Wow lost another 300k subs this quarter

Zorachus

Zorachus

[H]F Junkie
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I am curious what Blizzard plans to do with WoW around the launch of SW;ToR ? WoW lost another 300k subs this quarter, and 600k subs the previous qtr So that is close to a million subscriptions lost this year so far. Will Blizzard just let WoW slowly fade away, and bank on making money off upcoming Diablo ]l[ ? But with the cash cow that WoW has been, I would be surprised if Blizzard just sat by and let it fade away, without totally revamping it and make it fresh again ?

I personally quit earlier this year, got to 85, and quickly bored. After 6+ years playing WoW I am sick of the same old world and character models, etc...too much the same rinse and repeat. I will admit I had some of my most fun gaming moments in my life playing TBC and early Wrath, wish I could get those fun times going again.

Word is they have a patch 4.3 lined up and waiting to drop this Fall, with MAJOR changes, possibly all new character models/animations, and maybe updating of the graphics engine, new Raids new dungeons, etc...

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content....3-this-year-Blizzcon-2011-Tickets-Blue-Posts

Patch 4.3 news !!
http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2418-Patch-4.3-Deathwing-Transmogrifier-Void-Storage

Patch 4.3 - Deathwing, Transmogrifier, Void Storage
Tom Chilton (Kalgan) answered a couple of questions from Gamona.de at GamesCon on Patch 4.3, and we got a bunch of very interesting news out of it. Patch 4.3 will feature:

- New Raid - The Deathwing raid, making it very likely to be the last patch before the next expansion.

- 3 new 5-man instances - Including one in the Caverns of Time. (War of the Ancients was mentioned as a cataclysm instance a few years ago, but a lot of things have changed since then, who knows!)

- The Transmogrifier NPC, which will let you change the appearance of any armor piece on you, while retaining the stats of your current gear. (= T12 stats, but with the Tier 2 look!)
Players won't be able to change the appearance of their armor into another armor type or class armor set, and you might have to own the armor before you can use it to swap the appearance of your existing armor.

- The Void Storage is a new type of bank where players will be able to store their old armors in order to free up space in their regular bank.

- The Abyssal Maw dungeon is gone for the moment, the storyline wasn't convincing enough/fitting.


Personally I was looking forward to updated/revised character models. The humans in particular look super outdated, like from a Quake ]l[ game. I recall reading last year that Blizzard said they wanted to update all character models in the game, but didn't have the time for Cataclysm release, it would be done in a future patch. I guess not :( Will be saved for the 4th expansion as a big selling point ?
 
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The true question, young asshoppa, is not what Blizzard plans to do with WoW, but rather who gives an ancient chinese rats ass?

Seriously, I thought only Chinese Farmsluts (tm) still played that game?
 
Well, I'm sure in that period, they gained new subscriber too...but it doesn't look that great for them in the near/distant future
 
4.3 is supposed to be massive. Redoing the old world (something shit loads of people begged for) cost them a lot of players because they didn't spend as much time on endgame content. Get the feeling they are going to fix that real soon.
 
I quit WoW in November before Cata hit, and haven't looked back since, good riddance, really.
 
austinwachukwu said:
Well, I'm sure in that period, they gained new subscriber too...but it doesn't look that great for them in the near/distant future
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I think we can assume that the numbers reported are the net sum of both new and lost subscribers. It's been on a negative slope for a while now.
 
Tempest_Prime said:
The true question, young asshoppa, is not what Blizzard plans to do with WoW, but rather who gives an ancient chinese rats ass?

Seriously, I thought only Chinese Farmsluts (tm) still played that game?
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If the only people who played the game were Chinese farmers, who would be the market for their gold?

It's not exactly surprising that the game has peaked. In the words of King Terenas, "No king rules forever."
 
Well considering the nature of the last expansion its not surprising they've lost subs. They've ignored there player base when it comes the issues that have plagued the game for years. They focused more on the end game but they made the leveling part of the expansion quick and boring. One of the best things in Wrath was the 10 levels you got and how it actually made you feel like you were a more powerful character in turn with new skills/spells and items. Wrath was just bursting with content and Cata didn't feel the same.

Its not like WoW hasn't lost subs before , it might be in its decline but a game with 11 million current subscribers is hardly what many would consider "failing".
 
Blizzard screwed the pooch with "endgame" content imo. Firelands only has 7 bosses, 6 of which are fairly easy with only Ragnaros providing a substantial challenge (my casual 2 nights a week guild went 6/7 normal the first week and downed Rag the second week). So the hardcore raiders are bored because they can clear the entire current raid bosses in one night, heroic Ragnaros excluded.

The people that do heroics for their valor points have all of 2 dungeons to choose from and dps queue times are 35-50+ minutes and have a relatively high rate of failure with all the tanks/healers ragequitting (Jindo the pugbreaker, trash in ZA, etc.) Add to that that both instances can take upwards of an hour in a normal group and the time vs. reward is horrible.

The "solo" players who are doing the Molten Front daily quests have a huge grind in front of them and receive rewards a full tier under the normal Firelands 378 gear. Again the time vs. rewards is horrible.

The high end arena players (to be fair, my highest 3s rating is 2250 so I wouldn't consider myself high end) are again beset by class imbalances. 80-90% of matches I can tell who is going to win based solely on their class makeup. Heals are getting out of control. My lock has about 130k hp in arenas and our resto shaman routinely gets crit heals on me for over 100k. Burst damage is also insane - Warriors, DKs, and feral druids can pump out 100k+ damage in just 2 or 3 gcd's and that's with 4k+ resilience.
 
My sub is still active for a couple weeks yet. I raided 6 nights / week in vanilla + a bit in TBC up through SSC/TK. I never raided in WotLK, and I've only filled in a few nights in Cata. I've got 6 toons at 85, 1 at 83, and 3 at 82, and am very near 365 days /played. I'm a bit of an addict.

I started the molten front dailies on my blacksmith, and realized that grinding those out to buy recipes for mediocre ilvl 365 weapons requiring a crapload of truegold wasn't worth the time. Especially since the dailies are exactly 0 amount of fun. And there's no world pvp involved. At least not to the extent of the Sunwell dailies.

I was actually on a haitus due to RL stuff when ZA/ZG were patched in again. When I reactivated, I had no clue. They were fun a couple times, kinda cool to see what they did with them. Unfortunately, the queue times have prevented me from running them on anything that's not a tank/healer.

I have to agree that pvp healing is a little broken. In 2 weeks of solid playing time, I geared my holy paladin in season 10 bg gear with an average ilvl of 369. Do you know how hard it is to kill a holy paladin in that kind of gear? I don't want to have the time to /lol at people trying to kill me one on one or even two on one. It shouldn't be that way. A good pvper should be able to kill me if I make a mistake or mistime a CD or something. It doesn't happen, and that takes some of the excitement out of it. Resilience has reduced pvp damage to nothing more than a joke.

For the sake of ridiculousness, I'm probably going to play up to 365 days /played (only 36ish hours to go). Guildbank is going to get another crapton of gold. And I'm going to get through my Steam backlog =)
 
Oh no, Blizzard lost 300+K accounts. Now they only have like 10.7 million other accounts to bank off of. What's going to happen to Blizzard now? Oh, right, nothing, and not one fuck was given that day...


In all seriousness though, I doubt Blizzard is crapping all over themselves after this.
 
Colt___45 said:
The people that do heroics for their valor points have all of 2 dungeons to choose from and dps queue times are 35-50+ minutes and have a relatively high rate of failure with all the tanks/healers ragequitting (Jindo the pugbreaker, trash in ZA, etc.) Add to that that both instances can take upwards of an hour in a normal group and the time vs. reward is horrible.
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This is what made me give it up for good this time around. While WoTLK heroics were a joke (doing speed runs with my guild, was able to get some done in under 12 minutes, and this was before end-game gear), Cata just bumped it up too much. As a tank, I just couldn't stand terrible DPS or healers that couldn't handle the heroics. I was regularly having to spend at least 1.25 hours per run - and those were the successful runs. The unsuccessful runs I don't even want to talk about.

Maybe it just means the game isn't for me any more, but I can't dedicate myself to just sitting there for 75-90 minutes at a minimum, not even counting queueing, dailies and any other little tasks that need doing other than the heroic. I actually really liked the questlines for leveling in Cata, especially the underwater area, I thought they were very well done and kept the game fresh.


Xenomaniac said:
In all seriousness though, I doubt Blizzard is crapping all over themselves after this.
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900k subs lost in 6 months? I'm pretty sure they're taking it very damn seriously, that is an 8% drop, which is significant - $13.5M per month in lost revenue.
 
Crapping themselves no, but I would guess there is some discussion going on. They were gaining lots of subs all throughout Wotlk, and no every report comes out that their numbers have gone down. Remember the next big contender in the market, TOR has not even come out yet. So if anything the numbers indicate that wow will lose significantly more when that comes out.

I still play basically because I have beat all the other games I want to play right now (although Deus Ex may change that tommorow) and don't want to start a new MMO until TOR comes.

From my perspective though I hate the new changes. I find my paladin annoying to play, the rotation is now highly proc based and you can easily have large chunks of time where you literally have no buttons you can press if an ability doesn't proc. The new talent trees cut out a lot of possibilities for cool builds and it is next to impossible to actually quest with other people now as everything is huge quest chains and phased zones. Unless 4.3 makes some MAJOR changes I foresee HUGE exodus to TOR.

Graphics updates are not what WoW needs right now, people are happily playing wow with shitty graphics. Hell a good portion of the people who play it play on integrated graphics. What wow needs is major gameplay changes going back toward BC/Wotlk style.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
That's because eventually, people realize MMO's are boring.
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Yep it only took 6+ years :rolleyes:

To think that Blizzard doesn't care about losing 900k subscribers is just dumb. Of course they do , they want there cow to keep milking as much as possible. What they've gone on record to say is that they plan to release more content faster to keep players happy but what they should be doing is fixing the already growing problems with certain aspects of the game.

Arena's are a joke , the composition of the team means more than the actual skill level of the player and that's nothing like it was when Arena's started. All team compositions should be viable period. Also spending a good 30-40+ minutes waiting in que for a dungeon that will likely end up in failure with other random people after which point you've wasted over an hour and half trying is just not working. I would say a feedback system would help but lets be honest , most players would spam lies simply to be assholes.

The release of Ragnaros is a step forward in terms of proper raid difficulty as many guilds have yet to down him and the challenge is there which counts. The thing that could spell actual trouble for the game is that its been confirmed that Blizzard's developer B team is handling the game now while the original A team is working its new MMO "Titan" supposedly because the original development group was getting burned out always doing "WoW" content.

But I think WoW has at least another expansion maybe two before it starts to seriously decline.
 
If you're right and their B team is working on it

then WoW is and has been in decline, and will continue to decline, it only makes sense.

They aren't a B team for nothing. I'm not saying they are garbage, but simply, they won't do as good a job.
 
Well even Blizzard's "B" team they likely exceed many "A" teams out there. I think its a matter of fixing issues that have been largely ignored if they wanna survive.

Guess we'll see what 4.3 brings and maybe it'll inject some life into it.
 
The best times in WoW were just vanilla before all the expansions and welfare gear. I quit right before TBC came out, but I have come back for each of the other expansions for a month or two just to try them out and I don't think anything will ever compare to vanilla in my eyes.
 
TBC was amazing. I had a lot of fun with it. I really believe TBC was the top of the game so far in its history.
 
I grabbed a two-month time card after being on hiatus for 6 months. I created a new toon on a new server and have been enjoying it. The main issue I have is that levelling has gotten TOO fast. You can only do about 1/2 of the quests in an area before they're not worth the xp. If you do any instances then you'll outlevel the current area and you'll have to stay behind and grind gathering professions before moving on.

You're also never in any danger of dieing anywhere. If I join a random PUG we'll normally blow through an instance by chain pulling entire rooms because healing is OP and tanks never have to worry about aggro. I two-manned most of Uldaman the other day with just a resto Shaman and me as an enhance Shaman in leather gear.

I miss the pre-BC days when elites were tough to take down solo, every class had some nice class quests, huge PVP battles happened right outside of the towns, and there were only a handful of stats. Crit rating, resilience, haste, etc. just add too many extra numbers that could be included in the base stats.
 
I am waiting for wow to be completely free to play without restrictions if they want me to play. Just have to pay for the game itself.
 
I've been unsubbed for about half a year now and this is actually the first time I question resubbing in the near future. I'm usually confident that I'll revisit the world once in a while to see what's going on, but I guess my interest has waned over time. Now that I think about it, discounting the beta test I participated in, I've been subbed for ~5 months last year and 2 months this year. It's kind of a shame though since Cataclysm was easily their most costly effort for an expansion yet.

I can imagine why I've been losing interest over time, but it has nothing to do with difficulty. Maybe I'll at least come back for the last major patch near the next expansion to see what's been going on.
 
Godmachine said:
Yep it only took 6+ years :rolleyes:
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It may be fun, but in the long haul, it gets boring. No game after 7 years can remain fresh. It becomes more of a "I have too much invested and too many friends here" thing than "OMG I can't wait to log in to find a cool new quest or raid".
 
LeninGHOLA said:
It may be fun, but in the long haul, it gets boring. No game after 7 years can remain fresh. It becomes more of a "I have too much invested and too many friends here" thing than "OMG I can't wait to log in to find a cool new quest or raid".
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That's exactly how I felt. Too much time invested to just drop it all. Then I turned around and said "What the fuck, it's just a game".
 
they should start cracking on WOW2. Its likely gonna take em 5 years minimum to have it developed anyway
 
That's a lot of people lost, but I don't care since so many addicts gave them so much money over the years. I'm glad that company never got a penny out of me.
 
People still play and pay for the original Everquest.

WoW will go the way of all MMOs and will start to consolidate servers. Then they will keep enough servers running to support those who still pay. There's no need to shut the game down if it still makes them money.
 
It was enjoyable up to TBC for me, except for the flying mounts. The formula they were using was bound to get boring at some point. I don't mind grinds in MMO's, but WoW is largely defined by its grind, which gets old.
 
Bankie said:
I grabbed a two-month time card after being on hiatus for 6 months. I created a new toon on a new server and have been enjoying it. The main issue I have is that levelling has gotten TOO fast. You can only do about 1/2 of the quests in an area before they're not worth the xp. If you do any instances then you'll outlevel the current area and you'll have to stay behind and grind gathering professions before moving on.
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I got in on Cataclysm for 10 days or whatever, leveled at an absolutely absurd pace, got to like 72 from 1... and at that point it hits a soul crushing standstill. Everything is fast as fuck, fairly entertaining, and pretty enjoyable actually even if you've done it before because it's so fast. Then you hit Northrend and it's like slamming into a fucking wall.

I went through most of Outlands in a single sitting. I barely managed 2 levels in Northrend in like 2 days. Through the 30's I was hitting a level nearly every 15 minutes.


The fast leveling up to the latest content is fun... except it wasn't the latest, it was Northrend and that sucked.
 
Godmachine said:
TBC was amazing. I had a lot of fun with it. I really believe TBC was the top of the game so far in its history.
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While TBC definitely had some issues and there have been some new changes that are good I definitely agree with you on this. If I could just go back to TBC but with dual talent specs and the dungeon finder I would be a happy man.

Another thing I think is not helping the game, or at least it doesn't work for be is blizzards inability to come up with new bosses. I killed Nefarion, I killed Onyxia, I killed Ragnaros, I killed Kelthuzad. I was okay with them brining back naxx so more people could see it, but when you start bringing back every boss I've ever killed it really makes me wonder what the point of killing them in the first place was. Nefarion and Onyxia weren't like Kelthuzad either (who you turn his phylactory in to a pretty shady dude). No I put their head up on a fucking pike, they should be dead and stay dead.

With leveling I wish they would balance it out more so that each level took slightly more time then the last in a somewhat even fashion instead of hitting the wall that you do at 70 (which really isn't that bad in comparison to how long it took to level in vanilla, it is just bad in comparison to the fact that outlands takes under and hour a level).
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Leveling up every 15 minutes is a good thing?
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Seriously. How fucking boring that would be for a first timer , you skip over nearly the entire story line , you cut your experience of the content right into 1/4.

I could understand if you had level a character to 85 and wanted to rush the shit you've already done but man you've gone and experienced the game in such a rushed fashion its no wonder you don't like it at this point.
 
I don't know what it is about Cataclysm, but I became bored very quickly after hitting 85.
 
They are probably just hard at work on their next MMO, which even if it's complete shit since it's blizzard it will still sell millions and millions in both the Western and Eastern markets.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Leveling up every 15 minutes is a good thing?
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yes, because that's what i was aiming to do... it's not the norm. if i had anything planned it could have been faster yet, and it was my first time doing the horde side of things.

i already had a 60, 70, and 80 from all the previous expansions etc. i had a new character for vanilla, bc, wotlk and then for cataclysm.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10565193/games/WoWScrnShot_122210_055652.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10565193/games/WoWScrnShot_122410_033633.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10565193/games/WoWScrnShot_122910_003145.jpg
 
Godmachine said:
Seriously. How fucking boring that would be for a first timer , you skip over nearly the entire story line , you cut your experience of the content right into 1/4.

I could understand if you had level a character to 85 and wanted to rush the shit you've already done but man you've gone and experienced the game in such a rushed fashion its no wonder you don't like it at this point.
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It's how you get high level inexperienced players. Exactly the reason people try and stay away from pugs
 
The 1-60 game is imo much better that it was before 4.0. The quest design is leaps and bounds better than before. It can be very fast if you push it with the various boosts you can get. But if you want it will still take a decent about of time. Though I do agree that instances really throw a wrench into things, they give way too much xp.

Edit: You are going to have inexperienced players no matter how long the leveling experience is. Since the game is definitively not balanced for group play until the end people are going to suck when they get there. Though its been like this for a long ass time. But now since heroics are not piss easy (still pretty easy) new players do hit a wall in terms of the things they have to learn.
 
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