WoW Down to 8.3 Million Subscribers

[Aeula]

I honestly though they'd loose more, i myself have been very unhappy with MoP since it was released, having quit for a good 2 months shortly after MoP's release, now i've done everything there is to do at my skill level, from dailies to raid finder...there's literally nothing for me to do and the stuff that i have done is shallow and rarther boring...infact 5.1 is the only patch i've even half-liked so far.

[dacoolist]

I just love people saying "I WAS RIGHT WOW IS DYING HAHAHAHAHA" on a World of Warcraft Fansite.

-> Shouldn't you guys NOT be here anyhow?

[Glaziola]

People are going to completely blow this out of proportion. I wish Blizz would release regional numbers so people would see that the US and EU servers haven't really fluctuated anywhere near as much as people think.

Exactly why the hell would I give a damn about china? I want EU/US info.

[theniffrig]

I played wow for along time. I took the odd month off during the Cata expansion & found myself hardly playing the game after the 1st month of Mists. Yes, the devs are adding content faster than ever, but having said that, I really get the impression the devs are out of touch with the playerbase, especially when you read the blues posts here on this very site. They seem like they don't know when X is broken or believe it isn't & the players are wrong etc... It's a real nanny-state approach to the playerbase. God, just look at that blog afew days ago telling players basically how to play the end game: Ding 90 ->do this ->then this -> then that -> etc... My god, hand holding out-of-touch bs.

I'm not going to re-sub unless 1)Gnome paladins are added to the game 2) Naga become a playable race & 3) Some real fixing of Rogues is done.

[Deleted]

Could it be that Blizzards "changes" are shit? I sure think so!

[Pua]

(2) More generally, loss of engagement by casual players (I read: grind was a turn-off).

Among other things, that was very much what I took from this announcement.

I expected a drop, but nowhere near one so dramatic. My own view on MoP as an expansion is that it's perfectly good and a lot of work has gone into it; however, the time demands that Blizzard has placed on their "normal" players have become far too much. We can argue until we're blue in the face that the dailies or LFR catch-up grind aren't mandatory, but the community doesn't appear to agree.

[Buck-Shot]

Sad news indeed.


Constant DAILY rep grinds.
Frustrating drop rates from LFR.

Sorry but giving a casual player that, by definition doesn't play on a schedule, DAILIES is just retarded beyond belief.
I have a casual friend. He sometimes plays 8hrs on a Saturday and then he doesn't do a thing for 2 weeks. He'd like to make progress in MoP but all he sees are friggin dailies he can do ... once .. per Saturday. Back in the day he would have put on a tabard and grinded dungeons like madman when he had the time.
Now, it'll take him the better part of a year to get even ONE faction to exalted

He ran a few LFRs and was severely frustrated by the constant gold bag + the knowledge that his chances for loot didn't even improve for the next time around. He literally said to me: "LFR is boring as a healer and with that terrible drop rate it just feels like I'm wasting my game time."

So, witnessing the effect of MoP on him I'm not surprised in the very least that lots of casuals just surrendered to the daily brick wall.

For mists i was going to switch fro doing mostly pvp and make progress pve wise.. But man The gating of dailies shouldn't have happen plus the crappy drop rate in LFR, i ended up taking 3 months off then return once pvp got some kinda love...

Blizz claim LFR was mostly meant to see content, but the loot has a bigger impact on persons psychs

[Todd Duval]

Exactly why the hell would I give a damn about china? I want EU/US info.

The whole point of the press release is to mislead investors. I think a lot of people already know what caused the massive drop in subs, and I'm sure many more people know that 5.3 isn't going to fix that. Heroic Scenarios? That is Blizzard's desperate attempt to get the old people who used to do 5 mans back, since they clearly screwed up by killing them off this expansion.

[Deleted]

Daily quests made me quit! I played since Vanilla and raided hardcore the entire time, but the amount of dailies required at the start of mop atleast outside of raids was absolutely ridiculous. When they added the gear upgrade, which further required you to farm dungeons or do dailies, that was the breaking point for me.

[Blur4stuff]

you could make a wish list. blizzard could check off every single one just to make you happy. you'd still quit playing at some point because WoW is getting old and something new will come along.

people like making posts to the effect of, "if only blizzard did what i want they would still be over 10 mil subs". no they wouldn't.

the fact is they have made the game better. it's days are numbered just like any other game.

[Goldpaw]

Maybe now they'll finally merge dead servers, fix unbalanced ones and give us cross-realm arena. They won't do it until last minute tho...

Probably not. Most of the drop was in Asia they said. That has no impact or connection to EU or US servers.

[slackjawsix]

maybe the game isnt getting easier, were just getting better after 8 years. just a thought just a thought

[Sazabius]

And here I was thinking my two accounts didn't matter? lol...

[Buck-Shot]

you could make a wish list. blizzard could check off every single one just to make you happy. you'd still quit playing at some point because WoW is getting old and something new will come along.

people like making posts to the effect of, "if only blizzard did what i want they would still be over 10 mil subs". no they wouldn't.

the fact is they have made the game better. it's days are numbered just like any other game.

Well Put.. But its the doomsayers that want to look important with "I told you SO"...

[Zaqwert]

WoW fanboys really can spin the news any way they want.

For years they were more than happy to include all the phony Chinese subscriber numbers (their subscription model is totally different and incuding it with the rest has always been misleading).

And now that those numbers are going down it's all "Well those subscribers were from China, they don't really count"

You were happy to count them yesterday.

WoW lives, but the glory days are behind it. A slow, steady decline is pretty much all that the future holds. The good news for WoW fans is that it might take another decade to reach the end.

[Todd Duval]

Lets look at this expansion:
1) Daily Grinds
2) LFR Grinds
3) Heroic 5 Mans Dead
4) Scenarios pushed down our throat
5) Major Content Patch (5.1) with no new tier
6) Upgradeable Items - no one wanted this grind

It's not that the game is getting old, it's that their direction is terrible. They're lazy and they're trying to drag out content. It's Ghostcrawler fault! (I'm half joking when I say that)

[sizzlinsauce]

Where did they get their 8.3m subscriber base # at? looking at their page 1 of the ccso page shows a net of 7,420,000 subscribers if they have total subscriptions revenue of $334m. Do they have 1m accounts that are counted that dont have any income to the company? or am i looking in the wrong place.

[Deleted]

Wow is an old game, people are simply just losing intrest in it. I doubt it has much to do on how it's changing.

It's never gonna get better, it can only get worse, subsriber wise. We're only gonna see an increase each expansion and maybe at major patches, but then subs will drop again. It's normal.

The fact that wow still has that many subscribers is quite impressive, considering it's 9 years old.

[Deleted]

I played wow for along time. I took the odd month off during the Cata expansion & found myself hardly playing the game after the 1st month of Mists. Yes, the devs are adding content faster than ever, but having said that, I really get the impression the devs are out of touch with the playerbase, especially when you read the blues posts here on this very site. They seem like they don't know when X is broken or believe it isn't & the players are wrong etc... It's a real nanny-state approach to the playerbase. God, just look at that blog afew days ago telling players basically how to play the end game: Ding 90 ->do this ->then this -> then that -> etc... My god, hand holding out-of-touch bs.

I'm not going to re-sub unless 1)Gnome paladins are added to the game 2) Naga become a playable race & 3) Some real fixing of Rogues is done.

Yes the tone of Bliz posts really pissed me off over the last year or so. the arrogance and ego in them is just silly. They cant take criticism, and think they can dictate how the players play. They cant, if you try to force players into crap content, then they will leave.

That whole "make players do dailies to bolster dev ego as they are having a hisssy fit because people are not running dailies they made" was just lol-tastic

[Deleted]

you could make a wish list. blizzard could check off every single one just to make you happy. you'd still quit playing at some point because WoW is getting old and something new will come along.

people like making posts to the effect of, "if only blizzard did what i want they would still be over 10 mil subs". no they wouldn't.

the fact is they have made the game better. it's days are numbered just like any other game.

I don´t know about you but I rather play an old game that´s good instead of a new game that´s bad. But hey.... Maybe that´s just me?

I stopped playing not because I didn´t want to play it anymore. I stopped playing because the game changed too much. It went from a good game into a crapgame!