WoW Loses 600k Subscribers, Diablo 3 Beta Q3 2011, Arena Passe, Blue Posts

[lightmgl]

You know its really funny. About 2 months ago as they were announcing that the Firelands would be delayed, Blizzard made the statement that people were moving through the content slower than expected so they were pushing back the release of Firelands to 4.2 and allowing ZG and ZA to help make the current tier easier.

Now Blizzard is saying that people are going through the content faster than ever. Completely contradictory to their previous comments.

Which one is it? Sounds like alot of corporate bullshit to try and appease their investors. My guess is a large portion of the 600k who quit probably felt that the game no longer suited them either due to difficulty or massive amounts of changes.....

Theres still only a few hundred guilds worldwide who have completed this entire Tier. Those 600,000 people have nothing to do with them.

[Frumpy Frumpy Frak]

Best news post ever. Diablo 3, proof WoW is dying to use against the white knights and a good Daily Blink, oh so delicious.

[Deleted]

so i guess like another 25%+ are sitting on subs and not playing due to being to attached to there toons and not wanting to cancel just in-case they come back.... ya 11.4 but i bet allot more are not playing anywhere near the amount they used to. meh blizzard gets the same amount of money if they play or not as long as they pay still. I guess. cheaper server costs I guess thats the idea behind the game being more casual the less they pay but same they play blizzard wins.

5% loss in profits from players is fairly significant though. when a game comes out numbers should go up or stay the same not diminish rofl. poor blizzard

[epec]

Damn, 600k in 4 months? That's a lot regardless of how you try to spin it... No wonder stockholders were concerned.

[Venziir]

yep, diablo 3 is coming soon, just in time for wow to die and lose the rest of its subs

GG

Yes all 11½ million players will leave for D3...................
I for one do not care about D3, i liked D2, but D3 doesn't seem appealing whatsoever, the classes look bland and boring and the story of Diablo has never been that interesting.

[Granyala]

so i guess like another 25%+ are sitting on subs and not playing due to being to attached to there toons and not wanting to cancel just in-case they come back....

Like me ^_^

Well ok I do play but I only log in for Raid nights because there's nothing else to do. That and my Friend stopped playing

[Dace]

I'm one of those 600k people. And I didn't quit because of lack of expansion packs. But because of the expansion pack itself! It's now over 5 months that I'm clean.
I still sometimes check MMO-Champs and I watch Totalhailbut videos. But that's about it. I'm not coming back to that grindfest. So based on what I've just said I think that new expansion packs will only reduce the player base even more. But I don't really know or care obviously :P

[Deleted]

Dont think rift will be the new big thing, people dont want a mmo thats remotely close to what wow is.
Game designers need to come up with a completely new play and view style for mmo.
Would say it takes like 5-10 years before people even consider binding themself to a game that looks/plays like wow.
Next gen mmo will prob be first person view or top view, dont think 3rd person view like todays mmo will kick thru.

[DaGhostDS]

im part of that number

[Strafer]

Haha, 600k is nothing.

Game will not die.

[Deleted]

Wajooo 600k subscribers. W00000000000000000t. >.<

[Deleted]

From a personal progress/achievements point of view:

Personally, I still have loads of stuff to do, doing some archeology, doing old content for achievements. I don't raid (anymore) but have done all the heroics once for the achievement. When they go faster I'll probably do everything for the meta... Call me crazy, but I enjoy undermanning ICC or even Naxx more then the new content. Solo or duo the Weekly raid in Dalaran, oh yeah.

But that's me. I can totally see that if you have nothing to do in old content, have done the new quests, have maxed archeology, are stuck on progress... what is there to do? Dailies?

The bottom line is, there are some players that have nearly done everything... That has nothing to do with the expansion, they would have burned out regardless. I'm pretty sure that is why the top 5 (ranked by achievements) players in my guild have stopped playing.

[Deleted]

Ultimately it's not balanace, but just boredom. Sure there's no way to make game fun forever, but it was their failure to merge raid content, implement new kind of PvP which is not successful at all, instead of expanding arenas.
I'd bet people would run rounds in Dalaran, uh I mean Stormwind much less likely if they could raid and pvp twice as much they can now.

Removing progress from arenas and merging raid content saved people a lot of time. However they have nothing to spend that time on.
Same will happen with spammable heroics, though valor bonus used to be low anyway.

[tankbug]

I think it's impressive that the game can still hold over 11 million users. Even though it has been polished over the years, it's still an old game, and has survived major changes in technology trends and tough competitors. I don't think a new expansion or more content will affect the number of subscriptions greatly.

[Deleted]

I khow why players quit WoW: Archeology!

It's so boring that I fall asleep during the trip from a dig site to another!

[MarizzaDraenor]

Doubt its only 600 k subs. And even if it is the real numbers if we could get a reliable activity graph (thats what should concern us as players above all else) would be more on the 20-25 % range imo judging purely from the activity that i see on my realm .

I mean all those players that still maintain active subs while loging 1 hour per week etc.

Also stating that players clear the content faster then before its completely ridicoulous. Infact raiding guilds have NEVER EVER been slower when it came to clearing content and the vast majority of the 25 man guilds havent even cleared half of the available HM's.

Of course the above is directly related to difficulty and we never seen a harder tier in the past but the fact that most guilds are far zway from clearing the content isnt really questionable.

[Vasz]

It isn't the quantity of content that stopped us from subscribing, it is the quality of the contest itself.

Not when we have to wait half a year for another raid its not. And that is assuming that 4.2 will be out within a month. Did they honestly expect a single tier of raid content to last over a year?

[Mif]

For those claiming 600k lost subs is nothing, 600k lost subs = 9 million dollars lost profit.

[Impzor]

The decrease of subs is probably the people leaving wow for rift, but they will come back, no worries

[Kryos]

Now Blizzard is saying that people are going through the content faster than ever. Completely contradictory to their previous comments.

If you did your dailys every day you run out of content (everything exalted, every reputation item aquired) very fast. About 2 months ago I maxed out everything there is possible to do outside raid content and archeologie (after getting the junior professor title I stopped this boring crap) just by doing the daily quests and running my daily heroic.

So if you don't have a raid, you have nothing to to. If you have a raid, then you will soon find out, that the normal modes are not very challenging (maybe except Nefarian). Hardmodes on the other hand are too hard (the first 3 bosses are ok). This is also very well reflected in this:
http://www.wowprogress.com/

H: Sinestra: 348 (0.61%) and H: Cho'gall: 665 (1.17%)
means hardmodes are too hard. 5-10% would be a good number.
if you compare it to normal mode:

Cho'gall: 26524 (46.78%)
about half of the raid guilds are able to farm the same boss on normal.
So raiding is over- and undertuned resulting in bored normal mode raiders and frustrated hardmode raiders (ignore the 1% players that will now tell you hardmodes are fine the way they are now).

So my conclusion is, that people are going through the content faster than ever if you exclude the hardmodes. So you have boredom<->frustration which leads to quitting. And the game is over 6 years old now, so many try other games.