No More WoW Numbers

Activision Blizzard has decided that it will no longer give out subscriber counts for World of Warcraft.

In yesterday's financial reporting they revealed the game is down to 5.5 million subscribers, which is still impressive, but well under half the game's peak. With their user count getting smaller every time around, they no longer feel this is in their best interests to continue publicizing the game's gradual decline.

It was a fun run while it lasted, especially WotLK.

Thanks for reminding me to cancel my account. I resubbed to pass the time while I waited for Fallout 4 to hit. I got bored really quick though and haven't even logged in lately.

I keep going back for each expansion, and have a ton of fun. Then, it gets boring since I'm not able to devote enough time to raiding. I might refire up the sub for a month or two before the next expansion and use LFR to see the end game, but its past its prime.

My only regret is not playing during WotLK. I stopped after BC, joined again 3/4 of the way through MOP. Everything about Northrend looks like it would have been awesome. The reason I never went back is because I remember people saying it was the worse expansion of them all.

5.5 million at how much a month?

FFXIV has been growing and with the release of the 3.1 trailer listed its subscriber base as 5 million. I guess Blizzard doesn't want to let anyone know that WoW has been usurped in subscribers.

trick0502 said:

5.5 million at how much a month?

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$15

Hsensei said:

FFXIV has been growing and with the release of the 3.1 trailer listed its subscriber base as 5 million. I guess Blizzard doesn't want to let anyone know that WoW has been usurped in subscribers.

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That's probably got a lot to do with it. First game to surpass World of Warcraft will get a lot of free publicity.

Not really knowing much about WoW - are these expansions legit sequels/major upgrades or is the game still similar to the way it was 5-10 years ago?

The basics are still the same. There are pretty major shifts between xpacs in terms of new features, but I wouldn't exactly call an xpac a sequel.

Till the next expansion hits.

Rumor mill a-churning with rumors of a Diablo MMO.

I'd LOVE to see something done like that. As good as Vanillia was they could probably make an awesome Diablo MMO with modern graphics.

Fairly legit sequels. They add 5 to 10 levels, change mechanics, release large expanses of new territory to explore, and provide a new story.

Funny, I heard MoP was the worst. I skipped it completely though, but have played in some part every other expansion including vanilla. I mostly PvP now since it is still pretty fun. Too bad it is so hard to find a group of regulars to team up with. My server only has 5 horde that even show up on the rated battleground Blizzard page.

The game is definitely great in terms of having a lot to do for newer players. They'd be jumping in with several expansions worth of new content and countless items to collect, grind out, etc. With the addition of being able to pay for your monthly subscription with gold, it basically makes it a free game now (if you've got the cash flow in-game of course).

I play off and on when I can find time, hopping on some dungeon runs and leveling up alts with my guild who are all basically doing the same thing until the next expansion hits. It is a shame that there are a few months of no content once you're done with everything raid wise, but still plenty to do to be honest.

I haven't played much of FFXIV but it did look excellent from the few hours I spent in Beta followed by a few more hours when it launched. Worth playing?

I know I really enjoyed Guild Wars 2 as well, and that's entirely free for those who care. Lot of stuff to do for sure.

Corvette said:

Funny, I heard MoP was the worst.

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Like I said, I jumped in 3/4 of the way through it, but I enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the territory (thought it was really well done) and enjoyed the story.

OEM said:

My only regret is not playing during WotLK. I stopped after BC, joined again 3/4 of the way through MOP. Everything about Northrend looks like it would have been awesome. The reason I never went back is because I remember people saying it was the worse expansion of them all.

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Other then the joy of starting out in my first MMORPG with Vanilla WoW, WotLK was my favorite by far. For anyone that grew up playing WC3 it was damn near the perfect end to the Arthus story line. Honestly I should have stopped playing after that as I never came close to the same enjoyment out of the game since.

Draenor didn't do much for the persistent endgame issue, and patch 6.1 was very underwhelming. Once I hit level 100, I was done with the game. The expansion kept me busy for all of 2 months.

It's worth noting that the actual in-game experience does not depend on there being millions of players. Until relatively recently, players on different realms (there are hundreds of realms) could not even interact with each other. The finally introduced cross-realm play, where you can now do just about anything other than be in the same guild with friends who are from other realms. They have also been linking lower-populations realms together to make sure there is always a reasonable sized playerbased on every realm. The game could continue to exist just fine even if it was down to a few thousand players and just a single realm.

I miss WOTLK also, mostly because back then I was in a guild with mostly real-life friends who all played the game also. It's just not the same playing with random people.

The current expansion is pretty lame. It fixed many of the bad things about MoP but introduced a whole bunch of new issues also. The worst is probably garrisons (sort of an in-game "home" that is customizable and different for each player). Instead of everyone hanging out in a major capital city where you can see each other, check out everyone elses armor, etc, everyone just hangs out alone in their garrisons all day. You have to perform tedious garrison tasks every day in order to accomplish broader tasks that are necessary for progression. Garrisons are so tedious, boring, and anti-MMO it ruined my enthusiasm for the game faster than almost anything else.

The gameplay involved in raiding has changed quite a bit for the worse. It used to be that when you raided, you spent most of your time focusing on your role (tanking, healing, or doing damage). Now when you raid the main focus is usually on positioning, having to constantly move and jump around, avoiding fire, obstacles, and other gimmicky mechanics that they felt they needed to add to make the encounter interesting. For me, playing my role and being good at my role is what was always interesting. Now raiding feels more like like synchronized ballet dancing

They have said that they plan to release expansions more often now. That is both good and bad. Good in the sense that content won't get stale as fast, but bad in the sense that expansions tend to cost $60 now, and they are going to now expect us to pay that once per year (instead of once every 2-3 years) in addition to $15/month. That's a bit of a difficult pill to swallow. Honestly, I feel like for people who have been active subscribers for over a year, expansions should be half-price if not free.

WoTLK was easily the most fun i'd had in an expansion in WoW. I did quit right before MoP came out.

When i think back to my WoW career and the WoTLK expansion in particular, Northrend still triggers nostalgia that only vanilla can bring back. You had vikings, trolls, scourge, dragons, robots....

25 man IC was also awesome (outside of running those big halls) - we cleared it all normal 25m, and 3 wings on Heroic. The Lich King fight was very, very well done. I put it up there with BWL on the fun-o-meter.

Good times! My old guild is still going i see...

Hsensei said:

FFXIV has been growing and with the release of the 3.1 trailer listed its subscriber base as 5 million. I guess Blizzard doesn't want to let anyone know that WoW has been usurped in subscribers.

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Astral Abyss said:

That's probably got a lot to do with it. First game to surpass World of Warcraft will get a lot of free publicity.

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From what I understand that number is misinterpreted and it was not referring to actual current active subscriptions but cumulative unique subscribers since launch.

Corvette said:

Fairly legit sequels. They add 5 to 10 levels, change mechanics, release large expanses of new territory to explore, and provide a new story.

Funny, I heard MoP was the worst. I skipped it completely though, but have played in some part every other expansion including vanilla. I mostly PvP now since it is still pretty fun. Too bad it is so hard to find a group of regulars to team up with. My server only has 5 horde that even show up on the rated battleground Blizzard page.

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With every expansion the game is "at its worst" according to the vocal minority; Vanilla was better when BC was out, BC was better when WotLK was out, WotLK was better when Cata was out, etc. Most people that thought MoP sucked was just because they felt pandas made it a kids' game, nevermind that you are running around as cartoonish werewolves/bipedal cows. I personally found MoP to be the most enjoyable because of the depth of the storyline and the additional endgame content that wasn't just raids/PvP.

Jaymzkerten said:

With every expansion the game is "at its worst" according to the vocal minority; Vanilla was better when BC was out, BC was better when WotLK was out, WotLK was better when Cata was out, etc. Most people that thought MoP sucked was just because they felt pandas made it a kids' game, nevermind that you are running around as cartoonish werewolves/bipedal cows. I personally found MoP to be the most enjoyable because of the depth of the storyline and the additional endgame content that wasn't just raids/PvP.

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Not really.
New expansions added a lot of quality of life features, some of them were detrimental to the 'community' feel. For example, dungeon finder allowed you to queue up for dungeons with random people, instead sitting in IF and spamming trade with LFG Dire Maul for 3 hours.

Story-wise, WOTLK was pretty much the pinnacle of WoW, but then it rapidly went downhill with Cataclysm nonsense, MoP managed to prop the falling sub numbers, but WoD pissed off a lot of people with delayed and cut off content.

WoD raid were pretty much meh with gimmicky fights a constant re-use of "and now shit breaks loose" boss fights with 3-5 completely different phases of increasing difficulty.

At some point it had to get "old". It is going the way of EverQuest before it. It's been massively successful and continues to be successful for now but it will get to a point of stabilization.

I wonder where Ben Schulz is now

Guess they [finally] got tired of getting bent over hard by the media and gaming sites every time the sub numbers would go down (or "tank" according to some gaming sites).

OEM said:

$15

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Not necessarily. Multi-month discounts, pricing in the Far East is different, etc.

Blizzard trying to hide the fact that WoW has been declining as of late. Nice to see them work on other games like Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm.

OEM said:

Rumor mill a-churning with rumors of a Diablo MMO.

I'd LOVE to see something done like that. As good as Vanillia was they could probably make an awesome Diablo MMO with modern graphics.

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A Diablo MMO seems like it would be hella fun.

I will never pay a subscription fee to play an online game.

Never under any circumstance.

Thus far it has been easy, as I am not into MMO's and don't own (or plan to own) an Xbox, but someone could release my ultimate game, and if it involves a subscription, I won't touch it.

Zarathustra[H];1041950401 said:

I will never pay a subscription fee to play an online game.

Never under any circumstance.

Thus far it has been easy, as I am not into MMO's and don't own (or plan to own) an Xbox, but someone could release my ultimate game, and if it involves a subscription, I won't touch it.

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As long as I get enjoyment out of the game with content updates and fixes, I am OK with subs. I MUCH rather subs than this micro-transaction crap.

I play Rift, which I find to be better content wise, but it probably only sports maybe 100k users and probably 20k of them are bots.

Gmok Bonecrusha said:

As long as I get enjoyment out of the game with content updates and fixes, I am OK with subs. I MUCH rather subs than this micro-transaction crap.

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Microtransactions and pay-to-win format games that properly leverage paywalls to prevent everyone from seeing like all of the game are better. People who play them can pick out their proper social circles just by looking at another character to see if they've paid money to get things in game and how much money they probably paid. The more they spend the more likely they're not like some little kid or that they at least have money and are willing to spend it for entertainment which raises the odds that they're worth talking to over the freeloaders who are probably less well off in their personal money situation. Sure, subscription games at least get like the basic "have a job and can afford a computer + internet connection types" but without there being a free element to the game there are fewer people to shun while you're hanging out at the bank with the other wealthy people of leisure.

OEM said:

Rumor mill a-churning with rumors of a Diablo MMO.

I'd LOVE to see something done like that. As good as Vanillia was they could probably make an awesome Diablo MMO with modern graphics.

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We will never see a game as challenging as Vanilla WoW again from Blizzard. They have now tuned their games for casuals. Thus the Candy Crush purchase as it fits their portfolio.

Played WoW for three months last year. I'll never get those three months back.

Tedium.

No surprise, its been declining pretty rapidly. Blizzard will get numbers when the next expansion releases but a year down the road I think it will be sub 5m.

cageymaru said:

We will never see a game as challenging as Vanilla WoW again from Blizzard. They have now tuned their games for casuals. Thus the Candy Crush purchase as it fits their portfolio.

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In fairness, it was the CEO of Activision-Blizzard Bobby Kotick (who everyone knows and loves) who bought King and their title Candy Crush ... it wasn't the CEO of Blizzard, Michael Morhaime, who made the purchase ... it is possible that Blizzard may not be able to recreate their previous successes but now that they have completed Star Craft and probably only have one more expansion for D3 they are open to try something new ... I still have hopes that they will think back to what made them great and make Warcraft IV

kbrickley said:

In fairness, it was the CEO of Activision-Blizzard Bobby Kotick (who everyone knows and loves) who bought King and their title Candy Crush ... it wasn't the CEO of Blizzard, Michael Morhaime, who made the purchase ... it is possible that Blizzard may not be able to recreate their previous successes but now that they have completed Star Craft and probably only have one more expansion for D3 they are open to try something new ... I still have hopes that they will think back to what made them great and make Warcraft IV

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Wouldn't count on it. If they can't milk a franchise with microtransactions I don't think Blizzard will be releasing anything of the sort. Diablo 3 had the real money auction house which turned into a failure so they canned it. Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone and even WoW are all huge money sinks and exactly the type of games Activision wants. If you notice, these games pretty much act like mobile games.

MoP was the worst. BC was the best, WoTLK was Awesome, Cata was cool as hell too. I was playing a lot for this latest release but meh.. internet been sucky, got bored. Why play if bored?

I switched to FFXIV long time ago the content just seem to get getting better and better. Also the creators play the game.

I quit for a while after MoP came out and was too boring and had to many chores, and quit completely shortly after the last expansion came out and proved to be no more than just daily chores. Really, a game shouldn't be daily chores, ever. I shouldn't have to log in for three hours and run repetitive, boring non-story related quests for three hours, just to maintain a character. They just added crap after crap with more and more daily chores, to the point that a player can't even run the max level dungeons and have fun unless he or she does those daily chores for months before.

Wrath of the Lich King was great. I loved it back then. Even Cataclysm was fun. Mists of Pandaria and Warlord of Draenor were just crap.