1. #1981
    Quote Originally Posted by Noahsmith37 View Post
    In Vanilla I believe it was less than 10% of the population cleared Naxx, then about 16% cleared Sunwell in BC.
    I think these are very substantial overestimates.
    "There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
    "The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
    "Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"

  2. #1982
    There is so much conjecture in this thread that the opinions expressed will always spark an outburst of comments. I haven't played World of Warcraft in a very long time, but this game sure has had massive changes involving the direction it went. I play random games with my friends from vanilla days and I posed the question as to why even increase level cap at all and develop 'level' content. The leveling is short lived, but once you hit cap... we expect a lot. It's an opinion, but I just find it an issue of wasted resources.

  3. #1983
    Quote Originally Posted by Deficineiron View Post
    The fact they stated this is interesting - why did it allow further development? Wow is bringing in a LOT less revenue and presumably income than in the SWP time-frame. Less income means more development?
    This is wrong and thus invalidates your whole post.

    Even while the time where subscribers dropped, WoW revenue has always grown and continues to do so.

  4. #1984
    Quote Originally Posted by Crashdummy View Post
    Even while the time where subscribers dropped, WoW revenue has always grown and continues to do so.
    This is simply wrong, as even a cursory examination of the earnings statements would show. WoW revenue dropped dramatically over Cataclysm.
    "There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
    "The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
    "Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"

  5. #1985
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jazalak View Post
    There is so much conjecture in this thread that the opinions expressed will always spark an outburst of comments. I haven't played World of Warcraft in a very long time, but this game sure has had massive changes involving the direction it went. I play random games with my friends from vanilla days and I posed the question as to why even increase level cap at all and develop 'level' content. The leveling is short lived, but once you hit cap... we expect a lot. It's an opinion, but I just find it an issue of wasted resources.
    That is actually a really great point. I had never thought of it like that, because every game just does it the same of making new content for leveling. But I had never thought of just making expansions for end game content.
    Quote Originally Posted by Moon Blade View Post
    There's nothing for casuals to do, beyond pretend they are raiders in LFR.

  6. #1986
    Quote Originally Posted by Noahsmith37 View Post
    I agree whole-heartedly about wanting to have the same system as BC of having to tier up through the lower versions and work your way to the end. It was a pretty neat system, how late in the expansion people were still doing CoT things to get to Kara and moving on from there.

    However, it is just stupid to say we need to remove to remove the Heroic and LFR versions, just because some people don't want to raid if other people get the same shinies. Sure, there are other things for casual to do, however hardcore raiders can do those things too. You claim fewer people are raiding, however Dragon Soul had the highest clearance percent of any raid they have ever released. In Vanilla I believe it was less than 10% of the population cleared Naxx, then about 16% cleared Sunwell in BC, and it was somewhere around 40% cleared ICC in WotLK. (These are stats I am trying to remember from past articles I can't find through google, so I'm sorry if they are off). However, with DS LFR I am not sure of the exact number but it is probably well up in the 70-90% range, as anyone that wanted to clear it could. It wasn't some elitist union, where if you haven't got the ACH or don't know the secret handshake you couldn't get in. If you want to do the harder version good for you, but I love how LFR works around my College Classes, and it is here to stay.
    You do here something that Blizzard tends to do too. Comparing the numbers of how many players have cleared the raids during each expansion. That number is not equal to the amount of players who had fun doing that. Counting those numbers might be quite misleading. I had more fun in the first boss of Black temple (one that we never downed) than I had in 6 bosses in (nerfed version of) Firelands. Why? Black temple felt dangerous place where one should watch out and focus on everything around him. How about Firelands then. We downed 6/7 bosses in one night with only one wipe. I was so dissapointed that I never cared enough to see Ragnaros. The atmosphere is COMPLETELY different. In Black Temple the atmosphere actually matched with the lore, things are evil there, you actually feel bit scared in a good way when you move there. In Firelands it felt like we were somekind of overpowered superheroes who kill everything they see.
    If you just look at the numbers YOU don't know what people really think. My account is counted as one that didn't see anything in tier 11. Blizzard count's it as one who found the tier too hard, even tho the reason was that I had lost my faith in raiding after rewamped naxx in WoTLK.
    I really hope Blizzard used polls and such to see what people find fun and what they find boring/frustrating.

  7. #1987
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jazalak View Post
    I play random games with my friends from vanilla days and I posed the question as to why even increase level cap at all and develop 'level' content. The leveling is short lived, but once you hit cap... we expect a lot. It's an opinion, but I just find it an issue of wasted resources.
    The answer to this is relatively simple. Blizzard believes that players want or need to feel a sense that their characters progress over the long run. Moving from 80 to 85 and then to 90 while your power increases (bigger numbers) satisfies that purely psychological need. In fact, this has created something of a problem for the designers because the size of the damage/healing/health numbers are getting out of hand and that will need to be addressed (search for the technical term 'squish'). Now, I think that 'must progress' is something of an arguable proposition but only arguable. Several years of everyone being at the same level may feel somewhat stagnant to the casual gamer in which case they might say, "Thanks and adios."

    So we get patches for end game and expansions to progress to the next thing. Moving sideways is not apparently an option and I can't say that I think it's viable for a mass-market game. Once you stop progressing, the game can more easily appear to be *over*. That's death for an MMO.
    "...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."

  8. #1988
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    Quote Originally Posted by Noahsmith37 View Post
    I agree whole-heartedly about wanting to have the same system as BC of having to tier up through the lower versions and work your way to the end. It was a pretty neat system, how late in the expansion people were still doing CoT things to get to Kara and moving on from there.
    Because being stuck in the "gear up new player - see him poached by more progressive guild - recruit - gear him up" was great fun. As always, some people liked running Kara or whatever...but other got sick to the hind teeth of it because of the continuing need to gear up new members of their guilds.

    In Vanilla I believe it was less than 10% of the population cleared Naxx, then about 16% cleared Sunwell in BC, and it was somewhere around 40% cleared ICC in WotLK. (These are stats I am trying to remember from past articles I can't find through google, so I'm sorry if they are off).
    They are off. By about a factor of 10 in the first two. Not sure about the clearance of ICC myself though.

    EJL

  9. #1989
    Legendary! Deficineiron's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Crashdummy View Post
    This is wrong and thus invalidates your whole post.

    Even while the time where subscribers dropped, WoW revenue has always grown and continues to do so.
    For anyone following this poster who confuses his post with a truthful statement (it isn't), know that this post is completely and totally false and can be easily verified as such on the activision IR page's filings.

    ---------- Post added 2012-09-26 at 01:29 AM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Osmeric View Post
    This is simply wrong, as even a cursory examination of the earnings statements would show. WoW revenue dropped dramatically over Cataclysm.
    get this from the blizzard 2008 10k

    We consider the World of Warcraft boxed product including expansion packs and other
    ancillary revenues as a single deliverable with the total arrangement consideration combined and
    recognized ratably as revenue over the estimated product life beginning upon activation of the
    software and delivery of the services. Revenues attributed to the sale of World of Warcraft boxed
    software and related expansion packs are classified as product sales
    and revenues attributable to
    subscription and other ancillary services are classified as subscription, licensing and other
    revenues.
    they did 320m in q4 2008, with NO box sales in that number. They later changed things to include box sales in the mmo number.

    Subscription,
    licensing and
    other revenues 320
    This number (and the revenue for 2008 in general for wow, all without box sales included) is a big part of the basis of my assertion that the western sub peak was in early 2009 (vivendi ceo's 12m sub comment). In fact, wow without boxes never matched that revenue number again, not even q1 2009. It is gaap, but not sure how much stuff in it would have been deferred anyway without boxes.

    Tangentially of interest, came across a comment in a filing from this time period that release of bc in 2007 was a part of why they sold more Classic wow boxes in 2007 than in 2006.
    Last edited by Deficineiron; 2012-09-26 at 01:56 AM.
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  10. #1990
    Deleted
    I would just like it if instead of having to do "normal" dungeons and raids to acess the "heroic" versions which makes it a boring grind for the people who think normal is too easy and is just more gear grinding, that it was made so that you could somehow choose to "skip" normal stuff and go straight to the harder heroic dungeons + raids without having to go through normal just to get the gear required to start heroic raiding. It's like in diablo where you have to go through multiple "easier" difficulties doing the same content over and over again to get to the content that is at your skill level/considered challenging, whereas in TL2 straight from the start you CHOOSE what difficulty you start on and it will be hard from the start rather than hard after you beat the content once or more. Now as to balancing/implementing something along these lines is a different problem entirely. But something similar to this could solve a lot of problems people have with raiding since heroic content came out.

  11. #1991
    Quote Originally Posted by Noahsmith37 View Post
    . In Vanilla I believe it was less than 10% of the population cleared Naxx, then about 16% cleared Sunwell in BC
    If my memory doesnt fail me, the actual numbers where that less than 2% of the population cleared Naxx 60 and less than 5 cleared Sunwell.

    That was a big problem and a big reason why the system failed.

    ---------- Post added 2012-09-26 at 08:17 AM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Osmeric View Post
    This is simply wrong, as even a cursory examination of the earnings statements would show. WoW revenue dropped dramatically over Cataclysm.
    At least the first 3 times in Cata that they announce a sub dropped in Cataclysm they also said that whiloe the subs dropped, the Blizzard revenue went up, mostly because of side services.

    ---------- Post added 2012-09-26 at 08:23 AM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Jazalak View Post
    There is so much conjecture in this thread that the opinions expressed will always spark an outburst of comments. I haven't played World of Warcraft in a very long time, but this game sure has had massive changes involving the direction it went. I play random games with my friends from vanilla days and I posed the question as to why even increase level cap at all and develop 'level' content. The leveling is short lived, but once you hit cap... we expect a lot. It's an opinion, but I just find it an issue of wasted resources.
    Because more people enjoy leveling than raiding.

    Raiders are a huge minority, even considering LFR raiding, there are still more people that HAVENT raided than the ones that did.

    The game had massive changes, but oonly at the start of Cata Blizzard changed the DIRECTION. The direction of the game has been the same from Vanilla untill the very end of Wrath, make the most casual fiendly MMO in the markets. Only at the start of Cata that direction changed to try to cater for a vocal minority of hardcores qqing about Wrath.

    We know how that ended.

    Blizzard greates advantage is its greatest problem. The GUHE playerbase Blizzard has means that a lot of their players want different things from each other, so they have to develop for all of them.

    That means leveling, lore, casual things to do, dailies, casual dungeoning, nono casual dungeoning, casual raiding, non casual raiding, casual PVP, non casual PVP etc, etc, etc

    ---------- Post added 2012-09-26 at 08:39 AM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Deficineiron View Post
    For anyone following this poster who confuses his post with a truthful statement (it isn't), know that this post is completely and totally false and can be easily verified as such on the activision IR page's filings.[COLOR="red"]
    What i say its not false, you might first want to check your facts before treating me as a lier

    "Activision Blizzard on Tuesday announced better-than-expected Q3 2011 net revenues and earnings, reporting that the company delivered GAAP net revenues of $754 million, as compared with $745 million for the third quarter of 2010. This gain was achieved via digital channels, accounting for more than 57-percent of the company's total net revenues. "

    Look at how much subs Blizzard lost in Q3 2011, while they earned 10 more million in revenue than the previous year.

    So please, before calling other posters as liers, investigate a little and dont talk of things you dont have a clue about, thanks.

  12. #1992
    Quote Originally Posted by Crashdummy View Post
    At least the first 3 times in Cata that they announce a sub dropped in Cataclysm they also said that whiloe the subs dropped, the Blizzard revenue went up, mostly because of side services.
    They may have said GAAP revenue went up from the previous year. This happens at the start of an expansion, since GAAP revenue includes deferred box sales revenue, and the year-ago quarter (at the end of an expansion) didn't have many box sales.

    If you just want to look at what they actually made in a quarter, and not have things confused by deferred revenue, you look at the non-GAAP numbers. After the initial surge (when these included lots of box sales) non-GAAP numbers began to be lower than the previous year (before Cataclysm). Quarter-on-quarter, both GAAP and non-GAAP numbers also declined over the expansion.

    Overall, they have not been saying WoW revenue has been going up, since it most definitely has not. Go look at the tables in the earnings reports; Deficineiron and I have been all through the expansion.
    "There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
    "The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
    "Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"

  13. #1993
    Quote Originally Posted by Osmeric View Post
    They may have said GAAP revenue went up from the previous year. This happens at the start of an expansion, since GAAP revenue includes deferred box sales revenue, and the year-ago quarter (at the end of an expansion) didn't have many box sales.

    If you just want to look at what they actually made in a quarter, and not have things confused by deferred revenue, you look at the non-GAAP numbers. After the initial surge (when these included lots of box sales) non-GAAP numbers began to be lower than the previous year (before Cataclysm). Quarter-on-quarter, both GAAP and non-GAAP numbers also declined over the expansion.

    Overall, they have not been saying WoW revenue has been going up, since it most definitely has not. Go look at the tables in the earnings reports; Deficineiron and I have been all through the expansion.
    I just gave ane xample of Q3 2011. That is not because of box sales.

    There is a reason why FTP games work, the revenue from secondary sources is Great.

    Again, Q3 2011, (long after game launched, so not many box sales included) earned 10 millon more than Q3 2010.

    tehir subs went down, their revenues went UP.

    I dont know why you are trying to argue this, numbers dont lie.
    Last edited by Crashdummy; 2012-09-26 at 12:21 PM.

  14. #1994
    Quote Originally Posted by Cybran View Post
    But it gets nerfed all the time.



    at 7:19 Greg Street explains that he nerfed TBC style raiding so that "Everyone is able to see it". He failed miserably at this. WoW worked better when people knew that raiding is not for everyone. This is why the game is going down. Greg Street ruined WoW.
    you sir is not being fair. if every1 pay the same monthy fee and some (casuals) dont get to enjoy the whole content, there will be more rage on forums. Plus wow 's player base consists of more casual players than hardcores.
    i think Greg made the right thing.....

  15. #1995
    Quote Originally Posted by Crashdummy View Post
    I just gave ane xample of Q3 2011. That is not because of box sales.

    There is a reason why FTP games work, the revenue from secondary sources is Great.

    Again, Q3 2011, (long after game launched, so not much box sales included) earned 10 millon more than Q3 2010.

    tehir subs went down, their revenues went UP.

    I dont know why you are trying to argue this, numbers dont lie.
    Oh good grief. You gave numbers for all of Activision-Blizzard, a company that sells a number of other products than WoW. You've heard of the Call of Duty franchise, for example?

    The earnings reports give numbers broken down more finely. In particular, there are numbers in the reports for just WoW revenue. If you look at these numbers, WoW revenue is definitely declining.

    Let's look at Q3 2011, for example. Reports are available from http://investor.activision.com/index.cfm (and more specifically, http://files.shareholder.com/downloa...CY11_Final.pdf ):

    Under "Non-GAAP Net Revenues by Segment/Platform Mix", "Online subscriptions" (definition: "Revenue from online subscriptions consists of revenue from all World of Warcraft products, including subscriptions, boxed products, expansion packs, licensing royalties, and value-added services. "), we have:

    Q3 2010 $282 M
    Q3 2011 $274 M

    This is particularly damning because Q3 2010 was the last full quarter of the Wrath expansion (outside China). And yet, non-GAAP net revenue had already fallen below that mark.
    "There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
    "The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
    "Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"

  16. #1996
    Legendary! Deficineiron's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Crashdummy View Post
    I just gave ane xample of Q3 2011. That is not because of box sales.

    There is a reason why FTP games work, the revenue from secondary sources is Great.

    Again, Q3 2011, (long after game launched, so not many box sales included) earned 10 millon more than Q3 2010.

    tehir subs went down, their revenues went UP.

    I dont know why you are trying to argue this, numbers dont lie.
    Sigh. You are arguing something other than mmorpg/licensing/sub/other revenue and trying to pass it off as only Wow-revenue, then intermixing revenue and income. Furthermore, the profit numbers of wow are not released separately ANYWHERE, and product development isn't broken down by title. Not sure if you are arguing the blizzard revenue number as a whole (sounds like it), but you certainly aren't talking the category which, until q4 2011, included wow only. Wow's q3 2011 revenue (non-gaap) declined both sequentially and, if memory serves, year over year, and was roughly around 274m.

    I dont know why you are trying to argue this, numbers dont lie.
    numbers don't, but posters can misrepresent what the numbers they post actually are. Why not post the column from the 10q your numbers come from?

    ---------- Post added 2012-09-26 at 12:36 PM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Osmeric View Post
    Under "Non-GAAP Net Revenues by Segment/Platform Mix", "Online subscriptions" (definition: "Revenue from online subscriptions consists of revenue from all World of Warcraft products, including subscriptions, boxed products, expansion packs, licensing royalties, and value-added services. "), we have:

    .
    You know this of course but others may not - from q4 2011 forward, this category also includes call of duty elite, which as far as I can figure was maybe worth 30m for ths category in q2 2012. Wow revenue, even with annual pass and the one-time in q2, is shockingly low, like 75% of late bc/early wotlk levels (ignoring q4 2008, which I still haven't figured out what made it so much higher than even q1 2009, when subs hit or nearly hit 12m.)
    Last edited by Deficineiron; 2012-09-26 at 12:43 PM.
    Authors I have enjoyed enough to mention here: JRR Tolkein, Poul Anderson,Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, Brian Stableford, MAR Barker, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, WM Hodgson, Fredrick Brown, Robert SheckleyJohn Steakley, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, the norse sagas, CJ Cherryh, PG Wodehouse, Clark Ashton Smith, Alastair Reynolds, Cordwainer Smith, LE Modesitt, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Stephen R Donaldon, and Jack L Chalker.

  17. #1997
    Quote Originally Posted by Osmeric View Post
    Oh good grief. You gave numbers for all of Activision-Blizzard, a company that sells a number of other products than WoW. You've heard of the Call of Duty franchise, for example?

    The earnings reports give numbers broken down more finely. In particular, there are numbers in the reports for just WoW revenue. If you look at these numbers, WoW revenue is definitely declining.

    Let's look at Q3 2011, for example. Reports are available from http://investor.activision.com/index.cfm (and more specifically, http://files.shareholder.com/downloa...CY11_Final.pdf ):

    Under "Non-GAAP Net Revenues by Segment/Platform Mix", "Online subscriptions" (definition: "Revenue from online subscriptions consists of revenue from all World of Warcraft products, including subscriptions, boxed products, expansion packs, licensing royalties, and value-added services. "), we have:

    Q3 2010 $282 M
    Q3 2011 $274 M

    This is particularly damning because Q3 2010 was the last full quarter of the Wrath expansion (outside China). And yet, non-GAAP net revenue had already fallen below that mark.
    Those numbers you gave are for subscriptions only, of course when subs drops subs revenue will go down, but WoW generates money from other sources too.

    Even then, taking your own chart, and taking nine months, non-gaap online subs its 877M in 2010 and 905M in 2011. In those nine months, WoW lost subs.

  18. #1998
    Quote Originally Posted by Crashdummy View Post
    Those numbers you gave are for subscriptions only, of course when subs drops subs revenue will go down, but WoW generates money from other sources too.
    Did you even bother to read what I posted?

    "Revenue from online subscriptions consists of revenue from all World of Warcraft products, including subscriptions, boxed products, expansion packs, licensing royalties, and value-added services."

    Pets and mounts are part of "value added services", btw, as are faction/server/name changes.
    Last edited by Osmeric; 2012-09-26 at 01:48 PM.
    "There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
    "The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
    "Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"

  19. #1999
    Quote Originally Posted by Osmeric View Post
    Did you even bother to read what I posted?

    "Revenue from online subscriptions consists of revenue from all World of Warcraft products, including subscriptions, boxed products, expansion packs, licensing royalties, and value-added services."

    Pets and mounts are part of "value added services", btw, as are faction/server/name changes.
    Yes i read it, and its wrong, for example, that quote you are giving says it includes boxed products, which we know non-gaap doesnt include them, as well as expansion packs.

    Pets, mounts and faction/server/name changes are not included.

    Do you even bother to read your own quotes?

  20. #2000
    Quote Originally Posted by Crashdummy View Post
    Yes i read it, and its wrong, for example, that quote you are giving says it includes boxed products, which we know non-gaap doesnt include them, as well as expansion packs.

    Pets, mounts and faction/server/name changes are not included.

    Do you even bother to read your own quotes?
    Non-GAAP includes box sales in that quarter. What it doesn't include is deferred revenue from box sales (and certain other things) in previous quarters. To put it another way: the difference between GAAP and non-GAAP is not what they count, but when they count it.

    Also, what part of "all World of Warcraft products" did you not understand? Pets, mounts, etc. are WoW products.

    At this point you are just running on ego and cluelessness. Stop digging your hole deeper.
    Last edited by Osmeric; 2012-09-28 at 11:30 AM.
    "There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
    "The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
    "Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"

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