Wow lost another 300k subs this quarter

moussaka said:
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.
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This is how I tend to play it. It's a game like any other for me: play it for a couple of months, then I'm tired of it. People don't realize that you don't have to play an MMO like a second job that you have to pay for. You don't need to subscribe to it all the time. You don't need to play it 12 hours a day.

I can't say I agree about Vanilla though. You're suffering from the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia on that front. I think if they were to open a Vanilla server that people would realize just how dogshit annoying and terrible it really was. The lag on the major servers due to overpopulation, the constantly and majorly fluctuating difficulty of the raids, the classes that were complete chores to play.

If there is one thing that I would like back from Vanilla, it would be a better sense of class identity. I don't particularly care for their philosophy of making hybrids really good at any individual role.
 
Near the end of vanilla WoW I thought it was quite good. Once they'd gotten all the cross realm BGs and all that working it was quite fun over all. However I'd say TBC was WoW's glory period. There was a lot fun about it, particularly in the beginning. WotLK was still fun, but a step back in a number of ways. Cata I just couldn't get in to and enjoy.
 
I'll try it when there's no monthly fee and anyone can host a server without a middle man. Never until then.
 
xenios said:
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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It depends on what you are looking for. It is better for questing quickly, but I don't like how you only get ~3 quests at a time and then progress around the zone. Personally I much prefered the outlands style where there were a ton of quests and you could fill your quest log then just do whatever one you decided to work on. Or go and easily pick up the same quests that your friend a level ahead of you was on. I agree that the vanilla questing sucked horribly, but I still like outlands the best even with the redone content.
 
I accounted for two of those -300k's. The endless carrot chase hasn't been fun in a while. There used to be so much more world PvP, not just stupid griefing attempts by noobcakes. I might get one of my accounts back up to do keep doing some 49 twinking but other than...
 
Godmachine said:
So never then? Are you sure you are even into MMOs?
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nobody_here said:
I really enjoyed Guild Wars for a couple years, bought it for $20 and never paid another cent.
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I play them time to time. Not every day, not every week, not every month and at times i skip a year or two, but when i want to play one I fire up GW or Black Prophecy, both very enjoyable and free for the most part. I don't pay monthly to play any games.
 
The game is so freaking ugly and old, let it die. Id rather play Minecraft for the visuals.
 
I think that people who constantly praise Vanilla WoW forget it was also equally frustrating. The PVP system was far more punishing (not in a good way) and 40 man's while properly challenging were very hard to hold together as guilds over the long term as they would always crumble for the most part or merge.

It was also equally hard on professions in vanilla WoW as farming materials was a real bitch. Than there was just generating money through trades to pay for buffs and potions during raids , you could spend hours each day just farming materials for the next raid ..not fun.

I could go on but really the best of WoW was truly during TBC , it was a fully fleshed out expansion that altered the game for the positive. Wrath was an attempt at regaining that glory that never really panned out. If Blizzard releases an expansion even half as good as TBC the next time around they could charm back a lot of former subs with the right kind of content. Its not likely they will however.
 
Godmachine said:
I think that people who constantly praise Vanilla WoW forget it was also equally frustrating. The PVP system was far more punishing (not in a good way) and 40 man's while properly challenging were very hard to hold together as guilds over the long term as they would always crumble for the most part or merge.

It was also equally hard on professions in vanilla WoW as farming materials was a real bitch. Than there was just generating money through trades to pay for buffs and potions during raids , you could spend hours each day just farming materials for the next raid ..not fun.

I could go on but really the best of WoW was truly during TBC , it was a fully fleshed out expansion that altered the game for the positive. Wrath was an attempt at regaining that glory that never really panned out. If Blizzard releases an expansion even half as good as TBC the next time around they could charm back a lot of former subs with the right kind of content. Its not likely they will however.
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I preferred PVP before the system was even in place. 40mans were rough but there were a few 10 or 15 man raids already. While I do agree that the professions were a pain in the ass, it also made them more useful and rewarding. The gathering professions were also more enjoyable since they levelled with your character instead of you outlevelling the area in 30 minutes and then having to spend another hour or more grinding them in an area with mobs that don't give xp.

Wrath was by far my least favorite expansion. I liked BC and would have to say it's my favorite expansion but I still didn't enjoy it like I did vanilla. I like to login to Blizzlike pre-BC servers and tool around from time to time and would definitely go back to a Blizz run pre-BC server if it was available.
 
I am sure Blizzard will get through this OK. Their main problem as far as I was concerned was a lack of content. Blizzard tries to make it sound like every single dungeon and raid takes them 100,000 hours and $50 million to design and test, then makes up excuses why they keep re-using content. The fact is games like LOTRO were putting out high quality content much faster than Blizzard and they only had 200K to 300K subscribers.

Hopefully this downward trend will encourage them to try a bit harder instead of mailing it in and trying to maximize profits by holding back content.
 
Godmachine said:
I could go on but really the best of WoW was truly during TBC , it was a fully fleshed out expansion that altered the game for the positive. Wrath was an attempt at regaining that glory that never really panned out. If Blizzard releases an expansion even half as good as TBC the next time around they could charm back a lot of former subs with the right kind of content. Its not likely they will however.
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Keep in mind they ruined TBC right at the end before LK came out though. I believe TBC was still on a strong upward subscriber trend when 3.0 came out and turn the game into EZ-Mode and removed many of the challenges and hurdles that were keeping people playing.
 
I've never played WoW. But, if I did, my guess is that I would instantly tire of it upon reaching level 20.
 
Obviously there are alot of factors but I think alot of the F2P movement and quality games based on it makes it harder and harder for alot of people to justify WOWs costs. And I think the people whom are leaving for that will never return unless WOW goes F2P with microtransactions.
 
I honestly dont think its F2P that is killing them. Its the fact its BORING. Hey guess what Cata is? The exact same thing WotLK was. The only thing they did right was original content which wasn't 100% structured, then moved to Burning Crusade which was very structured, then made it even more structured with WotLK and remade WotLK into Cata with new skin.

Cata got horribly boring after you reached 85, there was ... yes the exact same stuff to do once you got 80 in WotLK.

Bring back content like the original. :(
 
Vanilla > All

After TBC I started losing intrest and it only got worse.
 
That seems to be the chief complaint about Cata and much more boring if you are not in a raiding guild. Most of the big Arena PVPers have left the game since the Arena's are in great need a overhaul. I'm interested to see if Blizzard will announce an expansion this Blizzcon , doubtful since 4.3 is supposed to be the "game" changer patch but I think letting people know in advance that something is in the pipe for late next year wouldn't hurt.
 
Godmachine said:
That seems to be the chief complaint about Cata and much more boring if you are not in a raiding guild. Most of the big Arena PVPers have left the game since the Arena's are in great need a overhaul. I'm interested to see if Blizzard will announce an expansion this Blizzcon , doubtful since 4.3 is supposed to be the "game" changer patch but I think letting people know in advance that something is in the pipe for late next year wouldn't hurt.
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Unless 4.3 changes a lot with the end game there won't be much saving the game honestly. They would have to literally blow the game apart, the game they made increasingly uninteresting since TBC. They need to get rid of this boring ass dailies for faction grind, grind heroics for tokens, grind raids for gear and more tokens. There is nothing outside of doing the same thing every day. They even incorporated cooking and fishing into dailies, WTF?! that was cool with TBC but c'mon get rid of this crap.

PVP has been broken since TBC. The arena system was awesome back then and they didn't bother to see the problem that would arrise, even with the mass mudflation of pvp equipment at the end of TBC. If you are into the game for hardcore PVP'ing you will have at least 5 characters that are already substantially PVP geared and wait to see which class the new patch makes over powered in PVP. Sadly its been that way for a while now.

None of the raids are at all interesting and whats even worst is they took a page out of EQ's raid book, instead of putting new interesting stuff lets add more HP/AC/REGEN to it! rar Avatar of War all over again!

The original content team for WoW was really good, wonder what happend to them?
 
It was all downhill after TBC.

It's been "discussed" to death by legions of fanboy nerds and normal people.

WOTLK went for the derpy appeal extreme. Cataclysm went for the turbo nerd appeal extreme. One side holds all the money, and it aint the turbo nerds. Both games were pretty tedious IMO and I never played WoW for anything but competitive BGs and arenas. Cataclysm really destroyed the game balance and the whole PvP aspect in general. DKs were the first nails in the coffin. The lame new race additions really just added insult to injury. Blizz doesn't care about PvP though because 95% of the players like raids better, because direct competition with other people is hard - and most of them can't compete. DKs were a huge mistake and Blizz knows it, notice the wholesale abandonment of the Hero Class idea. Even if they were removed, I wouldn't return to WoW. It's had its run.
 
PoopsMacClaude said:
It was all downhill after TBC.

It's been "discussed" to death by legions of fanboy nerds and normal people.

WOTLK went for the derpy appeal extreme. Cataclysm went for the turbo nerd appeal extreme. One side holds all the money, and it aint the turbo nerds. Both games were pretty tedious IMO and I never played WoW for anything but competitive BGs and arenas. Cataclysm really destroyed the game balance and the whole PvP aspect in general. DKs were the first nails in the coffin. The lame new race additions really just added insult to injury. Blizz doesn't care about PvP though because 95% of the players like raids better, because direct competition with other people is hard - and most of them can't compete.
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That is ultimately what pulled players from EQ to WoW, competition was gone. It turned into "who can kill" to "who can kill first." I miss the times when you had to make an attempt on a boss/dragon/giant/cursedlizard before the other guild could get enough in the zone. EQ wasn't able to go fully instance fast enough, honestly the game was never made to instance. I miss direct competition, I dislike instancing and I hate fair play rules.
 
Godmachine said:
I think that people who constantly praise Vanilla WoW forget it was also equally frustrating. The PVP system was far more punishing (not in a good way) and 40 man's while properly challenging were very hard to hold together as guilds over the long term as they would always crumble for the most part or merge.
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thats probably why i liked vanilla so much. I was in one of the top guilds on a very large server (Shattered Hand) and we were always competing with the other guilds for first kills and what not. Guild pvp queues against the other horde guilds were amazing and the world pvp was still there as well.

Face rolling pubs in BGs was hilarious too because we were all in Tier 2 and gear was actually hard to get back then so you were actually rewarded for getting it by destroying people who didn't have it. I also liked being a frost mage before it was popular :p
 
I think what I missed in vanilla days was spending time in a zone for a looong period of time to focus on a particular set of goals. I spent a lot of time in Silithus to grind rep, badges and run AQ to get some of the stuff I wanted. Spending several hours farming and logging out at the local town was normal. It gave the role-play feeling of being out on an adventure and doing "work" (in somewhat of a bad way, but whatever). Now we just hop through portals for dailies, hop back and log out in the main town.
 
Lets be honest here..
- The Blizzard you know and love barely has a finger in the wow development right now. The Blizzard that we all remember from Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft are working on other projects.

- Cataclysm is boring. Its lacking content because I don't think they care. It still makes more money that you could ever imagine, even if people are quitting left and right.

- They will release another patch that will include a new raid, a few new dungeons, and it will go through the rotation of buffs and nerfs that draw people back. Do you really think they change classes to balance things? Look at the patch notes for a certain class over the last 6 years and you will see the same rotation of buffs and nerfs to the class over and over. Why? It has nothing to do with balance.. it brings people back to the game. They will keep doing the same old crap where they just rehash a fight and call it "hard mode". Its been the biggest joke in the gaming industry for a very long time and Blizzard will keep doing it because it takes minimal effort and pulls in a lot of money. If I could somehow redirect all of the funds Blizzard makes from one day of WOW into my bank account... I would be set for life. If I took in their money for a month, I doubt my great great great grandchildren would ever know what a 9-5 job was. Wow brings in more money alone than all of their other games combined. Why would they ever let it go when they know they can do almost nothing with it and still make more money than you and I can even start to imagine?

- If you think they won't come out with another expansion, you are an idiot. They will hype it into the ground, they will do JUST barely enough to actually call it an expansion instead of another patch, they will continue to re-hash the same content (maybe redo Black Temple this time around as the first raid and have Warglaves drop with an orange color instead of green? I wouldn't be surprised).. and they will continue to break sales records because even if its complete trash, millions of people will buy it.
 
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My sub ended today. Not sure if I will renew. The game is more like work than anything. Grind for gear. Grind for mats to enchant and gem gear. Oh look that ring you spent two weeks doing dailies to get, it isn't doing much to help you get into that raid. OK lets grind gold.... oh wait elementium bars no longer sell for that much. It just is real boring and tedious right now to play. I spend 45 minutes in a dps queue only to join a fail ZG run. Back to the queue, only need four more runs to get those pants... hope the next one isn't fail. What run with the guild? that would be great if the tanks and healers weren't out farming herbs for the cauldron they will need for the raid your aren't invited to. Or worse, they don't want to run a troll because they just spent the whole weekend wiping on shanox.
 
League of legends has significantly cut into my already brief WoW time. Hard to justify paying $15/month when a ftp game is more fun.
 
Crispy002 said:
League of legends has significantly cut into my already brief WoW time. Hard to justify paying $15/month when a ftp game is more fun.
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Funny, I left WoW for League of Legends too.

There's no grind other than for runes/characters you want, but you can do it at your own pace, and each game is a new story.
 
I even bought cataclysm. I did the free trial to level 81 and liked the zones so I bought it. By level 83 I was bored and quit.
 
WoW has had a good run, but all MMOs hit the point where they max out. There comes a point where you're either going to lose subscribers because your game is too much the same, or because it has accumulated too many changes over the years. You can't win. Trying to correct for it in either direction only exacerbates the issue by pissing off the crowd on the other side. Either way, you're going to lose a large part of your subscriber base.

Some people, like me, burned out on WoW because the formula just got stale. I have no specific gripes about the game. It's just old to me. Others think it has changed too much.

Again, lose-lose for Blizzard, if you can call it a loss. WoW has made them immeasurable amounts of money and success. They're already working on another MMO, and WoW itself isn't exactly going to be dead any time soon. After some initial losses it'll be a long attrition.

MMOs all have a finite primetime lifespan, after which they become a retirement home for the players who just have too much invested to quit, and no longer have the desire to invest that much into a game again.
 
Godmachine said:
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.
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Where's the source on this? Curious to read it in full.

Also, I haven't played since I made it to 85, but never really was much for guilds (although I had a reputation for being a very good tank and got many invites). I was playing WoW since 2004. When Cata came out I was one of the early tanks to clear the heroic 5 man content in pugs when everyones gear was shit and we all were learning it, I can only imagine it must be alot easier now. Regardless, I never was much for raids, I liked raiding when I felt like it and that isn't really a good quality to have from a guild point of view. I got 250,000g sitting there doing nothing, although I bet thats not as impressive as it was during WOTLK.
 
PornoSatan said:
Where's the source on this? Curious to read it in full.

Also, I haven't played since I made it to 85, but never really was much for guilds (although I had a reputation for being a very good tank and got many invites). I was playing WoW since 2004. When Cata came out I was one of the early tanks to clear the heroic 5 man content in pugs when everyones gear was shit and we all were learning it, I can only imagine it must be alot easier now. Regardless, I never was much for raids, I liked raiding when I felt like it and that isn't really a good quality to have from a guild point of view. I got 250,000g sitting there doing nothing, although I bet thats not as impressive as it was during WOTLK.
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The article is from July 2009 but even then the B team was getting more and more involved with the bigger things (class balancing for instance). I can't blame the A team for wanting to move on .. spending years being shit on by the WoW community (which is legendary for it) and producing content on top of content on top of content must just make you wanna pull your hair out. Even so the B team might bring a refreshing perspective and new ideas to the game that could help refresh its boring nature now. Patch 4.3 will be there handy work fully so we'll see what kind of choices they make when it gets launched.

http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com/2009/07/blizzards-b-team.html
 
I am pretty sure Blizzard will announce the next WoW expansion at this years Blizzcon, what else can they really announce that we don't know about already ? Diablo ]l[ is well known, StarCraft ][ expansion we know about, "Titan" possibly might get a reveal, but would think their cash cow WoW would have to be a big event, with something big coming for it ?

I am fine with the "B" team working on WoW right now, if "Titan" really is gonna be super kick butt awesome MMO to replace WoW ? But what little I have heard about "Titan" scares me already, it will be a FPS ( first person view ) MMO, set in a cyberpunk world ? Not sure how true any of that is, but the FPS view I do not like for an MMO.
 
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Trimlock said:
None of the raids are at all interesting and whats even worst is they took a page out of EQ's raid book, instead of putting new interesting stuff lets add more HP/AC/REGEN to it! rar Avatar of War all over again!
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I am sorry but have you done the bosses this expansion? Just about every single fight is unique and pretty fun. Heroic modes of those bosses have also been alot of fun adding in new phases which really push your raid to the limit. You can say all you want about the readding Nef and Rag but both of those fights are 100% new and pretty epic. They are nothing like the original fights only thing in common is their name and general look.

The only thing wrong with raiding this patch is there is just not enough bosses, the fights are good.
 
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