ONE Domination map, ONE Point Control map, etc, etc, that I couldn't make maps for, or use mods for? I wouldn't play it. I would play something, ANYTHING else, from TF2 to Quake Live to even CoD:BlOps.
So if Blizzard decided they wanted that market, updated the graphics, made PvP competitive, fixed any issues that you would have that I can't think of at the moment, it would take a LOT of money, a LOT of effort, for VERY LITTLE RETURN.
I'm starting to sound like I'm foaming at the mouth here, and I'm quite sorry. The thing is that I don't think you understand how tiny the PC gamer enthusiast market is. Crysis might have like a million or two in sales for plenty of reasons, but the other problem is that WoW is an ongoing thing.
It's okay for EA if someone pays $50 for Crysis and never plays it, because the dev got the money. With WoW, if someone buys the game and an expansion or two for like 30 bucks, and they don't play it, the money doesn't keep rolling in. I'm sure everyone has some games they paid top dollar for, played for a while, and put on a shelf. And the company got the money when you paid for it. WoW, they get the money as you play it. And if a demographic isn't going to keep playing it, they don't want that demographic that much. Think about it! Blizzard would have to compete with every single new release to try to keep this enthusiast market. And if they lost, they'd no longer get money.
Instead, they focus ontheir other (main) demographics. These people are more, uhh, "loyal" and don't jump ship for whatever reasons. They might not even care- about shiny new games coming out - or maybe they do, and they just want to buy it, play it, beat it, and then go back to WoW. The avid WoW player is not the same kind of gamer as any other game, and even the casual WoW player gives Blizz the same #15 dollars a month to play for a few hours every weekend as an enthusiast would pay to play 7 days a week. If anything, their business strategy on making the game appeal to people who DON'T care about graphics seems to be better - they do less work, they get paid more. They still get the big majority of PC gamers, just not the top 10%, 5%, 1%, whatever it is. And they don't CARE that they get that slice, because to them, it's not worth it.
A graph might make it easier to understand, but think "diminishing returns" on "blizzard working on things they don't want to work on" and "getting more subscribers." The more they do the first, the less of the second happens. I'm not saying they'd necessarily lose subscribers, but they would gain them at a slower rate - a rate they don't find worth gaining them at.
Basically, rename the bottom "effort" or "work put in" and the left "subscriber base." Note that it gets to a critical mass where it won't make much of a difference. That's where they're at now. Let's say WoW was perfect and every PC gamer wanted to play it. Great. How many more players would they really have? Not many more than they already do.
Some good points but a lot of iffy ones as well. Firstly, VGChartz has no data for games like Crysis. Secondly, if you did your research you'd know my facts about the ATI/AMD 5XXX series are correct - a few million sold in the first few months and a few months ago they topped the 16 million mark. Thirdly:
" I still think they look pretty bad compared to anything new, but that's irrelevant. It's not like the deal-breaker is the graphics for the other demographics - which Blizzard has (correctly, from a business standpoint) decided to not cater to."
It's not irrelevant because WoW is in competition with modern games. You have to pay for WoW monthly etc. So why would people want to continue paying for a game that doesn't represent value for money in terms of graphics & the fact that it is far from perfect. Graphics may not be the soul reason to quit, but that stacked on top of everything else just leads to "why am I playing this game? It's unbalanced, broken and looks like ass - I'm not getting my moneys worth here". If Blizzard improved the graphics they would help get new players. Why would I want to pay for a game monthly which looks terrible and doesn't handle perfectly? I know I wouldn't, nor would a lot of people I know. Why? It's not value for money when compared to the rest of the market.
My point with bringing up the HD remasterings and GPU sales should be evident - we can't say they don't care about graphics, but we can't say they do. Everyone here is trying to argue that everyone doesn't care about graphics, which certainly doesn't seem true.
9800GT budget card? Go look at the minimum specs of WoW, it certainly isn't a 9800GT. The average card on the market is going to be much more powerful than when WoW was created and so the game should reflect this, just like every other game on the market. Falls back to "value for money".
...46% missing players? Maybe it's a result of different time zones instead of missing players....
I'm not sure why you go on about the enthusiast market as in the people with the hardcore cards...It's not exactly a source-able fact so you're going to have to trust me on this but people like my sister look at WoW and say "Why would I pay for that? It looks terrible". After further prying it turns out she was talking about the graphics. She's a casual gamer and had a stint with MMO's so would be a good market to aim for, but she is comparing WoW with other games she sees, so Black Ops and other games which are in adverts. Just like a person out to buy a car, you compare what you may buy with what you can buy, and I highly doubt she'll be alone in her thinking as it's what customers do - compare a product they may buy against what else is available.
Thing is it may not be diminishing returns. WoW is looking dated and needs a massive kick up the backside to bring it into the modern age otherwise it will start to die now that what looks to be the last expansion has come out, and an expansion which appeals far more to existing players than new ones. If Blizzard have any foresight, they better get working on improving WoW, or making a sequel, because as it stands it's not bringing in the same people it once was.
http://spinksville.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/subscriptions-level-in-wow-and-ensidia-have-their-eyes-on-the-old-republic/
It's stagnating.
Graphics cards sell all the time. You're still trying to say that this causes more sales in WoW without any evidence to back it up.
The anecdotal evidence of your sister liking/disliking the game doesn't do anything to prove that WoW is less popular. And with Cataclysm's added content [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/8421-Review-World-of-Warcraft-Cataclysm], you can't deny that Blizzard has certain things going for it. Sure, WC has graphical problems. But why do people still play Nethack, Ragnarok Online, or Pacman? It's not just the graphics, which I believe is what Valience is saying.
Graphics cards sell all the time. You're still trying to say that this causes more sales in WoW without any evidence to back it up.
The anecdotal evidence of your sister liking/disliking the game doesn't do anything to prove that WoW is less popular. And with Cataclysm's added content [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/8421-Review-World-of-Warcraft-Cataclysm], you can't deny that Blizzard has certain things going for it. Sure, WC has graphical problems. But why do people still play Nethack, Ragnarok Online, or Pacman? It's not just the graphics, which I believe is what Valience is saying.
That's a lot of DX11 cards when you consider the utter apathy that the DX10 cards were met with. What I'm saying is that Blizzard are not keeping WoW up-to-date and considering that subs have plateaued, they should be thinking of expanding down all possible avenues.
What proves WoW is less popular are the subs hitting a standstill -.-
And no, Cataclysm's content is pretty unspectacular 1)compared to the market 2)for new players. Think about it - one of the main selling points is that Azeroth has undergone pretty much an Apocalypse. Other than this is actually free content, it's also lost on new players as they won't have seen Azeroth before the cataclysm event....
You are right, it's not just the graphics that are a problem for WoW (imbalance, 'the grind', broken lore, a lot of redundant content etc) but as they are one of the first things you notice in a game, they should also be one of the most important ones if a franchise needs to be brought back up to date.
As for Ragnorok online, how many people are still paying for it? As for nethack...never heard of it or anyone that plays it...And pacman is free.
WoW has competition from the likes of Conan, Aion, Eve and other MMO's, more so that many are now free. I know it's not just graphics, I have never claimed that graphics are the only problem; just that they are a problem, but Blizzard do need to redo the graphics otherwise they will either not get any new players, which is already the case, or lose existing ones over time to competition. I'm just saying this, I really am not sure how it turned into a multi-page debate. Want to keep being successful? Keep up with the competition. It's always been the way regardless of industry so not sure why people think games are an exception to this...
To an experienced gamer, graphics are definitely a problem with WoW. To certain people, graphics are a problem with WoW. To you and me, graphics are a problem with WoW. They are not a problem for everyone. They are not a problem for most of the people in this thread. They are not a problem for the casual demographic, the demographic that gives Dungeon Fighter Online VVVVVV [http://mmohut.com/news/dungeon-fighter-online-officially-released].
No one can debate that the graphics in MoH are worse than WoW. That's simply not true. But for a lot of people, the graphics in WoW are more interesting than those in MoH, mostly due to environment design. If the environments in WoW were made in a new engine, I would be ecstatic, and it would be great. But as we've talked about, Blizzard has no real reason to do this. They've done the feasibility studies and decided to not do an engine update for the Cata expansion. Maybe they'll do it next expansion, maybe they won't.
You are right that graphics are a problem for me, you and others. However most of the people in this thread are already current WoW subscribers, hence why it's not a problem for them, but it looks like more & more casual gamers are finding a problem with WoW, whether it's gameplay, graphics or a mix, due to the plateud subs.
Dungeon Fighters online is free...Beggars can't be choosers. VVVVV also is pretty cheap & an indie game so you get what you pay for.
It just seems that something is becoming a problem for WoW due to subs not increasing. From first impressions, without even having to play the game, most people can see that the graphics are dated thanks to the prevalence of game adverts. As you said, the design is great, but the graphics are terrible. One HUGE reason Blizzard has to redo the graphics is to try and help increase subs as it would then put WoW closer to the competition it has from the likes of EvE, Aion & Conan. Maybe though they think WoW isn't worth saving for the long run and will just release a sequel with a better engine. As it stands if they don't radically improve something, it will most likely just begin to wither away and be a distant memory.
Logically, from a gamer's standpoint, that makes perfect sense and I understand your point of view.
In the graphical engine sense, WoW is clearly inferior.
However, look at the results. EvE, Aion and Conan are your examples there...WoW makes 10 times more money than the three of them combined. As long as the movie's a box-office hit, they might not care if it's universally panned by critics, you know?
The fact remains that WoW is not gaining subs as fast as it used to...However, Blizz seems to hope to fix that by exposing more people to the game, rather than fixing the game. For example, Cataclysm in North America is bringing a lot of old players back to the game. Blizzard is on pace to release WoW in Brazil, put up servers in Mexico, and (believe it or not) Wrath of the Lich King just recently came out in China after being out for 2 years in America. I can't find a solid release date but I think it was late August 2010.
Anyway, what I mean is that instead of improving the game drastically, they are exposing it to more people. If it'll work remains to be seen, but I don't think they care. They'll make money anyway, regardless of if it has 2 million active subscribers or 20 million. I think they expect it to start peaking out and dying down soon. Remember, they were making a ton of money when they had only 5 million subscribers, and pay-to-play subscription based games haven't come close, mainly because WoW has already cornered that market, not because the new games are bad.
I'm not disagreeing with you here, I just think that Blizzard figured WoW would have a 10-year lifespan when it was put on the market in 2004. If people keep buying a somewhat improved, and somewhat unimproved game in 2010, they don't see the return investment mattering. I get the feeling they'll let it slowly wind down (like you said) to just a few diehard players, which they've already done with some of their other games (ie: Diablo II, Warcraft III).
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