World of Warcraft: Current Year

Flight_sl said:

The thing is the problems - along with the drop in subs - is down to the game reaching critical mass. Sub drops are accelerating.

The game is too easy now even for the mouth breathers. I've been back playing a month and in the next week I'll have got one of every class to max level (only one of those was above lvl 70 a month ago, half are fresh rerolled chars from lvl 1) and done most of what the game has to offer. I haven't even been playing hardcore.

Once they've made it so easy it's hard to go back on it and make anything feel worthwhile.

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Well if our guild hadn't died, atleast there'd be cool peeps to raid with. LFR is fastfood gaming, the good stuff was always in a guild. They need to rethink pvp, and they need to do it asap. They have this entire digital world to leverage, yet, they just sit and do nothing with it. Its mind boggling.

I always thought Blizzard lied about subscription numbers. 12 million is a hard number to swallow and I just don't buy it, considering how empty a lot of servers are/were.

Unless there's literally millions of people with active accounts that have subscriptions running... Statistics are easily fucked with, and I think Blizzard is altering some metrics to come to the numbers they are. I just don't buy that there are 7.7 million active subscribers left.

Flight_sl said:

The thing is the problems - along with the drop in subs - is down to the game reaching critical mass. Sub drops are accelerating.

The game is too easy now even for the mouth breathers. I've been back playing a month and in the next week I'll have got one of every class to max level (only one of those was above lvl 70 a month ago, half are fresh rerolled chars from lvl 1) and done most of what the game has to offer. I haven't even been playing hardcore.

Once they've made it so easy it's hard to go back on it and make anything feel worthwhile.

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So instead of raiding, doing battlegrounds, doing all the other shit the game has to offer (old raids, achievements, etc) you've been leveling to 90? The fuck is wrong with you?

Tidbit Scaledclaw_sl said:

Pretty much this.

Sometimes the mouth breathers that use Vent even when they take shit, makes you just want to be to call in a drone strike.

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For sure, it to do be like that it do.

Flight_sl said:

The thing is the problems - along with the drop in subs - is down to the game reaching critical mass. Sub drops are accelerating.

The game is too easy now even for the mouth breathers. I've been back playing a month and in the next week I'll have got one of every class to max level (only one of those was above lvl 70 a month ago, half are fresh rerolled chars from lvl 1) and done most of what the game has to offer. I haven't even been playing hardcore.

Once they've made it so easy it's hard to go back on it and make anything feel worthwhile.

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Haha fuck off. Listening to people whining about "lack of challenge" was what kicked off the subs decline in Cataclysm. Everything since then has been a frantic backpeddle backtowardscasual players, and every time they try to make it more grindy ('challenging' in your lexicon) the player base hashatedit and quit even faster. See: MoP 5.0 Dailies and the attempt to get fucking shot of them in each successive patch to the extent of the site of the most hated set of them (Golden Lotus) getting sha-nuked in 5.4 and letting the players kill the quest-givers as raid-bosses.

Woolygimp_sl said:

I always thought Blizzard lied about subscription numbers. 12 million is a hard number to swallow and I just don't buy it, considering how empty a lot of servers are/were.

Unless there's literally millions of people with active accounts that have subscriptions running... Statistics are easily fucked with, and I think Blizzard is altering some metrics to come to the numbers they are. I just don't buy that there are 7.7 million active subscribers left.

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So your crazy-arse, not backed with any sort of evidence what-so-sodding-ever, theory is Blizzard is committing a criminal offence* because they want to hide their 'real' sub numbers?

* The quarterly results are legally binding documents. If Blizzard were institionally lying about their income to their shareholders, it'sfraud.

Some of you guys are out-right delusional. WoW is the only MMO that is not an absolute wasteland. Even if it is bleeding subs, what realistically does that mean? cause those subs sure as hell don't seem to be finding their way into other games. There is tons of shit to do in WoW but in my opinion it's a guild game and if you are playing it without one (or have a shitty one) then yeah you're going to hit a wall on how much fun you can have by yourself.

Just because it is the most successful mmo game does not make it a good game.

I am so nostalgic for vanilla its unreal, though. That was some good, crack-like addicting stuff.

They need new ideas, fresh ideas. They're stuck in a paradigm and they desperately need to come up with something refreshing that also works.

I also think we aren't getting enough for our subscription costs. You'd think there would be 100's of battleground maps, mutators and crazy shit for what we've been paying.

Same ol AV map we've always had. I mean, really? This is what we get?

Man if they would just rip off some of what Warhammer did, that was crazy fun. Active, progressive world pvp with a raid at the end where random people become raid bosses. They ripped off everything else, why not this?

I would like seasonal variations on the BGs. It seems like a small investment to get 4x the maps. They wouldn't have to be designed any differently as far as the flow of the map, but they could. Ice on the AB lake would be a huge tactical change, but they don't have to ice it over.

Scrap EQN and work on Vanguard 2, the anti-WOW game where the game punches us in the balls and god dammit we like it (And yes I love VG 100X more then I ever did WOW). Sadly no other game comes close to touching WOW in NA from a sub paying perspective so clearly they still are appealing to the masses to some extent. Then again I feel the masses in all walks of life are god damn lazy, unappreciative people who want well fare in all walks of life so I'm not exactly surprised that the largest MMO appeals to these folks.

The thing people fail to realize is operating costs is not linear with paying sub #'s, the majority of core development costs the same for 100 people as it does for 1M in the grand scheme of things leaving customer support and infrastructure etc as the only scaling costs. WOW is extremely profitable and has plenty of room to decline before it ever becomes in danger of major changes.

Also to be fair WOW still had some of the more challenging end game content at least up until I finally swore it off for good (HM quality anyway) but I just felt no attachment to the game or my accomplishments. Every time I quit it was basically me waking up and just feeling like I was playing a single player game without any true enjoyment so I quit on the spot and moved on. I've quit other MMO's but every time it was very difficult and usually driven by some real life need etc. God remember back in EQ, most servers had entire parts of the forums setup for good bye posts and they were usually very heart felt and well received with people staying in contact etc. Now if some one takes the time to post in a forum some where its along the lines of "fuck off noobs" and "can we have your shit". Its funny I was in some of the best WOW guilds in the US through out the years and I can hardly remember a damn thing about them but when I start a new MMO or rejoin an old guild its funny how many people remember and cherish some of the things we've all done in games like EQ, VG, and even EQ2/Rift.

Doesn't pay the bills clearly but like I've mentioned in the past I for one surely would pay 50 bucks a month for a polished game with more of a community based feeling to it that catered more towards high risk/challenge/time requirement, high reward. But alas, the business model just doesn't support it. Not enough people with the same mind set to make up for all the people who wouldn't fork over the cash. Instead we have the F2P shit which usually just absolutely ruins games. Here is what I don't get...I grew up in a fucking household of 5 w/ 1 drug addicted uncle on the side we supported and we were well below the poverty level. I've bought every computer I've ever had, paid for every MMO sub and pretty much supported myself since I was 14 and I never ONCE had a problem paying a god damn sub fee.

While I can't argue with the economics of F2P in most cases I can argue that it shows just how fucking pathetic the younger generation is (in general) about money management and working in the first place. For reference I'm 31 now, (no clue what fucking generation I even belong to...X? Pepsi?) and have worked my way up to having a very successful career while playing MMO's hardcore and god forbid having a life and even played college football WHILE being in a top 2 raiding guild zomg~! Moral of the rambles...the younger generation is fucking up my MMO experience and I would like most (read: irresponsible, lazy fuckers) to die in a fire. That is all.

ps: bring back the original chaos volley from VG sorc's...you have not lived dangerously in an MMO until your own nuke could 1 shot your ass

Ukerric_sl said:

Not going to happen until the game drops well below 1 million subs in EU/NA. At 1 million subs, they still get enough to run it and do expansion stuff. They are well aware that retooling the game for F2P is going to be real hard, since the game isn't designed for that.

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Why would it be hard to copy what everyone else is doing?

LoL, DOTA, Rift<free>, GW2<free>, and other games will continue to eat into their sub base. Say they have 2 million NA players who played 6 months last year. If those 2 million are only playing 3 months this year, and 1 month next year, should they move to a cash shop now to try and limit the bleeding?

I think too many people are looking at the overall sub numbers, and not thinking enough about churn. I'd be surprised if WOW went F2P before the next expansion, but if their churn is high enough over the next year, they'll probably look hard at it.

The worst part is for Horde it is actually faster to gear up in PVP by doing random heroics and converting the JP->Honor Points. I was all gungho PVPing the other day until someone told me this. I tried it out and got mad and stopped playing. Seems ass-backwards.

That's true for both factions. I can clear a heroic in like <10 minutes if the dps that I get stuck with aren't terribly geared/retarded. That's like 250 honor every 10-15 minutes versus every 20-30 minutes for a bg win.

It's dumb and caters to the WoW-player mindset of "I want to sit in town and look pretty with minimal effort"

I have NEVER understood that mentality. Whenever I wasn't actively playing, I logged. Too much other cool shit to do.

Gear is a tool moreso than status symbol...or maybe that's a tank mentality.

Noodleface_sl said:

It's dumb and caters to the WoW-player mindset of "I want to sit in town and look pretty with minimal effort"

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Shrug, if you don't want to do it, just grind honor the regular way? It's not that big a difference if you don't like doing dungeons. Shit, you can grind arenas for like 12-15 hours at this time and just get tyrannical gear then stomp scros in bgs all day every day. Warcraft finally has enough fun things to do at cap that sitting in town isn't the defacto go to anymore.

You can only get conquest points if you win, right? So your pvp progression will be extremely limited only getting honor points. My battlegroup is the worst, I can play all day and get 0 wins. Shouldn't it be ~50%? Nah, seems paranoid, but I it doesn't surprise me that wow only offers bad experiences when I'm logged in. I can't tell you the last time I was enjoying it and not just playing compulsively, or habitually.


It really fucks with you mentally. "Oh the game will be good when I get X." Huge uphill battle for X and then you get it, and lo and behold, it doesn't make fuck all difference in pvp and you still get pwnt.

Doesn't matter in PVE because they completely trivialized raid gear. In vanilla that gear was used in world pvp to keep the other faction from getting to the instance to raid. But now you got summoning stones and whatnots. What a fucking turn for the worst the game had starting at the first expansion.