I imagine that Ghostcrawler is drawing a pretty hefty salary right now. They're based in California so I bet he's in the low six figure range. WoW isn't an open source labor of love running on donations and good will. It's a for-profit game that is developed and distributed through a publicly owned corporation. I guarantee that someone is taking note of the downward subscription trend! Maybe the developers don't give a damn, but anyone who has developed software before knows that developers only get so much input into which features get added.
Question is as subs continue to decrease how long can they go saving raids in lieu of everything else in the game? Imagine if the game dwindled to say a million or two. Would we get new bgs? Would get timeless isle or just a raid instead? what else would go out the window?
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I should note I really do like Ghostcrawler for the most part. He's done some stupid shit (the wow dungeons are hard blog comes to mind) but he can acknowledge that and in the past hes acknowledged numerous and plenty faults with the game. They just seem to be so fucking stuck on raiding is everything man. I don't get it. I don't want them to be fired I'd rather they reevaluate decisions they made or fundamental assertions they have. I'd rather them actually diversify content and not pay lip service to it in favor of really just making one kind of content.
Right now while I do agree somebody is taking note I don't think their getting pressed to much. It reminds me of that Metallica album Lulu. Lulu is a terrible fucking album but the guys who made it (lou reed and metallica) had ultimate creative freedom and I think to a large extent the developers do now and it's produced a monstrosity without constraint or without enough constraint. I imagine they were given an option move away from raiding or broaden the appeal of raiding instead of simple being told move away from raiding as an end game model. Maybe lfr was just another iteration of the raiding model. It's hard to say. Boy I'd like to be a fly on the wall.
Last edited by Glorious Leader; 2013-09-10 at 07:36 AM.
People who play in a casual sense.. who don't necessarily have 18 hours a day in free-time to play the game and/or aren't in a raiding guild.. did not ruin the game. What ruins the feel of this game, or any other online game, is mostly attributable to the attitudes of the people playing it. That's everyone from the guy who criticizes your game-play with 'L2P noob LOL' (and gives no constructive feedback), all the way to the douche-bags who pull a boss and then leave a dungeon/raid group.
Blizzard has been far too secretive and seemingly hands-off in their approach to dealing with such problem elements. GM ticket responses all state that 'the report will be investigated and appropriate actions taken'.. and yet leaves victims of douchebaggery to wonder if anything ever really happens. Part of the problem lies in the anonymity people hide behind online. Their reasoning is, 'Oh I can pull this boss, leave group and escape unharmed while they die. Too funny! I'll never get busted!' If something happens to such a person, only that person knows of it (and maybe that person's closest friends). Otherwise, we see nothing.
Blizzard seriously needs to institute name-and-shame tactics for such individuals. Their character(s) should be rendered into corpses, shoved onto pikes outside the capital city Auction Houses, and clear tooltips/signs made viewable to denote who it is and why that person ended up there. The toon(s) in such a situation should be unplayable for 24 hours of actual play-time, not real-time hours. The other characters on that person's account should have their speech privileges revoked entirely - no tradechat trolling, no LFG, nothing at all. Those other characters should be given the equivalent of a deserter debuff that also prevents them from using any que of any type (BG, LFD, LFR) and entering any instance or raid for 24 hours of actual play-time. Penalize their experience gains to only 10% of their normal possible gain (given rested or not, BoA gear or not, etc). Make these people who foul things up for the rest of us actually feel some pain, and let us who have been victimized by that behavior at various times and various ways actually sense a true and present justice.. instead of receiving a form-letter response in-game and wondering what, if anything, actually happened to him/her/it.
I'll stop there. Agree if you like; disagree if you wish. I stand by what I've written here. Empowered to do it, I'd make it happen immediately.
#My2Cents #HatersGonnaHateTheTruth
#FlightIsImportant
Wannabe poser elitists are the most toxic players if you look at this forum. Those special snowflakes are the people who demand exclusive content and all of Blizzard resources tailor-made for them. Everybody else has glass half full but theirs is always half empty.
Brawler's Guild has been CRZ from day one, throwing your idea out of the window.
Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
Trolling should be.
What?!
Who are the ones throwing hissy fits, flaming people left and right, in instances when things don't go exactly as planned? It ain't the casuals I can tell ya that.
Either people like you are severely deluded, have an incorrect of the definition of "toxic" as used in this context or is a troll.
What is harder to ignore is a) the huge churn rate / low retention rate the game had in BC and b) the finance guys asking you why the heck did you spend millions in a raid most people won't even see (SWP).
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Then why did all those pseudo-hardcore MMOs all failed?
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OK, so most people playing the game are bad. Which makes sense. So what should developers do: boot them out of the game and deprive themselves of a huge of revenue? Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-
But that's precisely the problem! Some people are casual not because they are bad, but because they can't commit to that much hours.
I raided all of BC and LK, why do you think I would have stopped? Precisely for the same reason you're talking about.
You can't expect from people in today's world, working big hours, having families, etc... to spare so many hours to play. It is not realistic (talking Western Europe/US here).
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Do you even know the difference between churn, retention rate and subscription? Because from what I see, the answer is no.
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-
It IS the casual players though despite what you might think. When casual players are given a taste of hardcore content, they start thinking they're better than they actually are. This leads to a sense of entitlement and eventually the outpouring of toxicity that we hear nowadays. True hardcore players (not even world firsters, just hard mode raiders and even most normal mode raiders in this day and age where the vast majority are in LFR, people who run challenge modes, gladiators etc.) generally don't give two shits about their dungeon runs and just do their strokes and be done with it if they ever even do things outside of their own guild/groups.
Originally Posted by High Overlord Saurfangi7-6700 @2.8GHz | Nvidia GTX 960M | 16GB DDR4-2400MHz | 1 TB Toshiba SSD| Dell XPS 15
I see parroting phrases from blizzard employees that let the people think the game was totally crap until WotLK. The success of this "crap" is showing the opposite...Do you even know the difference between churn, retention rate and subscription? Because from what I see, the answer is no.
Another day another 'Did XXX ruin Wow" thread.
Learn to use the search function.
Just because some forum posters understand basic economics better than you doesn't mean they're blindly parroting what Blizzard says. Maybe they're trying to educate you... Ever thought of that?
And nobody claims the game was crap before WLK, it was good at the time. But what the game was back then is not good enough today.
Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
Trolling should be.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, The Hardcore players are the one that are ruining WoW with their Ignorance..
I actually wonder how many people from vanilla still plays the game and how many from other addons? I have the feeling thats a very small group. I would have stop long time ago if i didnt have the possibility of free time that studiying offers you. From my experience, started bc, many more like 75% dont play anymore.
There is no point to make a poll here in a wow fan forum, because people that stopped years ago will not show up here. Also people showing up here are more likely to be hardcore wow players. I started to think about it bacsuse gc said that there were always alot of people stopped playing but the difference is that not so much new players starting today.
If there are only a little minority vanilla and bc players its no wonder why blizz changed their way to designing the game. They will try to attract new fresh players with easier way to get to end game.
Blizzard will have statistics about this and they will build the game around the biggest group of customers. Everyone here would do the same, if it would be about their money.
Last edited by mmoca62d2010f3; 2013-09-10 at 09:27 AM.