World of Warcraft Subscriptions Continue to Slide
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
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personally my big problem with wow at the moment is that firelands is such a huge grind and the difficulty curve from BWD is like a shear cliff(my guild downed nef and ony before the patch and cant down a single boss in firelands.) now that would be ok if we could go do another raid thats slightly easier but no at the moment we have firelands which is above our gear lvl atm or go do raids that are so easy i can afk during cho'gall now. the problem is they didnt release progression raiding like they did at launch (BOT, BWD, and finally throne switching for bosses as needed.)Xanthious said:
The quests were overly repetitive. The economy gets trashed every time a new expansion comes out. There are huge areas of the game including cities completely devoid of players. The mobs are nearly universally identical across area to area so there's not much new to find when leveling a new character of a different race or faction. Crafting is a joke. No one wants the crap you make until you've maxed out your skill so you blow thousands in gold making garbage. Raids are pointless unless you're on a quality computer in which case you could be playing something more fulfilling. The lack of random events saddens the heart.
I still like WoW but it gets boring fast. I can only ever seem to remain interested for a month before I get bored. I have a two month subscription card sitting on my desk that I bought back in June and I just can't seem to force myself to continue playing and the more Blizzard gets desperate for players the less interested I become. I personally just want something new. Most MMOs try to copy too much from WoW and it ends up feeling like a less populated reskin of what I got tired of.
If Blizz is worried about the drop in subscribers you guys should listen. They've spent millions of dollars on market research and there are plenty of examples of fallen empires. Myspace died almost over night but at first there was nothing but a tiny trickle of people jumping over to Facebook. The more people leave, the more likely others will. If you servers population drops 30% you're going to notice that on the auction house. Blizz was smart enough to give players the cross server raids/dungeons and that might help a while. But players are going to wonder whats happening when over half their guild never logs on and when Stormwind and Orgrimmar start looking like Silvermoon city.
On a side note: The gaming industry has been run by the accountants for far too long.
I still like WoW but it gets boring fast. I can only ever seem to remain interested for a month before I get bored. I have a two month subscription card sitting on my desk that I bought back in June and I just can't seem to force myself to continue playing and the more Blizzard gets desperate for players the less interested I become. I personally just want something new. Most MMOs try to copy too much from WoW and it ends up feeling like a less populated reskin of what I got tired of.
If Blizz is worried about the drop in subscribers you guys should listen. They've spent millions of dollars on market research and there are plenty of examples of fallen empires. Myspace died almost over night but at first there was nothing but a tiny trickle of people jumping over to Facebook. The more people leave, the more likely others will. If you servers population drops 30% you're going to notice that on the auction house. Blizz was smart enough to give players the cross server raids/dungeons and that might help a while. But players are going to wonder whats happening when over half their guild never logs on and when Stormwind and Orgrimmar start looking like Silvermoon city.
On a side note: The gaming industry has been run by the accountants for far too long.
The extra 5 levels.Xanthious said:
But seriously, I felt the same way. Just cancelled my subscription a few weeks ago. The game just feels dead to me. It's too easy to do things on your own, I think. Back in vanilla WoW you were pretty powerless even after you hit 60 unless you were raiding. I feel like the game has just lost that spark. There's no community to it.
With SWTOR coming up, as well as the daunting Guild Wars 2 on the horizon, I would say WoW's days are just about numbered as a game people actually want to play. Most of the subs they have now are people who just get on to do some dailies and maybe raid since it's just part of their routine. If Blizzard's payment plan was a month of actual playing time for $15 I bet their revenue would drop to a laughable amount.
Hell Blizzard even as their own new MMO coming out. Most WoW subscribers in the future will probably be kids who like WoW's handholding cartoony gameplay, and people who think of their wow subscription the same as the daily newspaper that they don't read but still get.
I doubt WoW will ever really "die" but it's quickly becoming something that nobody wants to play, and it's increasingly obvious that the devs just don't fucking care.
Hell Blizzard even as their own new MMO coming out. Most WoW subscribers in the future will probably be kids who like WoW's handholding cartoony gameplay, and people who think of their wow subscription the same as the daily newspaper that they don't read but still get.
I doubt WoW will ever really "die" but it's quickly becoming something that nobody wants to play, and it's increasingly obvious that the devs just don't fucking care.
Donno what he's on about. I personally left because they didn't choose either a subscriber- or microtransaction based model, and just went with both! If yer gonna have yer players fork out money on a monthly basis EVERYTHING IN THE GAME should be accsesable, and the price for something like a server-transfer or a faction chance (which is an entierly automated proccess by the by) which is pretty critical to your fun-having in the game, is just infuriating!
(Also, any game grows kinda stale after 4-ish years of playing it, no?)
(Also, any game grows kinda stale after 4-ish years of playing it, no?)
This is what really, really bugs me. I feel like too much attention is paid to expansions instead of focusing on developing for the current state of the Warcraft universe.Archemetis said:
I mean, if they took all the effort they put into Cataclysm and just kept rolling with constant additional content for the Lich King arc and endgame content, they could better deal with the disappointment of the top-tier equipment being outranked by leveling quest rewards one level later.
They could also have gotten the entire world on one chronological page. *cough*Outlands and Draenei*cough*
Taking Deathwing seriously?Sonicmixer said:
I think if these two points are addressed I know a few people who would be happier for it. One of the reasons new players are scared away it's the abbreviations, the numbers and the need to conform to an ideal style of playing the game. It can quickly suck the fun out of it. I like to read quests and take in the lore, but when I'm in a group they just want to do the quests and level so they can do higher dungeons.Alorxico said:
Funny, as in my experience Lich King 25m HC was the hardest fight in WoW by a long, loooooooong stretch.Aeshi said:
But well, on the whole I can agree with that it certainly doesn't feel as epic as it used to. Not calling doom and gloom yet though, as at most these are the first indications that WoW is not everlasting.
Big surprise, I know.
Bit behind on the news?Can said:
It had just over 12 million subs at the start of the year.
It lost 600k subs last quarter and 300k this one.
Thats close to a million loss.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/911454-600k-Sub-Loss-EXPLAINED
To put it plainly they have gone from 12 million to just over 11 million. They might still have the big numbers but they are losing big numbers aswell.
Also bear in mind that people would still have been subbing yet the numbers are still dropping meaning more people leaving than signing up.
My biggest problem with wow is the insanely stagnant servers. My main is stuck on a server that has like 1,000 people at peak times. This really sucks compared to servers that run around 15k at peak times. It is hard to find groups, the economy is terrible (hell the Unheeded Warning is still running 10-15k despite the fact that the nerf made it garbage), and there is next to no raid progression. And the only solution to this is to server transfer. Blizz used to address this issue by letting people move around with the occasional free transfer to help fill out servers. But now that they realized that people will fork over $25 to transfer a single character they just let the servers that are falling apart rot and die. Which is such a shame because I know people who have multiple characters on a single server and transferring all of them would run in the hundreds of dollars and they just aren't willing to fork over that much money and they would rather quick than logging on every day, waiting 45 minutes for a ZA/ZG group, having 0 pugs for any raids, and having to pay inflated AH prices. Blizz needs to get its act together and merge these low pop/low progressions servers already.
And how many of those billions are people who once had the money to run multiple accounts but had to let one or more go due to lack of funds? That's not even counting the untold numbers of trials made by spammers and bots...savandicus said:I think you've missunderstood, that 11.1 million is the active number of accounts paying the monthly sub, if they counted free accounts and inactive accounts they'd probably be in the hundred of millions.Vrach said:So they're down to 11.1 million, which is actually the number counting free accounts (you know, those things people don't pay for?). I wonder how far they're down for real. Cause this ain't LOTRO where those free accounts are paying microtransactions or some shit like that, it's just a trial account.
Good to see it losing it's stranglehold - it'll make way for the new and better MMOs that are coming in '11/'12
Never trust a sub count.
OT: With even half the number of active subs it has now, WoW won't go belly up for a few years and it won't be because of some new game otherwise WoW would have gone under already. The reasons people are leaving now are too many to list, but with an MMO that's turned into a chat room with mini-games to play with friends, the effect is likely to snowball as more people leave to join their friends elsewhere. It will take more than another 5-10 level expansion to get people back and keep them. It will probably require a whole re-working of even the way things look in order to really grab people's interest and convince them to stay a while just to see the new pretty things.
YES YES YES! The last time I tried to play WoW, I saw only a few servers that weren't at low pop at all times of the day. Rather than opening up new servers, they need to start closing the ones that can't even get 5k people on at once. Think of the money saved by having fewer servers to maintain. It could all go to whatever other projects they have going as well as the added benefit of moving the one or two GMs overlooking those servers to someplace else. Everyone will benefit. (maybe)Rednog said: